People of the Confederacy
Stonewall Jackson
Thomas Jonathan Jackson was the third child of Julia Neale Jackson (1789–1831) and Jonathan Jackson (1790–1826), an attorney. Both of Jackson’s parents were natives of Virginia. The family already had two young children and were living in Clarksburg in what is now West Virginia when Jackson, their second son, was born.
Jefferson Davis
Jefferson Davis was born June 3, 1808 on a farm in Christian County, Kentucky, near the border with Todd County. Davis, the last of the ten children of Samuel Emory Davis and his wife, Jane, had come from a family of rich American history. The younger Davis’s grandfather had immigrated to the United States from Wales and had lived in Virginia and Maryland, working as a public servant. His father, along with his uncles, had served in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, his father serving with the Georgia cavalry and leading in the battle of Savannah as an infantry officer. His older brothers, too, served. During the War of 1812, three of Davis’s brothers fought the British, two of them serving with and were commended by Andrew Jackson for bravery in the Battle of New Orleans.
Robert E. Lee
Lee was born at Stratford, in Westmoreland County, Virginia, son of Revolutionary War hero Henry Lee (“Lighthorse Harry”) and Ann Hill Carter Lee. He entered the United States Military Academy in 1825. When he graduated (second in his class of 46) in 1829 he had not only attained the top academic record but was the first cadet (and so far the only) to graduate the Academy without a single demerit. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Army Corps of Engineers.
People of the Union
John Brown
John Brown (May 9, 1800 – December 2, 1859) was the first white American abolitionist to advocate and to practice insurrection as a means to the abolition of slavery. He has been called “the most controversial of all nineteenth-century Americans.”[1] His attempt to start a liberation movement among enslaved blacks in Virginia in 1859 electrified the nation, even though not a single slave answered his call. He was tried for treason (against the state of Virginia) and hanged, but his behavior at the trial seemed heroic to millions of Americans.
Ulysses S. Grant
Grant (born Hiram Ulysses Grant) was born in Point Pleasant, Clermont County, Ohio, 25 miles (40 km) above Cincinnati on the Ohio River, to Jesse R. Grant and Hannah Simpson. His father and his mother were born in Pennsylvania. His father was a tanner. In the fall of 1823 they moved to the village of Georgetown in Brown County, Ohio, where Grant spent most of his time until he was 17.
General Philip Sheridan
Sheridan was born March 6, 1831 in Albany, New York (or perhaps, Boston, Massachusetts), to John and Mary Sheridan, immigrants from County Cavan, Ireland. He grew up in Somerset, Ohio. Fully grown, he reached only 5 feet 5 inches (1.65 m) tall.
George B. McClellan
Born in Philadelphia, McClellan first attended the University of Pennsylvania, then transferred to West Point, graduating second in his class of 1846. Originally assigned to the engineers, he served under Winfield Scott in Mexico, then transferred to the cavalry in 1855.
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809 (coincidentally on the same day as Charles Darwin), in a one-room log cabin on a farm in Hardin County, Kentucky (now in LaRue Co., in Nolin Creek, three miles (5 km) south of the town of Hodgenville), to Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks. Lincoln was named after his deceased grandfather, Abraham Lincoln, who was killed by Native Americans. Lincoln’s parents were largely uneducated. When Abraham Lincoln was seven years old, he and his parents moved to Spencer County, Indiana, “partly on account of slavery” and partly because of economic difficulty in Kentucky. In 1830, after economic and land-title difficulties in Indiana, the family settled on government land along the Sangamon River on a site selected by Lincoln’s father in Macon County, Illinois, near the present city of Decatur. The following winter was especially brutal, and the family nearly moved back to Indiana. When his father relocated the family to a nearby site the following year, the 22-year-old Lincoln struck out on his own, canoeing down the Sangamon to homestead on his own in Sangamon County, Illinois (now in Menard County), in the village of New Salem. Later that year, hired by New Salem businessman Denton Offutt and accompanied by friends, he took goods from New Salem to New Orleans via flatboat on the Sangamon, Illinois and Mississippi rivers. While in New Orleans he may have witnessed a slave auction that left an indelible impression on him for the rest of his life.
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