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Home Town Portland, Maine
Last Address San Francisco, California Buried at Eastern Cemetery, Portland, Maine.
Civil War Union Naval Officer. He entered the United States Navy as a Midshipman in 1828, and served continuously in the next 33 years, up to the Civil War. Promoted to Lieutenant in 1841, he served in the Charles Wilkes' World Exploration Expedition which lasted from 1838 to 1842. During the Mexican War he served in the squadron that captured the City of Vera Cruz, Turspan and Tabasco. From 1846 until 1860 he was a member of the United States Navy Coast Survey, where in 1855 he was a prominent figure in the conflicts with Native Indians in Puget Sound, Washington. In command of the "USS South Carolina" at the outbreak of the Civil War, he participated in the fortifying of Fort Pickens in Florida for the Union (a move that kept the vital fort in Union hands throughout the War). He commanded his ship in blockading duty in Galveston, Texas before being assigned to command the "USS Richmond" in Admiral David G. Farragut's fleet that was detailed to capture New Orleans, Louisiana. He led his vessel past the New Orleans fort defenses, and subsequently helped secure the capture of the city. In 1863 he supported Union Army-Navy operations on the Mississippi River against Port Hudson and Vicksburg, winning commendations from superior officers. In June 1863 he was promoted to Captain, and was assigned to command the "USS Brooklyn", which he led in the Union Naval capture of Mobile Bay, Alabama in August 1864 and in the combined Army-Navy assault and capture of Fort Fisher, North Carolina in January 1865. Promoted to Commodore in 1866, and Rear-Admiral in 1871, he served as commander of the Mare Island Naval Yard, the Chief of the Naval Navigation, and as commander of the United States Navy's Atlantic Squadron. He died in San Francisco, California in 1877.
Description The American Civil War was an internal conflict fought in the United States from 1861 to 1865. The Union faced secessionists in eleven Southern states grouped together as the Confederate States of America. The Union won the war, which remains the bloodiest in U.S. history.
Among the 34 U.S. states in February 1861, seven Southern slave states individually declared their secession from the U.S. to form the Confederate States of America. War broke out in April 1861 when Confederates attacked the U.S. fortress of Fort Sumter. The Confederacy grew to include eleven states; it claimed two more states, the Indian Territory, and the southern portions of the western territories of Arizona and New Mexico (called Confederate Arizona). The Confederacy was never diplomatically recognized by the United States government nor by any foreign country. The states that remained loyal, including border states where slavery was legal, were known as the Union or the North. The war ended with the surrender of all the Confederate armies and the dissolution of the Confederate government in the spring of 1865.
The war had its origin in the factious issue of slavery, especially the extension of slavery into the western territories. Four years of intense combat left 620,000 to 750,000 soldiers dead, a higher number than the number of American military deaths in World War I and World War II combined, and much of the South's infrastructure was destroyed. The Confederacy collapsed and 4 million slaves were freed (most of them by Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation). The Reconstruction Era (1863–1877) overlapped and followed the war, with the process of restoring national unity, strengthening the national government, and granting civil rights to freed slaves throughout the country.
