Civil War
Following the completion of the Minot's Ledge Lighthouse project in 1860, the secession of South Carolina and the beginning of the American Civil War allowed Alexander to put his skills to military use for the first time since the Mexican-American War. On May 24, 1861, he was among several hundred engineers who marched into Virginia to begin building fortifications to protect Washington, D.C., which was located on the border between the Union state of Maryland and the Confederate state of Virginia. In July 1861, the force that had marched into northern Virginia on May 24 found itself opposed by a large Confederate States Army force that had marched up from the south. In the haste to meet the Confederates in battle, Alexander found himself serving as an infantry officer and was assigned to the 1st Division of the Army of Northeastern Virginia, under the command of Brig. Gen. Daniel Tyler. It was a situation common to the young Union Army, which found itself short of experienced officers. Many engineer officers building defenses south of Washington were assigned to a regiment or division during the First Battle of Bull Run. Alexander received a brevet to major in the regular army for his service during the battle.
Read more about this topic: Barton S. Alexander
Famous quotes by civil war:
“He was high and mighty. But the kindest creature to his slaves—and the unfortunate results of his bad ways were not sold, had not to jump over ice blocks. They were kept in full view and provided for handsomely in his will. His wife and daughters in the might of their purity and innocence are supposed never to dream of what is as plain before their eyes as the sunlight, and they play their parts of unsuspecting angels to the letter.”
—Anonymous Antebellum Confederate Women. Previously quoted by Mary Boykin Chesnut in Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, edited by C. Vann Woodward (1981)
“The United States is just now the oldest country in the world, there always is an oldest country and she is it, it is she who is the mother of the twentieth century civilization. She began to feel herself as it just after the Civil War. And so it is a country the right age to have been born in and the wrong age to live in.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)