Civil War
Humphreys was commissioned a captain in the Confederate States Army in 1861. He was subsequently promoted to brigadier general after the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863. There, Humphreys's regiment was part of the force that attacked Federal positions at the Peach Orchard, driving the defenders back toward Cemetery Ridge. Humphreys took command of the brigade upon the mortal wounding of Brig. Gen. William Barksdale.
He remained in command of the brigade through the end of the war.
Read more about this topic: Benjamin G. Humphreys
Famous quotes by civil war:
“Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage’s earthquake.”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)
“They have been waiting for us in a foetor
Of vegetable sweat since civil war days,
Since the gravel-crunching, interminable departure
Of the expropriated mycologist.”
—Derek Mahon (b. 1941)
“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)