Civil War
In 1861, the 4th Infantry was recalled to the East and placed in the defenses around Washington, D.C. Russell joined the volunteer army and accepted a commission as colonel of the 7th Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. Russell then served in the Peninsula Campaign and the Seven Days Battles. He was brevetted lieutenant colonel in the regular army for gallant and meritorious service.
In 1862, Russell was promoted to major in the regular army and assigned to the U.S. 8th Infantry Regiment. Still in command of the 7th Massachusetts, he fought in the Battle of Antietam. Later in 1862, Russell was promoted to brigadier general of volunteers and commanded a brigade during the Rappahannock campaign. He later fought at the Battle of Fredericksburg. Russell was primarily in reserve during the Battle of Gettysburg, but was brevetted colonel in the regular army shortly afterward.
In 1864, Russell fought in the Overland Campaign. He was mortally wounded later that year in the Shenandoah Valley during the Battle of Opequon, otherwise known as the Third Battle of Winchester, when he was struck by a shell fragment. He was brevetted major general in the regular army in the field.
He is buried in Salem, New York, in Evergreen Cemetery.
Read more about this topic: David Allen Russell
Famous quotes by civil war:
“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)
“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)
“... there was the first Balkan war and the second Balkan war and then there was the first world war. It is extraordinary how having done a thing once you have to do it again, there is the pleasure of coincidence and there is the pleasure of repetition, and so there is the second world war, and in between there was the Abyssinian war and the Spanish civil war.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)