Edmund Kirby Smith - Early Life and The U.S. Army

Early Life and The U.S. Army

Smith was born in St. Augustine, Florida, to Joseph Lee Smith and Frances Kirby Smith. Both his parents were natives of Connecticut, and moved to Florida in 1821 shortly before the elder Smith was named a U.S. District Judge there. In 1836, his parents sent him to a military boarding school in Virginia, which he attended until his enrollment in the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York.

On July 1, 1841, Smith entered West Point and graduated four years later, standing 25th out of 41 cadets. While there he was nicknamed "Seminole" after his native state, and brevetted a second lieutenant in the 5th U.S. Infantry on July 1, 1845. He was promoted to second lieutenant on August 22, 1846, now serving in the 7th U.S. Infantry.

In the Mexican-American War he served under General Zachary Taylor at the Battle of Palo Alto and the Battle of Resaca de la Palma. He served under General Winfield Scott later, and received brevet promotions to first lieutenant for Cerro Gordo and to captain for Contreras and Churubusco. His older brother, Ephraim Kirby Smith, a captain in the regular army, served with him in the 5th U.S. Infantry in both the campaign with Taylor and Scott, until he died from wounds suffered at the Battle of Molino del Rey in 1847.

After that war, he served as a captain (from 1855) in the 2nd U.S. Cavalry, primarily in Texas, but he also taught mathematics at West Point and was wounded in his thigh on May 13, 1859, fighting Indians in the Nescutunga Valley of Texas. When Texas seceded, Smith, now a major, refused to surrender his command at Camp Colorado in what is now Coleman, Texas, to the Texas State forces under Col. Benjamin McCulloch and expressed his willingness to fight to hold it. On January 31, 1861, Smith was promoted to major, but resigned his commission in the U.S. Army on April 6 to join the Confederacy.

Read more about this topic:  Edmund Kirby Smith

Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or army:

    Mormon colonization south of this point in early times was characterized as “going over the Rim,” and in colloquial usage the same phrase came to connote violent death.
    State of Utah, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)

    The price we pay for the complexity of life is too high. When you think of all the effort you have to put in—telephonic, technological and relational—to alter even the slightest bit of behaviour in this strange world we call social life, you are left pining for the straightforwardness of primitive peoples and their physical work.
    Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)

    I was interested to see how a pioneer lived on this side of the country. His life is in some respects more adventurous than that of his brother in the West; for he contends with winter as well as the wilderness, and there is a greater interval of time at least between him and the army which is to follow. Here immigration is a tide which may ebb when it has swept away the pines; there it is not a tide, but an inundation, and roads and other improvements come steadily rushing after.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)