Peter Conover Hains - Postbellum Career

Postbellum Career

Hains remained with the regular army following the war, and was promoted to major in September 1870. Much of his notable post-war service was with the U.S. Lighthouse Bureau. Among other accomplishments, Hains designed the Morris Island and St. Augustine lighthouses. He became a lieutenant colonel in 1886,and was promoted to colonel on August 1895. He designed the Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C., thus solving the drainage problems and foul smell of most of the Washington area marshlands.

Still in the Army during the Spanish-American War, Hains served as a brigadier general of volunteers from August to November 1898. He was promoted to brigadier general in the Regular Army on April 21, 1903. He successfully lobbied for the construction of the Panama Canal site over one proposed in Nicaragua.

Hains retired from active service in 1904.

On August 15, 1908, two of his three sons, Peter C. Hains II and Thornton Jenkins Hains, a well-known author of sea stories, were involved in the murder of William E. Annis at the Bayside Yacht Club, Long Island. The crime, and the subsequent separate trials for the brothers, became one of the notorious cases of its day, front-page news across the country. Thornton was acquitted in January 1909; Peter was convicted of manslaughter in May 1909 and sent to Sing Sing, but, on General Hains' appeal, was pardoned by the Governor of New York in 1911. The General spent much of his savings financing the defense of his sons.

General Hains was recalled and promoted to major general during the First World War, in 1916. He died at Walter Reed Hospital.