American Civil War Service
At the outbreak of the Civil War, Couch was appointed commander of the 7th Massachusetts Infantry on June 15, 1861, with the rank of colonel in the Union Army. That August he was promoted to brigadier general with an effective date back to May 17. He was given brigade command in the Military Division then Army of the Potomac that fall, and Couch was given divisional command in the VI Corps in the following spring. From July 1861 to March 1862 he helped train and then maintain the defenses of Washington, D.C.. He participated in the Peninsula Campaign, fighting in the Siege of Yorktown on April 5–May 4 and the Battle of Williamsburg the following day.
Read more about this topic: Darius N. Couch
Famous quotes containing the words american, civil, war and/or service:
“An ... important antidote to American democracy is American gerontocracy. The positions of eminence and authority in Congress are allotted in accordance with length of service, regardless of quality. Superficial observers have long criticized the United States for making a fetish of youth. This is unfair. Uniquely among modern organs of public and private administration, its national legislature rewards senility.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)
“Virtue and vice suppose the freedom to choose between good and evil; but what can be the morals of a woman who is not even in possession of herself, who has nothing of her own, and who all her life has been trained to extricate herself from the arbitrary by ruse, from constraint by using her charms?... As long as she is subject to man’s yoke or to prejudice, as long as she receives no professional education, as long as she is deprived of her civil rights, there can be no moral law for her!”
—Flora Tristan (1803–1844)
“There never was a good war or a bad peace.”
—Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790)
“The true courage of civilized nations is readiness for sacrifice in the service of the state, so that the individual counts as only one amongst many. The important thing here is not personal mettle but aligning oneself with the universal.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)