Civil War Service
During the Civil War, he served as an officer in the 2nd Regiment Iowa Volunteer Cavalry. He was promoted from Captain of Company B to Major of the First Battalion on September 13, 1861, then to Lieutenant Colonel in 1862. He participated in the final stage of the Battle of Island Number Ten near New Madrid, Missouri, and saw combat during the Siege of Corinth, the Battle of Iuka in northeastern Mississippi, and the Battle of Collierville, Tennessee. From time to time he was also assigned as an inspector of cavalry for the Army of the Cumberland and, due to his legal experience, served as an acting inspector general and court martial president or judge advocate for troops in the lower Mississippi River theatre.
He was mustered out on October 3, 1864, upon the expiration of his term of service. He moved his family to Memphis, Tennessee before returning to Iowa in 1867, to a home in Clarinda.
Read more about this topic: William Peters Hepburn
Famous quotes containing the words civil war, civil, war and/or service:
“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)
“... one of the blind spots of most Negroes is their failure to realize that small overtures from whites have a large significance ... I now realize that this feeling inevitably takes possession of one in the bitter struggle for equality. Indeed, I share it. Yet I wonder how we can expect total acceptance to step full grown from the womb of prejudice, with no embryo or infancy or childhood stages.”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 1, ch. 10 (1962)
“Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind”
—Stephen Crane (1871–1900)
“We too are ashes as we watch and hear
The psalm, the sorrow, and the simple praise
Of one whose promised thoughts of other days
Were such as ours, but now wholly destroyed,
The service record of his youth wiped out,
His dream dispersed by shot, must disappear.”
—Karl Shapiro (b. 1913)