Dabney Herndon Maury

Dabney Herndon Maury

Dabney Herndon Maury (born May 21, 1822 in Fredericksburg , Virginia , † January 11, 1900 in Peoria , Illinois ) was an officer in the US Army and later Major General of the Confederate Army during the Civil War .

Maury was born the son of Naval Officer John Minor Maury. His father died when he was two years old and as a result Dabney was raised by his uncle, the well-known hydrograph Matthew Fontaine Maury . Maury studied at the University of Virginia , where he graduated in 1842, and then went to the United States Military Academy of West Point , New York. He served in the mounted infantry, including in the Mexican-American War , where he was badly wounded in the Battle of Cerro Gordo .

Until the outbreak of the Civil War, active service alternated with the mounted infantry and activities as an instructor at the USMA or at the cavalry school in Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania. After the attack on Fort Sumter , Maury joined the Confederate Army. He initially served as a Colonel on General Earl Van Dorn's staff , was promoted to Brigadier General after the Battle of Pea Ridge and was given field command. Maury fought as a division commander at the Battle of Iuka and the Second Battle of Corinth . He was then promoted to major general in November 1862. He served in the Vicksburg area for a while before he was eventually transferred to the defense division of golf. The Gulf Defense Area included the city of Mobile , Alabama , which Maury defended against the Northern States until April 1865 , but eventually had to evacuate.

After the Civil War, Maury set up a school in Virginia to teach math and classical literature. In 1868 he founded the Southern Historical Society . In later years Maury became involved in the militia and became the US envoy to Colombia . Maury died on January 11, 1900 in Peoria.

He is buried with five other officers in the Fredericksburg Confederate Cemetery in Fredericksburg. More than 3,300 soldiers of the Confederate States are buried here, 2,184 of them are buried as unknowns.

literature

• Dabney Herndon Maury: Recollections of a Virginian in the Mexican, Indian and Civil Wars , Charles Scriber's Sons, New York, 1894 (Maury's memoirs); available online at docsouth.unc.edu
• Dabney Herndon Maury: A young people's history of Virginia and Virginians (PDF; 1.1 MB), 1896
• John C. Waugh: Last Stand at Mobile , McWhiney Foundation Press, 2002 (book about the mobile campaign, also contains biographical information about Maury)
• Ezra J. Warner, Generals in Gray: Lives of the Confederate Commanders , Louisiana State University Press, 1959, ISBN 0-8071-0823-5 (Standard Biographical Work on the Confederate Generals)

Web links

Commons : Dabney Herndon Maury  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Dabney H. Maury in the database of Find a Grave (English)