Franklin Gardner

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General Gardner

Franklin Gardner (born January 29, 1823 in New York , New York , † April 29, 1873 in Vermilionville , Louisiana ) was an officer in the US Army , major general in the Confederate Army during the Civil War and planter .

Life

Gardner was born in New York in 1823. His father was a general in the British-American War of 1812 and his mother was a southerner from Louisiana where she co-owned a thriving plantation. After his normal school education he attended the military academy in West Point , New York, which he successfully completed in 1843 as the 17th of his class. A short time later, Gardner married the daughter of Alexander Mouton , the then governor of Louisiana. His brother-in-law, Jean Jacques Alfred Alexander Mouton , also became a prominent Confederate general, and his father-in-law married Gardner's older sister after the death of his first wife.

In 1861 Gardner resigned from the US Army and joined the Confederate Army as a colonel . On April 6 and 7, 1862, he took part in the Battle of Shiloh and in December he took command of the strategically important Port Hudson , Louisiana, on the Mississippi - 30 km northeast of Baton Rouge , Louisiana - from General William Nelson Rector Beall .

However, on May 22, 1863 Gardner received the order for the evacuation of Port Hudson, this could not perform more since already about 12,000 soldiers of the Marines had gone to the north by land and marched about 20,000 troops from the south to Port Hudson. The first attack came five days later, on May 27th. The siege of Port Hudson lasted 47 days and only ended on July 9th. When Gardner got the news that day that Vicksburg had fallen after the Battle of Vicksburg , which lasted from May 8th to July 4th, he surrendered to the Union troops and was taken prisoner. In 1864 he was released from prison, returned to the Confederate Army and served under the command of General Richard Taylor until the end of the war .

After the war, Gardner returned to his family and rebuilt his farm near Vermilionville, where he died in 1873.

See also

literature

  • David J. Eicher: The Civil War in Books: An Analytical Bibliography , University of Illinois, 1997, ISBN 0-252-02273-4 .
  • Richard N. Current: Encyclopedia of the Confederacy (1993) (4 vol.) ( ISBN 0-13-275991-8 )
  • John H. Eicher & David J. Eicher: Civil War High Commands , Stanford University Press, 2001, ISBN 0-8047-3641-3 .
  • Ezra J. Warner: Generals in Gray: Lives of the Confederate Commanders , Louisiana State University Press, 1959, ISBN 0-8071-0823-5 .

Web links