Henry Larcom Abbot

Henry Larcom Abbot

Henry Larcom Abbot (born August 13, 1831 in Beverly , Massachusetts , † October 1, 1927 in Cambridge , Massachusetts) was an American officer and pioneer . During the civil war he served in the Union Army from 1861 to 1865 and, after retiring in 1895, was an influential advisor in the planning for the construction of the Panama Canal .

Lineage and Early Life

Henry Larcom Abbot was a descendant of George Abbot, who immigrated from the northern English county of Yorkshire to what is now the United States around 1640 and settled in Andover, Massachusetts at the time that town was founded. His two great-grandfathers, Abiel Abbot and Joseph Hale, had served in the War of Independence . His parents were the educator Joseph Hale Abbot and Fanny Ellingwood Larcom. The philosopher and theologian Francis Ellingwood Abbot was his brother.

Henry Larcom Abbot first attended the Boston Latin School and began training for military service at the US Military Academy in West Point, New York State in 1850 , which he completed four years later as the second of his class - among others J. E. B. Stuart and George Washington Custis Lee belonged - completed. He joined the pioneer troops and took part in 1854/55 with the rank of lieutenant in the investigations to determine possible routes of a transcontinental railroad connection in the western United States ( Pacific Railroad Surveys ).

On April 27, 1856, Abbot married Mary Susan Everett, who was only a little younger. He had at least three children from his wife, who died in 1871, including Frederic Vaughan Abbot (* 1858; † 1928), who later also served in the pioneer troops.

From May 1857 to July 1861, Abbot, now promoted to lieutenant colonel, carried out several scientific studies on the lower reaches of the Mississippi River with Captain Andrew A. Humphreys . In particular, they had to work out proposals to improve flood protection in the estuary area of ​​this river. They recommended the construction of dams and wrote a significant report upon the Physics and Hydraulics of the Mississippi River (1861).

Service in the Civil War

In the civil war that broke out in April 1861, Abbot served in the Union army of President Abraham Lincoln in the northern states who remained loyal to the north . First he was a topographical pioneer with the troops of Brigadier General Irvin McDowell and was wounded in the first battle at Bull Run (July 21, 1861), which ended with McDowell's defeat . After that he was under the command of John G. Barnard and was from March to July 1862 the adjutant during the Peninsula campaign , during which he for his achievements in the Siege of Yorktown (5 April to 4 May 1862) for certification - Major was appointed. From November 1862 to February 1863 he served as a surveyor in the army of Major General Nathaniel Prentiss Banks during his campaign to New Orleans . On January 19, 1863, he was promoted to colonel in the ranks of the Massachusetts Volunteers and now commanded the first Connecticut heavy artillery regiment . From March 1863 to May 1864 he defended Washington with his regiment .

Abbot then commanded the siege artillery from June 1864 to January 1865 during the Richmond-Petersburg campaign , about which he published a report in 1867. At Alfred Terry's request , he accompanied his expeditionary force to Fort Fisher , an important fortification of the Confederate States Army , and commanded a brigade of siege artillery in the Second Battle of Fort Fisher , which ended with the capture of the fortress by Terry's troops. The highest of the seven brevet ranks Abbot was awarded in the course of the civil war that ended in June 1865 with the victory of the Northern States, was that of a major general in the volunteer army, from which he resigned on September 25, 1865.

Later career

Abbot, who had become a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1862 and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1863 , was awarded the rank of Major in the Engineer Corps of the US Army on November 11, 1865 after the end of the Civil War and was in command from 1866 to 1886 Engineer Battalion at Willet's Point, New York. Here he directed a school he founded for pioneers and experiments with explosives, the most suitable of which were to be used in underwater mines to defend the coasts of the United States. The underwater mine system he developed proved itself in the Spanish-American War in 1898 .

Abbot visited Europe three times as a member of special commissions. He observed a solar eclipse from Sicily in 1870 , inspected torpedo systems of European countries in 1873 and obtained information about the manufacture of large cannons from steel from 1883–84. In 1872 Abbot was elected to the National Academy of Sciences . In October 1886 he was made a colonel in the engineer corps and retired on August 13, 1895.

Life after retirement

In 1895 Abbot acted as technical advisor to the Wisconsin Central Railroad for the construction of an inland port of Manitowoc in the state of Wisconsin and 1895-1896 in the same capacity for the planned canal from Pittsburgh to Lake Erie . In 1897 he joined the technical committee of the Compagnie Nouvelle du Canal de Panama , which continued the construction work on the Panama Canal after a failed first attempt (1881-1889). In this position Abbot stayed in Paris and on the Isthmus of Panama in the following years . Even after the USA bought the canal rights from the French Panama Canal Company in 1902 and took over the canal zone after a conflict with Colombia in 1904, Abbot retained his advisory post. When the USA planned to carry out the further construction work, he made a significant contribution to the fact that President Theodore Roosevelt accepted the construction of the Panama Canal in the form of a lock canal. In 1905 he published his book Problems of the Panama Canal on this subject and also wrote numerous specialist articles on various topics such as coastal defense or the use of explosives.

From May 1905 to July 1910 Abbot was Professor of Hydraulic Engineering at George Washington University . He died on October 1, 1927 at the age of 96 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was buried there at Mount Auburn Cemetery .

literature

• Martin Reuss: Abbot, Henry Larcom . In: American National Biography . Vol. 1 (1999), pp. 12f.

Web links

• Henry Larcom Abbot in the database of Find a Grave (English)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Member History: Henry L. Abbot. American Philosophical Society, accessed April 2, 2018 .