John Martindale

John Henry Martindale (born March 20, 1815 in Sandy Hill (now Hudson Falls ), Washington County , New York , † December 13, 1881 in Nice , France ) was an American lawyer, Union general during the Civil War and politician.

Before the civil war

John H. Martindale was the son of Congressman Henry C. Martindale and Minerva Hitchcock Martindale. He was on the 1831 Military Academy in West Point added (New York) and graduated there in 1835. Martindale received the brevet of a Second Lieutenant , but resigned from the Army the following year and began law study. He was admitted to the bar in 1838 and then practiced in Batavia, New York. In 1840 he married Emeline H. Holden. Then he served as the district attorney in Genesee County from 1842 to 1846 and then again from 1848 to 1851 . He then moved to Rochester, New York.

In the civil war

In August 1861, Martindale received an officer license to become Brigadier General of Volunteers in the Union Army and was assigned to the V Corps , which participated in all battles in the Peninsula Campaign . After retiring from Malvern Hill , he received a major general of the Volunteer rating and was appointed Military Governor of Washington, DC , which he remained from November 1862 to May 1864. Shortly after his return to the battlefield, he fought with the XVIII Corps in the Bermuda Hundred campaign and the siege of Petersburg , where he briefly commanded the corps in mid-July 1864. In September 1865 he gave back his officer license due to his poor health.

After the civil war

A Republican , he was elected Attorney General of New York State, a post he held from 1866 to 1867. In 1877, one of his clients tried to shoot him at his Rochester law firm. He died in France in 1881; his body was then transferred to the United States, where he was buried in Batavia.

literature

• Eicher, John H., and Eicher, David J., Civil War High Commands , Stanford University Press, 2001, ISBN 0-8047-3641-3 .
• Google Book Life Sketches of State Officers, Senators, and Members of Assembly in the State of New York in 1867 by SR Harlow and HH Boone (Weed, Parsons & Co., Albany NY, 1867)

Web links

• Pictures of Martindale ( Memento from August 19, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
• John Martindale at The Political Graveyard
• The "attempted murder" at his office , in the New York Times on November 26, 1877
• His obituary , transcribed from the New York Times on December 14, 1881
• List of New York Attorneys General , at Office of the NYSAG