Stephen A. Hurlbut

Stephen A. Hurlbut

Stephen Augustus Hurlbut (born November 29, 1815 in Charleston , South Carolina , † March 27, 1882 in Lima , Peru ) was an American politician, diplomat and commander in chief of the US Gulf Army in the American Civil War .

Life

Hurlbut studied law and was admitted to the South Carolina bar in 1837. During the Second Seminole War , he was an adjutant in a South Carolina infantry regiment . In 1845 he moved to Illinois and opened his own legal practice in Belvidere . He was also presidential elector for the Whig Party in the presidential election of 1848. He was also in 1859, and again in 1861 a member of the House of Representatives from Illinois .

When the American Civil War broke out, Hurlbut joined the Union Army in 1861 with the rank of Brigadier General . The following year he was promoted to major general. He commanded the 4th Division of the Tennessee Army in the Battle of Shiloh , on the advance towards Corinth, Mississippi, and in the subsequent siege .

One thesis put forward by historian Bertram Korn is that while his division was stationed near Memphis , Tennessee , Hurlbut issued anti-Semitic orders that resulted in the confiscation of Jewish land and preventing Jews from trading. In 1864, Hurlbut led a corps under William T. Sherman on the Meridian Expedition . Hurlbut then succeeded Nathaniel Prentiss Banks as commander of the military area of golf , who was also commander-in-chief of the army of the same name and kept this command until the end of the war.

After being retired from the US Army on June 20, 1865, Hurlbut was one of the founding fathers of the Grand Army of the Republic , of which he was Commander-in-Chief between 1866 and 1868.

He was then appointed envoy to Colombia in 1869 , an activity he carried out for three years. In 1872, Hurlbut was elected to Congress as a Republican from Illinois , and re-elected in 1874, where he was defeated in another candidacy in 1876. Some time later, in 1881, Hurlbut was appointed US ambassador to Peru, a position he held in Lima until his death. He and his wife were buried together in Belvidere Cemetery in Belvidere.

biography

• Jeffrey Norman Lash: Stephen Augustus Hurlbut: A Military and Diplomatic Politician, 1815–1882. Ph.D. diss., Kent State University, 1980, OCLC 20788826 .
• Jeffrey Norman Lash: A Politician Turned General: The Civil War Career of Stephen Augustus Hurlbut. Kent State University Press, Kent, OH 2003, ISBN 0-87338-766-X .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Bertram Wallace Korn : American Jewry and the Civil War. Jewish Publication Society of America, Philadelphia 1951, OCLC 761780 , p. 154.

Web links

Commons : Stephen A. Hurlbut  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Stephen A. Hurlbut in the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (English)

• Stephen A. Hurlbut in the database of Find a Grave (English)