This text is part of:
[382] he was promoted major-general, and in the spring of 1865 he was detached with a small division for the campaign against Sherman in the Carolinas. He commanded the rear guard of Hardee's army at the evacuation of Columbia and Cheraw, and at the last had division command of cavalry, his forces and Gen. Joe Wheeler's forming the command of Lieut.-Gen. Wade Hampton. The close of the war left him in financial ruin, but he bravely met the exigencies of the occasion, and in a short time attained national repute for the firmness and boldness with which he handled the political questions which concerned the essentials of the reorganized social life. While he powerfully advocated obedience to the reconstruction measures as the law, law being preferable to chaos, he receded at no time from a persistent opposition to infringements on good government, and was largely instrumental in securing the election of Gov. Wade Hampton. In 1876 he was elected to the United States Senate, where his admission was met by a storm of partisan protest which is memorable in the history of the nation, but his career of eighteen years in that exalted body vindicated the good judgment and patriotism of the State which deputed him as its representative. In the stormy days of sectional debate in Congress he was one of the foremost champions of the South, but at a later period he was enabled to make a splendid record in constructive statesmanship by his staunch advocacy of a strong navy, of civil service reform, and other measures now settled in national policy. After the expiration of his service in the Senate, March, 1895, he engaged in the practice of law at Washington, D. C. In 1898 he was appointed a major-general in the volunteer army of the United States, for the war with Spain, and after peace was secured he served as a member of the commission for the removal of the Spanish forces from Cuba.
Atlanta, Ga. 1899.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.