An illustrated portrait of Elmer Ellsworth, Colonel of a New York Zouave Unit in the Union Army. A favorite friend of the Lincoln family, Ellsworth was killed by a Southern sympathizer, May, 1861 in Alexandria, Virginia.
Confederate General Henry A. Wise of Accomack County, Va.
Date:
ca. 1861
Description:
Wise served as governor of Virginia, 1856-1860. He supported Virginia's secession from the United States in 1861 and began waging war against the Union before the Ordinance of Secession was passed, by ordering the Virginia Militia to forcibly take possession of the U. S. facilities at Harpers' Ferry and Norfolk. Subsequently Wise was commissioned a brigadier general in the Confederate Army and after the war labeled himself an "unsubmitting rebel", refusing to take the Oath of Allegiance to the United States government. Bitter toward Western Virginia and later West Virginia, Wise judged the new state as a “bastard child of a political rape”.
