David Hunter

• 1. Introduction

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  David Hunter rode on Abraham Lincoln's inaugural train in February 1861, shoulder to shoulder with the president-elect as the locomotive made its way from Springfield, Illinois, to Washington, D.C. Somewhere in Buffalo, the crowd pressed so hard against the carriages that Hunter suffered a dislocated collarbone. It was the kind of moment that defined the man: close to power, caught in the crush of history, absorbing the impact so others might not. Hunter was born on the 21st of July, 1802, and over the course of a long military life he would issue one of the Civil War's most controversial emancipation orders, burn a college and a military institute in the Shenandoah Valley, and preside over the trial of the conspirators who killed the very president he had traveled with that winter. His maternal grandfather was Richard Stockton, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and his cousin David Hunter Strother would also become a Union general. How a man shaped by that lineage became one of the war's most divisive commanders is a story that runs from a frontier fort in Chicago to the smoking ruins of Lexington, Virginia.

• 2. From Frontier to Fort Sumter

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  After graduating from the United States Military Academy in 1822, Hunter was commissioned a second lieutenant in the 5th U.S. Infantry Regiment. Between 1828 and 1831 he was stationed at Fort Dearborn, in what was then the frontier settlement that would become Chicago. There he met and married Maria Kinzie, the daughter of John Kinzie, considered the city's first permanent white resident. Hunter served eleven years in the infantry before being promoted to captain of the 1st U.S. Dragoons in 1833. He resigned in July 1836, moved to Illinois, and spent years as a real estate agent or speculator. He rejoined the Army in November 1841 as a paymaster, made major by March 1842, and one source credits him with service in both the Second Seminole War and the Mexican-American War, though records of his early military career contain significant gaps. By 1860 he was stationed at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and had begun a correspondence with Abraham Lincoln, making no secret of his anti-slavery convictions. That correspondence paid dividends: Lincoln invited him onto the inaugural train, and within weeks of the firing on Fort Sumter, Hunter was promoted to colonel of the 6th U.S. Cavalry. Three days later, on the 17th of May, 1861, his political connection to the administration earned him appointment as the fourth-ranking brigadier general of volunteers.

• 3. General Orders 7 and 11

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  After the Battle of Fort Pulaski in April 1862, when Hunter's troops bombarded and reclaimed the Confederate-held fort at the mouth of the Savannah River, Hunter issued two orders that would make him famous. General Orders 7, dated the 13th of April, freed the enslaved people held in the fort and on Cockspur Island. That small action was the seed of a much larger ambition. In May 1862, Hunter issued General Orders 11, declaring all enslaved people in Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida permanently free on the grounds that slavery and martial law could not coexist in a free country. President Lincoln rescinded the order on the 19th of May. His concern was the border states, whose leaders were advocating gradual emancipation with compensation for slave owners, and he feared that sudden emancipation might push some slave-holding Unionists toward the Confederacy. Confederate President Jefferson Davis reacted differently. He issued orders that Hunter should be treated as a felon to be executed if captured. The national mood, however, was already moving against slavery, particularly within the Army itself, and Congress and Lincoln had been steadily tightening restrictions on the institution since the First Confiscation Act of August 1861. Hunter's order anticipated Lincoln's own Emancipation Proclamation, issued in September 1862 and set to take effect on the 1st of January, 1863.

• 4. The 1st South Carolina Regiment

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  Undeterred by the president's rescission of General Orders 11, Hunter moved on a parallel front. Without permission from the War Department, he enlisted formerly enslaved men from occupied districts in South Carolina and formed the 1st South Carolina (African Descent), the first such regiment in the Union Army. He was initially ordered to disband it, but eventually won congressional approval. The action enraged pro-slavery border state politicians. Representative Charles A. Wickliffe of Kentucky sponsored a resolution demanding an explanation. Hunter's response, sent to Congress on the 23rd of June, 1862, was anything but contrite. He pointed out that he had no regiment of "Fugitive Slaves" but rather a regiment of men whose masters were "Fugitive Rebels." He closed by expressing his hope to present the government with forty-eight to fifty thousand such soldiers by the following autumn. Republican members of the House greeted the reading of his letter with loud applause. Representative Robert Mallory of Kentucky called the scene disgraceful. In 1863, Hunter pressed the matter further by writing directly to Jefferson Davis to protest the Confederate army's brutal treatment of captured Black Union soldiers, attacking the Confederate claim to be fighting for liberty with language that compared that liberty to the one Satan contended for when he was cast into Hell. The War Department eventually forced Hunter to abandon his unauthorized enlistment scheme, but Congress moved shortly after to expand the use of Black men as military laborers through the Confiscation Act of 1862, which forbade Union soldiers from returning fugitive slaves.

• 5. Scorched Earth in the Valley

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  On the 21st of May, 1864, Hunter replaced Major General Franz Sigel in command of the Army of the Shenandoah and the Department of West Virginia, after Sigel was routed at the Battle of New Market by a Confederate force that included cadets from the Virginia Military Institute. Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant's orders were unambiguous: move through Staunton to Charlottesville and Lynchburg, live off the country, and destroy the Virginia Central Railroad beyond any possibility of repair for weeks. On the 5th of June, Hunter defeated Major General William E. Jones at the Battle of Piedmont, then moved south through Staunton to Lexington, destroying blacksmiths, stables, and other industries that could serve the Confederate cause. On the 11th of June, his troops burned the Virginia Military Institute, including its library and scientific apparatus. He ordered the home of former governor John Letcher burned in retaliation for a proclamation Letcher had issued urging guerrilla warfare against Union troops. Washington College, later known as Washington and Lee University, was also plundered, and the statue of George Washington was stolen. Lieutenant General Jubal A. Early, describing the scene after retaking possession of Lexington, wrote of houses burned, women and children left without shelter, furniture cut to pieces, trunks rifled, and a man named Creigh hanged because he had once killed a Federal soldier who was committing outrages against the women of his family. Hunter's campaign ended when Early defeated him at the Battle of Lynchburg on the 19th of June.

• 6. Retreat and Its Aftermath

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  After the defeat at Lynchburg, Hunter retreated across the Allegheny Mountains into West Virginia, effectively removing his army from the war for several weeks and leaving Jubal Early free rein in the Valley. The retreat drew wide criticism. Grant, writing in his Memoirs, excused it by explaining that Hunter had run short of ammunition and had no choice of return route but through the Gauley and Kanawha rivers, then up the Ohio to Harper's Ferry by way of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Hunter himself never accepted the criticism. He wrote repeatedly to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and President Lincoln arguing that the retreat was entirely sound. He later wrote to Robert E. Lee, soldier to soldier, asking whether Lee did not agree with the strategic wisdom of the withdrawal. Lee, who had a loathing of Hunter, replied that he had no idea what the exact strategic value of the retreat into West Virginia had been, but that it had been extremely helpful to himself and the Confederate cause. On the 1st of August, Grant placed Major General Philip Sheridan in command of the campaign against Early. Hunter was offered the chance to retain department command on paper while Sheridan handled the active fighting, but he declined, saying he had been so overwhelmed by contradictory War Department orders that he did not even know where Early's army was. Grant immediately accepted the resignation of command. Hunter's headquarters during the Valley campaign, Sandusky House, was later listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982 and operates today as a house museum.

• 7. After the War

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  Hunter served in the honor guard at Abraham Lincoln's funeral and accompanied the president's body on its return journey to Springfield. From the 8th of May to the 15th of July, 1865, he presided as president of the military commission that tried the conspirators in Lincoln's assassination. He retired from the army in July 1866. In 1873, he published his own account of his war service under the title Report of the Military Services of Gen. David Hunter, U.S.A., during the War of the Rebellion. He died in Washington, D.C., on the 2nd of February, 1886, and was buried at Princeton Cemetery in Princeton, New Jersey. His cousin David Hunter Strother, who had served alongside him as a Union general, survived him. In 2011, actor Colm Meaney portrayed Hunter in the film The Conspirator, bringing one chapter of his story, the assassination trial, to a new audience more than a century after the events.