General Edmund Kirby Smith
(1824-1893)

Died aged c. 69

General Edmund Kirby Smith, born in 1824 in St. Augustine, graduated from West Point in 1845 and served in the army during the Mexican War. He resigned from the U. S. Army to join the Confederacy. He served under generals Joseph Johnston, Gustave Beauregard and Braxton Bragg and was instrumental in Confederate success at the First Battle of Bull Run in Virginia. In 1863, he was promoted to Lieutenant General commanding the Trans-Mississippi Department, the highest-ranking Confederate officer in the western campaign. On May 26, 1865, he surrendered his troops, the last major Confederate army to surrender. Following the war, Kirby Smith served as president of a telegraph company, then of the Western Military Academy in Nashville, and became a mathematics teacher at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. General Edmund Kirby Smith died in 1893, the last surviving full general of either army.

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General Edmund Kirby Smith (May 16, 1824 – March 28, 1893) was a senior officer of the Confederate States Army who commanded the Trans-Mississippi Department (comprising Arkansas, Missouri, Texas, western Louisiana, Arizona Territory and the Indian Territory) from 1863 to 1865. Prior to the American Civil War, Smith served as an officer of the United States Army. Smith was wounded at First Bull Run and distinguished himself during the Heartland Offensive, the Confederacy's unsuccessful attempt to capture Kentucky in 1862. He was appointed as commander of the Trans-Mississippi Department in January 1863. The area included most actions east of the Rocky Mountains and west of the Mississippi River. In 1863, Smith dispatched troops in an unsuccessful attempt to relieve the Siege of Vicksburg. After Vicksburg was captured by the Union in July, the Trans-Mississippi Department was cut off from the rest of the Confederacy, and became virtually an independent nation, nicknamed "Kirby Smithdom". In the Red River Campaign of Spring 1864, he commanded victorious Confederate troops under Major-General Dick Taylor, who defeated a combined Union army/navy assault under Major-General Nathaniel P. Banks. On June 2, 1865, Smith surrendered his army at Galveston, Texas, the last general with a major field force. He quickly escaped to Mexico and then to Cuba to avoid arrest for treason. His wife negotiated his return during the period when the federal government offered amnesty to those who would take an oath of loyalty. After the war, Smith worked in the telegraph and railway industries. He also served as a professor of mathematics at the University of the South in Tennessee. He botanized plant specimens and bequeathed his collection to the University of Florida.

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