Civil War Confederate Brigadier General. Born in Howard County, Maryland, he was an 1850 graduate of the College of New Jersey. He studied law in Maryland and maintained a practice there until his marriage in 1857 to a woman from Louisiana, where he established himself as a planter. Two of his brothers-in-law, Duncan F. Kenner and Richard Taylor, became prominent Confederates. At the outbreak of Civil War he organized a battalion of infantry, which was enlarged into the 29th Louisiana Infantry. He was later elected Colonel of the regiment, and led them in the fighting around Vicksburg, notably at Chickasaw Bluffs in December 1862. Having been pushed back into the city by advancing Federals, he and his command were among the troops surrendered by Major General John C. Pemberton on July 4, 1863. He was paroled quickly, and carried to President Jefferson Davis in Richmond Pemberton's report of the surrender of Vicksburg. The War Department then assigned him to the Trans-Mississippi with orders to collect and reorganize parolees west of the Mississippi River. On February 4, 1864, he was promoted to Brigadier General and sent to Alexandria, Louisiana, to Major General Richard Taylor's department. He took over Major General Camille Polignac's division early in 1865, when Polignac traveled to Europe to seek Napoleon's aid for the Confederacy. He was paroled at Natchitoches, Louisiana, on June 8, 1865, shortly after Taylor surrendered the last troops east of the Mississippi. He then returned to his plantation, serving as a presidential elector in 1872 and 1880. He also served on the board of supervisors of Louisiana State University in 1882, and as a professor of agriculture there from 1882 until 1884. From 1889 until 1907 he lived in Florida, except for 3 years from 1894 to 1897, when he held the consularship in Venezuela. Shortly before his death, he moved to a plantation he had bought near Waveland, Mississippi. Upon his death his remains were buried in his wife's family vault.