Civil War Soldier. Author. Lawyer. After graduating from Princeton, he spent three years studying at Heidelberg and Munich. He then attended the Sorbonne. For three days he was a captain of a barricade in the Paris revolution of 1848. Returning to the United States, he was an early supporter of Abraham Lincoln and fought in the Civil War. He saw service in an emergency regiment during the Gettysburg campaign as a private in Landis's Independent Battery, Pennsylvania Light Artillery (Emergency, 1863). He abandoned his law practice. Becoming a journalist, he worked for P. T. Barnum and R. W. Griswoldin's The Illustrated News. He also wrote for Philadelphia's Evening Bulletin and the periodical Vanity Fair. Hans Breitmann's Ballads established him as a literary humorist. His later life was spent in America and Europe in a successful effort to establish industrial art as a branch of public education. He also explored gipsy lore, tinkers' language, Indian legends, Italian witches, and a variety of exotic, mysterious, and occult subjects. During this time he wrote more than fifty books on those subjects. Leland died in Florence. His friend and biographer, Elizabeth Robins Pennell in Charles Godfrey Leland: A Biography (1906) wrote: "His ashes . . . lie at Laurel Hill with those of the wife [Eliza Bella Fisher] he missed so sorely that he could live without her but a few months." While this is an intriguing and romantic tale, his remains were, in reality, interred at his parents' plot at Woodlands.
Civil War Soldier. Author. Lawyer. After graduating from Princeton, he spent three years studying at Heidelberg and Munich. He then attended the Sorbonne. For three days he was a captain of a barricade in the Paris revolution of 1848. Returning to the United States, he was an early supporter of Abraham Lincoln and fought in the Civil War. He saw service in an emergency regiment during the Gettysburg campaign as a private in Landis's Independent Battery, Pennsylvania Light Artillery (Emergency, 1863). He abandoned his law practice. Becoming a journalist, he worked for P. T. Barnum and R. W. Griswoldin's The Illustrated News. He also wrote for Philadelphia's Evening Bulletin and the periodical Vanity Fair. Hans Breitmann's Ballads established him as a literary humorist. His later life was spent in America and Europe in a successful effort to establish industrial art as a branch of public education. He also explored gipsy lore, tinkers' language, Indian legends, Italian witches, and a variety of exotic, mysterious, and occult subjects. During this time he wrote more than fifty books on those subjects. Leland died in Florence. His friend and biographer, Elizabeth Robins Pennell in Charles Godfrey Leland: A Biography (1906) wrote: "His ashes . . . lie at Laurel Hill with those of the wife [Eliza Bella Fisher] he missed so sorely that he could live without her but a few months." While this is an intriguing and romantic tale, his remains were, in reality, interred at his parents' plot at Woodlands.
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