Winfield Scott

Winfield Scott trained for a courtroom, not a battlefield. He studied briefly at William and Mary, read law under a Petersburg attorney, and was practicing in Dinwiddie County by 1806, at 19. He sat through Aaron Burr's 1807 treason trial and came away distrusting the army's senior general, James Wilkinson, whose testimony he watched firsthand. A militia stint during the Chesapeake-Leopard crisis pulled him toward a commission instead of a legal career, and by 1808 he was a 21-year-old artillery captain serving under the very general he despised. He clashed with Wilkinson almost immediately over filthy camp conditions in Louisiana, was court-martialed for insubordination in 1810, and used the year's suspension to study military tactics rather than sulk.

Scott spent the next half-century almost never out of a command post, rising from a 21-year-old captain to general-in-chief, and was still running the Union's opening war strategy at 74, too heavy by then to sit a horse. BriefHistory covers the Mexico City campaign, the Anaconda Plan, and his oversight of the 1838 Cherokee removal in full. This page is about the man underneath the fifty-four years of uniform.

Scott married Maria Mayo in 1817 and had seven children with her; four died before he did, including a daughter who became a nun and died at 24 and a son dead at four. Maria spent her later years in Europe for her health and died in Rome in 1862, apart from him. He ran for president twice more after the war made him famous, in 1848 and 1852, losing the nomination once and the general election once, the second time in the worst defeat the Whig Party ever suffered, done in by southern Whigs who distrusted a Virginian who had enforced Indian removal but would not fully commit to slavery's expansion. He spent his final Washington years in a running expense-account feud with Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, the man who would lead the Confederacy against the army Scott had spent his life building.

Scott sent Ulysses S. Grant a copy of his memoirs in 1864 inscribed 'from the oldest to the greatest general,' and Grant went on to fight the war largely along the Anaconda Plan's lines, the strategy Northern newspapers had mocked when Scott proposed it. He died at West Point in 1866 with Grant, George Meade and George Thomas at his funeral. Washington kept an equestrian statue of him at Scott Circle and named counties and towns for him across a dozen states, monuments to the soldier rather than the officer who oversaw Cherokee removal, a fact his most detailed biographers now treat as inseparable from the record rather than a footnote to it.

Winfield Scott's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Infantry Tactics book
  Three-volume drill manual, the army's standard until 1855 1835
• Aroostook War truce other
  Negotiated with British commander John Harvey to defuse the Maine border crisis 1839
• San Juan Islands settlement other
  Resolved the "Pig War" boundary dispute with Britain 1859
• Memoirs of Lieut.-General Scott book
  Sent a copy to Grant inscribed "from the oldest to the greatest general" 1864

• 1806 aged ~20 Admitted to the Virginia bar at 19
• January 1810 aged 23 Court-martialed for insubordination toward General James Wilkinson Suspended for a year; used the time to study military tactics.
• March 1817 aged 30 Marries Maria DeHart Mayo
• June 25, 1841 aged 55 Becomes commanding general of the US Army
• November 2, 1852 aged 66 Loses the presidency to Franklin Pierce in a landslide The worst defeat in Whig Party history; won just four states.
• 1855 aged ~69 Promoted to brevet lieutenant general The first to hold the rank since George Washington.
• October 1861 aged 75 Resigns as commanding general at 75
• May 29, 1866 aged 79 Dies at West Point, at 79 Grant, Meade and Thomas attended the funeral.

• Jefferson Davis 1808–1889
  President of the Confederacy whose defense of slavery and secession made him central to the Civil War and its memory. feuded with
• Robert E. Lee 1807–1870
  Confederate commander whose military reputation and later commemoration became central to Civil War memory and the Lost Cause. offered command to
• Ulysses S. Grant 1822–1885
  18th President and Union Army general whose leadership was decisive in winning the Civil War. sent his memoirs to
• Franklin Pierce 1804–1869
  Fourteenth president whose support for the Kansas-Nebraska Act deepened the sectional crisis over slavery. defeated