Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 1.djvu/745

Rh ber of the commission which had in charge the arrangement of that superb memorial of the valor of American soldiery, and he is yet engaged in that work with his residence near the National park.

Lieutenant-General Simon Bolivar Buckner was born in 1823 in Hart county, Kentucky, entered the United States military academy in 1840, and being graduated in 1844, was assigned to a lieutenancy in the Second infantry. Later he was called back to West Point as assistant professor of ethics, and from this position was returned to the active service at his request, in order that he he was again at West Point, as assistant inspector of infantry tactics, and in 1853 he resigned his commission in the army. In 1861 during the Kentucky period of neutrality he was in the command of the State militia and performed his duties with such even balance that in August President Lincoln ordered a commission as brigadier-general in the United States army to be secretly made out, and delivered to General Buckner unless there were reason to the contrary. After the battle of Manassas the Kentucky militia disintegrated, the majority following General Buckner, who without wavering in his allegiance to his conception of duty, went south to join the army of the Confederacy. He was commissioned a brigadier-general in the provisional army September 14, 1861, and as signed to the command of the central division of Kentucky, under the general command of. Albert Sidney Johnston. He at once advanced northward from Camp Boone, and one of his detachments proceeded within thirty-three miles of Cincinnati, causing great consternation at that city, and causing the advance of an opposing force under General W. T. Sherman. He then fortified and held Bowling Green, as the salient of the Confederate line in Kentucky and Tennessee. When the campaign of 1862 was opened by the Federal advance under Grant