Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 3.djvu/1257

Rh the town of Suffolk, and since 1889 has held the office of clerk of the Nansemond county court. In 1866 he was married to Laura B., daughter of Mills C. Daughtrey, of Suffolk.

Lieutenant Thomas Washington Smith, of Suffolk, prominent among the gallant soldiers of southeastern Virginia, and since the war one of the most widely known and popular gentlemen of the State, was born at Somerton, Nansemond county, June 1, 1832. He is the son of Washington Smith, of that county, a prosperous planter and merchant, who served in defense of his country as a captain in the war of 1812. Colonel Smith was reared and educated amid the social environments of a great plantation of the ante-bellum days, where the virtues of hospitality and the requirements of manly honor reigned supreme. A son of the South by birth, instinct and education, and sustained by the dignity of ancestral rank and the resources of private fortune, he developed into an ideal Southern gentleman. His youth passed, he embarked in mercantile pursuits, to which he devoted himself for a few years at Suffolk and subsequently in North Carolina. Just before the outbreak of war in 1861 he returned to Suffolk, and being thoroughly devoted to the cause of Virginia and the Confederacy, raised a company for the defense of his State. He was elected second lieutenant of this company, which was assigned to the Sixteenth Virginia infantry regiment, and brigaded under the command of General Mahone, subsequently of General Weisiger, in Mahone's division of A. P. Hill's corps. With the splendid record of this brigade he was identified, much of the time in command of his company, until the close of the struggle. He participated in all the battles and campaigns of the army of Northern Virginia, bravely taking his place among the heroes who held the posts of danger; at Seven Pines and through the battles of the Seven Days, until McClellan was driven from before the threatened Confederate capital; in the second rout of the Federals at Manassas, and in the gallant defense of the passes of South Mountain, where the soldiers of the Confederacy were no less valorous than Roland in the pass at Roncesvalle, at Sharpsburg, in the Wilderness, on the Petersburg lines fighting against tremendous odds and making the Crater the burial place of the enemy instead of a gate to Richmond—through all this tremendous struggle he did manfully and devotedly and modestly all that a brave man could do for the cause to which he had devoted his life. Three times he was wounded, once severely and twice slightly, at Spottsylvania Court House, Malvern Hill and Hatcher's Run. With a rare comradeship for the men in the ranks, he repeatedly refused offers of promotion. On one occasion General Mahone sent a messenger to inform him that he was promoted quartermaster of the regiment, but Lieutenant Smith promptly replied, "I won't accept it." This was the off-hand expression of his feelings which he supposed the general's aide would translate into the proper forms of official communication. But the words were reported to Mahone verbatim, which caused that brave warrior to exclaim: "Well, we'll see if he won't." The lieutenant was required to interview the general on the subject, but Mahone respected his generous desire to stay in the line of duty with the men whom he had enlisted for war, and permitted him to retain his position. At Appomattox the remnants of two companies