Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 3.djvu/1367

Rh bar. By successive re-elections he filled the office of commonwealth attorney from 1870 to 1880. Elected to Congress from the Third district of Virginia in 1880, he was returned by his constituents without interruption until 1894. During this service he held membership in the most important committees, such as those on naval affairs, foreign affairs, rivers and harbors, military affairs, merchant marine and fisheries, and in the Forty-ninth Congress was chairman of the committee on manufactures. During the Fifty-second and Fifty-third Congresses he was chairman of the committee on interstate and foreign commerce. Captain Wise cherishes his comradeship with the survivors of the Confederate armies, and maintains memberships in the R. E. Lee and George E. Pickett camps, of Richmond.

Lieutenant Henry A. Wise, superintendent of the public schools of Baltimore, is a Virginian by birth and rearing, and during the war served with the forces in the field, as well as in other capacities, though not yet in years having attained his majority at the close of the struggle. He was born in Accomack county, Va., May 18, 1844, and passed the years of childhood in Princess Anne county and at Norfolk, where he attended the Norfolk academy. Thence he entered the Virginia military institute, at Lexington, and was there as a student when the war, became imminent. In April, 1861, he went with the other students to Richmond to report for duty in the service of the State, and was assigned to the work of drilling volunteers, an occupation which he continued subsequently at Ashland, and in western Virginia. He was commissioned in May, 1861, as first lieutenant and adjutant of the Forty-sixth Virginia regiment of infantry, and served with the command in the early operations in West Virginia, where he participated in several skirmishes. In February, 1862, he participated in the defense of Roanoke island, and was captured with a large number of the troops, and held there two or three weeks, after which he was paroled. He then proceeded to the Virginia military institute, and received the appointment of assistant professor of mathematics, Latin and tactics, as which he served during the major part of the war period. At one time he was appointed adjutant of a battalion of scouts and guides under command of Col. John H. Richardson, and attached to the headquarters of General Lee, but in this capacity never served, remaining at the institute. In the spring of 1864, when General Breckinridge collected a body of men to reinforce General Imboden in the valley of Virginia he called out the full corps of cadets at Lexington, to the number of over two hundred, who marched under the command of Col. Scott Shipp, commandant, to the battlefield of New Market. Here Professor Wise commanded Company A with the rank of captain V. M. I. cadets, and when Colonel Shipp was wounded took command. For several hours they successfully engaged, with their supports, the troops of General Sigel, and finally made a gallant charge against a battery of six guns. The boys made their way through a deep gulch, grown with underbrush, in advance of their support, the Sixty-second regiment, and formed their lines under Captain Wise's commands, standing steady in the face of a destructive fire. Then they charged and drove the Federals from the position, capturing the guns but with severe loss. Capain Wise escaped unhurt, though eight or ten bullets pierced his