Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 7.djvu/420

Rh farming and made his home with his daughter at Jackson's Gap, Ala. Venerable, dignified, and crowned with many honors, he enjoys, in serene old age, the esteem of his people.

Brigadier-General James Cantey was born in Kershaw district, S. C., December 30, 1818. His father was a South Carolina planter, his mother a Miss Richardson. He graduated at the South Carolina college, was admitted to the bar in 1840, and practiced law in Camden for several years. At the commencement of the War with Mexico he responded to the call of his country, and was an officer in the celebrated Palmetto regiment of South Carolina. He won distinction in the battles of that regiment in Mexico, and was wounded in one of them. The year after the return of peace (1849) he settled in Russell county, Ala., and became a planter. He married a daughter of Col. Lemuel Benton, of that county. He led this quiet life until the war of 1861-65 called the sons of the South to arms. He was one of the true men of that day, who, without stopping to count the cost, laid their all upon the altar of country. In 1861 he was elected colonel of the Fifteenth Alabama, and went with it to Virginia. He served in the Shenandoah valley, under Stonewall Jackson, and was engaged in the battles around Richmond, shortly after which he was transferred to the Western army and stationed at Mobile. There he organized a brigade, consisting of the Seventeenth, Twenty-first and Twenty-ninth Alabama regiments, and the Thirty-seventh Mississippi. He received his commission as brigadier-general January 8, 1863. He was next placed in command of his own, Sears' Mississippi and Reynolds' Arkansas brigades. When the army of Tennessee was being reorganized and reinforced at Dalton in the winter of 1863 and 1864, the First and Twenty-sixth Alabama were added to his brigade, and the Twenty-first taken from it. As then organized, it entered the campaign of 1864, one