Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 1.djvu/729

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CONFEDERATE MILITARY HISTORY
681

manding a part of his rallied force he ventured on danger with daring that was natural to him, and was killed by a Federal command whose surrender he had demanded. The General s gallant escort and staff at once charged the enemy and recovered his body. He was buried while Petersburg and the capital of the Confederacy were aflame and occupied by the Federal armies, and his corps was on retreat to Appomattox. Without the usual military honors he was committed to the grave. His personal purity, his devotion to the South, his military renown, have become the heritage of his people.

Lieutenant- General Daniel Harvey Hill was born at Hill’s Iron Works, South Carolina, July 12, 1821, of Scotch-Irish lineage. His [grandfather, a native of Ireland, built an iron foundry in York district where cannon were cast for the Continental army until it was destroyed by the British. This ancestor also fought gallantly as a colonel in Sumter s command. General Hill was graduated at West Point in 1842, in the class with Longstreet, A. P. Stewart, G. W. Smith, R. H. Anderson and Van Dorn, and his first service was on the Maine frontier. During the Mexican war he participated in nearly every important engagement either under Scott or Taylor, and attracted notice by his conspicuous courage. He soon rose to the rank of first-lieutenant, won the brevet of captain at Contreras and Churubusco, and that of major at Chapultepec, where he was one of the first of the storming party over the ramparts. When his State legislature voted swords to the three bravest survivors of the war, one was awarded to Hill. He served at Fortress Monroe in 1848, and on February 28, 1849, resigned from the army to accept the professorship of mathematics at Washington college, Virginia. In 1852 he was married to the he became a professor in Davidson college, North Carolina. In 1859, impressed with the duty of preparing the