Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 7.djvu/443

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416
CONFEDERATE MILITARY HISTORY.

He was wounded twice in Tennessee, once at Franklin, the next time at Kingston, and once in North Carolina, at Fayetteville. Though for some time commanding a brigade, he did not receive a brigadier-general's commission until a short while before the close of the war, in February, 1865. Being a man of generous nature and manly impulses, he was greatly admired and loved by his soldiers. He knew how to obey as well as command, and set before his men an example of the implicit obedience due by a subordinate to a superior officer. Since the war he has led a quiet, uneventful life, the kind best calculated to give peace and comfort to declining years.

Brigadier-General Moses Wright Hannon was a native of Georgia, born in Baldwin county in 1827, the son of a planter and lawyer, whose wife was an aunt of Hon. Augustus R. Wright of that State. He moved to Alabama in 1847, settled in Montgomery county and engaged in mercantile business, in which he continued, except during a residence in California for eight years, from 1850. He was living in Montgomery when the war began, and at once entered the service of the Confederate States as lieutenant-colonel of the First Alabama cavalry. A few months later he raised the Fifty-third Alabama (a mounted regiment). At the head of this regiment, he served for some time in the Tennessee valley in Roddey's brigade of Forrest's cavalry command, being intimately connected with all the movements of the army of Tennessee. When Forrest went to Mississippi, in the latter part of 1863, Hannon remained with the army of Tennessee, and was placed in command of a brigade consisting of his own regiment, Young's Georgia regiment, Roswell's Georgia battalion, and the Alabama battalion of Major Snodgrass. This brigade was assigned to Kelly's division of Gen. Joseph Wheeler's cavalry corps. It was a magnificent body of horsemen (or mounted infantry, for they could fight either on horseback or on foot). During the Atlanta campaign