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Making of America - Library of Congress Harvard Memorial Biographies, VOL II.
FITZHUGH BIRNEY.
FITZHUGH BIRNEY was the youngest son of James G. Birney, the distinguished Kentuckian, who, born and bred a slaveholder, emancipated his slaves in 1835, and, in the distribution of his father's estate, took the negroes for his portion, that he might set them also free. When a young man he had been Attorney-General of Alabama. His ability, virtue, and sacrifices made him the candidate of the Liberty Party for the Presidency, in 1844. By a first marriage with a relative of General McDowell, Mr. Birney had five sons and one daughter. In 1841, he married Elizabeth P. Fitzhugh, a daughter of the New York branch of an old Maryland family. Fitzhugh Birney was born at Saginaw, Michigan, January 9, 1842. The following April his parents removed to Bay City, near the mouth of the sluggish Saginaw River. In 1842, the site of the town had been cleared of pine forests, but the only buildings yet erected were the warehouse, the hotel, and the bank. In the hotel Mr. Birney and his family temporarily lodged. In the bank he had an office and a Sunday school. The settlement was much visited by the Ojibway Indians, with whom the boy became a favorite. The first words he learned to speak were in the Indian tongue. Fitzhugh was an athletic and adventurous child. He could not remember when he began to swim. Once, before he was five years old, having pushed out on the river in a sail-boat with two little companions, he was discovered at the helm, assuring them that there was no danger, and promising to take them ashore if they would "stop crying." At seven, he skated by moonlight from Saginaw to Bay City, a distance of twelve miles. At four he had learned to read well. From five to eight he was taught by an excellent New England teacher, Miss Berry of Belfast, Me. In September, 1851, he was placed in Theodore D. Weld's family school at Belleville, New Jersey, where he remained until, in 1854, Mr. Weld removed to Eagleswood, Perth Amboy. Hither Mr. Birney came, being then in bad health, and here he lived until his death in the fall of 1857. During these invalid years Fitzhugh was a nurse to him, as tender and gentle as a girl. He was a thorough and ambitious student. He unconsciously exerted over his mates a powerful personal influence which they were glad to feel and acknowledge. If others rivalled him in some feats of the play-ground and gymnasium, none excelled in so many, none threw over all sports such a fascination as he. In his seventeenth year he had the happiness to save the life of a school-girl too adventurous in learning to swim. She had sunk once; the tide was running rapidly to the sea. Without taking off hat, coat, or shoes, Fitzhugh, who had watched her from the pier, plunged in, seized her as she rose, and supported her till help came. Among his companions at this school was one subsequently known as General Llewellyn F. Haskell, whose rapid promotion was the reward of equal talent, valor, and good fortune. Another was that brave Quaker, Captain Hallock Mann, whose gallant rescue of General Kilpatrick at Aldie Gap, Virginia, was one of the memorable deeds of the war. Kilpatrick was in the hands of the enemy. Mann, seeing his men hesitate, shouted, "Are you heroes or cowards? Follow me! Charge!" and, without looking back, dashed into the fight. His troop, fired by the example, rallied, dispersed the Confederates, and carried him, severely wounded, with the General, from the field. Captain Mann was killed in a subsequent battle. In the spring of 1859, a wrestling match with his young friend Mann brought on bleeding at the lungs, which obliged Fitzhugh to abandon his purpose of entering college that year. The following July he sailed for Europe, arriving there shortly after the peace of Villafranca. The Continent was in a ferment; and he was sufficiently well informed to take an excited interest in the questions of the time. From a balcony on the Boulevard, looking down the Rue de la Paix, he saw the triumphal entry into Paris of the Emperor and the army of Italy. "I suppose war is a great evil," he said, " but it is so splendid that I am half sorry we can never have one at home." A week later he was in Chamouni in Savoy. On the Mer de Glace, his party came to a place where two large masses of ice, sloping towards each other, left between them a dangerous crevasse. An Englishman, named Haskin, went from the upper edge of one of these inclined planes, intending to cross it obliquely and join his friends on an ice-mound at the end of the opening. He was beginning to slide helplessly towards destruction, when Fitzhugh ran upon him from the elevation with an impetus sufficient to carry both along the edge of the abyss to a place of safety beyond it. Of course the story was told in Chamouni. Prince Humbert of Italy, a youth of about the same age, then visiting the Valley, sent an aid with his compliments; and during his stay Fitzhugh was annoyed by the curiosity of travellers and guides. He was in Berlin at the time of John Brown's attack on Harper's Ferry. He was fascinated by the generosity of the deed, but shocked by the fatal miscalculation which seemed almost to clothe it with the attributes of crime. "You condemn, then, the enterprise, my son," said the American Minister to him, "while you justify John Brown." In the third year of the war he wrote, "I have passed over the scene of John Brown's adventurous raid. He was our leader, after all. We shall finish his work, and that 'perturbed spirit' may rest in peace." He remained at Berlin three months, studying German and music. His health seemed re-established; he was the best skater on the ponds of the Thier-garten. Once, after he had performed an evolution of peculiar grace and dexterity, the crown-princess, Victoria of Prussia, witnessing the sport from her carriage, gave with her own hands the signal of applause. He was at Rome during the Carnival; in Paris, at Easter. He landed at Boston in July, 1860, and a few days afterwards entered Harvard College without conditions. Few allusions to public affairs occur in his letters from Cambridge during the first term. Two days after the attack on Fort Sumter, he wrote,
But he was ill, —
His letters to his mother are now devoted by almost alternate sentences to his health and the war.
He was quite feeble during the most of the summer, but in August grew rapidly stronger. On the 17th of August, at the house of his uncle, Gerritt Smith, in Peterborough, New York, he received a letter from his brother David, who said,
On the envelope is written in pencil,
is the answer in his mother's hand,
At the end of August, Fitzhugh, now a Sophomore, rejoined his Class. October 27th, he wrote:
To another:
These reflections weighed on his spirits. His physician shut up his books, recommending some active out-of-door employment. November 28, he wrote from Camp Graham, near Washington:
He was soon detached from the regiment for signal duty. "On the battle-field," he wrote, "our position is dangerous. But the greater the danger, the better the service." He acted on the signal corps seven months, and was considered one of its three most able and accurate officers. A friend once found him on the Chickahominy, with two attendants, far from any Union force. In this position, very dangerous but favorable for watching the enemy's movements, he had been several days. A hostile scouting party might have come upon him at any time; but the advantages, he thought, overbalanced the risk, and he stayed. In February he had an attack of cough and fever, during which he wrote: "I do not like to think of the country. Its situation saddens me. The war is the price of slavery. I hope it will prove to be the price of liberty." He returned to duty towards the middle of March, but shortly fell sick again, and was nursed by his mother till near the end of April. On the 12th of May he was on the steamer City of Richmond, at Yorktown, bound for West Point and General McClellan. On the 21st of May he wrote: "Eight miles from Richmond! in shirt-sleeves, trying to catch the breeze; tanned quite brown; not now the pale, thin, sick boy you nursed so tenderly. General Stoneman and I have seen Richmond from the balloon." May 23. "To-day, at the crossing of the Chickahominy, at last I was under fire, and do not think I showed fear." In the midst of the seven days' battle at Richmond, Lieutenant Birney found time to write his mother:
General William Birney gives a picture of him in this battle:
Colonel David B. Birney having become Brigadier-General, Lieutenant Birney wrote,
August 1, 1862, he was commissioned as
"Assistant Adjutant-General of the Second Brigade, of Kearney's division, with the rank of Captain." He added to the duties of this position those of Aid in the field.
In the second battle of Bull Run, Captain Birney's collar-bone was broken by the falling of his horse. This was the only hurt he received in two years and a half of dangerous service, during which he participated in more than twenty engagements. After the battle of Fredericksburg he wrote:
April 28, 1863.
May 5.
May 14.
July 5, he wrote from Gettysburg:
The promotion of his brother David to the rank of Major General was followed by the promotion of Captain Birney. His commission as Assistant Adjutant-General, with the rank of Major, is dated September 15, 1863. November 30, he sent a pencilled note from Mine Run:
On Christmas-day, 1863, Major Birney married Laura, youngest daughter of the late Jacob Strattan, of Philadelphia, - a lady with whom he became acquainted when both were pupils at Eagleswood. It is harder for him "now to be away from home than it ever has been before," but he will "stay till the good work is done." In April he says:
From Chancellorsville, May 4th, he writes:
Through the spring of 1864 he suffered from cold and cough; towards the end of May it became evident that he was breaking down. The General's confidence in him invited constant over-exertion. He was too sensitive to accept the proffered assistance of his friends. He positively refused to go on the sick-list,
He
(the division badge)
The last two days of May he suffered severely from want of sleep, coughing violently whenever he lay down. Unwillingly he allowed his tent-mate to hold him in his arms that he might rest. All this time, studiously concealing his condition as far as possible, he performed his official labors. June 2d, he wrote to his wife,
It was pneumonia. June 5th he wrote, on board the steamer,
(Duddington is the old Carroll mansion, still inhabited by members of the Carroll family, cousins of Major Birney's mother.) He reached Duddington on the 6th of June. Though very sick and travel-worn, he wrote with his own hand the telegraphic messages that summoned his wife and mother to his side. He bore his physical sufferings with cheerfulness and patience, and looked forward with resignation to the end; but he showed a soldier's sensitiveness at dying of disease. The day he died he said to a wounded cousin,
Once he asked, musingly,
An hour after his death came the invitation to attend the exercises of his Class-day at Cambridge. It was the 17th of June, 1864, - the anniversary of the battle of Bunker's Hill. Fitzhugh Birney was an uncommonly handsome man, tall, athletic, and apparently robust, but unable to endure long-continued hardship and exposure. He was an excellent horseman and a passionate hunter. He never got lost; his knowledge of place was instinctive and unerring, like an Indian's. Courage, truthfulness, and generosity, which distinguished his boyhood, were yet more conspicuous ornaments of his brief manhood. He was always helping others; but others rarely found it possible to help him. The gentleness of his manners veiled from most observers the singular decision of his character. He was little influenced by the opinions of others; but, having formed his own, he adhered to them without obtrusion or argument. Genial in temper, fond of society and mirth, he maintained strictly temperate habits. When the circle of his friends was hilarious with wine and revel, this boy with the beardless chin and the steady, brown eyes, the gayest of the company, was never flushed. Genuine self-respect and principles deeply implanted kept him pure amid the extraordinary temptations to which his beauty, kindness, and universal popularity exposed him. Thus richly endowed with bright faculties and instinctive virtues, still further recommended by the charm of fine demeanor, of him the impartial judgment becomes spontaneous praise. He was buried by his father's side at Hampton, the old homestead of the Fitzhughs, near Geneseo, Livingston County, New York. A posthumous daughter, born in November, bears his name. Of the five sons of James G. Birney living at the outbreak of the war, four entered the Union Army, of whom three died in the service. Noblesse oblige.
By his father, Major Fitzhugh Birney was first-cousin of the Confederate General Humphrey Marshall; by his mother, a more distant relative of the Confederate General Fitzhugh Lee. |
| Birney Pages |
 Family Genealogy
Family Pictorial
1893 KY Newspaper Articles
{1948 Saginaw News (pdf)}
First family: Agatha (McDowell), spouse
James Birney, 1st child
William Birney, 2nd child
David Bell Birney, 5th child
James G. Birney IV, grandson
Second family: Elizabeth (Fitzhugh), spouse Fitzhugh Birney, 1st child
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| Names Referenced |
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Andrew, (Gov.)
Banks, (Gov.) Berry, Miss (teacher) Birney, David (bro./Gen.) Birney, James G.(father) Birney, William (bro./Gen.) Brown, John Edward's Ferry Felton, Fitzhugh, Elizabeth P.(mother) Gaines's Hill Harper's Ferry Haskell, Llewellyn F. (Gen.) Haskin, Jackson, Stonewall(Gen.) Kearney, (Gen.) Kilpatrick, (Gen.) Lee, Fitzhug (Gen.) Mann, Hallock (Capt.) Marshall, Humphrey (Gen.) McClellan, (Gen.) Prince Humbert of Italy Smith, Gerritt Stoneman, (Gen.) Victoria of Prussia Statton, Jacob (father-in-law) Statton, Laura (wife) Weld, Theo. D. (teacher) Wentworth, Thomas |
| Subjects Referenced |
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23rd Penn. Vols. Inf., Co. A
Attorney Gen., AL Bay City, MI Battle of Bunker Hill Battle of Bull Run #2 Battle of Chancellorsville Battle of Fredericksburg Battle of Gettsburg Battle of Richmond Belfast, ME Belleville, NJ Berlin, Germany Birney's Zouaves Boston, MA Brandy Station Camp Graham Chickahominy Civil War Duddington (Carroll mansion) Engleswood, Perth Amboy Fort Sumter Geneseco, NY Groveland, NY Harvard College Liberty party, AL Livingston Co., NY Meade's Penn. Reserves Mechanicsville Mine Run Ojibway Indians Paris, France Peterborough, NY Philadelphia, PA Presidential candidate Rome, Italy Saginaw, MI Saginaw River Steamer City of Rich Richmond Union Army Washington, DC West Point Yorktown Williamsburg Cemetery |
| Additional References |
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Congressional Records:
Bay City Press & Times: |
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