W.H.L. Wallace
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Image:WHL Wallace.jpg William Hervey Lamme Wallace (July 8, 1821 – April 10, 1862), more commonly known as W.H.L. Wallace, was a lawyer and a Union general in the American Civil War, considered by Ulysses S. Grant to be one of the Union's greatest generals.
Wallace was born in Urbana, Ohio. In 1834, he was educated at Rock Springs Seminary in Mount Morris, Illinois. Although he planned to study law with Abraham Lincoln in Springfield, he joined Theophilus Lyle Dickey's practice in Ottawa, Illinois, instead. (Dickey was a friend of Lincoln's and would eventually be a justice on the Illinois Supreme Court.) In 1851 he married Dickey's daughter, Martha Ann. Wallace became licensed in law in 1846 and that same year he joined the 1st Illinois Infantry as a private. He rose to the rank second lieutenant and adjutant and participated in the Battle of Buena Vista along with a few other minor engagements. After this brief experience in the Mexican War he became district attorney in 1853.
At the start of the Civil War, Wallace volunteered as a private with the 11th Illinois, which was assembled in Springfield. He was then elected the unit's colonel. He rose up the ranks after the Battle of Fort Donelson in 1862, where he commanded a brigade of General John A. McClernand's division of Grant's Army of the Tennessee and was appointed a brigadier general of volunteers. At the Battle of Shiloh, he was a new division commander, yet he managed to withstand six hours of assaults by the Confederates, directly next to the famous Hornet's Nest, or Sunken Road. When his division was finally surrounded, he ordered a withdrawal and many escaped, but he was mortally wounded and only later found barely alive on the battlefield by his troops. They carried him to his wife, who helped tend to him on the way back to General Grant's estate to the north, but he died three days later in Savannah, Tennessee. He is buried in La Salle County, Illinois, near Ottawa.
Wallace County, Kansas, was named in his honor in 1868.
References
- Eicher, John H., & Eicher, David J.: Civil War High Commands, Stanford University Press, 2001, ISBN 0-8047-3641-3
External Links
Categories: U.S. Army generals | 1821 births | 1862 deaths | American Civil War people | Mexican-American War people
