Web Letters: In His League

Mr. Sherman's article on George Plimpton notes: "His great-grandfather Adelbert Ames was the youngest general in the Civil War and subsequently became a Reconstruction governor of Mississippi."

As both William McFeely's Pulitzer winning biography of President Grant and Richard Current's splendid Those Terrible Carpetbaggers," shows General Ames was many things. Despite what President Kennedy wrote in Profiles in Courage, Ames was an idealistic and generally honest patrician who hoped to better the lives of the freedmen. Having said that, while Ames was a decorated hero of the Civil War, he was not the youngest general. Adelbert Ames was born in 1835. The much more famous George Armstrong Custer, of Little Big Horn infamy, was born in 1839. The oddly named Gen. Galusha Pennybacker was born in 1844. Young General Pennybacker could not even vote for his commander in chief. Gen. Charles C. Dodge, the son of a Congressman, was born in 1841. While General Ames was the last Civil War general to pass away in 1933 at the age of 97, he was not the youngest general officer in the Union army.

Ames is a fascinating figure whose life reveals much of the idealistic hopes and the heartbreaking failures of white Northerners who tried to fulfill the promise of racial equality.

Kevin Michael Derby

Jacksonville, FL