1. Rufus Saxton was a Union Army brigadier general during the American Civil War who received America's highest military decoration, the Medal of Honor, for his actions defending Harpers Ferry during Confederate General Jackson's Valley Campaign.
18 Facts About Rufus Saxton
1. 2.
Rufus Saxton was appointed military governor of the Department of the South in May 1862 and was involved with the Port Royal Experiment.
3.
Rufus Saxton was removed from his position in the government agency by President Andrew Johnson.
4.
Rufus Saxton was born in Greenfield, Massachusetts, to Jonathan and Miranda Rufus Saxton.
5.
Rufus Saxton's father was a Unitarian and a Transcendentalist whose feminist and abolitionist writings were heard on the lyceum circuit.
6.
Rufus Saxton descended from a family of Unitarian ministers.
7.
Rufus Saxton's father attempted to secure a place for Rufus Saxton at Brook Farm in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, a transcendentalist community started by George Ripley and attended by Nathaniel Hawthorne.
8.
Rufus Saxton was educated at the United States Military Academy at West Point, graduating in 1849.
9.
Rufus Saxton was promoted to first lieutenant in March 1855.
10.
Rufus Saxton married a Philadelphian missionary, Mathilda Thompson, who had come South to teach the newly freed blacks with her newspaper journalist brother.
11.
Rufus Saxton recruited Gullah men from the surrounding South Carolina Sea Islands and other contrabands from Georgia and Florida.
12.
In 1865, Rufus Saxton gave a speech at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina.
13.
Rufus Saxton later served as assistant commissioner for the Freedmen's Bureau, where he pursued the policy of settling freed slaves in land confiscated from white landowners in the Sea Islands, until he was removed from his position by President Andrew Johnson.
14.
Rufus Saxton retired in 1888 as a colonel and assistant quartermaster general and lived in Washington, DC until his death.
15.
Rufus Saxton was a member of the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States and the Sons of the American Revolution.
16.
Rufus Saxton was an abolitionist and proponent for greater civil rights for blacks.
17.
Rufus Saxton appointed his friend, author and abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson, colonel of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, the first official black regiment.
18.
The Rufus Saxton School established to educate African Americans in Charleston was named for him.