Earl Van Dorn

Earl Van Dorn (1820-1863) was a nineteenth-century American soldier, fighting first for the United States Army in the Mexican War and the campaigns against the Seminoles, then for the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War. When his home state of Mississippi seceded in January 1861, he volunteered for is militia and was immediately made a brigadier general, then became major general and commander of all of Mississippi's forces when the militia's previous commander, Jefferson Davis, stepped aside to accept the position of President of the Confederate States.

Van Dorn accepted the post of commander of the Trans-Mississippi Department after several other generals had refused it. Van Dorn commanded at the Battle of Pea Ridge, where he was defeated by Samuel Curtis's Union Army of the Southwest, despite being one of only two Confederate generals to command a numerically superior force in a pitched battle. (The other was Braxton Bragg, at the Battle of Chickamauga, in September 1863.)

Van Dorn's command was transferred to the Army of Tennessee, with which he was responsible for another Union victory at the Second Battle of Corinth. Van Dorn would never be trusted with an army command again; he was demoted to command the Army of Tennessee's cavalry, at which he proved to be much more capable, seriously disrupting Ulysses S. Grant's campaign against Vicksburg all through the winter of 1862-63. He would hold this position until his death--which came under unusual circumstances for a general.

In addition to his military prowess (which was a mixed bag), Van Dorn was renowned for a number of other talents, including horsemanship, poetry, painting, and especially womanizing. His reputation for the latter was particularly infamous, and ultimately proved fatal. He carried on an affair with Jessie McKissack Peters, of Maury County, Tennessee, the wife of Dr James Bodie Peters. On May 7, 1863, the cuckolded Dr Peters gained access to Van Dorn's headquarters at Spring Hill, Tennessee, and shot Van Dorn to death.

Earl Van Dorn in The Guns of the South
When Molly Beane presented Nate Caudell with a copy of Bruce Catton's The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War, she instructed him to open it to any page at random. He opened to a page in a discussion of the Vicksburg Campaign that included photographs of Generals Grant and Van Dorn. The photos were printed directly onto the page, not woodcut. This amazed Caudell; he had never encountered a printing technology which would have made this possible.