======================================================================
=                         Theodore_Winthrop                          =
======================================================================

                            Introduction
======================================================================
Major Theodore Woolsey Winthrop (September 22, 1828 – June 10, 1861)
was a writer, lawyer, and world traveller. He was one of the first
Union officers killed in the American Civil War.


                             Biography
======================================================================
Winthrop was born in New Haven, Connecticut, and is a descendant of
several prominent Colonial families. Through his father, he was
descended from Governor John Winthrop, and through his mother, from
theologian Jonathan Edwards, as well as early settlers George (Joris)
Woolsey and Thomas Cornell.

He graduated in 1848 from Yale University, where his uncle Theodore
Dwight Woolsey was President, and he was a member of the Phi chapter
of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. He traveled for a year in Great
Britain and Europe and then through the United States, settling in
Staten Island in the 1850s. After contributing to periodicals, short
sketches, and stories, which attracted little attention, Winthrop
enlisted in the 7th Regiment, New York State Militia, an early
volunteer unit of the Federal Army that answered President Abraham
Lincoln's call for troops in 1861. He wrote a popular essay about the
experience titled "Our March to Washington."  He was appointed Major
and soon became an aide-de-camp to Major General Benjamin Butler,
commander of the Department of Virginia headquartered at Fort Monroe.
Winthrop had long been an abolitionist, along with his younger brother
William Winthrop, who later became the nation's leading authority on
military law.  Butler credited Winthrop with first formulating the
policy that automatically conferred freedmen status on escaped slaves
who entered into Union Army-held territory.


                        Battle of Big Bethel
======================================================================
At the Battle of Big Bethel on June 10, 1861, he volunteered for
General Ebenezer W. Peirce's staff and drew up a crude plan of battle.
After a Federal attack to the enemy right flank was foiled, Winthrop
led an ill-fated assault on the Confederate left held by four
companies of the 1st Regiment North Carolina Infantry, under the
command of Colonel (later Lieutenant General) Daniel Harvey Hill.

In the heat of battle, Major Winthrop leapt onto the trunk of a fallen
tree and reportedly yelled, "One more charge boys, and the day is
ours."  Soon thereafter, he was killed by a musket ball to the heart
and became the first casualty of rank for the Northern side in what
history regards as the first pitched land battle of the Civil War.
Ironically, ardent abolitionist Winthrop may have been shot by the
African-American slave of a Confederate officer in the 1st North
Carolina Infantry. (Three different soldiers, as well as this slave,
referred to in the records only as "Sam," claimed to have killed him.)


                               Author
======================================================================
Winthrop's novels, for which he had failed to find a publisher during
his lifetime, appeared posthumously. They include
'[https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/73738 John Brent]', founded on his
experiences in the far West, and 'Edwin Brothertoft', a story of the
American Revolution. 'Cecil Dreeme', his most important work, was a
semi-autobiographical novel dealing with social mores and gender roles
set at New York University, where Winthrop had once been a lodger.
Other works include 'The Canoe and the Saddle' and 'Life in the Open
Air'. His sister, Laura Winthrop Johnson, assembled a collection of
his poems and prose organized by the time period of his life 'Life and
Poems of Theodore Winthrop'.

Works published during Winthrop's lifetime include a pamphlet
accompanying the painting The Heart of the Andes by his friend
Frederic Edwin Church, distributed in 1859. After Winthrop's death in
1861, the 'Atlantic Monthly' published sketches of the military
campaigns in Virginia based on his own experiences.


                              See also
======================================================================
*Elmer E. Ellsworth


                           External links
======================================================================
*
[http://www.nyu.edu/library/bobst/collections/exhibits/bobst/washsq/voices/volumes/cdreeme/html/CD_int.HTM
'NYU and the Village: Theodore Winthrop']
* [https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_PwQXAAAAYAAJ Life and Poems of
Theodore Winthrop]
*
*
*


License
=========
All content on Gopherpedia comes from Wikipedia, and is licensed under CC-BY-SA
License URL: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Original Article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Winthrop