Recently detached from the Army of Tennessee, the Arkansas troops of Brig. Gen. Thomas J. Churchill’s division had not yet met their new commander when the division came under fire at Richmond, Kentucky, on August 30, 1862. No one recognized the bespectacled officer who appeared among them on horseback, urging them to charge the enemy. This was the way that the Arkansas soldiers became acquainted with Edmund Kirby Smith, a Southern general whose American Civil War career lasted from the opening campaigns of the war in Virginia in 1861 to the last days of the collapsing Confederacy in June 1865. In three years, he rose from the rank of major to that of full general, in charge of the vast, seemingly semi-independent Department of the Trans-Mississippi that came to be known as “Kirby Smithdom.”
Edmund Kirby Smith’s Early Years
Edmund Smith was born in St. Augustine, Florida, on May 16, 1824, to Connecticut natives Joseph Lee Smith and Frances Kirby Smith. Early during his childhood, Edmund’s family realized that the lad was nearsighted and would always need spectacles. Like many Victorian-era soldiers and civilians, he would avoid having his photograph taken while wearing glasses, but he depended on them when on the battlefield.
Several years of private schooling prepared him to enter the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1841. Edmund’s fellow cadets called him “Seminole” because the Second Seminole War was being fought in his native Florida.
