General In The Civil war Major General Spanish-American War

Thomas Lafayette Rosser left West Point without waiting to graduate with the class of 1861. Accepting a commission in the Confederate army, he was in a number of famous battles, including First Manassas (Bull Run), the Seven Days, Beaver Dam Creek, Second Manassas, South Mountain, Sharpsburg (Antietam), Gettysburg, the Wilderness and Appomattox.

He was wounded three times. Thirty-three years later, McKinley made Rosser a brigadier general of United States volunteers in the Spanish-American War.

Peter Conover Hains didn’t see as much action as his Southern counterparts, but no other officer had the distinction of serving in the Civil War, the Spanish-American War and the First World War.

Hains graduated from the United States Military Academy on June 24, 1861, two months after the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter. His West Point classmates included George Armstrong Custer and Thomas L. Rosser.

Hains was commissioned a second lieutenant and promoted to first lieutenant, Light Battery M, 2nd Artillery Regiment, under Major Henry Jackson Hunt. The unit was part of the Horse Artillery Brigade of the Army of the Potomac.

Image: Peter Conover Hains (seated, second from left) at Fair Oaks, Virginia, 1862, with officers of the Horse Artillery Brigade. Standing, left to right: Lt. Edmund Pendleton, Lt. Alex C. M. Pennington, Capt. Henry Benson, Capt. H. M. Gibson, Lt. James E. Wilson, Capt. John C. Tidball, Lt. William N. Dennison. Seated, left to right: Capt. Horatio Gibson, Lt. Peter C. Hains, Lt. Col. William Hays, Capt. James M. Robertson, Lt. J. W. Barlow. Seated on the ground, left to right: Lt. Robert H. Chapin, Lt. Robert Clarke, A.C. Vincent | Library of Congress

Legend has it that Lieutenant Hains got to fire the first shot of the Union cannonade at Bull Run, July 21, 1861. His outfit saw action at Grove Wharf, Williamsburg, Hanover Court House and Malvern Hill. Hains was brevetted a captain and cited for gallantry.

Lieutenant Hains transferred to the Corps of Engineers, and soon found himself in Mississippi as chief engineer of the Thirteenth Corps in Grant’s Army of the Tennessee.

Hains wrote a perceptive article about this experience in the last year of his life. “The Vicksburg Campaign” ran in the May-June 1921, issue of Military Engineer.

In his book The Class of 1861, Ralph Kirshner draws heavily on Hains’s article to describe the Union victory at Vicksburg. Here are some of the many times Kirshner quotes Hains’s analysis of Confederate mistakes:

The idea that Vicksburg was designed to protect a field army, and the field army was designed to protect Vicksburg, are incompatible. These duties were not dependent upon each other. If there was field army, its place was in the field, not around Vicksburg.

Hains notes that General John C. Pemberton’s command “was a field army, or, at least, it was used as such, and yet it was a garrison army as well. As a field army it was too small. As a garrison army it was too large.”

Putting his finger on the nub of Pemberton’s dilemma, Hains says:

Vicksburg, itself, was of no special value to the Confederacy except insofar as the guns mounted on the river front closed the river to navigation. How, then, were these guns to be protected? The answer to that question depends on the answer to the further question. By what would their destruction be threatened? Certainly not by a cavalry raid nor by the navy alone operating from the river. The menace could only come from a field army, and the menacing army must be met by an opposing field army. The batteries could not be protected by chaining the army to the guns but by giving it mobility.

— Ralph Kirshner, The Class of 1861: Custer, Ames, and Their Classmates After West Point (Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), pp. 37-46

General Grant mentions Hains in his memoirs, noting the contribution the engineering officer made to the success of the Vicksburg campaign:

Four bridges had to be built across bayous, two of them each over six hundred feet long, making about two thousand feet of bridging in all. The river falling made the current in these bayous very rapid, increasing the difficulty of building and permanently fastening these bridges; but the ingenuity of the “Yankee soldier” was equal to any emergency. The bridges were soon built of such material as could be found near by, and so substantial were they that not a single mishap occurred in crossing all the army with artillery, cavalry and wagon trains, except the loss of one siege gun (a thirty-two pounder). This, if my memory serves me correctly, broke through the only pontoon bridge we had in all our march across the peninsula. These bridges were all built by McClernand’s command, under the supervision of Lieutenant Hains of the Engineer Corps.

— Ulysses S. Grant, The Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), p. 254

Here Grant describes the action at the Big Black River Bridge (May 17, 1863):

As the bridge was destroyed and the river was high, new bridges had to be built. It was but little after nine o'clock A.M. when the capture took place. As soon as work could be commenced, orders were given for the construction of three bridges. One was taken charge of by Lieutenant Hains, of the Engineer Corps, one by General McPherson himself and one by General Ransom, a most gallant and intelligent volunteer officer. My recollection is that Hains built a raft bridge; McPherson a pontoon, using cotton bales in large numbers, for pontoons; and that Ransom felled trees on opposite banks of the river, cutting only on one side of the tree, so that they would fall with their tops interlacing in the river, without the trees being entirely severed from their stumps. A bridge was then made with these trees to support the roadway. Lumber was taken from buildings, cotton gins and wherever found, for this purpose. By eight o'clock in the morning of the 18th all three bridges were complete and the troops were crossing.

— Grant, Personal Memoirs, p. 288

Peter Conover Hains was an outstanding civil engineer. Between wars, he created the Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C., and was instrumental in ensuring that what became known as the Panama Canal was dug in Panama instead of Nicaragua. Hains Point, at the southern tip of East Potomac Park in DC, is named for him.

Here’s how the New York Times announced his death:

Gen. Peter C. Hains Dies

Engineer Assisted in the Construction of the Panama Canal

Washington, Nov. 7—Maj. Gen. Peter C. Hains, U.S.A., retired, who occupied important posts on the various commissions which surveyed and assisted in the construction of the Panama Canal, died today at Walter Reed Hospital after a brief illness. He was 81 years of age.

Following his graduation from West Point in 1861 he distinguished himself in the Engineer Corps in the Civil War, being cited thrice for “gallant and meritorious services.” Although he retired in 1904, a special act of Congress made him eligible for the World War, and he was assigned to active duty in September, 1917, as engineer for the Norfolk Harbor and River District, the next year becoming division engineer for the Eastern Division, retiring permanently in the Fall of 1918.

In August, 1908, the General’s two sons, Thornton Jenkins and Peter C. Jr., were charged with the shooting of William E. Annis at the Bayside Yacht Club. The former was acquitted, but Peter Hains was sent to Sing Sing and served two years before being pardoned.

— The New York Times, Tuesday, November 8, 1921, p. 19