Born 1800-1819

John Brown, born May 9, 1800

John Brown was born May 9, 1800, in Torrington, Connecticut. He was the fourth of eight children of Owen Brown and Ruth Mills Brown. He died more than a year before the Civil War began, at the age of 59.

William Seward, born May 16, 1801
William Henry Seward was born in Florida, New York on May 16, 1801, the fourth of six children born to Samuel Sweezy Seward and his wife Mary Jennings Seward. At the time there were only a dozen buildings in the village of Florida. The Seward house consisted of 5 rooms on the main floor with a staircase leading to a large loft made up of 2 bedrooms with sloping walls and a large chimney. The Sewards owned three slaves who lived in the kitchen and the attic above it. He was 60 years old when the Civil War began.




Dorothea Dix, born April 4, 1802

Dorothea Lynde Dix was born April 4, 1802, in the town of  Hampden, Maine.   She was 59 years old when the Civil War began. 

Albert Sidney Johnston

Albert Sidney Johnston, 
born February 2, 1803
Albert Sidney Johnston was born in the village of Washington, Mason County, Kentucky. He was the youngest son of Doctor John Johnston, a physician and one of the early settlers of that town. His mother was Abigail Harris Johnston.  Johnston was 58 years old when the Civil War began; he was the commander of the U.S. Army Department of the Pacific in California.  He resigned his commission as soon as he heard that the state of Texas had seceded.  

Angelina Grimké, born February 26, 1805
Angelina Emily Grimké was born in Charleston, South Carolina to John Faucheraud Grimke, a wealthy Episcopalian lawyer, judge, planter, politician, slaveholder, Revolutionary War veteran and distinguished member of Charleston society. Angelina was 56 years old when the Civil War began; she was living with her husband, children, and sister, Sarah, in New Jersey. 

Claiborne Fox Jackson, born April 4, 1806
Claiborne Fox Jackson, one of ten children of Dempsey Carroll and Mary Orea "Molly" (Pickett) Jackson, was born in Fleming County, Kentucky, where his father was a wealthy tobacco farmer and slaveholder. He was 55 years old when the Civil War began.

David Sinton, born June 26, 1808
David Sinton was born in County Armagh, Ireland, the son of Quaker linen manufacturer John Sinton, of Unshinagh, and Mary McDonnell Sinton. John Sinton was a cousin of Irish Quaker industrialist brothers, Thomas and John Sinton. The Sintons, like so many of Northern Ireland's linen families, were Quakers. David Sinton was 53 years old when the Civil War began.

Abraham Lincoln, born February 12, 1809
Abraham Lincoln was born February 12, 1809, the second child of  Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Lincoln (née Hanks), in a one-room log cabin in Kentucky. Lincoln was 52 years old when the Civil War began; he was assassinated six days after the Confederate general Robert E. Lee surrendered.

Fanny Kemble, born November 27, 1809
Frances Anne Kemble was born in London, England, on November 27, 1809, the daughter of the English actor, Charles Kemble, and his Viennese-born wife, Marie Therese De Camp, a ballet dancer and actress. She first went to the United States in 1832, at the age of 23.  The 30-day voyage was the first of the 18 trans-Atlantic crossings Kemble made in her lifetime. She was 51 years old when the Civil War began.

Charles Lenox Remond, born February 1, 1810

Charles Lenox Remond was the eldest son of eight children born in Salem, Massachusetts to John Remond, a haridresser who was a native of the Caribbean island of Curaçao, and Nancy Lenox Remond, daughter of a prominent Bostonian, a hairdresser and caterer. Remond was 51 years old when the Civil War began; he was living in Massachusetts with his family.

David Ruggles, born March 10, 1810
David Ruggles was born in Lyme, Connecticut. His parents were David Ruggles, Sr. and Nancy Ruggles, both free blacks. He died 10 years before the Civil War began.









Margaret Fuller, born May 23, 1810

Sarah Margaret Fuller was born May 23, 1810, in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, the first child of Timothy Fuller, an attorney, and Margaret Crane Fuller. The Fullers were descended from Thomas Fuller, a pious and poetry-writing Englishman who settled in Salem in 1638. Timothy’s father, a clergyman, had opposed the signing of the United States Constitution on the grounds that it condoned human slavery. She died 11 years before the Civil War began, at the age of 40.

Robert Purvis,
born August 4th, 1810
Robert Purvis was born August 4, 1810 in Charleston, South Carolina, the second of three sons. His father was William Purvis, an English immigrant who was in business with his brothers as a cotton broker.  His mother, Harriet Judah, was a woman of color.  Robert and his two brothers (William, born in 1806, and Joseph, born in 1812) were three-quarters European by ancestry.  Robert Purvis was 50 years when the Civil War began.

Ormsby Mitchel, born August 28, 1810

Ormsby MacKnight Mitchel was born near Morganfield in Union County, Kentucky, to John and Elizabeth McAllister Mitchel, who had moved there from Virginia. His father died when Ormsby was three years old. In 1814, his mother took her younger children, Vincent, John, Jane, Ormsby, and Letitia to Lebanon, Ohio, where her oldest daughter, who was married, had settled. He was 50 years old when the Civil War began.

Cassius Marcellus Clay, born October 19, 1810
Cassius Clay, nicknamed "Cash", was the youngest son of the nine children of General Green Clay and his wife, Sally Lewis Clay. He was born at Clermont, their home in the Richmond area of Madison County, Kentucky. He was 50 years old when the Civil War began.

Edward Dickinson Baker, born February 24, 1811
Edward Baker was born in London, England in 1811 to schoolteacher Edward Baker and Lucy Dickinson Baker, poor but educated Quakers. He was fifty years old when the Civil War began.

Alexander Stephens, born February 11, 1812
Alexander Stephens was born on February 11, 1812. His parents were Andrew Baskins Stephens and Margaret Grier, who were married in 1807. The Stephenses lived on a farm near present-day Crawfordville, Georgia. Stephens was 49 years old when the Civil War began. By the time of the Civil War, Stephens owned 34 slaves and several thousand acres.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, born June 14, 1811

Harriet Elisabeth Beecher was born in Litchfield, Connecticut on June 14, 1811. She was the seventh of 13 children born to religious leader Lyman Beecher (1775-1863) and Roxana (Foote) (1775- 1816), a deeply religious woman. Harriet Beecher Stowe was 50 years old when the Civil War began.

Samuel Phillips Lee, born February 13, 1812

Samuel Phillips Lee was born February 13, 1812 at "Sully" in Fairfax County, Virginia to Francis Lightfoot Lee II and Jane Fitzgerald Lee. He was 49 years old when the Civil War began.










Martin Delany, born May 6, 1812

Martin Robison Delany was born free in Charles Town, Virginia (later West Virginia) to Pati Peace and Samuel Delany. Although his father, Samuel, was an enslaved carpenter, his mother was a free woman and a seamstress. He was 49 years old when the Civil War began.

"Madame Restell" (Ann Trow Lohman), born May 6, 1812
Ann Caroline Trow was born in Painswick, Gloucestershire, England. Her father, John Trow, was a woolen mill laborer. She was 49







James McCune Smith, born April 18, 1813

James McCune Smith was born free in 1813 in New York City, New York; his mother, Lavinia Smith, was a slave from South Carolina who had been brought to New York by her master. He was 48 years old when the Civil War began; he would die five months after it ended.

Henry Ward Beecher, born June 24, 1813

Born in Litchfield, Connecticut, Henry was the eighth of thirteen children of Lyman Beecher, a Presbyterian preacher from Boston, Massachusetts. Henry's mother, Roxana Foote, died when Henry was three years old. He was 48 years old when the Civil War began.

Wilmer McLean, born May 3, 1814
Wilmer McLean was born on May 3, 1814 in Alexandria, Virginia. He was 47 years old when the Civil War began.

Edwin Stanton, born December 19, 1814

Edwin McMasters Stanton was born in Steubenville, Ohio, the first child of David and Lucy Norman Stanton. His father was from a Quaker family, but was obliged to leave the Society of Friends when he married Lucy, who was a Methodist.  Lucy Norman was the daughter of a wealthy Virginia planter and miller.  Edwin Stanton was 46 years old when the Civil War began.

G.W. Logan, born February 22, 1815
George Washington Logan was born February 22, 1815 in Chimney Rock, Rutherford County, North Carolina. He was 46 years old when the Civil War began.

Beriah Magoffin, born April 18, 1815
Beriah Magoffin was born on April 18, 1815 in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, the son of Beriah and Jane (McAfee) Magoffin. He was 46 years old when the Civil War began.













Elizabeth Cady Stanton, born November 12, 1815

Elizabeth Cady was the eighth of 11 children born to Daniel and Margaret Livingston Cady in Johnstown, in what later became Fulton County, New York.  Daniel Cady was a prominent Federalist attorney who, at the time of Elizabeth's birth, was serving a term in the United States Congress. As a young lawyer, he worked with Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. Daniel Cady later became a circuit court judge and, in 1847 to 1854, a New York Supreme Court justice.  Elizabeth Cady Stanton was 45 years old when the Civil War began; she was the mother of seven children, aged two to nineteen years.

Louis Trezevant Wigfall, born April 21, 1816

Louis Wigfall was born on a plantation near Edgefield, South Carolina, to Levi Durant and Eliza Thomson Wigfall.  He was 45 years old when the Civil War began.

Montgomery Meigs, born May 3, 1816

Montgomery Cunningham Meigs was born in Augusta, Georgia on May 3, 1816. He was the son of Dr. Charles Delucena Meigs and Mary Montgomery Meigs. His father was a nationally known obstetrician and professor of obstetrics at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was 45 years old when the Civil War began.


















George Thomas, born July 31, 1816

George Henry Thomas was born at Thomaston, near Newsom's Depot, in Southampton County, Virginia. His father, John Thomas, of Welsh descent, and his mother, Elizabeth Rochelle Thomas, a descendant of French Huguenot immigrants, had nine children. George was the youngest of the three boys; he had six sisters. He was 44 years old when the Civil War began.

John Gregg Fee, born September 9, 1816

John Gregg Fee was born in Bracken County, Kentucky on September 9, 1816, the first child of John Fee, Jr. and Sarah Gregg Free. The community was founded with the help of his grandfather, John Fee, Sr., a native of Maryland, who moved to Kentucky in 1791. His mother and her brother, John Gregg, came from an antislavery Quaker family.  As a boy, he was known as Gregg. He was 44 years old when the Civil War began.

Richard Ewell, 
born February 8, 1817
Richard Stoddert Ewell was born in Georgia.

Isham Harris, born February 10, 1818
Isham Green Harris was born in Franklin County, Tennessee. He was the ninth child of Isham Green Harris, a slave-holding farmer and Methodist minister, and his wife Lucy Davidson Harris. Harris was 43 years old when the Civil War began; he was governor of Tennessee. Harris and the legislature were for secession and the Confederacy, but the Union Army invaded and occupied Nashville. Harris joined the Confederate Army.

Frederick Douglass 
born ca. February 14, 1818
Frederick Douglass was born as Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, a slave at Holme Hill Farm, Talbot County, Maryland. His mother, Harriet Bailey, was a field slave from whom he was separated during his infancy. Douglass never knew for certain whom his father was. He did know that his father was white, and he believed he was their owner, Aaron Anthony.  Douglass was 43 years old when the Civil War began; he had escaped from slavery more than 20 years earlier. 

Wade Hampton III, born March 28, 1818

Wade Hampton III was born in Charleston, South Carolina, the eldest son of  Wade Hampton II, one of the wealthiest planters in the South and the owner of the largest number of slaves.  He was 42 years old when the Civil War began.

Carnot Posey, born August 5, 1818

Carnot Posey was born near Woodville in Wilkinson County, Mississippi, the second son and fourth of eight children of planter John Brooke Posey and Elizabeth Screven Posey. He was 42 years old when the Civil War began.

Edward von Westphalen, born March 26, 1819

Edgar Julius Oscar Gerhard Ludwig von Westphalen was born March 26 1819 in Trier, Germany.  He was a son of the royal Prussian Governor, Ludwig von Westphalen, and his second wife Caroline Heubel.  His father was a friend of Heinrich Marx, the father of Karl Marx, and the children of both families became friends. Edgar von Westphalen was 42 years old when the American Civil War began.









Charles Anderson Dana, born August 8, 1819

Charles Anderson Dana was born in Hinsdale, New Hampshire, the first child of Anderson and Ann Denison Dana. His paternal grandfather was a Revolutionary War soldier and a delegate to the Constitutional Convention.  His father. Anderson Dana, was a merchant who failed in business when his oldest son was a few years old. Charles Dana was 41 years old when the Civil War began.