March Birthdays

Roger Taney, born March 17, 1777
Roger Brooke Taney was born March 17, 1777. He was the third child and the second son of seven (four sons and three daughters) born to a slaveholding family of Roman Catholic tobacco planters in Calvert County, Maryland. He was 84 years old when the Civil War began, and died 3 years later, before it ended.

John Calhoun, born March 18, 1782
John Caldwell Calhoun was born in 1782, the fourth child and third son of Patrick Calhoun and his second wife, Martha Caldwell, in Abbeville District, South Carolina. He was born a year before the Revolutionary War ended, and died 11 years before the Civil War began.

John McLean, born March 11, 1785
John McLean was born in Morris County, New Jersey, on March 11, 1785, the son of Fergus McLean and Sophia Blackford. He was born two years after the end of the Revolutionary War, and died a week before the beginning of the Civil War.

Simon Cameron, born March 9, 1799
Simon Cameron was born in Maytown, Pennsylvania, the third son of Charles Cameron, a poor tailor, and Martha Pfoutz. He was 62 years old when the Civil War began.

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.

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 43 years old when the Civil War began.

Edgar von Westphalen, born March 26, 1819
Edgar Julius Oscar Gerhard Ludwig von Westphalen was born March 26 1819 in Trier, Germany.  He was 42 years old when the American Civil War began.

Mary Boykin Chesnut, born March 31, 1823
Mary Boykin Miller was born on March 31, 1823, on her maternal grandparents'  plantation, Mount Pleasant, near Stateburg, South Carolina. She was 38 years old when the Civil War began.

Emily Parsons, born March 8, 1824
Emily Parsons was born on March 8, 1824 in Taunton, Massachusetts, the daughter of Professor Theophilus Parsons of the Harvard Law School and granddaughter of the late Chief Justice Parsons of Massachusetts.  She was 37 years old and living in Cambridge at the beginning of the Civil War.

Matilda Electa Joslyn Gage, born March 24, 1826
Matilda Joslyn was born March 24, 1826, in Cicero, New York, a daughter of the abolitionist Hezekiah Joslyn and his wife, Helen Leslie.  She was 35 years old when the Civil War began.

Jefferson C. Davis, born March 2, 1828
Jefferson Columbus Davis was the first of eight children born near present-day Memphis, in Clark County, Indiana to William Davis and Mary Drummond.  He was 33 years old when the Civil War began.

George Francis Train, born March 24, 1829
George Francis Train was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1829, son of Oliver Train and his wife Maria, née Pickering.  He was 32 years old when the Civil War began.

Sullivan Ballou, born March 28, 1829
Sullivan Ballou was the son of Hiram and Emeline (Bowen) Ballou, a distinguished Hugenot family in Smithfield, Rhode Island.  He was 32 years old when the Civil War began, and died 3 months later at the First Battle of Bull Run.

Peter Humphries Clark, born March 29, 1829
Peter Humprhies Clark was born March 29, 1829 in Cincinnati, Ohio. Peter Humphries Clark was 32 years old when the Civil War began. 

Philip Sheridan, born March 6, 1831
Philip Henry Sheridan claimed to have been born in Albany, New York, the third child of six by John and Mary Meenagh Sheridan, immigrants from the parish of Killinkere, County Cavan, Ireland.   Other accounts indicate that he may have been born at sea while his parents were immigrating from Ireland. He was 30 years old when the Civil War began.

Martin Witherspoon Gary, born March 25, 1831
Martin Witherspoon Gary was born in Cokesbury, South Carolina, the third son of Dr. Thomas Reeder Gary and Mary Ann Porter.  He was 30 years old when the Civil War began.

Isaac Israel Hayes, born March 5, 1832
Isaac Israel Hayes was born in Chester County, Pennsylvania and raised in a Quaker family.  He was 29 years old when the Civil War began.

John Marmaduke, born March 14, 1833
The fourth child and second son among ten children, Marmaduke was born on his father's plantation near Arrow Rocke in Saline County, Missouri. He was 28 years old when the Civil War began.

Hubert Dilger, born March 5, 1836
Hubert Anton Casimir Dilger was born in Engen in the Black Forest region in Germany on March 5, 1836. He was 25 years old when the Civil War began.
  
Grover Cleveland, born March 18, 1837
Stephen Grover Cleveland was born on March 18, 1837, in Caldwell, New Jersey to Richard Falley Cleveland and Ann Neal Cleveland. Grover Cleveland was 24 years old when the Civil War began.

Myles Walter Keogh, born March 25, 1840
Myles Keogh was born in Orchard House, County Carlow, Ireland on March 25, 1840. He was 21 years old when the Civil War began.

George Elstner, born March 14, 1842
George Elstner was born in Cincinnati, Ohio where he lived until the Civil War began.  He was 19 years old at the beginning of the war. He was killed while leading his regiment at the Battle of Utoy Creek on August 8, 1864 near Atlanta, Georgia when he was 22 years old.  

Henry Adams, born March 16, 1843
Born a slave in Newton County, Georgia on March 16, 1843, Henry Adams was originally named Henry Houston but his name was changed at the age of seven when he and his family became the property of the teen-aged Nancy Emily Adams. He was 18 years old when the Civil War began.

Mary "Queen" Mellen Palmer, born March 26, 1850
Mary Lincoln Mellen was born in Prestonburg, Kentucky on March 26, 1850. She was 11 years old when the Civil War began.

Henry Flipper, born March 21, 1856
Henry Ossian Flipper was born into slavery in 1856 in Thomasville, Georgia. He was 6 years old when the Civil War began in April 1861.  

Garrett Morgan, born March 4, 1877
Garrett Morgan was born in Paris, Kentucky, 12 years after the end of the Civil War to Sydney, a former slave and son of Confederate Col. John Hunt Morgan, and Eliza Reed, also a former slave.

Ralph Ellison, born March 1, 1914
Ralph Ellison, named after Ralph Waldo Emerson, was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, to Lewis Alfred Ellison and Ida Millsap. He was the grandson of former slaves.  Ellison was born about 50 years after the end of the Civil War.