February Birthdays

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. 






Charles Lenox Remond

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.

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.  

Rosa Parks, born February 4, 1913
Rosa Louise McCauley was born in Tuskegee, Alabama to Leona Edwards and James McCauley, a teacher and a carpenter. She was born 48 years after the Civil War ended. The former Confederate states had passed new constitutions and electoral laws that effectively disfranchised black voters and, in Alabama, many poor white voters as well. Under the white-established Jim Crow laws, racial segregation was imposed in public facilities and retail stores in the South, including public transportation. Bus and train companies enforced seating policies with separate sections for blacks and whites. School bus transportation was unavailable in any form for black schoolchildren in the South, and black education was always underfunded.

John Rankin, 
born Febuary 5, 1793
John Rankin was born in Jefferson County, Tennessee , the fourth son of Richard and Jane Steele Rankin. Following the birth of their first son, Richard and Jane Rankin had moved to eastern Tennessee from Virginia.  Richard and Jane Rankin would raise eleven sons and one daughter.  Religion and reading played key roles in their childhoods. They were staunch Presbyterians; Jane “earnestly opposed the use of whiskey and tobacco, and zealously spoke against Free Masonry”. She also strongly opposed dance and frolicking in any form. The most important and lasting impression Jane made on John was her unyielding opposition to slavery.
He was 68 years old when the Civil War began.

Richard Ewell, 
born February 8, 1817
Richard Stoddert Ewell was born in Georgetown, Washington, D.C., the third son of Dr. Thomas and Elizabeth Stoddert Ewell.  He was raised in Prince William County, Virginia, from the age of 3, at an estate near Manassas known as "Stony Lonesome." He was 44 years old when the Civil War began.

William Tecumseh Sherman, born February 8, 1820
William Sherman was born in 1820 in Lancaster, Ohio. His father, Charles Robert Sherman, a successful lawyer who sat on the Ohio Supreme Court, died unexpectedly in 1829. Sherman was 41 years old when the Civil War began; he was superintendent of the Louisiana State Semimary of Learning & Military Academy in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He resigned as superintendent and became president of the Saint Louis Railroad in Saint Louis, Missouri, until he received a commission in the Union Army in June, 1861.






Cornelia Hancock, born February 8, 1840

Cornelia Hancock was born in 1840 at Hancock's Bridge, Salem County, New Jersey to Thomas Yorke and Rachel (Nicholson) Hancock, she was the fourth child and third daughter in this Quaker abolitionist family. Hancock was 21 years old when the Civil War began; she became a nurse two years later.

John Logan, born February 9, 1826
John Alexander Logan was born in 1826 near what is now Murphysboro, Jackson County, Illinois. Logan was the son of Dr. and Mrs. John Logan, a prominent family in the area. Logan was 35 years old when the Civil War began; he was a Democratic Congressional representative. He fought at Bull Run as an unattached volunteer to a Michigan regiment, then resigned his congressional seat and and entered the Union Army as colonel of the 31st Illinois Volunteers, which he organized.



Elizabeth Hamilton Halleck, born February 9, 1835

Elizabeth Hamilton was born February 9, 1835 in Westernville, New York. She was 26 years old when the Civil War began.

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.

Joseph Vann, born February 11, 1798

Joseph Vann was born at Spring Place, Georgia on February 11, 1798. Vann died 17 years before 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.









Theodore O'Hara, born February 11, 1820

Theodore O'Hara was born to educator Kane O'Hara and his wife in Danville, Kentucky on February 11, 1820. O'Hara was 41 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 53 years old when the Civil War began; he was assassinated six days after the Confederate general Robert E. Lee surrendered.









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.

Susan B. Anthony, born February 15, 1820
Susan Brownwell Anthony was born in Adams, Massachusetts to Daniel Anthony and Lucy Read Anthony.  She was the second of seventh children. She was 41 years old when the Civil War began.













Sarah Anne Ellis Dorsey, born February 16, 1829

Sarah Anne Ellis was born in Natchez, Mississippi in 1829 to Mary Malvina Routh and Thomas George Percy Ellis, both from wealthy planter families, She was 32 years old when the Civil War began.

Francis Preston Blair, Jr. born February 19, 1821
Francis Preston Blair, Jr. was born in Lexington, Kentucky. He was the the third and youngest son of Francis Preston and Eliza Gist Blair. He was 41 years old when the Civil War began.

Mother Angela Gillespie, born February 21, 1824
Eliza Maria Gillespie was in Washington county, Pennsylvania, on February 21, 1824, the daughter of John Purcell Gillespie and Mary Madeleine Miers.  Her mother was a convert to the Roman Catholic Church. Her cousin, James G. Blaine, was an early playmate. Eliza Maria first attended the school of the Dominican sisters at Somerset, Ohio, and completed her studies at the Visitation Convent at Georgetown in Washington, D.C., in 1844. She was 37 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.

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.













James Edward Hanger, born February 25, 1843

James Edward Hanger was born at Mount Hope, his father's plantation near Churchville, Virginia. He was 18 years old when the Civil War began. 

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. 









Angelina Weld Grimké, born February 27, 1880

Angelina Weld Grimké was born in Boston, Massachusetts on February 27, 1880, 15 years after the end of the Civil War. Her father, Archibald Grimké was born a slave. He was the eldest of three sons of Nancy Weston, an enslaved woman of European and African descent, and her master Henry W. Grimké. They lived in a common-law relationship, and Grimké recognized his sons. Henry Grimké was a member of a prominent, large slaveholding family in Charleston. Archibald Grimké was a lawyer, the second African American to have graduated from Harvard Law School. Angelina's mother, Sarah Stanley, was European American from a Midwestern middle-class family.

Robert Carter III, born February 28, 1727
Robert Carter III was born in Virginia in 1727, the son of Robert Carter II and Priscilla Churchill. He died more than 60 years before the Civil War.













William Harvey Carney, born February 29, 1840

He was born simply as "William," a slave in Norfolk, Virginia. He was 21 years old when the Civil War began.