Stephen Augustus Hurlbut

Stephen Augustus Hurlbut (November 29, 1815 – March 27, 1882) was an American attorney, soldier, politician, and diplomat who rose to the rank of major general in the Union Army during the Civil War and later commanded the U.S. Army of the Gulf. After the war he became a prominent Republican officeholder from Illinois, a founding leader of the Grand Army of the Republic, and a United States diplomatic representative in Colombia and Peru.

Hurlbut was born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1815, the son of Martin Luther Hurlbut and Lydia Bunce, both originally from the North. His father was a Unitarian minister and educator who served as president of Beaufort College in South Carolina from 1812 to 1814. Although born and educated in the South, Hurlbut was raised in a household shaped by Northern origins and liberal religious views. He read law under the tutelage of the noted South Carolina attorney James L. Petigru, worked as his law clerk, and was admitted to the South Carolina bar in 1837. During the Second Seminole War he served as adjutant of a South Carolina infantry regiment, gaining early military experience that would later inform his Civil War service.

In 1845 Hurlbut moved north to Illinois, then a free state, where he established a law practice in Belvidere. Two years later, in 1847, he married Sophronia R. Stevens; the couple had two children together and made their home in Belvidere. That same year he entered public life in his adopted state as a Whig delegate to the Illinois constitutional convention of 1847. He served as a presidential elector for the Whig Party in the 1848 presidential election, campaigning for Zachary Taylor—popularly known as “Old Rough and Ready”—and during this period became acquainted with Abraham Lincoln. Hurlbut’s political career advanced steadily: he was elected to the Illinois House of Representatives in 1859 and re-elected in 1861. He campaigned actively for Lincoln in the presidential election of 1860 and attended Lincoln’s first inauguration on March 4, 1861.

At Lincoln’s request, Hurlbut undertook an important fact-finding mission to Charleston, South Carolina, in the tense weeks before the outbreak of the Civil War. Traveling with Colonel Ward H. Lamon, he visited Charleston from March 24 to 26, 1861, to assess “the actual state of feeling in this City & State” amid the crisis over Fort Sumter, while Lamon also carried a separate assignment from Secretary of State William H. Seward to visit the fort itself. In a detailed report dated March 27, 1861, Hurlbut concluded that Southern nationalism in South Carolina had supplanted any effective sense of American patriotism, writing that “the Sentiment of National Patriotism always feeble in Carolina, has been extinguished and overridden by the acknowledged doctrine of the paramount allegiance to the State.” He observed that merchants and business leaders believed that “great growth of trade and expansion of material prosperity will & must follow the Establishment of a Southern Republic,” and that they expected “a golden era, when Charleston shall be a great commercial emporium & control for the South as New York does for the North.” According to later accounts, including Donald T. Phillips’s study of Lincoln’s leadership, Hurlbut reported that war was inevitable unless the South were allowed to secede; Lincoln’s decision to resupply Fort Sumter, thereby placing the onus of initiating hostilities on the Confederacy, was informed in part by this assessment.

When the Civil War erupted, Hurlbut, despite his Southern birth, supported the Union and the emerging Republican Party. He joined the Union Army and was commissioned a brigadier general of United States Volunteers on May 17, 1861. He was promoted to major general of volunteers on September 17, 1862. Hurlbut commanded the 4th Division of the Army of the Tennessee at the Battle of Shiloh in April 1862, where he played a significant role in the defense of the Union position, and he continued to lead his division in the advance on Corinth, Mississippi, and during the subsequent siege. He later commanded a division at the Battle of Hatchie’s Bridge, where he assumed command of the entire Union force after Major General Edward O. C. Ord was wounded. From his headquarters at Memphis, Tennessee, Hurlbut commanded the XVI Corps, overseeing a large and strategically important garrison. Historian Bertram Korn has suggested that during this period Hurlbut issued antisemitic orders that resulted in the confiscation of Jewish property and restrictions on Jewish trading activities in the region.

In early 1864 Hurlbut led a corps under Major General William T. Sherman during the Meridian Expedition in Mississippi, a campaign aimed at destroying Confederate infrastructure and logistics. Later in the war he was appointed to command the Department of the Gulf, succeeding Major General Nathaniel P. Banks, and in that capacity he commanded the U.S. Army of the Gulf for the remainder of the conflict. His tenure in the Gulf was clouded by allegations of financial irregularities and suspected embezzlement. General Edward R. S. Canby ordered his arrest and the initiation of court-martial proceedings, but Hurlbut was ultimately allowed to resign his command in June 1865. He mustered out of the Union Army on June 20, 1865, concluding his military service.

Following his return to civilian life, Hurlbut resumed his political and public career in Illinois and on the national stage. He was one of the founding fathers of the Grand Army of the Republic, the influential Union veterans’ organization, and served as its commander-in-chief from 1866 to 1868, helping to shape its early structure and agenda. In 1869 President Ulysses S. Grant appointed him Minister Resident to Colombia, a diplomatic post he held for three years. Returning to electoral politics, Hurlbut was elected as a Republican to the U.S. House of Representatives from Illinois in 1872 and was re-elected in 1874, serving two consecutive terms in Congress. He was defeated in his bid for a third term in 1876 but remained a figure of note within the Republican Party and among Union veterans.

In 1881 Hurlbut reentered diplomatic service when he was appointed United States minister to Peru, at a time when that country was embroiled in the closing stages of the War of the Pacific. His tenure was marked by a sharp and public dispute with General Hugh Judson Kilpatrick, the U.S. minister to Chile; each diplomat became an outspoken partisan of the country to which he was accredited, complicating U.S. efforts to maintain a balanced posture in the region. Hurlbut continued to serve as U.S. ambassador to Peru until his death in Lima on March 27, 1882. His body was returned to Belvidere, Illinois, where he was buried in Belvidere Cemetery alongside his wife, Sophronia R. Stevens Hurlbut, closing the life of a Southern-born lawyer who became a Union general, Republican congressman, and American diplomat.