Ambrose Burnside

Biography

Ambrose Burnside was born in Liberty, Indiana, in 1824. After his mother's death he was apprenticed to a tailor, until his father's connections won him a place at the United States Military Academy in 1843. He graduated in 1847, reached Mexico too late to fight, and served on the western frontier, where he was wounded by an arrow in 1849.

He resigned from the army in 1853 to manufacture the breech-loading Burnside carbine in Bristol, Rhode Island. A lost government contract, a fire at his factory and a failed run for Congress as a Democrat in 1858 ruined him, and he went to work as treasurer of the Illinois Central Railroad under George B. McClellan.

In the Civil War he raised the 1st Rhode Island regiment, led a successful expedition on the North Carolina coast and commanded the IX Corps at Antietam. Given command of the Army of the Potomac, he led it to a costly defeat at Fredericksburg in December 1862 and was replaced in January 1863. Sent to the Department of the Ohio, he issued General Order No. 38 and had the antiwar congressman Clement Vallandigham arrested and tried by a military court. He later held Knoxville and returned to the east, but after the disaster at the Crater in 1864 he was relieved and resigned in April 1865.

After the war he led several railroad companies and, as a Republican, served three one-year terms as governor of Rhode Island from 1866 to 1869. He was the first president of the National Rifle Association and commander-in-chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, and from 1875 sat in the U.S. Senate, briefly chairing the Foreign Relations Committee in 1881. He died at Bristol in September 1881. His side-whiskers gave the word 'sideburns'.