Corydon launches Iowa's youngest general

 I stumbled across Gen. Samuel L. Glasgow earlier this week while writing about the day-long July 19, 1866, program during which the Evans Cemetery Soldiers' Monument, one of Iowa's earliest, was erected and dedicated. Hundreds gathered on a wooded hilltop north of the Chariton River valley near the convergence of Lucas, Wayne, Appanoose and Monroe counties for the event.

The featured speaker, according to a reporter on hand, was "Gen. Glasgow of Corydon" and after the foundation of the monument was put into place at noon, the crowd retired to stands "a distance south" and listened to the general's address. "He spoke perhaps two hours, and did nobly, told plain truths," according to the report.

The audience had not had lunch and would not not be released to enjoy a community picnic until after his two-hour address ended. So the young lawyer, age 27 --- recently returned to Wayne County as Iowa's youngest general and recently elected to the Iowa Legislature --- must have been a compelling speaker.

So looking for more information, I turned to The Annals of Iowa and found the following, published some 55 years later (and five years after his death) in Volume 13, No. 1 (1921), that offers a good summary of his career:

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Samuel L. Glasgow was born in Adams County, Ohio, September 17, 1838, and died January 9, 1916, at Washington, D.C., where he was looking after legislation in the interests of old soldiers. He was educated in common schools and in the South Salem Academy, Ross County, Ohio. He came to Oskaloosa, Iowa, in 1856 and read law, and in 1858 was admitted to the bar and removed to Corydon, where he practiced his profession until the opening of the Civil War.

He then enlisted in Company I, Fourth Iowa Infantry, General Dodge's regiment, and was chosen first lieutenant. In January, 1862, he resigned and came home because of poor health. The following summer, having regained his health, he organized Company D of the twenty-third Iowa Infantry and was elected its captain. He was soon thereafter appointed major of the regiment. Because of meritorious service he was successively promoted to lieutenant-colonel, and colonel, and was breveted brigadier-general. He was a gallant, courageous and able officer, and was the youngest of his rank from Iowa.

He remained in active service until the close of the war when he returned to Corydon. Here he was active in politics. In 1865 he was elected representative in the Eleventh General Assembly. In 1868 he was a presidential elector at large from Iowa, being elected on the Grant ticket. In 1869 he was appointed cousul to Havre, France, and in 1874 he was transferred to Glasgow, Scotland.

In 1877 he returned to Iowa, removing to Burlington and resuming law practice. In 1879 he was elected representative in the Eighteenth General Assembly. In 1911 he removed to Chicago. He was of fine physique and appearance, of good abilities and a companionable and popular man.

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There is, of course, more to his story, including a family not mentioned in the Annals piece. Thrice married, Gen. Glasgow's life took some interesting twists and turns.

Single when he settled in Corydon, Samuel soon met Miss Harriet, daughter of Samuel and Margaret McCune. The McCunes lived on a farm near Corydon but the patriarch's occupation was given as "merchant" in  1860 census.

Harriet was 17 when she married the young lawyer, age 21, on May 22, 1860, in Corydon. Their only surviving child, Edwin Lyle Glasgow, was born two years later, on April 12, 1862.

It would appear that Edwin had been conceived not long before his father enlisted for the first time, on Aug. 31, 1861, and that because of illness Samuel had been released from service in time to be at home in time for his son's birth. But soon thereafter, he enlisted again and began his meteoric rise in rank.

When Samuel was appointed consul to Havre during 1869, a reward for his labor on behalf of the Grant ticket, Harriet accompanied him to France but Edwin seems to have been left behind at Corydon with his maternal grandparents. He was enumerated as a resident of their household in 1870.

Sadly, Harriet did not make it home --- alive. She died in France on Feb. 5, 1871, as reported in a brief item picked up from The Corydon Index and republished in The Centerville Citizen of March 18, 1871:

Mrs. Harriet Glasgow, wife of General S. L. Glasgow, of Corydon, U.S. Consul at Havre, France, died at Havre, on the 5th of February, at the age of thirty years, after an illness which had confined her to her bed for fifteen months. The remains were embalmed, properly placed in an air-tight case and forwarded by express to Samuel McCune, father of the deceased, who lives near Corydon, by whom they were mournfully laid away in their long resting place.

That explains how Harriet came to be buried in the Corydon Cemetery, a considerable distance from where she died half a continent and an ocean away (Find a Grave photo).

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Young Edwin Glasgow seems to have remained in Corydon with his grandparents through the death of his mother, then his grandmother, Margaret, on Nov. 30, 1875, and his grandfather's subsequent remarriage to Cassandra Niday at Corydon on April 27, 1876. At some point between 1876 and 1879, Samuel and Cassandra moved west to Cloud County, Kansas, where Edwin, age 18, was making his home with them when the 1880 federal census was taken. 

Edwin married Amanda Cline in Cloud County, they produced a family of eight children and settled eventually at Enid, Oklahoma, where he died during 1943. There's no indication that father and son were estranged, but they apparently were not especially close either. Edwin was Samuel's principal heir when he died during 1916.

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Meanwhile back in France, Samuel married as his second wife a young widow, Silvie (Wotton) Thompson (1844-1907), at the U.S. Embassy in Paris on July 19, 1872. She accompanied him to Glasgow, Scotland, when he was transferred there during 1874, then home to Iowa in 1877 after he retired from the diplomatic service.

They did not return to Corydon, however, but settled instead in Burlington where Samuel established a law practice, was elected again to the Iowa Legislature and they lived rather grandly for 30 years. During 1884, an infant daughter was born and died. Silvie died at Burlington at the age of 63 on July 10, 1907, and her remains were taken to New York for burial in Greenwood Cemetery, Brooklyn, where her parents, first husband and infant daughter also are interred.

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On July 7, 1908, in Chicago, Samuel married for a third time --- to Edith Winona Schlichter (1875-1916), about 37 years his junior, also from Burlington. They had settled permanently in Chicago by 1910 and his occupation was given as consulting attorney. 

About 1912, the couple relocated to Washington, D.C., so that he could more effectively continue his work as a veterans affairs lobbyist. 

He died there at age 77 on Jan. 16, 1916, and was cremated following funeral services on Jan.  19 with plans to inter his ashes at Arlington National Cemetery. But the grieving widow upstaged her husband by shooting herself to death after returning home from his funeral --- an event that attracted far more media attention than did the record of a distinguished old soldier. 

Here's how her death was reported in The Boston Globe --- and many other newspapers nationwide --- on Jan. 20, 1916, and shortly thereafter:

Returning from funeral services of her husband, Brig. Gen. Samuel L. Glasgow, U.S.A., retired, at Arlington Cemetery this afternoon, Mrs. Winona Glasgow, 45 years old, committed suicide in her apartments in the Falkstone Courts by shooting herself through the heart with the revolver her husband carried during his later years in the Army.

Thus ends a happy union begun in Chicago 10 years ago, when Gen. Glasgow married Miss Winona Schlichter of Burlington, Ia.

Gen. Glasgow died Sunday from a nervous attack. Mrs. Glasgow, hysterical from grief, fainted at the services. Her husband's body was cremated, but the ashes are not yet buried.

Mrs. Glasgow left this note: "I am lonesome and unhappy without the General. Death is better than bitter solitude. Cremate my body and tomorrow lay the ashes alongside those of the man I love better than life."

And that's what happened. Their ashes rest together now beneath a large tombstone at Arlington National Cemetery. The general had bequeathed $5,000 of an estate with an estimated value of some $50,000 to his son, Edwin; the balance to Winona. In her will,  prepared shortly before her suicide, she made a few bequests to her own family,  but left the balance to Edwin as, she wrote, the general would have wanted her to do.

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Notes: For those interested in Civil War minutiae, Dubuque's Francis J. Herron, born Feb. 17, 1837, was aged 25 years, 5 months and 13 days when promoted to brigadier on July 30, 1862. Sam Glasgow, born 17 September 1838, was aged 26 years, 3 months and 12 days when promoted on Dec. 19, 1864. So while Glasgow was the younger man, Herron was technically the youngest Iowan when promoted to brigadier.

Also, I'm grateful to the curator of the family history file at Ancestry.com entitled "Clifford Wayne Glasgow" for sharing the photographs of Samuel and Harriet (McCune) Glasgow used here.