Humphrey Marshall, politician and Confederate general, was born to John Jay and Anna Reed (Birney) Marshall on January 13, 1812, in Frankfort, Kentucky. He was the nephew of antislavery leader James Birney and grandson of Humphrey Marshall. Graduating from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1832, Marshall soon resigned his commission for a career in law and Whig politics. After serving as colonel of the 1st Kentucky Cavalry in the Mexican War, he was minister to China (1852-54) and spent two terms in the U.S. House of Representatives (March 4, 1855, through March 3, 1859). Marshall supported John C. Breckinridge in the 1860 presidential campaign but then lobbied for Kentucky's neutrality during the secession crisis. With the onset of the Civil War, he accepted a commission as brigadier general in the Confederate army effective October 30, 1861, and was assigned to eastern Kentucky.

Standing five feet eleven inches and weighing over three hundred pounds, Marshall was physically unfit for active duty in the rugged mountains, but he was obsessed with an independent command for his army of 2,000. At Middle Creek in Floyd County on January 10, 1862, lesser numbers of Union troops under Col. James Garfield forced Marshall to withdraw. After playing a minor role in Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg's invasion of Kentucky, Marshall resigned his commission on June 17, 1863. He then served in the Second Confederate Congress until the end of the war, when he fled to Mexico. Marshall returned to Louisville in 1866, where he practiced law until his death on March 28, 1872. He was buried in the Frankfort Cemetery .

Lowell H. Harrison, The Civil War in Kentucky (Lexington, Ky., 1975)

C. David Dalton, "Confederate Operations in Eastern Kentucky, 1861-1862," M.A. thesis, Western Kentucky University, 1982.

C. DAVID DALTON
Entry Author

In the print edition this entry appears on page 610