Daniel Harvey Hill

For the library named after D.H. Hill's son, see D.H. Hill Library.

Daniel Harvey Hill
Born	July 12, 1821(1821-07-12) York district, South Carolina
Died	September 24, 1889(1889-09-24) (aged 68) Charlotte, North Carolina
Place of burial	Davidson College Cemetery
Allegiance	United States of America Confederate States of America
Service/branch	Confederate Army
Years of service	1842–49 (USA) 1861–65 (CSA)
Rank	Major (USA) Lieutenant General (CSA)
Commands held	Division command, Army of Northern Virginia; corps command, Army of Tennessee
Battles/wars	Mexican-American War Battle of Contreras Battle of Churubusco Battle of Chapultepec American Civil War Battle of Big Bethel Battle of Seven Pines Seven Days Battles Maryland Campaign Battle of South Mountain Battle of Antietam Battle of Fredericksburg Gettysburg Campaign Battle of Chickamauga Battle of Bentonville
Other work	Editor of The Land We Love President of the University of Arkansas President of the Middle Georgia Military and Agricultural College of Milledgeville

Daniel Harvey Hill (July 12, 1821 – September 24, 1889) was a Confederate general during the American Civil War and a Southern scholar. He was known as an aggressive leader, and as an austere, deeply religious man, with a dry, sarcastic humor. He was brother-in-law to Stonewall Jackson, a close friend to both James Longstreet and Joseph E. Johnston, but disagreements with both Robert E. Lee and Braxton Bragg cost him favor with Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Although his military ability was well respected, he was underutilized by the end of the Civil War due to the aforementioned political reasons.

Daniel Harvey Hill is usually referred to as D.H. Hill in historical writing, in part to distinguish him from A.P. Hill, who served with him in the Army of Northern Virginia.

Early life

D.H. Hill was born at Hill's Iron Works, in York District, South Carolina to Solomon and Nancy Cabeen Hill. His paternal grandfather, Col. William "Billy" Hill, was a native of Ireland who had an iron foundry in York District where he made cannon for the Continental Army. His maternal grandfather was a native of Scotland. Hill graduated from the United States Military Academy in 1842, ranking 28 out of 56 cadets, and was appointed to the 1st United States Artillery. He distinguished himself in the Mexican-American War, being brevetted to captain for bravery at the Battle of Contreras and Churubusco, and brevetted to major for bravery at the Battle of Chapultepec.

In February 1849, Hill resigned his commission and became a professor of mathematics at Washington College (now Washington and Lee University), in Lexington, Virginia. At Washington he wrote a college textbook for the Southern United States market, Elements of Algebra, which "with quiet, sardonic humor, points a finger of ridicule or scorn at any and everything Northern." While not all of the textbook's questions were "anti-Yankee", many were, such as:^[1]

The field of battle at Buena Vista is 6½ miles from Saltillo. Two Indiana volunteers ran away from the field of battle at the same time; one ran half a mile per hour faster than the other, and reached Saltillo 5 minutes and 54 6/11 seconds sooner than the other. Required their respective rates of travel.^[1]

and:

A man in Cincinnati purchased 10,000 pounds of bad pork, at 1 cent per pound, and paid so much per pound to put it through a chemical process, by which it would appear sound, and then sold it at an advanced price, clearing $450 by the fraud. The price at which he sold the pork per pound, multiplied by the cost per pound of the chemical process, was 3 cents. Required the price at which he sold it, and the cost of the chemical process.^[1]

By contrast, "Southerners in his problems invariably appear in a favorable light."^[1]

In 1854, he joined the faculty of Davidson College, North Carolina, and was, in 1859, made superintendent of the North Carolina Military Institute of Charlotte.

Marriage and children

On November 2, 1848, he married Isabella Morrison, who was the daughter of Robert Hall Morrison, a Presbyterian minister and the first president of Davidson College, and through her mother, a niece of North Carolina Governor William Alexander Graham. They would have nine children in all. One son, Harvey Jr., would serve as president of North Carolina State College, (now North Carolina State University.) Their youngest son, Joseph Morrison, would preside as the Chief Justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court from 1904 to 1909.

In July 1857, Isabella's younger sister, Mary Anna, married Professor Thomas J. Jackson of the Virginia Military Institute.^[1] Hill and Jackson, who would later earn the nickname "Stonewall" as a Confederate officer, had crossed paths during the Mexican-American War, and later developed a closer friendship when both men lived in Lexington, Virginia in the 1850s.^[2][3] Also in 1857, Jackson endorsed Elements of Algebra as "superior to any other work with which I am acquainted on the same branch of science."^[1]

Civil War

At the outbreak of the Civil War, D.H. Hill was made colonel of the 1st North Carolina Infantry, at the head of which he won the Battle of Big Bethel, near Fort Monroe, Virginia, on June 10, 1861. Shortly after this, he was promoted to brigadier general.

He participated in the Yorktown and Williamsburg operations that started the Peninsula Campaign in the spring of 1862, and as a major general, led a division with great distinction in the Battle of Seven Pines and the Seven Days Battles.

It wasn't war; it was murder.

D.H. Hill following the Battle of Malvern Hill (Seven Days Battles)

On July 22, 1862, Hill and Union Maj. Gen. John A. Dix concluded an agreement for the general exchange of prisoners between the Union and Confederate armies.^[4] This agreement became known as the Dix-Hill Cartel.

In the Maryland Campaign of 1862, Hill's men fought at South Mountain. Scattered as far north as Boonsboro, Maryland when the fighting began, the division fought tooth and nail, buying Lee's army enough time to concentrate at nearby Sharpsburg. Hill's division saw fierce action in the infamous sunken road ("Bloody Lane") at Antietam, and he rallied a few detached men from different brigades to hold the line at the critical moment. He had three horses shot out from under him during the battle.^[5]

Hill's division was held in reserve at the Battle of Fredericksburg. At this point, conflicts with Lee began to surface. On the reorganization of the Army of Northern Virginia after Stonewall Jackson's death, Hill was not appointed to a corps command. He already had been detached from Lee's Army and sent to his home state to recruit troops. During the Gettysburg Campaign he led Confederate reserve troops protecting Richmond, and successfully resisted a half-hearted advance by Union forces under John A. Dix and Erasmus Keyes in late June. In 1863, he was sent to the newly reorganized Army of Tennessee, with a provisional promotion to lieutenant general, to command one of Gen. Braxton Bragg's corps. In the bloody and confused victory at Chickamauga, Hill's forces saw some of the heaviest fighting. Afterward, Hill joined several other generals openly condemning Bragg's failure to exploit the victory. President Jefferson Davis came to personally resolve this dispute, in Bragg's favor, and to the detriment of those unhappy generals. The Army of Tennessee was reorganized again, and Hill was left without a command. Davis then refused to confirm Hill's promotion, effectively demoting him back to major general. Because of this, Hill was mostly relegated to the sidelines for the rest of the war and fought in no more significant battles.

After that, D.H. Hill commanded as a volunteer in smaller actions away from the major armies. Hill participated in the Battle of Bentonville in North Carolina, the last, sad fight of the Army of Tennessee. Hill was a division commander when he, along with Gen. Joseph E. Johnston, surrendered on April 26, 1865.

Postbellum career

From 1866 to 1869, Hill edited a magazine, The Land We Love, at Charlotte, North Carolina, which dealt with social and historical subjects, and had a great influence in the South. In 1877, he became the first president of the University of Arkansas, a post that he held until 1884, and, in 1885, president of the Military and Agricultural College of Milledgeville, Georgia until August 1889, when he resigned due to failing health. General Hill died at Charlotte the following month, and was buried in Davidson College Cemetery.^[6]

In memoriam

The main library at North Carolina State University is named after Daniel Harvey Hill, Jr. (1859 – 1924), the son of Gen. D. H. Hill.

See also

	Biography portal
	United States Army portal
	American Civil War portal

• List of American Civil War generals

Notes

1. ^ ^{a b c d e f} Bridges, Hal (May 1956). "D. H. Hill's Anti-Yankee Algebra". The Journal of Southern History 22 (2): 220–222. JSTOR 2954240. 
2. ^ Bridges, Lee's Maverick General, pp. 21-25, 277.
3. ^ "Justices, Judges and Officers of the Courts (1686-2006)". Arkansas Judiciary. http://courts.state.ar.us/reporter_decisions/historical_background/officials.cfm. Retrieved 2008-01-29. ^{[dead link]}
4. ^ See Dix's report to Union Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, July 23, 1862, Official Records, Series II, vol. 4, pp. 265-68.
5. ^ Hill's report of his operations from July 23 to September 17, 1862 is included in the Official Records, Series I, vol. 19, pp. 1018-30.
6. ^ Bridges, Lee's Maverick General, pp. 277-279; Owen and Owen, Generals at Rest, p. 176.

References

• Bridges, Hal. Lee's Maverick General: Daniel Harvey Hill. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991. ISBN 0-8032-6096-2. First published 1961 by McGraw-Hill.
• Evans, Clement A., ed. Confederate Military History: A Library of Confederate States History. 12 vols. Atlanta: Confederate Publishing Company, 1899. OCLC 833588.
• Hawkins, Vincent B. "Daniel Harvey Hill." In The Harper Encyclopedia of Military Biography, edited by Trevor N. Dupuy, Curt Johnson, and David L. Bongard. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. ISBN 978-0-06-270015-5.
• Johnson, Robert Underwood, and Clarence C. Buel, eds. Battles and Leaders of the Civil War. 4 vols. New York: Century Co., 1884-1888. OCLC 2048818.
• Owen, Richard, and James Owen. Generals at Rest: The Grave Sites of the 425 Official Confederate Generals. Shippensburg, PA: White Mane Publishing Co., 1997. ISBN 1-57249-045-4.
• U.S. War Department. The War of the Rebellion: a Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1880–1901.
• Online biography of Hill
•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. 

External links

• "Daniel Harvey Hill". Find a Grave. http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=4432. Retrieved August 17, 2010. 

Persondata
Name	Hill, Daniel Harvey
Alternative names
Short description	Confederate Army general
Date of birth	July 12, 1821
Place of birth	York district, South Carolina
Date of death	September 24, 1889
Place of death	Charlotte, North Carolina