Lovell, Mansfield

Life Span
to
    Full name
    Mansfield Lovell
    Place of Birth
    Birth Date Certainty
    Exact
    Death Date Certainty
    Exact
    Gender
    Male
    Race
    White
    Sectional choice
    South
    Origins
    Slave State
    Family
    Joseph Lovell (father), Margaret Mansfield (mother), Emily Plympton (wife),
    Education
    West Point (US Military Academy)
    Occupation
    Military
    Farmer or Planter
    Businessman
    Relation to Slavery
    White non-slaveholder
    Military
    US military (Pre-Civil War)
    Confederate Army

    Mansfield Lovell (American National Biography)

    Scholarship
    Having entered West Point at the age of sixteen, he graduated in 1842 and was assigned to the Fourth Artillery Regiment as a second lieutenant. During the Mexican War he was wounded at the battle of Monterrey (18-21 Sept. 1846) and in the storming of Mexico City (13-14 Sept. 1847), in the process winning promotion to first lieutenant and being brevetted captain for gallantry in action. In 1849 he married Emily Plympton, the daughter of an army officer. In 1854, tiring of garrison duty along the frontier, he resigned from the army to take a position with the Cooper & Hewitt's Iron Works in Trenton, New Jersey. In 1858 he moved to New York City, where he was at first superintendent of street improvement, then deputy street commissioner under another future Confederate general, Gustavus W. Smith. His own entry into the Confederate service came exceptionally, and in the eyes of some southerners suspiciously, late, not occurring until September 1861, five months after the Civil War began. Even so, because of his high reputation in the "old army," he was appointed a major general on 7 October 1861 and placed in command of "Department No. 1"--New Orleans, the South's largest city and main port.
    Albert Castel, "Lovell, Mansfield," American National Biography Online, February 2000, http://www.anb.org/articles/05/05-00453.html.
    How to Cite This Page: "Lovell, Mansfield," House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, https://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/6122.