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Contact Info
Home Town Carlisle, Pennsylvania
Last Address Brookline, Massachusetts
Date of Passing Jul 26, 1937
Location of Interment Arlington National Cemetery (VLM) - Arlington, Virginia
Wall/Plot Coordinates Plot: Section East, Site 1107
US Army General. During the Civil War he served on the staff of his father, General Edwin Vose Sumner. Afterwards he remained on active duty, serving in the western United States during the Indian Wars. In May, 1898 he was appointed Brigadier General and commander of the 1st Cavalry Brigade, serving in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, leading his brigade at the Battle of Las Guasimas, and commanding the Army's Cavalry Division when General Joseph Wheeler became ill. Sumner commanded his brigade at the Battle of San Juan Hill for which he earned the Silver Star, and the Siege of Santiago, for which he earned promotion to Major General. After the war Sumner served as attaché at the US Embassy in London, commanded a brigade during the China Relief Expedition, a military district in the Philippines, and the Army's Department of the Missouri, Department of the Southwest and Department of the Pacific before retiring in 1906. He was the brother of General Edwin Vose Sumner, Jr.
Description The American Civil War was an internal conflict fought in the United States from 1861 to 1865. The Union faced secessionists in eleven Southern states grouped together as the Confederate States of America. The Union won the war, which remains the bloodiest in U.S. history.
Among the 34 U.S. states in February 1861, seven Southern slave states individually declared their secession from the U.S. to form the Confederate States of America. War broke out in April 1861 when Confederates attacked the U.S. fortress of Fort Sumter. The Confederacy grew to include eleven states; it claimed two more states, the Indian Territory, and the southern portions of the western territories of Arizona and New Mexico (called Confederate Arizona). The Confederacy was never diplomatically recognized by the United States government nor by any foreign country. The states that remained loyal, including border states where slavery was legal, were known as the Union or the North. The war ended with the surrender of all the Confederate armies and the dissolution of the Confederate government in the spring of 1865.
The war had its origin in the factious issue of slavery, especially the extension of slavery into the western territories. Four years of intense combat left 620,000 to 750,000 soldiers dead, a higher number than the number of American military deaths in World War I and World War II combined, and much of the South's infrastructure was destroyed. The Confederacy collapsed and 4 million slaves were freed (most of them by Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation). The Reconstruction Era (1863–1877) overlapped and followed the war, with the process of restoring national unity, strengthening the national government, and granting civil rights to freed slaves throughout the country.