USMA Class of 1861 (5th of 45). Too much to unpack. Before West Point, he was a sailor. First Colonel of the 20th Maine. Rose to bvt MGUSV and USA. Awarded MOH for action at First Bull Run. Post-war Reconstruction Senator and Governor of Mississippi. His future wife Blanche was considered Kate Chase’s successor as the belle of Washington, DC, despite being the daughter of one of the ugliest figures of the period, Benjamin Butler. With his father Jesse he was an investor in a bank in Northfield, Minnesota, which may have been why it was targeted by the James-Dalton gang and robbed in 1876. Became a golfing partner with his friend John D. Rockefeller. When he died in 1933, he was the last surviving general officer of the Civil War. His son Adelbert was a noted scientist in the field of optics. His daughter Blanche Ames Ames (she married a non-relative named Ames) was also a noted artist, scientist, writer, and suffragette. But she is best known as her father’s first biographer. She was compelled to write the biography by what she considered a slanderous sketch of him presented by John F. Kennedy in Profiles in Courage, after her attempts to get the now-POTUS to change it in a new edition via her intermediary failed. That intermediary was her grandson, author George Plimpton.
Adelbert Ames at Ancestry.com
Adelbert Ames at Fold3
Adelbert Ames at FindAGrave
Adelbert Ames at Wikipedia
Adelbert Ames at Grokipedia
Adelbert Ames, Golf Partner of the Stars
Adelbert Ames and Jesse James
How John F. Kennedy Fell for the Lost Cause
Profiles in Courage
Harry Smeltzer
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