June 16, 2010

Jesse McNeill

Here we see a carte-de-visite photo of Jesse McNeill, who took over the leadership of McNeill's Rangers when his father was killed near Mount Jackson in 1864. I found a 3-page biography of Jesse in Faces of the Confederacy: An Album of Southern Soldiers and Their Stories by Ronald S. Coddington.

The portrait of Jesse stands out among the pictures in the book for it's laid-back yet insolent-looking pose. But Jesse turned out to be talented and daring, successfully capturing two Union generals in a dramatic raid in Maryland.

After the Civil War, Jesse appears to have been surprisingly modest, not commenting publicly on the raid until 1907, when he credited "the brave, heroic band of men" that he had the honor to command.

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