biography
| name: |
Hitchcock, Ethan Allen
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1798–1870)
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| biography:
| US soldier and writer, born at Vergennes, Vermont, USA. The grandson of Ethan Allen, he trained at West Point (1817) and commenced a remarkable military career. While commandant of cadets at West Point (1829–33), Robert E Lee, Jefferson Davis, Edgar Allan Poe, and others, were among his pupils. He served in Florida and on Indian duty in the Northwest (1837–40). He wrote a scathing report on the frauds against the Cherokee Indians (1841–2), and he served in the Mexican War, although his diary indicated his distaste for that conflict. He retired in 1855, but then returned to duty in the Civil War and served as a Union commissioner for exchange of prisoners and as a major general of volunteers. His publications include books on alchemy, religion, and spirituality, notably on Emanuel Swedenborg, and he left a memoir, Fifty Years in Camp and Field, not published until 1909. |
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