Maury, Dabney Herndon, 1822-1900

Dabney Herndon Maury was a West Point instructor, military textbook author, and Confederate general. Born on May 21, 1822, in Fredericksburg, Virginia, Maury was raised by his uncle Matthew Fontaine Maury (an oceanography and naval meteorology expert) after his father, a naval officer, died in the West Indies. Maury attended the University of Virginia before receiving an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York. He graduated in 1846 and was commissioned an officer in a mounted regiment. Badly wounded in the arm during the Mexican-American War, Maury was promoted for bravery and sent home to Virginia to recuperate. After recovering from his wound, Maury was appointed an instructor at West Point, where he served from 1847 until 1852. During the 1850s, Maury returned to field service and carried out various assignments in Pacific Northwest and Texas. In the late 1850s, he was stationed at the Cavalry School at Carlisle Barracks in Pennsylvania, where he wrote Tactics for Mounted Rifles, which became a standard training manual for the U.S. Army.

When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Maury was in New Mexico Territory serving as assistant adjutant general. He resigned from the U.S. Army and returned to Virginia to volunteer for Confederate service. He received an appointment as a colonel and eventually became chief of staff under General Earl Van Dorn in the Trans-Mississippi region. Following Van Dorn’s loss at Pea Ridge, Maury was promoted to brigadier general and given command of a division. He led troops at the Second Battle of Corinth in October 1862, and was again promoted (to major general) the following month. Maury participated in various operations in Mississippi and Alabama. During the last two years of the war he commanded the Department of the Gulf and performed well in the defense of Mobile.

At the end of the Civil War, Maury returned to Virginia and founded a school in Fredericksburg. He later pursued a business venture in New Orleans, but the effort failed and Maury struggled financially. He had much greater success as an academic, founding the Southern Historical Society in 1869 and providing many of his own writings on southern history. While articles by former Confederates published by the historical society helped establish Lost Cause mythology (the effort to celebrate the Confederacy and separate the institution of slavery from the cause of the war), Maury did not use his writings to self-promote or attack rivals. His publications were appreciated by former Confederates and former Union officers as being fair and well written. His book Recollections of a Virginian in the Mexican, Indian, and Civil Wars, published in 1894, received wide praise for its candor and humor.

Maury maintained an interest in military training, lobbying in the 1870s to reorganize a national militia and the authoring the book Skirmish Drill for Mounted Troops in 1886. He also received an appointment as U.S. minister to Colombia from President Grover Cleveland.

Maury was married to Nannie Rose Mason. He had five children. Maury died on January 11, 1900, in Peoria, Illinois, at his son’s house. He is buried at Confederate Cemetery in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

(Wikipedia; FindaGrave; Ruth Ann Coski, “Dabney Herndon Maury (1822-1900),” Encyclopedia Virginia)

Dabney Herndon Maury belonged to the following social groups: