Smedes, Charles Edward, 1824-1898

Charles Edward Smedes was an attorney, businessman, and Confederate officer in Mississippi.

Born in 1824 in New York, Smedes moved to Mississippi as a young man. He studied law and briefly worked as an attorney, but found greater interest and success in grocery sales. In 1846, when the Mexican-American War began, he volunteered for military service and served in the Mississippi Rifles under future Confederate president Jefferson Davis. After that war, he operated a wholesale grocery business in Vicksburg, Mississippi.

When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Smedes was commissioned an officer in the Mississippi state troops. He was appointed brigadier general in 1862 in command of the Third Brigade, Mississippi Minute Men. After the Civil War, Smedes worked with his brother in the cotton firm George Smedes & Company, based in New Orleans, Louisiana. Later, he became the proprietor of the St. James Hotel in New Orleans, a venture that proved extremely profitable and led to his association with several other high-end hotels and resorts, including the Maxwell House in Nashville, Tennessee, the Marnes Hotel, in Mississippi City, Mississippi, and the Planters’ House in Augusta, Georgia. In 1878, he took over the Barnes Hotel in Mississippi City and renovated it into the new Gulf View hotel, which became one of the most popular resorts in the south.

Smedes died in November 1898 in Louisia. He was married twice, first to Martha Brodnax. He later married Sophie Sibley. Smedes had at least five children. (The Biloxi Herald, Biloxi, MS, November 19, 1898; FindaGrave; “Mississippi Minute Men,” Carroll County MSGenWeb Project; Biographical and Historical Memoirs of Mississippi, Vol. II, 788)