John Bankhead Magruder

A graduate of West Point and career army officer, John Bankhead Magruder served with distinction in the Mexican War and afterwards came to be regarded as the army’s foremost expert on artillery tactics. His flamboyance and dashing persona earned him the nickname “Prince John” and he was considered one of the most handsome men in the country. When his native Virginia seceded in 1861, Magruder resigned his commission and Virginia governor John Letcher appointed him to command the defense of the peninsula to the east of Richmond.

Prince John had a flair for the theatrical, which was of great benefit during the Peninsula Campaign of 1862. Facing a vastly superior army under Federal General George McClellan, Magruder staged elaborately deceptive ruses designed to convince McClellan that Magruder’s army was much larger than it actually was. Magruder’s stunts caused the cautious McClellan to dramatically slow his advance on Richmond and bought the Confederates enough time to gather sufficient forces to oppose him. By the time the Seven Days Battles began outside Richmond in the early summer of 1862, Magruder was a hero in the South—second only to General Beauregard in popularity, according to at least one historian.

But by the time the battles that turned back McClellan and elevated Robert E. Lee to command were over, Magruder had suffered a precipitous fall from grace. His performance during the Seven Days Battles was widely criticized—he was slow to obey orders and on one occasion his command got lost trying to find their way to the battlefield. Rumors circulated widely that Magruder had been drunk while commanding his troops.

Magruder was well-known to be a heavy drinker, but there is no credible evidence that he was drunk during the battles, and no formal allegation was ever made against him. Nevertheless the high Confederate command had lost confidence in him, and Jefferson Davis reassigned him to command of the Confederate forces in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, far from the critical fronts.

Magruder spent nearly all of the rest of the war in the relative isolation of the Texas theater, regaining some of his lost luster when he devised and carried out a bold and unlikely attack that captured Galveston, which had fallen to Federal forces in October 1862.

After the war, Magruder moved to Mexico and advocated for the establishment of colonies of Confederate exiles. As Mexico descended into a civil war of its own in 1867, Magruder returned to the U.S. Impoverished, he tried unsuccessfully to establish a law practice in New York. Still highly regarded in Texas, Magruder moved to Houston in 1871, where he died of heart disease at age 63. A few years after his death and burial in Houston, citizens of Galveston petitioned to have Magruder’s remains moved there. In January 1876, he was reinterred in Galveston Episcopal Cemetery.

John Bankhead Magruder died on February 18, 1871.