Don Carlos Buell (23 March 1818 – 19 November 1898) was a Major-General of the US Army and commander of the Army of the Ohio during the American Civil War. Buell was known for his rivalry with Ulysses S. Grant after the 1862 Battle of Shiloh, and the cautious and rigid Buell was relieved of command after failing to pursue Braxton Bragg's Army of Tennessee after the Battle of Perryville. Buell refused to hold another command, seeing it as degradation, and he died in 1898.
Biography[]
Don Carlos Buell was born in Lowell, Ohio on 23 March 1818, the cousin of general George P. Buell. He graduated from West Point in 1841 and fought in the Mexican-American War, and he served on the frontier in California before becoming commander of the Army of the Ohio at the start of the American Civil War in 1861. In November 1861, Buell took over the army from William T. Sherman in Louisville, Kentucky, and Buell captured the Tennessee capital of Nashville on 25 February 1862 as the Confederates were drawn south by Ulysses S. Grant's campaigns against Forts Henry and Donelson. At the Battle of Shiloh, he brought 20,000 Union troops to reinforce Grant's army, but Buell and Grant would become rivals due to Buell's insistence that he "saved" Grant and that he was the true victor of the battle. Buell was sent to capture Chattanooga by Henry Halleck in May 1862 as Grant moved on Corinth, but Nathan Bedford Forrest's cavalry ransacked the Army of Ohio's supply lines and halted Buell's summer campaign. In the fall, he defeated Braxton Bragg's Army of Tennessee at the Battle of Perryville, but his failure to pursue Bragg led to William S. Rosecrans replacing him on 24 October 1862. Buell was mustered out of service 23 May 1864, as he refused to serve under either Grant or Edward Canby because he outranked them both. He worked as President of the Green River Iron Company and as a pension agent after the war, and he died in Rockport, Kentucky in 1898.
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