Ethan Allen Hitchcock (18 May 1798-5 August 1870) was a US Army Major-General who served in the Seminole Wars, the Mexican-American War, and the American Civil War.
Biography[]
Ethan Allen Hitchcock was born in Vergennes, Vermont, the son of Federalist judge Samuel Hitchcock, the maternal grandson of Ethan Allen, the brother of Henry Hitchcock, and the father of Ethan Hitchcock. He graduated from West Point in 1817 as an artillery lieutenant, and he served as commandant of cadets at West Point from 1829 to 1833. Hitchcock reached the rank of lieutenant-colonel in 1842, and he served in the Second Seminole War in Florida, in the Pacific Northwest, as General Winfield Scott's Inspector General during the Mexican-American War, as commander of the Pacific Division from 1851 to 1854, and as commander of the Department of the Pacific from 1854 until his retirement in 1855. Hitchcock retired to St. Louis, where he became a writer and diarist. However, he returned to military service in 1862 as a Major-General, and he assisted in the management of the War Department during the American Civil War and sat on the court martial of Fitz John Porter. He was mustered out in 1867 and moved to Charleston, South Carolina and then to Sparta, Georgia, and he died in 1870.