Henry Beebee Carrington (2 March 1824 – 26 October 1912) was a US Army Brigadier-General who served in the American Civil War and Red Cloud's War.
Biography[]
Henry Beebee Carrington was born in Wallingford, Connecticut in 1824, and he was an ardent abolitionist in his youth and worked as a professor in Tarrytown, New York from 1846 to 1847. He later became a lawyer in Columbus, Ohio, and he helped to organize the Republican Party in 1854 and befriended William Dennison Jr. and Salmon P. Chase. Carrington became a Brigadier-General of Volunteers and an intelligence officer in the Union Army during the American Civil War, after which he was sent to the American West to command the Mountain District in the Department of the Missouri. Assigned to protect the Bozeman Trail, he built and personally manned the remote Fort Phil Kearny during Red Cloud's War, but he became known for his hesitancy to engage the Native American raiders; one of the officers who agitated for a more aggressive approach, William J. Fetterman, was himself killed in a Sioux ambush in December 1866 in the famed "Fetterman Fight". Ulysses S. Grant blamed Carrington for the disaster, claiming that he had sent the popular and insubordinate Fetterman to his death, but Carrington was exonerated at his court-martial. However, his military career was ruined, and he became an Indian agent and died in Boston in 1912 at the age of 88.