Robert Ransom Jr. (12 February 1828-14 January 1892) was a Confederate States Army Major-General during the American Civil War.
Biography[]
Robert Ransom Jr. was born in Warren County, North Carolina in 1828, the brother of Matt Whitaker Ransom and a cousin of Wharton J. Green. He graduated from West Point in 1850 and served as a US Army lieutenant on the frontier, fighting against the Sioux and policing Kansas amid "Bleeding Kansas". When the American Civil War broke out, he joined the Confederate States Army cavalry, taking part in skirmishes in northern Virginia as a cavalry colonel before fighting in the 1862 Peninsula Campaign as a Brigadier-General. His division successfully defended Marye's Heights at the Battle of Fredericksburg, and he fought in the Valley Campaigns of 1864 before resigning in August 1864 due to poor health. After the war, he became an express agent and city marshal at Wilmington, and he later worked as a civil engineer in New Bern and died in 1892.