In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

ABOUT MAJ. GEN. JOHNSON HAGOOD Lee Hagood (1846–1890), Johnson Hagood’s father, was one of eleven children and a Confederate veteran of the Civil War. In 1863 Lee left school to join his older brother Capt. James R. Hagood, who was on his way to eastern Tennessee with the First South Carolina Volunteer Infantry. Failing to locate James, sixteen-year-old Lee was taken under the wing of Brig. Gen. Micah Jenkins, the brigade commander of six South Carolina regiments in Maj. Gen. John Bell Hood’s division. Jenkins made Lee an orderly and let him stay with the army throughout the Tennessee campaign. Urged by older brother James to return home, Lee left in late 1863 or early 1864 for South Carolina, where he joined the corps of cadets at the Citadel in Charleston. Although James probably hoped to safeguard his younger brother by sending him away, Lee took the field again in the remaining months of the war with other Citadel cadets in actions around South Carolina. Following the surrender, Lee returned to Barnwell, where he worked on one of his father’s plantations, taught school, and eventually took up the insurance business. In 1871, at the age of twenty-five, Lee married Kathleen Rosa Tobin (1851–1914), and Johnson Hagood was born June 16, 1873, near Orangeburg, South Carolina . Lee and Kathleen had three other children, James (who died as a child), Lee, and Alice Kathleen. Young Johnson was namesake of his father’s oldest brother, Brig. Gen. Johnson Hagood, C.S.A. (1829–1898). Young Johnson’s father and his brigadier uncle were active in 1870s South Carolina politics as part of the “Bourbon era” effort to regain control of the state’s government from the Reconstruction Republicans. General Hagood was a political ally of the first post-Reconstruction governor of South Carolina , Wade Hampton III, and Lee Hagood was a member of Hampton’s Red Shirt Brigade, an armed group used to intimidate blacks and Republicans. When Hampton took the governorship in 1878, he appointed General Hagood as president of the Association of Graduates of the Citadel. General Hagood then led the campaign, ultimately successful in 1882, to recover the Citadel from the federal government, which had requisitioned the school for use as a garrison during Reconstruction. After two interim governors finished Hampton’s term when he became U.S. senator, General Hagood won the next xii About Maj. Gen. Johnson Hagood election for governor in 1880. Hugh S. Thompson, another of Hampton’s allies, succeeded General Hagood as governor, and he appointed Lee to his gubernatorial staff with the rank of colonel. Perhaps indifferent to greater political involvement, Lee Hagood continued to work in the insurance business with several different companies until, at the age of forty-four, he died late on Christmas night 1890 of an accidental gunshot wound. Young Johnson Hagood attended schools in Orangeburg, Allendale, and Columbia while growing up, and at fifteen, in 1888, he entered the University of South Carolina. A few years later, as he wrote in The Services of Supply, “I decided to try for West Point.” Actually Hagood applied for appointments to both the U.S. Naval Academy, in a letter dated March 17, 1891, and to the U.S. Military Academy, in a letter dated March 20, 1891. His decision was almost certainly influenced by the loss of his father. An appointment to either academy would have eased the family’s financial burden by providing him with an education and a living while he got it. Congressman George Washington Shell of Laurens, South Carolina, the new representative of the Fourth District, nominated him to West Point on June 20, 1891.1 On June 15, 1892, he entered West Point, where he soon received “the first title of distinction . . . in the military service, to wit, Water Corporal.”2 Hagood graduated twenty-third in his class in 1896 and was appointed to the artillery as an additional second lieutenant, joining Battery “G” of the Second Artillery at Fort Adams on Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island. He spent the next five years at various artillery posts in Connecticut, Florida, and South Carolina. Just after being posted to Fort Fremont, located on Port Royal Sound a few miles south of Beaufort, South Carolina, he married Jean Gordon Small on December 14, 1899. The newlyweds remained in South Carolina until his promotion in August 1901 to captain, artillery corps. Soon afterward they traveled to West Point, where Hagood taught...

Share