1918 Index

Iowa: Its History and Its Foremost Citizens
Revised, Home and School Edition by Brigham Johnson.  2 Vols.  Des Moines, IA: The S. J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1918.

B

Unless otherwise noted, biographies submitted by Tamara Jorstad.

William Worth Belknap

Lawyer – Legislator – From Mayor to Brevet Major-General – from the Army to President Grant’s Cabinet

A career may round out into a veritable tragedy though wholly lacking in the dramatic features with which the word tragedy is usually associated. All who recall General Belknap at the height of his fame and in full enjoyment of his splendid mental and physical powers, must think of him as the Norseman of old regarded the Volsungs, descendants of Odin – tall, sun-crowned men, erect, deep-chested warriors for whom the sword seemed designed.

William Worth Belknap, son of brevet Brig. Gen. William Goldsmith Belknap, of the regular army, was born in Newburgh , New York , September 22, 1829 , a graduate of Princeton in 1848 and a lawyer of record in 1851. In 1853 he came to Keokuk and entered into a law partnership with Ralph P. Lowe, afterward governor of Iowa . Elected a member of the Seventh General Assembly he was among the foremost of the able young men who came together in the new capitol in 1858.

Prior to the war he was captain of a company of “Rifles,” and General Bussey in his story of the late Athens with Missouri forces speaks of Captain Belknap’s opportune coming on a special train from Keokuk prior to his own arrival.

When war was declared, sinking his ambition as a lawyer and ignoring all party considerations, he offered his services to the state. Entering the service as a major, at the age of thirty-three, he retired a brevet major-general.

The Fifteenth Iowa Infantry was organized at Keokuk, February 22, 1862 , with Hugh T. Reid, colonel, William Dewey, lieutenant-colonel and William W. Belknap, major. It left for St. Louis in March and early in April it was with Prentiss under fire. The home appreciation of their valor at Shiloh is evinced by the beautiful silken flag presented the members of the Fifteenth in recognition of their services on that field. That flag, pierced by eleven bullets, its staff shattered by four balls, is part of the state’s collection of battle flags in Iowa ’s State Capitol.

Promotion followed quickly. In command of his regiment at Corinth , he was afterward placed on McPherson’s staff. General Crocker gives Belknap especial praise for his bravery at Corinth . He speaks of his regiment as “under the hottest fire,” and Belknap as being “everywhere along the line, mounted, and with sword in hand encouraging, by voice and gesture, his men to stand their ground.” He was wounded in this engagement.

After the battle of Atlanta he was made a brigadier-general and given command of the Iowa Brigade. A passing incident of the battle of Atlanta reveals the reincarnated Viking. In the hand-to-hand encounter across the works, Belknap, seeing Colonel Lampley of Alabama actively engaged directly opposite him, reached out after him and, though under fire all the while, succeeded in dragging the Alabamian over the works and making him his prisoner. After much service around Atlanta , he followed Sherman to the sea, and in the brief siege of Atlanta his brigade performed honorable part.

In the Grand Review at Washington , the splendid Iowan rode proudly at the head of his brigade, receiving at least his full measure of the applause of the onlooking thousands. He was afterward placed in command of a division, and then of a corps and when mustered out was a brevet major-general. Offered a position in the regular army, he declined it, returning to Keokuk, to resume the practice of his profession.

Civil honors awaited General Belknap. He was first appointed collector of internal revenue in his district. When in 1869 Grant became President, Belknap was his choice as secretary of war. This position he held until March, 1876, when his resignation followed an acquittal by the Senate of the charge of official misconduct, on the ground of want of jurisdiction. The charge was made in a period of intense partisan bitterness. Occurrences revealing laxity of administration rather than positive misconduct and a chivalrous disposition to shield another from blame led to his political downfall.

President Grant related to Frank G. Carpenter, the story of Belknap’s visit at the White House soon after the blow had fallen, part of which is as follows: “He looked as if he hadn’t slept for a week . . . He said he had written his resignation, and he therefore handed me a paper, bursting into tears. I told him I did not want his resignation; but I finally accepted it.” Carpenter quoted the President as saying he knew all the circumstances and he considered Belknap innocent. Senator George G. Wright, of Iowa , one of the judges in the Belknap impeachment case, recorded his individual verdict as “Not guilty on the facts.” In an address before Crocker’s Iowa Brigade in 1891, the venerable ex-senator solemnly declared he had never had the least cause to question the correctness of that conclusion. He added: “I believe then, and time has but confirmed the conviction, that there were circumstances which the big manly and chivalrous nature of General Belknap would not disclose, which would have greatly relieved him from the effects of some slight culpatory testimony; that he suffered himself, rather than compromise others, relying upon time and after-developments for his ultimate vindication.”

The devotion of his comrades of the Crocker Brigade to the memory of their former commander, and their belief in his probity and honor may be inferred from the fact that, under the inspiration of Col. H. H. Rood and Maj. M. A. Higley, an adequate sum was raised among his comrades, in 1894, for the purpose of erecting a monument to the memory of General Belknap in the National Cemetery on Arlington Heights.

The soldiers of Iowa , and especially those of his own Iowa Brigade, retained their confidence in him, and his surviving comrades still treasure his memory. Senator Matt Carpenter, of Wisconsin , who defended Belknap, declared the entire innocence of the accused, and announced his purpose, should he outlive the ex-secretary, to clear his memory and place the blame where it belonged. The senator’s death, in 1881, prevented this act of justice.

After Crocker’s lamented death, Belknap became the central figure in all reunions of the Iowa Brigade; and, when he died, all Iowa mourned.

The general’s death occurred in Washington , October 12, 1890 . His remains were buried in the National Cemetery in Arlington .

The general’s son and the intimate companion of his last years, Hugh J. Belknap, was for a time member of Congress from a Chicago district. He, too, is dead.

General Belknap was three times married. His first wife was a sister of Gen. Hugh T. Reid, first colonel of his regiment; his second was a daughter of Doctor Tomlinson, of Harrodsburg , Kentucky ; his third was Mrs. Brown, a younger daughter of Doctor Tomlinson.

After his acquittal the general engaged in the practice of his profession in Washington , where he enjoyed the intimate friendship and full confidence of Justice Harlan and other great men of his time. The general rarely failed to come all the way from Washington to Iowa to attend the reunions of the Iowa Brigade of which he was long the presiding officer and the most prominent and popular member.

Soon after her husband’s retirement, Mrs. Belknap took up her residence in Paris , with her infant daughter, Alice . Two years later, after the death of her husband, she returned to her Vermont avenue home, where years afterwards she also died.

Nothing has thus far been said of General Belknap’s eloquence. But, that something should be added which will convey to later generations a well-rounded impression of the man, let this sketch conclude with a brief extract from one of the general’s notable speeches – delivered by him at the first great reunion of the Army of the Tennessee, at Crosby’s Opera House, Chicago, December 15, 1868. Lest someone might  suspect that the general caught his inspiration from Colonel Ingersoll’s famous Vision – beginning with “The past rises before me like a dream,” it should be remarked that it was delivered eight years before Ingersoll’s great tribute to our soldiers living and dead. This is from General Belknap’s peroration:

“It all seems like a dream – the insult to the flag, the President’s call for troops, the great uprising of the people, the unfurling to the breeze, from every mast and staff and spire of the North, of the nation’s emblem; the enthusiastic meetings of men of all classes to devise means in that solemn hour to strike a blow for union and save the nation; the prompt response of the young men of the land; the muster in of armed hosts; the waving of handkerchiefs and the handshakings at parting and the last kisses of the loved; the first battles in the West; the eager demand for news; the victory at Donelson, where began the public life of a new leader of the nation; the field of Shiloh, with its bloody victory seized from defeat; the gradual opening of the Father of Waters; Vicksburg, with its memorable siege; the return home as veterans of those who but a short time before had left us untried; the proud consciousness of the youthful soldier as he told of his deeds afar off in the wars; the return to the field; the flankings and fightings of our great captain about Atlanta, until it was ours and fairly won; the sudden departure; as, turning their backs on home, the men of this army made their march to the sea; Savannah and its pleasant holidays of rest; the seemingly unceasing swamps of Carolina; the toilsome march to Raleigh; the welcome words of the announcement which told of the surrender of the flower of the armies of the South; the joy of that happy hour turned to gloom as the hushed intelligence of the death of the nation’s chief was broken in low words to the men; the final march to Washington; the Grand Review at the nation’s capital; the last order and the welcome muster-out – all these memories seem not like memories, but like the faint glimpses of an imagined picture, as panorama-like, it passes before the eye and leaves here and there an impress and is gone, line the half-faded recollection of something that we have seen and yet at times can scarce believe that we have witnessed . . . It all seems like a dream!”

John Bruce