page_title: List of brigadier generals in the United States Regular Army before February 2, 1901
section_title: Civil War
hierarchical_section_title: List of brigadier generals in the United States Regular Army before February 2, 1901 / History / Civil War
caption_attribution_description: English: Philip St. George Cooke (June 13, 1809 – March 20, 1895)
context_page_description: This is a complete list of brigadier generals in the United States Regular Army before February 2, 1901. The grade of brigadier general is ordinarily the fourth-highest in the peacetime Army, ranking above colonel and below major general.
  The grade of brigadier general was the highest peacetime rank in the Regular Army during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the second-highest for most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was also rare: until 1901 there were fewer than twenty brigadier generals on active duty at any given time. Even during times of war, the number of Regular Army brigadier generals remained relatively constant, because rather than expand the permanent military establishment to meet transient wartime requirements, the Regular Army served as a cadre for a much larger temporary force of volunteers and conscripts. Many famous generals of the American Civil War held high rank only in the volunteer service, and reverted to much lower permanent grades in the Regular Army when the volunteers were disbanded after the war.
context_section_description: During the Civil War Congress augmented the permanent Regular Army with a massive temporary force of volunteers and conscripts. The overwhelming majority of Civil War brigadier generals were appointed to that grade only in the volunteer service, so hundreds of wartime generals lost their ranks when the volunteers were disbanded after the war.
  Early wartime vacancies in the Regular Army grade of brigadier general were filled on the basis of prewar experience or anticipated brilliance, and included Colonels Edwin V. Sumner and Philip S. G. Cooke, Inspector General Joseph K. F. Mansfield, and Major Robert Anderson, all senior stalwarts of the peacetime Army; plus two relative newcomers, Brevet Assistant Adjutant General Irvin McDowell and former First Lieutenant William S. Rosecrans. By mid-1862 permanent Regular Army brigadier generalcies were being dangled as rewards for particularly successful volunteer generals, many of whom had been civilians or very junior Regular officers before the war; these later appointments went to Colonels William T. Sherman and George H. Thomas; Major Winfield S. Hancock; Captains John Pope, George G. Meade, James B. McPherson, Philip H. Sheridan, and John M. Schofield; former Captain Joseph Hooker; and First Lieutenant Oliver O. Howard — all major generals of volunteers — and civilian Alfred H. Terry, a brigadier general of volunteers.
  Most of the Army's wartime bureau chiefs were eventually elevated to the ex officio rank of brigadier general, including the Adjutant General, the Chief of Ordnance, the Surgeon General, the Commissary General of Subsistence, the Chief of Engineers, and the Judge Advocate General. In 1864 James B. Fry was appointed Provost Marshal General with the rank of brigadier general to administer the non-Regular volunteers and draftees; unique among ex officio general officers of this era, Fry lost his rank when his office was abolished after the volunteers were disbanded in 1866. In 1865 Congress established the office of Chief of Staff to the Lieutenant General with ex officio rank of brigadier general as a mechanism to transfer Brigadier General of Volunteers John A. Rawlins to the Regular Army so that he could continue to serve as Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant's principal military assistant after the war; the office terminated when Rawlins became President Grant's first Secretary of War in 1869.
  The postwar demobilization of the volunteers reduced most Civil War officers to much lower permanent grades in the Regular Army or to civilian life, so in 1866 Congress tripled the size of the Regular Army to create enough new force structure to reward officers with the grades their wartime service merited. To recognize the many outstanding volunteer officers who had not been professional soldiers before the war, half of the new commissions were reserved for civilian volunteers and the other half for prewar professionals. As a result, many civilian volunteers gained seniority over long-serving Regulars with similar or better records. For example, by 1886 Wesley Merritt stood only eleventh on the list of colonels of the line despite having outranked during the war all ten colonels now senior to him; Merritt was appointed only a lieutenant colonel in 1866, while civilians like Thomas H. Ruger and Orlando B. Willcox were appointed to colonelcies for which Merritt, a Regular officer, was ineligible, and twenty years later Ruger and Willcox were both promoted to brigadier general ahead of him.
caption: Philip S. G. Cooke
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