page_title: Edward Porter Alexander
section_title: Later life
hierarchical_section_title: Edward Porter Alexander / Later life
caption_attribution_description: English: Edward Porter Alexander, circa 1900s.
context_page_description: Edward Porter Alexander was a military engineer, railroad executive, planter, and author. He served first as an officer in the United States Army and later, during the American Civil War, in the Confederate Army, rising to the rank of brigadier general.
  Alexander was the officer in charge of the massive artillery bombardment preceding Pickett's Charge, on the third day of the Battle of Gettysburg, and is also noted for his early use of signals and observation balloons during combat. After the Civil War, he taught mathematics at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, spent time in Nicaragua, and wrote extensive memoirs and analyses of the war, which have received much praise for their insight and objectivity. His Military Memoirs of a Confederate were published in 1907. An extensive personal account of his military training and his participation in the Civil War was rediscovered long after his death and published in 1989 as Fighting for the Confederacy.
context_section_description: After the surrender, Alexander briefly considered joining the Imperial Brazilian Army. Finding that he no longer desired the Georgia plantation life of his youth, he taught mathematics at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, and then served in executive positions with the Charlotte, Columbia, and Augusta Railroad (executive superintendent), the Savannah and Memphis Railroad (president), the Louisville and Nashville Railroad (president), and in the late 1880s the Central Rail Road and Banking Company of Georgia until 1891.  During his employment at the Savannah and Memphis Railroad, the decision was made to route the railroad through Youngsville, Alabama. Youngsville was later renamed Alexander City in his honor.
  Alexander became friends with Grover Cleveland and the two spent many hours hunting for ducks on Alexander's estate. In May 1897, President Cleveland appointed Alexander as the arbiter of the commission tasked with fixing and demarcating the boundary between the Republics of Nicaragua and Costa Rica, with a view towards the possible construction of an interoceanic canal to be dug across Central America. Alexander spent two years at the head of that commission, headquartered in the coastal village of Greytown (now San Juan de Nicaragua).  He completed the work to the satisfaction of the two governments and returned to the U.S. in October 1899. His wife Bettie became ill while he was in Nicaragua and she died shortly after his return, on November 20, 1899. In October 1901, Alexander married Mary Mason, his first wife's niece.
  Alexander was selected to give the Confederate veteran's speech on Alumni Day during the centennial celebration at the United States Military Academy on June 9, 1902.  The speech was so well received that it was reprinted in the NY Times in its entirety in the 15 June 1902 edition. The NY Times referred to the speech as "decidedly the feature of Alumni Day." The audience included President Theodore Roosevelt as well as Alexander's former commander, General Longstreet.
  After the war, Alexander became a well-respected author. He wrote many magazine articles and published his Military Memoirs of a Confederate: A Critical Narrative (1907), praised by Douglas Southall Freeman as "altogether the best critique of the operations of the Army of Northern Virginia."  Long after his death, it was realized that Alexander had produced the Military Memoirs, which sought to be a professional work of military history and analysis, after a long effort of editing a collection of much more personal memoirs that he had started compiling during his time in Greytown, Nicaragua, at the behest of his family.  Those earlier memoirs were edited and published posthumously in 1989 as Fighting for the Confederacy: The Personal Recollections of General Edward Porter Alexander, edited by Gary W. Gallagher.
  Unlike such Confederate officers as Jubal Early and William Pendleton, Alexander eschewed the bitter Lost Cause theories of why the South was doomed to fail, given the overwhelming superiority of the North.  He was willing to express in writing his criticisms of prominent Confederate officers, including General Lee himself.  Many historians regard Alexander's memoirs as among the most objective and sharpest sources produced by a Civil War combatant.  David Eicher called Fighting for the Confederacy "a superb personal narrative with a good deal of analysis of Lee's operations ... Dramatic and revealing, an important source on the general, his fellow officers, and the Army of Northern Virginia." Alexander's other books include Railway Practice (1887) and Catterel, Ratterel (Doggerel) (1888). Alexander died in Savannah, Georgia and is buried in Magnolia Cemetery, Augusta, Georgia. In 2006 he was inducted into the Georgia Aviation Hall of Fame.
caption: Edward Porter Alexander in 1900s
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