Alpheus Starkey Williams

Williams, Alpheus Starkey (1810-1878) U.S. army officer and congressman. Born in Deep River, Connecticut, Alpheus Williams graduated from Yale in 1831. He practiced law and rendered public service in Detroit, and was selected as the lieutenant colonel of the only Michigan regiment to serve Mexico during the Mexican War (1846-48). When the Civil War began, he was appointed brigadier general of state troops, and was soon given the same rank of volunteers by President Abraham Lincoln. He served in the Shenandoah Valley before distinguishing himself leading a division against Stonewall Jackson at Cedar Mountain in August 1862. He served as an acting corps commander at Antietam, and shored up the shattered Union flank at Chancellorsville on May 2, 1863, saving the Army from an even worse disaster. Still the acting corps commander of XII Corps at Gettysburg (1863), he stiffened the Union left against a Confederate breakthrough on the second day, then shifted back to the right to save Culp's Hill. He reverted to division command in Tennessee later that year, distinguishing himself again during the William T. Sherman's Atlanta campaign. Williams marched on to Savannah with the army, and into the Carolinas, earning a brevet to major general along the way and again serving as an acting corps commander. After the war he resigned his commission to become the U.S. minister to El Salvador. He was elected to Congress from Michigan in 1876, and died in Washington.

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