To preserve the history of our ancestors and their valiant service to their cause during the American Civil War, I selected 2nd Lieutenant Francis A. Shoup of Indiana, United States Military Academy, class of 1855. Assigned to U.S. Artillery, the 21-year-old lieutenant would serve the next four years in the wilds of Florida, settling the Seminole Indians. While in the South the lieutenant was motivated by aristocratic inclinations to side with southerners if there was war. This was cultivated by daily contact with officials of the state and local personages.


At the end of his required duty, Shoup returned home to Indianapolis to practice law and enter politics, in 1859. During mischief-maker John Brown’s raid in Virginia, Shoup organized a militia company of Zouaves in town, but was not called to duty. Active in politics in Indiana, he took a dislike of Abraham Lincoln’s arguments and soon labeled him a radical. At the same time, the nation pondered as representatives of the highest offices of both sides held a Peace Conference in Washington, D.C. This effort for peace between the states went nowhere; it stalled, floundered, and came to no satisfactory decision. War seemed certain. The question: When and where?


When it appeared Lincoln was be nominated in the fall of 1859 for President, Shoup left Indiana, taking refuge with friends in South Carolina.


With the election of Lincoln in 1860, war was imminent, much to Shoup’s chagrin. When Fort Sumter was fired upon in Charleston Harbor, his friends cooled on him! Undoubtedly his northern birth brought up the question of his loyalty and commitment to the Confederate cause and, thus, no possible commission from South Carolina. Shoup then sailed in a packet to his favorite Florida town, St. Augustine. By now the state of Florida had seceded from the Union and everyone was preparing for a short war.


Governor Madison Perry, although looking for officers for the Florida troops, seemed embroiled in state affairs, sidetracking Shoup’s request. Shoup then boarded a train and went west to the new Confederate capital at Montgomery, Alabama. He shook hands with Jefferson Davis and received his commission as an officer from Florida. Shoup was immediately sent to Pensacola, Florida, to begin training recruits. Here he served with his first commanding general.


The Virginia front in the east, according to later-day historians, was by far the most prestigious theatre of the Civil War. Yet the war’s outcome was decided not there but in the vast expanse called the Trans-Mississippi Department, which stretched west from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River and beyond. In addition, claims that the authorities both at Washington and Richmond looked at the west as a sort of salvage yard into which officers might be sidetracked (who could not be used elsewhere) was also incorrect. As the battles unfolded, generals on both sides proved this theory too absurd to be accepted. With these invalid certainties there gradually developed a story to be written.


It was timely that I discovered an artillery general, Francis A. Shoup, who served 11 Confederate commanding generals in the western theatre and who did battle with unknown Federal generals: George Henry Thomas, “The Rock of Chickamauga”; Ulysses S. Grant, who at the beginning of the Civil War was “least likely to succeed”; and William Tecumseh Sherman, “the concentrated quintessence of Yankeedom.” (Boatner, p. 751)


Appointed a general at the age of 28 by President Jefferson Davis, Shoup performed his duties under these Confederate commanding generals: W. J. Hardee, J. C. Pemberton, Earl Van Dorn, D. H. Maury, P. G. T. Beauregard, L. Polk, T. C. Hindman, J. E. Johnston, S. B. Buckner, J. B. Hood, and T. H. Holmes. He served them well, becoming a troubleshooter as he was transferred from one crisis to another. The general served ably and brilliantly at Shiloh, Vicksburg, and the Atlanta campaign as artillerist, engineer, and chief of staff for Hood’s Franklin and Nashville invasions.


His postwar life is what you would expect from a sensitive and caring individual. Shoup became an Episcopal minister, teaching at The University of the South at Sewanee, Tennessee.