838 SOLDIERS AND SAILORS WINFIELD SCOTT* By Hon. Theodore Roosevelt (l 786-1 866) w 'INFIELD Scott was bom at Petersburg, Vir- ginia, on June 13, 1786. His father was a gallant Revolutionary soldier, his mother one of the well-known Virginia family of Masons. He attended the schools in his neighborhood, and graduated at the then famous college of William and Mary ; and upon graduation began his career as a lawyer. All his tastes were military, however, and in 1807 he joined a volun- teer organization to watch the coasts, which were menaced by the British frigates ; there being then great excitement over the Leopard and Chesa- peake affair. When this flurry subsided he went down to practice in South Carolina. Soon after his arrival- there was another alarm of war, and back went Scott post-haste for Washington, again abandoning his law, with the hope of getting a commission in the army. Yet again, in 1808, the chances of war once more retiring to the background, he tried his fortune at the bar, this time in Virginia. Alarms of war were frequent during the next four years, how- ever, and Scott rigidly confined his practice as a lawyer to the intervals when it was not deemed possible that there could be danger from abroad. In 1808 he was made a captain of light artillery, and was sent with his company to New Orleans. Scott was always frank in announcing his utter contempt for Jefferson's foreign policy as President, and his abhorrence of the men whom Jef- ferson got into the army at this period. West Point had only just started. Its few graduates did well in the war of 181 2, but most of the other officers of the army were men appointed by political influence at the time, or else old officers who in their youth had had some experience in the Revolutionary War, but who were disabled by age, drunkenness, and long lack of acquaintance with military matters. Among the officers themselves there were savage factions, and Scott got into one or two scrapes in consequence of his advocacy of one of the parties. In May, 18 12, the long-delayed hostilities were evidently close at hand, and Scott left New Orleans for Washington. In September, Scott, now made a lieutenant-colonel, reached Niagara, only to share in the humiliating though petty defeats with which the land war opened on our northern frontier. His first serious affair was at the abortive effort to storm the Heights of Queenstown. When Van Rensselaer, who had led the at- Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.
