American soldier, poet, and novelist, a descendant of the governor of Connecticut; his mother was a sister of Dr. T. D. Woolsey, a niece of Dr. Dwight, and a descendant of Jonathan Edwards. He was born at New Haven, on the 22nd of September 1828, and graduated at Yale in 1843, after a course disturbed by hazing propensities, and settled by an idealized romance. In 1848–50 he travelled over Europe, meeting in Italy Mr. W. H. Aspinwall, whose son and nephew he took to Switzerland in 1851. Under the same auspices he went to Panama, whence in March, 1853, he went to California, Oregon, Vancouver’s Island, and Puget Sound. His adventurous trip across the Cascade range is described in Canoe and Saddle. Deserted by his Indian guide and ill, he made his way to Utah and thence to St. Louis, gaining the materials for John Brent. He was a volunteer with the Darien expedition to prospect for a canal across the isthmus. Separated from Lieutenant Strain in the tropical jungle, he returned with others of the party to New York in March, 1854. Thenceforth his home was on Staten Island. He was admitted to the New York bar in 1855, but literature had stronger attractions for him. At that time he wrote an unpublished novel, Mr. Waddy’s Return, and a poem, Two Worlds, which fills sixty-two pages in his Life. Immediately on Lincoln’s proclamation he joined the New York Seventh Regiment, and marched with it on the 17th of April 1861. The weeks that followed were his happiest, for he had found his place and work. He wrote, “I go to put an end to slavery.” His story, Love and Skates, had shortly before been accepted by Lowell as editor of the Atlantic, and this opened the way for his brilliant sketches, The March of the Seventh and Washington as a Camp, which appeared in the numbers for June and July. When the regiment returned in May, he remained as military secretary to General Butler at Fortress Monroe, presently attaining the rank of major, and was killed at Great Bethel, VA, on the 10th June 1861. His fall, among the earliest victims of the war, drew wide attention, but it accorded well with his half-prophetic words “whoever has lived knows that timely death is the great prize of life.”
His soldierly fame secured for his books an audience which they had long sought in vain. Cecil Dreeme, the last written, appeared first (1861), then in rapid succession the others. John Brent, Edwin Brothertoft, and the shorter Love and Skates, were originally parts of a series. His heroes are like himself, knights-errant, loving nobleness and beauty, hating and fighting all things base, so that the tales are a kind of secular Sunday-school books. His friend, G. W. Curtis, in an eloquent Biographical Sketch prefixed to Cecil Dreeme, compares him to Sir Philip Sidney. His Life and Poems were edited by his sister (1844). His cousin, Frederick Winthrop (1840–1865), a brigadier-general of volunteers, was killed in the last battle of the war. See also Literary Criticism.
