General Scott | Page 3

sends in his resignation, but withdraws it and returns
to Natchez--Is court-martialed--On staff duty at New
Orleans--Declaration of war with Great Britain--General Wade
Hampton and the Secretary of War--Hull's surrender--Storming of
Queenstown--March to Lewiston--Scott's appeal to the officers and
soldiers--Indians fire on a flag of truce--Incident with a Caledonian
priest--Letter in relation to Irish prisoners sent home to be tried for
treason.
Winfield Scott was born at Laurel Branch, the estate of his father,
fourteen miles from Petersburg, Dinwiddie County, Virginia, June 13,
1786. His grandfather, James Scott, was a Scotchman of the Clan
Buccleuch, and a follower of the Pretender to the throne of England,
who, escaping from the defeat at Culloden, made his way to Virginia in
1746, where he settled. William, the son of this James, married Ann
Mason, a native of Dinwiddie County and a neighbor of the Scott

family. Winfield Scott was the issue of this marriage. There were an
elder brother and two daughters. James Scott died at an early age, when
Winfield was but six years old. William, the father of Winfield, was a
lieutenant and afterward captain in a Virginia company which served in
the Revolutionary army. Eleven years after the father's death the
mother died, leaving Winfield, at seventeen years old, to make his own
way in the world.
At the death of his father, Winfield, being but six years old, was left to
the charge of his mother, to whom he was devotedly attached. It is a
well-warranted tradition of the county in which the Scott family resided,
that the mother of General Scott was a woman of superior mind and
great force of character. In acknowledging the inspiration from the
lessons of that admirable parent for whatever of success he achieved,
he was not unlike Andrew Jackson and the majority of the great men of
the world. He wrote of her in his mature age as follows: "And if, in my
now protracted career, I have achieved anything worthy of being
written, anything that my countrymen are likely to honor in the next
century, it is from the lessons of that admirable parent that I derived the
inspiration."
In his seventh year he was ordered on a Sunday morning to get ready
for church. Disobeying the order, he ran off and concealed himself, but
was pursued, captured, and returned to his mother, who at once sent for
a switch. The switch was a limb from a Lombardy poplar, and the
precocious little truant, seeing this, quoted a verse from St. Matthew
which was from a lesson he had but recently read to his mother. The
quotation was as follows: "Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit
is hewn down, and cast into the fire." The quotation was so apt that the
punishment was withheld, but the offender was not spared a very
wholesome lesson.
General Scott's mother, Ann, was the daughter of Daniel Mason and
Elizabeth Winfield, his wife, who was the daughter of John Winfield, a
man of high standing and large wealth. From his mother's family he
acquired his baptismal name of Winfield. John Winfield survived his
daughter, and dying intestate, in 1774, Winfield Mason acquired by

descent as the eldest male heir (the law of primogeniture then being the
law of Virginia) the whole of a landed estate and a portion of the
personal property. The principal part of this large inheritance was
devised to Winfield Scott, but, the devisee having married again and
had issue, the will was abrogated. The wife of Winfield Mason was the
daughter of Dr. James Greenway, a near neighbor. He was born in
England, near the borders of Scotland, and inherited his father's trade,
that of a weaver. He was ambitious and studious, and giving all of his
spare time to study, he became familiar with the Greek, Latin, French,
and Italian languages. After his immigration to Virginia he prepared
himself for the practice of medicine, and soon acquired a large and
lucrative practice. He devoted much of his time to botany, and left a
hortus siccus of forty folio volumes, in which he described the more
interesting plants of Virginia and North Carolina. He was honored by
memberships in several of the learned European societies, and was a
correspondent of the celebrated Swedish naturalist Linnæus. He
acquired such a knowledge of music as enabled him to become teacher
to his own children.
James Hargrave, a Quaker, was one of young Scott's earliest teachers.
He found his pupil to be a lad of easy excitement and greatly inclined
to be belligerent. He tried very hard to tone him down and teach him to
govern his temper. On one occasion young Scott, being in Petersburg
and passing on a crowded street, found his Quaker teacher, who was a
non-combatant, engaged in a