1862.
Edward Carson Bowman.
Acting Assistant Paymaster United States Navy, September, 1862; died at New Orleans, La., October 17, 1864, of disease contracted in the service.Edward Carson Bowman was born at Dadeville, Alabama, March 20, 1841. His father, who was of Southern birth and a man of culture, died while Edward was in his infancy, in consequence of which event his mother removed with him, when he was little more than two years old, to Massachusetts, her native State. In 1846, upon the second marriage of his mother, to Mr. Charles C. Bowman, Edward assumed the name of his step-father. He remained for a time in Massachusetts, receiving instruction at home. In his autobiography in the Class-Book he gives the following sketch of his early life:—
I was educated at home until about ten years old, when my father, having considerable interests in San Francisco, sent for us to join him there. I sailed from New York in June, 1851, in the clipper ship Flying Cloud, and made the trip to San Francisco in eighty-nine days (by way of Cape Horn), being the shortest time on record to the present day. The voyage was to me a period of unmixed pleasure and enjoyment; and the same is to be said of my stay among the beautiful scenes and under the genial skies of California. I then went to the school of Rev. Mr. Prevaux, who, though I believe a well-educated man, was much impeded by the instability which at that time educational systems shared in common with many other social arrangements in San Francisco. I learned, therefore, little from text-books; but I had early acquired the habit of reading good books, and the building, in four years, of a great and beautiful city, by all the nations of the earth, would hardly be witnessed without affording at least a valuable complement to mere book knowledge. My parents had always intended sending me to Harvard, and now thought it important that I should be fitted in Boston. In
