Brigadier-General Sterling Alexander Martin Wood was born in Lauderdale county, Ala., in 1823. He took a collegiate course, studied law in Columbia, Tenn., was admitted to the bar in 1845, and became the partner of his brother at Florence, Ala. In 1857 he was representative from Lauderdale in the Alabama legislature, and at that session was elected district solicitor, an office he held until 1861. He then went into service as captain of the first company that left Lauderdale county, and upon the organization of the Seventh Alabama he was elected its colonel. He remained with his regiment at Pensacola until February, 1862, when he was ordered to Bowling Green, Ky. His commission as brigadier-general dated from January 7, 1862. At Shiloh his brigade, the Third of Hardee's corps, consisted of the Eighth and Ninth Arkansas, Twenty-seventh and Forty-fourth Tennessee, and Forty-fifth Tennessee, Sixteenth Alabama, Hardcastle's Mississippi battalion, Jefferson light artillery, Avery's Georgia dragoons. Attacking the enemy, he captured