previous next

Shafter, William Rufus 1835-

Military officer; born in Kalamazoo county, Mich., Oct. 16, 1835; received a common school education; entered the National army as first lieutenant in the 7th Michigan Infantry, Aug. 22, 1861; became major of the 19th Michigan Infantry, Sept. 5, 1862; was promoted lieutenant-colonel, June 5, 1863; colonel of the 17th United States Colored Infantry, April 19. 1864; and was brevetted brigadier-general of volunteers. March 13, 1865. He was commissioned lieutenantcolonel in the regular army in January, 1867, and was promoted brigadier-general in May, 1897. When the American-Spanish War began he was appointed major-general of volunteers and ordered to Tampa, Fla., to command the invading

William Rufus Shafter.

army of Cuba. He conducted the military operations which ended in the surrender of Santiago de Cuba in July, 1898. Shafter was selected to lead the American troops in Cuba, according to General Corbin, “on account of his rank and conceded ability, his vigor and good judgment. He is one of the men in the army who has been able to do what he was ordered to do; not a man to find out how things can not be done.” On his return to the United States he was temporarily in command of the Military Department of the East, from which he was transferred to the Department of the Pacific in December, 1898, and on Oct. 16, 1899, he was retired, on reaching the age limit, but was retained in his last command. See El Caney; San Juan Hill; Spain, War with.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
United States (United States) (1)
Tampa (Florida, United States) (1)
Kalamazoo County (Michigan, United States) (1)
Cuba (Cuba) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide People (automatically extracted)
Sort people alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a person to search for him/her in this document.
William Rufus Shafter (3)
Cabo De Cuba (1)
H. C. Corbin (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: