Background
Raleigh Edward Colston was born on October 31, 1825, in Paris, France. He was the adopted son of Maria Theresa and Dr. Raleigh Edward Colston. Raleigh emigrated to the United States at the age of seventeen.
319 Letcher Ave, Lexington, VA 24450, United States
Raleigh Colston entered the Virginia Military Institute, where he graduated in 1846.
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1875
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Raleigh Edward Colston was born on October 31, 1825, in Paris, France. He was the adopted son of Maria Theresa and Dr. Raleigh Edward Colston. Raleigh emigrated to the United States at the age of seventeen.
Colston received his early education in Paris. In 1842 he was sent to the United States, and the next year entered the Virginia Military Institute, where he graduated in 1846. While still a student he acted as an instructor in French.
About 1846 Colston was appointed assistant professor at Virginia Military Institute. He was advanced to a full professorship in 1854. At the outbreak of the Civil War, he was appointed colonel of the 16th Virginia Infantry, and on December 24, 1861, he was made brigadier-general. He commanded a brigade in the Peninsular campaign from April to June 1862, when he was disabled by illness from which he did not recover until December.
In April 1863, on the application of his former fellow professor, he was assigned to a brigade in Stonewall Jackson’s corps. He commanded the division at Chancellorsville. He afterward served under Beauregard in the defense of Petersburg in 1864, and then commanded at Lynchburg. Left without resources upon the return of peace, he established a military school at Wilmington, North Carolina, and conducted it successfully until he offered an appointment as a colonel in the Egyptian army, in which several veterans of the late war, both Union and Confederate, held commissions.
Raleigh Colston served for six years in Egypt. Twice during that period, he conducted extensive exploring expeditions in the Soudan. On the second of these, while in the heart of the desert, he was injured by a fall from his camel, and paralyzed from the waist down. He refused to return to Cairo, however, for he was the only American with the command, and knew that if he abandoned it the expedition would fail. For days he was carried forward in a litter, until he reached El Obeid, where he connected with another force sent out from lower Egypt, to whose leader, Major Henry G. Prout, afterward distinguished as an engineer, he turned over his command.
After six months' rest at El Obeid, he started back, and reached Khartoum after a three-hundred-mile journey, in a litter as before. He returned to the United States in 1879, when the American officers were discharged. His savings, unwisely invested on the advice of friends, were soon completely lost. Impoverished and crippled, he secured a clerkship in the War Department in Washington, which he held until complete disability overcame him in 1894. There was no pension system for civil servants in those days, and he spent the last two years of his life in the Confederate Soldiers’ Plome in Richmond, suffering greatly, but always patient, cheerful, and companionable.
Colston's uncle tried to get him to enter the Presbyterian ministry but Raleigh preferred a military career.
Colston was a man of wide culture, kindly nature, and high character, and had the faculty of winning the ardent devotion of those who knew him. He was revered alike by his college students, his brother officers and soldiers of the Confederate army, and his Arab followers in Egypt.
Colston was married to Louise Meriwether Gardiner, the widowed daughter of John Bowyer of "Thorn Hill," near Lexington, Virginia. The couple had two daughters, Mary Frances, and Louise Elizabeth.