Background
William Robertson Boggs was born on March 18, 1829, in Augusta, Georgia, United States. He was the son of merchant Archibald Boggs and his wife Pamela Moseley Boggs.
600 W Michigan Ave, Augusta, MI 49012, United States
William Boggs attended Augusta Military Academy.
West Point, New York, United States
William Robertson Boggs won a position in the United States Military Academy at West Point, studying engineering and graduated in 1853.
(Boggs's memoir, Military Reminiscences of General William...)
Boggs's memoir, Military Reminiscences of General William R. Boggs, was originally written for his children in 1891 and was published in 1915 by the Trinity College Historical Society. It opens with Boggs's resigning his commission with the U.S. government and continues by describing some of the ways he set out to build and maintain armaments for the Confederacy comparable to those he had created for the Union. Boggs devotes a chapter to each of his major outposts and commissions and closes with his analysis of the factors that led to the Confederacy's defeat. Boggs provides a series of Appendix Commentaries that document some of the issues he discussed in the memoirs, including letters of commission concerning his frustrations with Bragg, and a letter affirming his responsibility in cotton speculation. His memoirs offer a fairly sharp criticism of the Confederate military and its leadership.
https://www.amazon.com/Military-Reminiscences-General-William-Boggs/dp/1503354245/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=William+R.+Boggs&qid=1576487907&sr=8-1
1915
William Robertson Boggs was born on March 18, 1829, in Augusta, Georgia, United States. He was the son of merchant Archibald Boggs and his wife Pamela Moseley Boggs.
William Boggs attended Augusta Military Academy, then won a position in the United States Military Academy at West Point, studying engineering and graduated in 1853.
Boggs accepted a commission in the Corps of Engineers and joined the Topographical Bureau of the Pacific Railroad survey in 1853. The following year he was made a second lieutenant of the Ordnance Corps and was stationed in New York.
In 1856, he was promoted to the first lieutenant. He was named inspector of ordnance at Port Isabel, Texas, in 1859. At the beginning of the Civil War, Boggs was a captain in the Corps of Engineers stationed at Charleston.
In February 1861, he resigned his commission and was appointed captain of ordnance in the Confederate Army. A staff rather than a line officer, he designed guns, secured fortifications, and purchased supplies for the Confederacy in 1861. In December 1861, he became chief engineer for the state of Georgia, on the staff of Governor Joseph Brown.
As superintendent of the Louisiana State Seminary in 1862, he was favored by General Braxton Bragg, but he later broke with Bragg at Pensacola, when Boggs felt himself unjustly bypassed for promotion. From August 1862 to 1864, Boggs served as chief of staff for the Trans-Mississippi Department under General Edmund Kirby Smith. He was promoted to brigadier general following the Kentucky campaign, on November 4, 1862.
After the Red River campaign of 1864, Boggs broke with Kirby Smith and resigned his commission. He was made commander of the Louisiana District, and early in 1865 he enlisted but later withdrew from a military expedition into Mexico. He never surrendered.
After the war, he became a Savannah architect in 1866. He moved to St. Louis in the late 1860s and served as chief engineer of the Lexington and St. Louis Railroad. From 1875 until his retirement in 1881, he taught mechanics at Virginia Polytechnic Institute.
Boggs spent the last years of his life writing military reminiscences.
(Boggs's memoir, Military Reminiscences of General William...)
1915Quotes from others about the person
"He was highly valued by his associates as a man of force and culture; was esteemed by the student body as an attractive and honest teacher; by the people of the community as an upright, genial, agreeable gentleman. Politics was alone responsible for his removal."
William R. Boggs married Mary Sophia Symington on December 19, 1855. They had three sons and two daughters.
Brigadier General