Thomas Alfred Smyth

 

On a crisp spring Sunday, April 9, 1865, defeated Confederate General Robert E. Lee met with Union commander Ulysses S. Grant to surrender the Army of Northern Virginia. The occasion effectively ended the bloody American Civil War. After four long years the troops, North and South, could return home to rebuild their lives. The death and destruction were over… almost.

Born in Ireland on Christmas Day in 1832, Thomas Alfred Smyth emigrated to Philadelphia at the age of 22. He was a woodworker and carriage maker by trade. At the onset of the Civil War, Smyth enlisted in the Union army as a captain. He was quickly commissioned as a major and after distinguishing himself in several battles, promoted to lieutenant colonel, then full colonel. He commanded troops at Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and the Siege of Petersburg where he was promoted to brigadier general.

Smyth was raised a Master Mason on March 6, 1865, as a member of Washington Lodge No. 1 of Wilmington, Delaware.

Increasingly distinguishing himself, Smyth became commander of a division of the famed Gibraltar Brigade, so named to signify its tenacity in combat and its steadfastness like the Rock of Gibraltar. On April 7, 1865, a Confederate soldier spied Smyth in his General's uniform, which made him an appealing target. The sniper's shot shattered Brother Smyth's cervical vertebra, paralyzing him.

Troops moved the wounded general to a local tavern to care for him.

Two days later as Grant and Lee sat signing documents just 30 miles away General Smyth passed to that House Not Made By Hands eternal in the heavens. Having been a Master Mason a mere 33 days, Brother Smyth had the unfortunate distinction of being the last Union General to lose his life in that awful conflict,