Question of the Week: Who had the most flamboyant name in the Civil War?
States Rights Gist? Alexander Schimmelfennig? Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard? Baron Adolph Wilhelm August Friedrich von Setinwehr? Who in the Civil War had the most flamboyant name?
Philip Regis Denis de Keredern de Trobriand. Any questions?.
I was going with him too.
Glen, he looked so bloody French, back in the Foreign Legion Days!
Concur with DeTrobriand.
Gustavus Vasa Fox. Assistant Secretary of the Navy.
Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar II who in addition to famous Roman names added a suffix!
States Rights Gist was the seventh of ten children. The others-John, Robert, Joseph, Sarah, Thomas, Nathaniel, William, Nathaniel(again), and James-were named conventionally. I assume that Mr. Gist, the father, was a one-trick pony when it came to the issues of the day!
Honorable mention: Napoleon Bonaparte Buford (half brother of Gettysburg’s John Buford).
Colonel Antoine Jacques Philippe de Marigny de Mandeville of the 10th Louisiana.
Prince Camille Armand Jules Marie de Polignac: Former French Army officer and Confederate division commander in the Western Theater … called General Polecat by his soldiers.
I don’t know if his given name qualifies as “flamboyant”, but the fact that Ivan Vasilyevich Turchaninov came from Russian nobility, had served as a high ranking officer in the Russian military, and became a Union general who was known as “The Russian Thunderbolt” for his actions and leadership at places like Chickamauga and Missionary Ridge, it can certainly be labeled as ‘exotic’. He was court martialed for ordering a Confederate town burned down because someone from there, either Confederate troops or townsfolk, fired on his retreating troops, but President Lincoln reinstated him following his guilty verdict.
His ‘American name’ is John Basil Turchin.
MAJ Heros Von Borcke, a Prussian cavalry officer, joined JEB Stuart’s staff. Promoted to LTC after Stuart’s death, he returned to Prussia after Appomattox to receive the Order of the Red Eagle for gallantry during the Franco-Prussian War.