Facial Hair Friday: A bushy beard, a murder, and a missing arm

Gen. Jefferson C. Davis (ARC Identifier 529104)

Today’s Facial Hair Friday is not a case of mistaken identity. Jefferson Davis was arrested for murder.

But this Jefferson Davis was not the president of the Confederate States. This one was a Union officer, with nearly the same name. Jefferson Columbus Davis was a brigadier general in the Union Army when he shot and killed a superior officer, Maj. Gen. William Nelson, after an altercation at a hotel in Louisville, Kentucky.

Although Davis was arrested, he was never convicted, but instead was sent back into the Army.  Charges were never pressed against him. After the war, he continued with the Army as the first commander of the “Department of Alaska.”

But there is a question of identity for Jefferson C. Davis.

Gen. Davis appears again in a group photo, identified at the far left. His arm appears to have been amputated, but I can’t find any mention of the event where he was wounded. Is he the man on the far left, or is he the man standing, second from the right? The beards make it somewhat hard to tell. Or do any of our readers know what happened to Davis’s arm?

Gen. Jefferson C. Davis, Gen. William B. Hazen, Gen. Oliver O. Howard, Gen. John A. Logan, Gen. William T. Sherman, Gen. Henry W. Slocum, ca. 1860-1865 (ARC Identifier 528426)

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