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 p61  Claudius W. Sears
No. 1089. Class of 1841.
Died, February 15, 1891, at Oxford, Miss., aged 74.

General Claudius W. Sears, who was stricken with paralysis at his residence in this city on January 30th last, died Sunday evening, February 15, 1891, at 5.30 o'clock, and was buried from St. Peter's Church the day following. He was born in Peru, Mass., November 8, 1817, and graduated from the U. S. Military Academy at West Point in the class of 1841. While at West Point he associated with the following distinguished Generals of the late Civil War: General W. T. Sherman, General A. P. Stewart, General W. S. Rosecrans, General D. H. Hill, General James Longstreet and General D. C. Buell. He served in the Florida War as Second Lieutenant, Eighth Regiment U. S. Infantry, until October, 1842. He was elected to a Professor's Chair in the University of Louisiana, which he filled until 1859, when he was made President of St. Thomas' Hall, Holly Springs, Miss., until the outbreak of the war.

He entered the Confederate service from this point in 1861, as Captain of Co. G, Seventeenth Mississippi Regiment, Colonel W. S. Featherstone in command. He was in many of the important  p62 battles of the war, notably those of first Manassas, Leesburg and the five days' battle around Richmond. Upon December 11, 1862, he was made Colonel of the Forty-Sixth Mississippi Regiment, and as such was in the siege of Vicksburg, and served all during the Mississippi campaign. He succeeded General Baldwin as Brigadier General on March 1, 1864, his Brigade being composed of the Fourth, Thirty-Fifth, Thirty-Sixth, Thirty-Ninth and Forty-Sixth Regiments and Seventh Battalion, Mississippi Infantry.

As Brigadier General he was in the Georgia campaign, his Brigade taking a very active and important part in the battle of Altoona or Kennesaw Mountain. He served also in the Tennessee campaign, and was at the bloody battle of Franklin, November 30, 1864. Fifteen days later, December 15, he lost his leg at the battle of Nashville, and was carried to the residence of Dr. Burrill Abernathy, near Pulaski. While there he received a visit from General G. H. Thomas, of the Federal Army, who placed him under parole, extending to him, however, many personal courtesies of which he often spoke in after days with high appreciation.

At the close of the war he was elected to the Chair of Mathematics in the University of Mississippi at Oxford, which position he most satisfactorily filled from 1865 to 1889. It is impossible in this brief space to chronicle all the events of so distinguished a career, but the South, and especially the State of Mississippi, will long hold in memory the name of one who has been so intimately associated with her history, and who has done so much in shaping the hearts and minds of her sons during the long period of hopelessness that followed the Civil War.

From the Oxford, Miss., Eagle, February 19, 1891.

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