Lucius Bellinger Northrop
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Confederate Commissary General and head of the Subsistence Bureau of
the Southern Army.
1811-?
NORTHROP, Lucius Bellinger, soldier, born in Charleston, South
Carolina, 8 September, 1811. He was graduated at the United States
military academy in 1829, and was then appointed 2d lieutenant of
dragoons and stationed at Fort Gibson and other places in the west
for eight years. He was severely wounded while following an Indian
trail, and after his recovery he returned to Charleston on sick-
leave, never resuming active service. He studied medicine at
Jefferson college, Philadelphia, and on his return to Charleston
practised occasionally for charity only. The war department, having
been informed that he was practising medicine, dropped him from the
army, but when Jefferson Davis became secretary of war he not only
reinstated him, but promoted him to the rank of captain with full
pay. When South Carolina seceded he was among the first to resign his
commission, and when a provisional government was established at
Montgomery, Alabama, Jefferson Davis offered him the place of
commissary-general, which, after declining twice, he accepted at the
urgent solicitation of Mr. Davis, who had been his classmate at West
Point and his friend ever since. When Richmond became the capital of
the Confederacy he removed to that city and remained at the head of
the commissary department until within a few weeks of the fall of the
Confederacy. It is related that, after the first battle of Bull Run,
on being requested to make some provision for feeding the prisoners
then in Libby prison, he replied:" I know nothing of Yankee
prisoners ; throw them all into the James river," and subsequently
did all in his power to thwart the efforts of those who were humanely
laboring to render the subsistence received by the prisoners less
precarious. By the spring of 1864 Northrop had succeeded in having a
law passed abolishing the office of commissary of prisons, thus
leaving the whole matter of providing food for them in his own
hands. " From this date," says Edward A. Pollard in his "Secret
History of the Confederacy," " whatever there was of distress for
food among the prisoners is to be properly and distinctly charged to
one man in the Confederacy, Northrop." He was referred to in the
Confederate congress as "a certain commissary-general who is a curse
to our country," " and has attempted to starve the prisoners in our
hands." Senator Orr, of South Carolina, with the aid of several
congressmen, attempted to procure his removal from office, but was
defeated by the opposition of Jefferson Davis, whose "affection for
Northrop" is declared by Mr. Pollard to be "grotesque, inexplicable,
insane." After the fall of Richmond, Northrop retired to North
Carolina and engaged in farming, but in July, 1865, he was arrested
by the National authorities and confined in Richmond until the
following November, when he was released. He then bought a farm near
Charlottesville, Virginia, where he spent the remaining years of his
life.
