Talk:Samuel W. Crawford

Reverted big edit

Someone has dumped in a large section of text and I have reverted it. It appears below. My reasons are:

1. It is written in a style quite different from the average Wikipedia edit, making me suspicious that it might be a copyright violation, although Googling passages yield nothing on the web. If the author can identify the work as public domain, it can go back in, although see next reasons.
2. It was placed in the Trivia section.
3. It is text that should be integrated into various parts of the existing article, not dumped in at the end.
4. It has a good deal more family-related material than most readers would find relevant.
5. It has a number of formatting and linking problems, which I don't feel like correcting until #1-4 are cleared up.

Hal Jespersen 00:50, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

---

Mark Twain's publishing company, C. L. Webster & Company, named for and run by the husband of the niece of Samuel L. Clemens, Mark Twain's real life alter ego, published General Crawford's personal opus on the Civil War, The Genesis of the Civil War: The Story of Sumter, 1860-1861. in 1887, two years after its first two works of much greater fame were published with great success, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Personal Memoirs by U. S. Grant. . To add to the highly prestigious positioning of the Crawford book, is that in 1886, the only book evideintly published by this company was Personal Memoirs of P. H. Sheridan, General, United States Army, placing General Crawford in company with military officers of much greater renown and of reported much greater tactical abilities.

Crawford was the son and namesake of Rev. Samuel Wylie Crawford, who is recorded to be in 1841 Principal of and Teacher of Classics in the "Academical Department" of the University of Pennsylvania. The senior Samuel Wylie Crawford was a noted Presbyterian minister, from a family of several, some much more prestigious Presbyterian theologians and educators, including uncle and guardian of him and his sister (after their parents' death as young adults), Rev. Samuel Brown Wylie of Philadelphia, a theologian of the classic reformed school and Rev. Andrew Wylie, his father's cousin, originally a somewhat obscure western Pennsylvania theologian and Jefferson College and then Washington College president (now conveniently merged together asWashington and Jefferson College of Washington, Pennsylvania), but who through adroit choice of his next assignment became recognized as the founding president of Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, being the two most notable.

Crawford also had, late in life, the unusual privilege of returning to his father's home state and visiting the area that his father was born, being surprisingly welcomed by many of his father's relatives some of whom who knew his father as a young boy. The ironic note in this post-bellum touring by General Crawford was that the Chester County from which Rev. Samuel Wylie Crawford had sprung, was not in England (they were Scots-Irish after all) nor even in Pennsylvania (the adult primary home state of Rev. Crawford and the birth place of General Crawford) as one might suspect. This Chester County was in South Carolina, site at Fort Sumter location of the start of surgeon's Crawford's transition from doctor to a line officer serving meritoriously even if imperfectly in the war that followed. As stated in the prior note, Rev. Crawford was taken in by his name source and uncle Rev. Samuel Brown Wylie of Philiadelphia, Pennsylvania, with his sister Margaret upon the death of their pioneering parents, a death occuring in the first generation of settlement in Chester County, South Carolina.

Crawford's brother-in-law was (Edward) Crawford Washington, born in Virginia, whose father's grandfather Warner was first cousin to General George Washington. Crawford Washington was ill-treated by destiny, at least in comparison to his illustrious forebears, with his wife Margaret Crawford (undoubtedly named after her South Carolina-born aunt Margaret) marrying and having at least two children born in Franklin County, Pennsylvania, moving to California and having at least two children born there and living there in the 1850's and then moving and being enumerated in Polk County, Texas in 1860, only to have to return north with the outbreak of the war of which the southern-born (Virginia Crawford claimed in 1860 but this must be carefully scrutinized with reality) but northern-reared (Franklin County, Pennsylania) Washington must have felt obliged to return to his adopted, and probably native, home state and to obtain a commission as a Union officer. The military career of this citizen soldier Washington ended sadly, multiply ironically, "in the assault on Vicksburg (Siege of Vicksburg) May 19, 1863 aged 43 yrs" against the South, his native land, and with barely a notice except at the time of his burial at Falling Spring Cemetery, Chambersburg, Pennsylvania in Franklin County, completing his return to Pennsylvania from the West and the South one last time. Some five or six months less than a half century later his wife Margaret Crawford Washington was laid to rest next to him. [It can also be noted that there appears to be no close nor near distant kinship between the two Crawford families beyond the marriage of Margaret Crawford with Edward Crawford Washington, a son presumably of an Elizabeth Crawford (by Reade Washington), daughter of Edward (and wife Elizabeth) Crawford, Esq, the latter two being also buried at this same cemetery.]

Family and love

Did Sameuel w. Crawford have any family. Also what was his love and passion. 174.59.127.153 (talk) 15:01, 25 February 2023 (UTC)