Thomas Fenwick Drayton (1808 - 1891)

Born 24 Aug 1808 in Charleston, Charleston, South Carolina, United States

Ancestors

Died 18 Feb 1891 at age 82 in Florence, Florence, South Carolina, United States

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Biography

Thomas Fenwick Drayton (1808-1891), attended West Point during Jefferson Davis’s student years. Thomas found his army career unsatisfying, though he enjoyed his work with the topographical service enough to later seek civilian engineering employment on several successive railroad projects. He did not relocate to Philadelphia with his father, but remained in South Carolina, where within a few years he married Catherine Pope of Edisto and established a plantation at Hilton Head. Dissatisfaction plagued Thomas’s adult life; he had great difficulty effecting his resignation from the army, suffered with poor living conditions while working as a surveyor and railroad engineer, and felt frequently frustrated by an antagonistic relationship with his motherin-law.

As sectional tensions increased during the 1840s and 1850s, Thomas’s allegiance settled firmly with the majority of South Carolinians and against the federal government and the free states. His stance set him against all his immediate family, and especially his younger brother Percival, a career naval officer and staunch Union man.

When the war began, Thomas was commissioned a brigadier general, and commanded troops at significant battles including Port Royal, where Percival commanded the Union gunboat Pocahontas, and Antietam. Thomas and his two eldest sons, John Edward and William Seabrook, who acted as his father’s aide, spent the last months of the war in Texas.

According to some accounts, Thomas received the Texas assignment after General Robert E. Lee expressed dissatisfaction with his performance as a commander at Antietam.

When peace finally came, Thomas, along with many other former southern planters, found himself destitute. He tried to reclaim his confiscated land in South Carolina, but had no success. Though a bequest of $30,000 from Percival helped Thomas and his family significantly, he spent the last twenty-five years of his life struggling to find consistent, livable employment. When he died in North Carolina in 1891, he had been reduced to selling insurance.

Brigadier General Thomas Drayton served in the United States Civil War.
Enlisted: Sept, 1861
Mustered out: Jun 30, 1865
Side: CSA
Regiment(s): 15th South Carolina Infantry Regiment

Thomas was born to William Drayton and Anna Gadsden in 1808. He passed away in 1891.

There is an interpretive historical marker/s on Walker Dr. about Drayton and the Battle of Port Royal, in what is now a gated community, but was Port Royal Plantation, or Fort Walker. They can be read here https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=16519

Sources

• https://hsp.org/sites/default/files/legacy_files/migrated/findingaid1584drayton.pdf
• Find A Grave: Memorial #10859

• https://antietam.aotw.org/officers.php?unit_id=33

• "United States, GenealogyBank Historical Newspaper Obituaries, 1815-2011", database, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:Q57F-821G : 30 July 2020), Gen Thomas Fenwick Drayton, 1891.