Description
Here’s one you don’t find very often. Colonel Washington Seawell. Graduating from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1825, Seawell was commissioned a Second Lieutenant and assigned to the 7th Infantry Regiment. In 1832, he was appointed a Disbursing Agent of Indian Affairs until 1834 when he became aide-de-camp on the staff of Gen. Matthew Arbuckle until 1836. Promoted to Captain that same year, he went on to serve with distinction on both the frontier and in the Mexican War. In 1852, now Lieutenant Colonel Seawell was given command of the 8th Infantry Regiment serving in Texas. With the outbreak of the Civil War, he was promoted to Colonel and assigned command of the 6th Infantry Regiment until 1862. He spent the remainder of the war in non-combat duties. For his service during the war, he was brevetted Brigadier General of Volunteers on March 13, 1865. He was originally interred in San Francisco’s Laurel Hill Cemetery, and was re-buried in an unmarked grave in Colma’s Cypress Lawn Cemetery when Laurel Hill Cemetery was moved there en masse in 1939 and 1940. Back marked out of Philadelphia.
