Slocum, Henry Warner, 1826-1894

Brooklyn businessman and Civil War hero.

Born in rural Onondaga County, N.Y., Henry Warner Slocum attended Cazenovia Seminary and worked as a teacher before obtaining an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point, where he was the roommate of Philip Sheridan. At the outbreak of the Civil War, Slocum was appointed colonel of the 27th New York Infantry, a two-year regiment mustered in at Elmira, N.Y. In 1862, Slocum was appointed major general of volunteers, the second youngest man in the Army to achieve that rank. Later he he assumed command of the XII Corps after its commander, Maj. Gen. Joseph K. Mansfield, was killed at the Battle of Antietam.

Henry Warner Slocum was a prominent citizen of Brooklyn, N.Y. who was honored for his service as a General during the Civil War. Born in 1826 in the town of Delphi in Onondaga County, N.Y., Slocum attended the Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., where he also studied law. He was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the First Artillery in 1852, and was promoted to First Lieutenant in 1855. Slocum resigned his commission in 1856 and settled in Syracuse, N.Y., where he practiced law after being admitted to the bar in 1858. With the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, Slocum entered the Union Army as Colonel of the 28th Regiment of the New York State Volunteers. He later served as a Brigadier and Major General in the Army of the Potomac, and served in the Army of Georgia as second in command to William Tecumseh Sherman. After the War's end in 1865, Slocum settled as a lawyer in Brooklyn and was elected as a Democrat to the 41st and 42nd United States Congresses from 1869 to 1873. In 1876, Slocum was appointed President of the Brooklyn Department of City Works, and from 1883 to 1885 he served as a Representative at Large from New York to the 48th United States Congress. Slocum died of heart failure in 1894 at his Brooklyn home, located at 465 Clinton Avenue, where he resided with his wife, two sons, and two daughters.