Baron Adolph Wilhelm August Friedrich von Steinwehr (September 25, 1822 – February 25, 1877) was a German-Brunswick army officer who emigrated to the United States, became a geographer, cartographer, and author, and served as a Union general in the American Civil War.
Early life
Steinwehr was born in Blankenburg, in the Duchy of Brunswick, Germany, the son of a military family. (His grandfather Friedrich Wilhelm von Steinwehr (1733–1809) was General in the Prussian Army of Frederick the Great) He attended the Brunswick Military Academy and was commissioned a lieutenant in the Brunswick Army in 1841. In 1847 he resigned his commission and emigrated to the United States, settling in Alabama. He served as an engineer in the United States Coast Survey, surveying the United States–Mexico border and Mobile Bay, Alabama, but his desire to serve in a combat position in the Mexican–American War was denied and he returned to Brunswick in 1849, but not before marrying 19-year-old Florence Mary of Mobile, Alabama. He returned to the United States in 1854 and purchased a farm near Wallingford, Connecticut. He later moved to New York state.
The command of what was now called the XI Corps changed to Maj. Gen. Oliver O. Howard in 1863, and Steinwehr continued to command the division in the Battle of Chancellorsville and the Battle of Gettysburg. The corps was the victim of the surprise flanking attack by Stonewall Jackson at Chancellorsville on May 2, 1863, and the overwhelming attack by Lt. Gen.Richard S. Ewell's Second Corps on the first day of Gettysburg, July 1, 1863. At Chancellorsville, Steinwehr's division had one brigade, that of Col Adolphus Buschbeck involved in resisting Jackson's attack. At Gettysburg, when the corps was forced to retreat back through the town to Cemetery Hill, Col Charles Coster took a brigade of Steinwehr's division out to the edge of the town, where it sacrificed itself buying time for the retreating soldiers of the other two divisions. These two defeats seriously degraded the combat effectiveness of the XI Corps and humiliated many of the German immigrant soldiers in the corps. Nevertheless, Steinwehr was well thought of by his superiors. After Chancellorsville, General Howard wrote that Steinwehr's bearing during the battle was "cool, collected and judicious." Brig. Gen. Alpheus Williams, a fellow division commander, described him as a "remarkably intelligent and agreeable person."
After the war, Steinwehr was employed as a geographer and cartographer. He returned to Connecticut to accept a professorship at Yale University. He moved to Washington, D.C., then to Ohio, and returned to New York. He died in Buffalo, New York, lay in state at the Buffalo Arsenal, and is buried in Albany Rural Cemetery, Menands, New York. Steinwehr was a prolific author, including A School Geography: Embracing a Mathematical, Physical, and Political Descriptions of the Earth (published in 1870); co-author of Primary Geography (1870) and An Elementary Treatise on Physical Geography (1873); editor of The Centennial Gazetteer of the United States (1874). He is memorialized by the prominent Steinwehr Avenue in the borough of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
