Alexander Peter Stewart

Stewart first opposed secession; when Tennessee left the Union he offered his services to the state, and his early Confederate months went to drilling recruits. He rose from brigade to corps command after Leonidas Polk's death in 1864 and surrendered with Joseph Johnston's army at Greensboro in May 1865. Before the war he taught mathematics at Cumberland University and the University of Nashville; afterward he returned to Cumberland, worked in St. Louis, and was chancellor of the University of Mississippi until 1888, then a Chickamauga park commissioner.

What the plaque says

Alexander Peter Stewart Born here, Oct. 2, 1821; graduate USMA, 1842; resigned 1845, and a professor at Cumberland U., of Nashville until 1861. Appointed major, CSA, quickly advanced to brigadier general successfully to corps command. Army of TN, and twice wounded. Chancellor, U. of Mississippi, 1874-1886, and a commissioner for creation of Chickamauga Military park. he died in Biloxi, Miss., Aug. 30, 1908, and is buried in St. Louis.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Rogersville Historic District — steps away
  Tennessee's first newspaper was printed in this Hawkins County seat in 1791, and Swift Memorial College, founded in 1883, educated Black students after the state's 1901 law forced Maryville College to expel them.
• Vardy Community Museum — 15 mi
  A 1899 Presbyterian church in Hancock County, now a museum, beside the Mahala Mullins cabin and the ruins of the Vardy school that educated the Melungeon children of Newman's Ridge.
• Andrew Johnson National Historic Site — 20 mi
  The tailor shop, homestead and grave of the seventeenth president in Greeneville, where the people he enslaved are named and where the Eighth of August emancipation celebration took root.
• Long Island of the Holston — 25 mi
  A four-mile island in the Holston at Kingsport, Cherokee council and treaty ground, the start of Boone's Wilderness Road in 1775, and in part returned to the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in 1976.

More markers nearby

• Tennessee's First Newspaper — steps away
• Swift Memorial College / St. Marks Presbyterian Church — steps away
• Amis House — 1.0 mi
• Thomas Gibbons — 5.4 mi