Henry Ware Lawton

Biography

Henry Lawton was the Army's beau ideal of a fighting general: six foot four, a Civil War Medal of Honor at Atlanta, and the man who led the expedition that ran Geronimo to ground in 1886. He commanded a division in Cuba in 1898, taking El Caney at heavy cost, and arrived in the Philippines in 1899 with a reputation as the hardest driver in the service. He proved it, leading amphibious and overland expeditions across Luzon in all weather — Santa Cruz, San Isidro, the great autumn campaign that broke the Republic's army. His men worshiped him; correspondents made him the war's most vivid American figure. He argued, presciently, that garrisoning the countryside and staying was the only way to win a guerrilla war. On December 19, 1899, directing a skirmish line before San Mateo in a rainstorm — refusing as always to take cover, unmistakable in his white raincoat — he was shot through the chest by a sharpshooter under General Licerio Gerónimo. The press could not resist the coincidence: the captor of Geronimo, killed by Gerónimo. He was the highest-ranking American to die in the war.

Key Battles