CLASS OF 1859

Lucien Bonaparte Eaton, who was colonel of the Sixty-ninth United States Volunteers in the Civil War, died May 24, 1915, in his seventy-ninth year, at his home in Memphis, Tenn., after a long illness.

He was born in Sutton, N. H., the son of John and Janet C. (Anderson) Eaton. He prepared for college at Thetford Academy, Orford Academy, and Phillips Andover Academy, and entered Dartmouth in 1855. After beginning the study of law at Wood-stock, Vt., for six months, he went to Cleveland, Ohio, and became the principal of a grammar school, where he remained until October, 1861. Then appointed second lieuten-and of the Sixty-fifth Ohio Volunteers, he was promoted to be first lieutenant in the same month, and captain in January, 1863. His regiment was engaged in the active movements in Kentucky and Tennessee, and then returned to Nashville for the campaign of 1862; he was in the battles of Shiloh, Perryville, Stone River, Charleston, Chickamauga, and the final assault on Missionary Ridge. Returning to Chattanooga from being "North on a veteran furlough", he was with the Army of Sherman,' in its advance toward Atlanta, at the battle of Kenesaw Mountain, and in the assault on Rocky Face Ridge in June, 1864. Being then commissioned lieutenant colonel of the Sixty-ninth United States Colored Infantry, of which he became colonel in 1865, he was ordered to Arkansas for duty until the close of the war. He served as brigade inspector in 1863-4, and inspector of freedmen's affairs, 1864-5.

His interest in the region of his later military service led him to settle in Memphis, with the purpose of completing his law studies. But, solicited by his brother, John Eaton (Dart. 1854), he became an editor with him of the Memphis Daily Post, established in 1866,—and chief editor and business manager in 1867. He was then appointed clerk of the court, and later elected member of the Memphis Board of Education. From 1869 to his resignation in 1877 he held the appointment of United States marshal for the Western District of Tennessee.

Admitted to the bar in 1872, he became active in many public interests and business organizations, besides conducting his extensive real estate business; in political affairs he was for many years, member and vice-president of the state Republican committee for Tennessee, many times chairman of campaign committees, and a candidate for the United States Congress in 1888. He was a trustee of a church, member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and of the Tennessee Historical Society.

His association for a time with his elder brother, General John Eaton, has significance here by recalling the kindred and unique record of an alumnus well known in his generation, who also served in the Civil War. Colonel Eaton had other alliances with Dartmouth: he married December 26, 1867, Clara, daughter of Valentine and Catherine Winters of Dayton, O., and their son, Valentine Winters Eaton (Dart. 1892), married the daughter of Prof. E. R. Ruggles (Dart., 1859) ; all of the family being now at rest in the cemetery at Dayton. A granddaughter is its only surviving member.

His vigorous health and efficiency were impaired after a street accident in 1905, and he retired from active business in 1909, the year of his attendance at the reunion of his class at Hanover on its fiftieth anniversary. His decline soon following this occasion, this seems to his classmates to have marked the ending of the career of one to whom we owe our deep affection and honor for his sturdy independence of character and ability to do well the things that came before him to be done; in the larger view we can see in such a career, as we trace his lineage to the colonial settlers of Haverhill and the Scotch-Irish of Derry, the influence of our Alma Mater upon an endowment characteristic of our New England heritage.