Colonel Robert Williams, the first commander of the 1st Massachusetts Volunteer Cavalry, usually didn't get along with his men [see story, P. 42]. At the time, it was customary for soldiers to elect their company and field officers, and Williams, a strict disciplinarian-and a Virginian by birth-was not a natural fit for the New Englanders. Still, Williams was a professional soldier with a decade of Western service. Despite discord in the ranks, he stayed with the regiment through early campaigning in South Carolina and its transfer to the Army of the Potomac in August 1862. At Antietam, however, Williams complained that he had been the victim of an unspecified injustice. He resigned his colonel's commission and returned to the Adjutant General's department in Washington, D.C., his previous posting. He remained in the Army postwar, serving during the Indian Wars. In July 1892, now a brigadier general, he was named adjutant general of the U.S. Army and retired in November 1893. Despite his prickly disposition, Williams won the heart of Adele Cutts Douglas, widow of Senator Stephen Douglas- Abraham Lincoln's longtime rival, who died in June 1861 after contracting typhoid fever. A chestnut-haired beauty from an old Washington family, she became Douglas' second wife in 1856 and raised the senator's two sons from his first marriage. Her family's Southern sympathies-Rebel spy Rose O'Neal Greenhow was her aunt-made her a popular capital hostess even after Douglas' death. In 1866, Adele met and married Williams, later accompanying him to the frontier, where she bore six children. She died in 1899 in Washington, predeceasing her husband by two years.
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