FRANKLIN, WILLIAM BUEL Federal general in the American Civil War, was born at York, Pa., on Feb. 27, 1823. He graduated at West Point, at the head of his class, in 1843, and served with distinction in the Mexican War. After the war he was engaged in miscellaneous engineering work, becoming a first lieutenant in 1853 and a captain in 1857. Soon after the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 he was made colonel of a regular infantry regiment, and a few days later brigadier-general of volunteers. He led a brigade in the first battle of Bull Run, and on the organization by McClellan of the army of the Potomac he received a divisional command. He commanded first a division and then a corps in the operations before Richmond in 1862; was promoted major-general, U.S.V., in July, 1862 ; commanded a corps at South mountain and Antietam; and at Fredericksburg commanded the "Left Grand Division" of two corps. His part in the last battle led to charges of disobedience and negligence being preferred against him by the commanding general, A. E. Burnside, on which the congressional committee on the conduct of the war reported unfavourably for Franklin, largely, it seems, because Burnside's orders to Franklin were not put in evidence. Franklin was a corps commander in the abortive Red River Expe dition. In this expedition he received a severe wound at the action of Sabine Cross Roads (April 8, 1864), in consequence of which he took no further active part in the war. After the war Franklin was vice-president of the Colt's Patent Firearms Manufacturing Co. ; 188o to 1899, president of the board of managers of the national home for disabled volunteer soldiers ; and he was for a time a director of the Panama railway. He died at Hartford, Conn., on March 8, 5903. He wrote a pamphlet, The Gatling Gun for Service Ashore and Afloat (5874).
See A Reply of Major-General William B. Franklin to the Report of the Joint Committee of Congress on the Conduct of the War (1863; 2nd ed., 1867) ; Jacob L. Greene, Gen. W. B. Franklin and the Operations of the Left Wing at the Battle of Fredericksburg (Hartford, 1900) ; and James H. England, "William Buell Franklin," U.S. Engineers' Department, vol. x., p. (1918) .