White clipped slip of paper meas. approx. 3.25 x 2.00 inches with a nice bold ink inscription in three lines that reads “YOURS TRULY / FITZ-JOHN PORTER / MAJ. GEN.”

Paper is mostly clean with only light foxing.

Fitz-John Porter was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire on August 31, 1822. He was an 1845 graduate of West Point and served in the Mexican War where he received a brevet promotion for bravery at Molino del Rey and a wound at Chapultepec.

During the Civil War he became a protégé of Major General George McClellan. Porter served admirably as an Army of the Potomac Division and Corps commander during the 1862 Peninsula campaign. In August of that same year Porter was ordered to take his 5th Corps and support Major General John Pope's forces in the developing battle at Second Manassas against Lee and Stonewall Jackson. Pope ordered Porter to assault Jackson's flank, unaware that Longstreet's troops had arrived on the field, and that the ordered assault would leave Porter's 5th Corps and that of Pope's entire army open to being rolled up by Longstreet. As events unfolded, Porter vacillated before finally bowing to Pope's order, with disastrous results all round. In the wake of the battle an enraged Pope ordered Porter court-martialed for being insubordinate and disobeying orders.

Dismissed from the Army in January 1863, Porter waged a twenty year campaign to have his Court-martial reversed, and to be restored to the army list, and eventually succeeded in the early 1880s. He resigned immediately afterward, and lived until 1901. He is buried in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.

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