Full-standing studio view of Lee in dark uniform. He wears a single-breasted frock with shoulder straps. Image clear with good contrast. Mount is trimmed. No photographer’s backmark.

Stephen Dill Lee (September 22, 1833 – May 28, 1908) was an American politician who served as the first president of Mississippi State University from 1880 to 1899. Prior to that, he was lieutenant general of the Confederate States Army in the Eastern and Western theaters of the American Civil War.

After resigning from the U.S. Army in 1861, Lee entered the Confederate forces as a captain in the South Carolina militia. On March 6 he was assigned as the assistant adjutant general and assistant inspector general of the Forces at Charleston, and on March 16 he was appointed a captain in the Regular Confederate States Artillery and aide-de-camp to Brig. Gen. P. G. T. Beauregard.

He was promoted to lieutenant colonel in March 1862, and was the artillery chief for Maj. Gen. Lafayette McLaws's division of the Army of Northern Virginia. On November 6, 1862, Lee was promoted to the rank of brigadier general. Leaving the artillery branch, Lee briefly led an infantry division during the Battle of Chickasaw Bayou. Beginning in January 1863 he led a brigade in the Department of Mississippi & Eastern Louisiana until that May, when he was ordered to take command of Lt. Gen. John C. Pemberton's artillery defending access to the Mississippi River at Vicksburg. Lee was wounded in the shoulder at Champion Hill. He served throughout the 1863 Siege of Vicksburg until Pemberton's surrender on July 4, becoming a prisoner of war.

Lee was promoted to lieutenant general on June 23, 1864, making Lee the youngest at this grade in the Confederate States Army. On July 26 he was assigned to lead the Second Corps, Army of Tennessee, commanded by John Bell Hood. He was in command of a corps at the Battle of Jonesborough and fought in the Franklin-Nashville Campaign and was severely wounded in the foot at the Battle of Spring Hill on November 29. Upon recovery, Lee joined Gen. Joseph E. Johnston during the 1865 Carolinas Campaign.

After the war Lee settled in Columbus, Mississippi and served in the Mississippi State Senate in 1878, and was the first president of the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Mississippi from 1880 to 1899. Lee served as a delegate to the state's constitutional convention in 1890. In 1895 Lee was the first chairman of the Vicksburg National Park Association and was instrumental in the congressional passage of the law creating the national park in 1899.  [jet] [ph:L]

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