|
Dromo's Den
|
|
Up] [Dromo's Den] Ethan Allen Hitchcock Biography HITCHCOCK,
Ethan Allen (1798-1870). An American soldier. He was a grandson of Ethan Allen,
of Ticonderoga fame, was born at Vergennes, Vt., and graduated it West Point in
1817. After garrison service he was instructor in tactics at West Point
(1824-27) and commandant there (1827-29). He served against the Indians in
Florida in 1836 and 1840 and in the last campaign of the Mexican War. For his
service in Mexico he was brevetted brigadier general (1847). He commanded the
Pacific Division from 1851 to 1854 and in the next year resigned because of a
quarrel with Jefferson Davis, then Secretary of War.
At the outbreak of the Civil War he was appointed major general and served at
first on special duty under the Secretary of War and later as commissioner of
exchange. He was also confidential adviser to the President.
Hitchcock was a scholar of great attainments and in expression of his peculiar
philosophy wrote: Remarks upon Alchemy and
the Alchemists, arguing that they were religious philosophers, and that
truth was the philosopher's stone (1857); Swedenborg,
a Hermetic Philosopher (1858); Christ,
the Spirit, in which the Gospels are treated as symbolical writings of the
Essenes, a Jewish secret society (1860); Red
Book of Appin, and Other Fairy Tales (1863); Remarks
on the Sonnets of Shakespeare (1865 and 1867); Spenser's Colin Clout Explained (1865); Notes on the Vita Nuova of Dante (1866), in all of which he gives
hermetic explanations of the matter of these books. The New International
Encyclopaedia, Vol. XI
(New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920)
336.
|