The Meade family had yet another Richard W. Meade II son fighting for the Union, this one in the Marine Corps. This also made him a nephew of Union General George Gordon Meade. Born December 25, 1842, and died Feb. 11, 1910.
Robert L. Meade was commissioned a 2nd Lt. in the Marines in 1862 and led a battalion of Marines in the suppression of the New York City Draft Riots in 1863, before taking part in the boat assault on Fort Sumter September 8, 1863.
During the Spanish-American War of 1898, he was the Fleet Marine officer in New York City and took part in the Battle of Santiago de Cuba. Later, he saw action in the Boxer Rebellion in China. He was promoted to colonel in 1899 and later breveted to brigadier general.
He is buried in Huntington Rural Cemetery in Huntington, New York.
Yet Another Fighting Meade. --Old Secesh
Robert L. Meade did, indeed, take part in the boat assault on Fort Sumter. He was one of 8 Marines who actually landed on the island and was abandoned there when the assault failed. He was taken prisoner and spent the remainder of the Civil War as a POW, which, as can be imagined, had a deleterious effect on his future health.
ReplyDeleteAt the time of his retirement in 1906, he was the senior Brigadier on the Marine Corps lineal list and believed he was rightfully next in line as Commandant of the Marine Corps. Unfortunately, earlier in his career, while commanding the Marine Barracks in Boston, he had brashly ignored the wishes of the Secretary of the Navy regarding the awarding of a support contract and that may have contributed to his being passed over as Commandant. That Secretary of the Navy was a young man named Theodore Roosevelt.
Meade actually participated in every significant military encounter involving the Marines between the Civil War and the Boxer Rebellion, to include river patrols in Korea in the 1870's, the Spanish-American War, the Philippine Insurrection at the turn of the century, and the Boxer Rebellion. Meade was actually the senior American officer at the American legation, but he was medically evacuated for what appears to have been a physical/emotional breakdown before he saw any actual combat in China; undoubtedly related in part to the toll taken on him by his lengthy incarceration under miserable conditions during the Civil War. It was not the first time in his career that he was incapacitated by an apparent frailty of constitution, but it was the most notable as it kept him from being proclaimed as one of the "heroes" of the Boxer Rebellion, and thus, made it even easier for him to be passed over as Commandant.