Civil War Union Brigadier General. He was born in Brownsville, New York, and was the grandson of Major General Jacob Brown, commander in chief of the Regular Army from 1815 to 1828, and the son of Brevet Colonel Edmund Kirby, an army paymaster who died when his son was 9 years-old. He entered the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1856, graduating 10th in the class of 1861. The Civil War split the allegiance of his family, including more than a dozen cousins, among them a second cousin, Confederate General Edmund Kirby Smith. Commissioned a Second Lieutenant in Battery I, 1st United States Regular Artillery on May 6, 1861, he was promoted to First Lieutenant eight days later. He initially commanded a section in the 1st, but later would command the battery. He fought in nearly all the major campaigns in the East. At Chancellorsville he was detached from his own battery and given charge of the 5th Maine Battery which had lost all of its officers in the fighting through May 3, 1863. Arriving at the scene to remove the exposed guns, a piece of Confederate case shot fractured his thigh. Insisting that the guns be removed first, he had two men come back for him later. He wrote his report of the fight from the ambulance and recommended them both for the Medal of Honor. He was eventually sent to a hospital in Washington D.C. Infection set in and surgeons amputated the leg. Told that he could not recover, the 23 year-old calmly accepted his fate. When President Abraham Lincoln visited him in the hospital, he told Lincoln that his only concern over his impending death was the loss of support for his widowed mother and his sisters. Lincoln commissioned him a Brigadier General of Volunteers, ironically on the day he died. The President's kind gesture ensured that his family would receive a generous pension.