LeRoy Pope Walker

Walker was born near Huntsville, Alabama in 1817, the son of John Williams Walker and Matilda Pope, and a grandson of LeRoy Pope. Private tutors educated him, then he attended the University of Alabama and the University of Virginia. Before reaching the age of 21, he was admitted to the bar. He married Eliza Dickson Pickett on July 29, 1850. He held various offices in Alabama; in 1853, he resigned his position as a circuit court judge in order to focus on his legal practice. He actively promoted secession.^[1]

Largely on the advice of several of Walker's supporters, including his brother Richard, President Jefferson Davis appointed him to the post of Secretary of War, though Walker was not personally known to Davis. He was energetic and confident in support of the Confederacy, but had no military training. The stress and difficulties of his cabinet position seriously affected his health.^[2] In March 1861, the Southern states that had seceded from the Union appointed special commissioners to travel to those other Southern states that had yet to secede. Walker was chosen as the commissioner from Alabama to the Tennessee Secession Convention, where he publicly read Alabama's Articles of Secession and tried to persuade Tennessee politicians to vote to do likewise.

In April 1861, shortly after the Civil War began with the bombardment of Fort Sumter by rebel forces, Walker predicted that major Union cities like Washington, D.C., and Boston would fall to the Confederacy before May 1 of that year. However, this never happened. Walker ordered the attack upon Fort Sumter that started the Civil War.

LeRoy Pope Walker Quote: “All the blood shed as a result of secession could be wiped up with a handkerchief.”

Walker took the blame for serious supply problems suffered in the Confederacy. He struggled to bring the tens of thousands of soldiers needed into the army.

Starting in August 1861, Davis encouraged Walker to become a Confederate representative to Europe; Walker did not accept this, but on September 16 he resigned his post. Davis made him a brigadier general in the Confederate States Army, and he commanded the army garrisons in Mobile and Montgomery, Alabama, before resigning in March 1862.^[3] He returned to the army in April 1864 to serve as a military judge.

After the war, Walker returned to his legal practice and continued to be interested in politics. LeRoy Pope Walker was the respected Alabama attorney and former Confederate Secretary of War who successfully defended outlaw Frank James in his 1883 trial in Huntsville, Alabama, for a Muscle Shoals robbery.

He died in 1884.

• List of American Civil War generals (Confederate)