Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Rufus Saxton (October 19, 1824 February 23, 1908) was a Union Army brigadier general during the American Civil War who received America''s highest military decoration, the Medal of Honor, for his actions at the Battle of Harpers Ferry. Saxton was born in Greenfield, Massachusetts. His father, Jonathan Ashley Saxton, was a transcendentalist whose feminist and abolitionist writings were heard on the lyceum circuit. He descended from a family of ministers (Ashley, Williams, Edwards). His father attempted to secure a place for Rufus Saxton at Brook Farm in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, a transcendentalist community started by George Ripley and attended by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Rufus Saxton''s brother Samuel Willard "Will" Saxton attended Brook Farm in his stead, learning the printing trade for the Farm''s publication The Harbinger. Later, Will would join RufusSaxton in South Carolina as his aide-de-camp and printer during the Port Royal Experiment. Rufus Saxton married a Philadelphian missionary, Mathilda Thompson, who had come South to teach the newly freed blacks with her newspaper journalist brother.