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Today's Featured Biography
Winfield Scott
 Winfield Scott was born at Petersburg, Virginia, on June 13, 1786. His father was a gallant Revolutionary soldier, his mother one of the well-known Virginia family of Masons. He attended the schools in his neighborhood, and graduated at the then famous college of William and Mary; and upon graduation began his career as a lawyer. All his tastes were military, however, and in 1807 he joined a volunteer organization to watch the coasts, which were menaced by the British frigates; there being then great excitement over the Leopard and Chesapeake affair. When this flurry subsided he went down to practice in South Carolina. Soon after his arrival there was another alarm of war, and back went Scott post-haste for Washington, again abandoning his law, with the hope of getting a commission in the army. Yet again, in 1808, the chances of war once more retiring to the background, he tried his fortune at the bar, this time in Virginia. Alarms of war were frequent during the next four years, however, and Scott rigidly confined his practice as a lawyer to the intervals when it was not deemed possible that there could be danger from abroad.
In 1808 he was made a captain of light artillery, and was sent with his company to New Orleans. Scott was always frank in announcing his utter contempt for Jefferson's foreign policy as President, and his abhorrence of the men whom Jefferson got into the army at this period. West Point had only just started. Its few graduates did well in the war of 1...
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