Winfield Scott Hancock, born in Pennsylvania in 1824 and named for the War of 1812 hero, graduated 18th of 25 at West Point and missed the assault on Mexico City while sick with fever. Before the Civil War he served in California, where his close friend Lewis Armistead wept at their parting before leaving to fight for the Confederacy. George McClellan’s dispatch after Williamsburg earned him the name “Hancock the Superb,” and on the first day at Gettysburg George Meade sent him ahead to take command and anchor the Union line on Cemetery Hill.

On the second day he sent the 1st Minnesota, about 262 men, against a far larger force to close a gap, and they suffered 87 percent casualties. During Pickett’s Charge he rode the line under bombardment, was struck in the thigh, and pulled out a bent saddle nail while Armistead fell mortally wounded nearby. After the war he oversaw the hanging of Mary Surratt, burned an abandoned Cheyenne village on the Plains, and issued General Order No. 40 in Texas and Louisiana returning power to civilian courts. As the 1880 Democratic nominee he lost to James Garfield by fewer than 40,000 votes.

• He joked that the Confederates must be running short of ammunition if they were firing scrap metal at him.
• Told to dismount under fire, he answered that there are times when a corps commander’s life does not count.
• The Indian Peace Commission later found that faulty reports, including George Custer’s, had misled him on the Plains.
• Republicans attacked his party’s “tariff for revenue only” plank as a threat to Northern factory jobs.
• Leading Ulysses S. Grant’s funeral procession in 1885, he silenced the crowd that began applauding him.