John Eaton Jr. (1829–1906)

John Eaton Jr. was an educator and soldier who was in charge of operations supporting formerly enslaved people in Arkansas during the latter part of the Civil War.

John Eaton Jr. was born on December 5, 1829, in Sutton, New Hampshire, to John Eaton Sr. and Janet Collins Andrews Eaton. He attended Bradford Academy and taught one term at the Morgan School District prior to enrolling at the Thetford Academy in Vermont. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1854.

He was principal of the Brownell Street School in Cleveland, Ohio, before being named second superintendent of schools in Toledo, Ohio, in 1856. Eaton resigned from that post in 1859 to attend the Andover Theological Academy in Newton, Massachusetts, and was ordained as a Presbyterian minister in 1861.

After the Civil War broke out, Eaton enlisted as chaplain of the Twenty-seventh Ohio Volunteer Infantry Regiment on August 15, 1861. He spent some time as a prisoner of war after being captured in Missouri while tending to the Twenty-seventh’s colonel when he was suffering from typhoid fever.

The Twenty-seventh Ohio moved east of the Mississippi River, fighting at Shiloh, Tennessee, and Corinth, Mississippi, before being stationed at LaGrange, Tennessee. On November 11, 1862, Major General Ulysses S. Grant appointed Eaton to take charge of the formerly enslaved Black people who flocked to the Union base there and see to “organizing them into suitable companies for working, see that they are properly cared for, and set them to work.” On December 17, his duties were expanded to include the entire Department of the Tennessee.

Eaton developed five classifications for these so-called contrabands. Some new arrivals were put to work as military laborers, hospital attendants, commissary and quartermaster workers, and officers’ servants. Those in cities had jobs as barbers, draymen, shoemakers, blacksmiths, seamstresses, and laundresses, among others. A third class worked as woodchoppers on islands and at other points on the Mississippi River, providing fuel for Union bases and shipping. Plantation workers continued working on plantations leased to the federal government. The “sick and otherwise incapacitated” were tasked with doing “what labor they could toward their own support.”

In October 1863, Grant had Eaton organize “a sort of Home Guard,—a colored military force, within the regular army, which should perform the duties required of troops in protecting the plantations, the wood-cutting operations, and the various enterprises undertaken beneath our superintendence.” Eaton was appointed as colonel of the Ninth Regiment Louisiana Volunteers of African Descent on October 2 and, a month later, raised a second regiment, the Seventh Louisiana. These units were later designated the Sixty-third and Sixty-fourth U.S. Colored Infantry, which, historian Louis S. Gerteis wrote, were “consisting of black men unfit for field duty but not wholly disabled, provided the means for maintaining the entire contraband population under martial law.”

By 1864, Eaton’s territory had expanded to include the state of Arkansas, including contraband camps at Helena (Phillips County), Little Rock (Pulaski County), DeValls Bluff (Prairie County), Pine Bluff (Jefferson County), and Fort Smith (Sebastian County). In keeping with his earlier training, he established schools to educate the newly liberated African Americans at the camps.

Eaton married Alice Shirley of Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1864. They would have two sons and a daughter.

Eaton received a brevet promotion to brigadier general of volunteers on March 13, 1865, for “valuable services during the war.”

After the war ended in 1865, Eaton served as Freedmen’s Bureau assistant commissioner for the District of Columbia, which included three Virginia counties and general oversight of the state of Maryland. He resigned that position in 1865 and founded the Memphis Post with his brother Lucien. He was elected as superintendent of Tennessee schools in 1867 and served in that role until being named U.S. Commissioner of Education in 1870, a position he held until 1885.

From 1886 to 1891 Eaton served as president of Marietta College in Ohio, and in 1891 he was appointed president of Sheldon Jackson College in Alaska. Following the Spanish-American War in 1899, he began organizing a school system in Puerto Rico but had to resign the following year for health reasons. He died at his home in Washington DC on February 9, 1906, and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

For additional information:
“Death of Gen. Eaton.” Evening Star (Washington DC), February 9, 1906, p. 6.

Eaton, John. Grant, Lincoln and the Freedmen: Reminiscences of the Civil War with Special Reference to the Work for the Contraband and Freedmen of the Mississippi Valley, edited by Micheal J. Larson and John David Smith. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2022.

Gerteis, Louis L. From Contraband to Freedman: Federal Policy Toward Southwestern Blacks, 1861–1865. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973.

“John Eaton.” Find a Grave. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/41565718/john-eaton (accessed March 31, 2026).

Rodriguez, John C. Freedom’s Crescent: The Civil War and the Destruction of Slavery in the Lower Mississippi Valley. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2023.

Mark K. Christ
Little Rock, Arkansas