Biography|Dixon S. Miles — The Commission Convened Ten Days After the Surrender

Dixon Stansbury Miles was born in Maryland on 4 May 1804 and graduated from West Point in 1824, into a career that ran through the Seminole and Mexican wars.

By 1859 he was a colonel of infantry. In the summer of 1861 he commanded a division at Bull Run.

There a subordinate, Israel B. Richardson, accused him of being drunk on the field. What the inquiry concluded is reported differently by different sources — the National Park Service says the finding was first sustained and then set aside — and Miles received no field command again until March 1862.

What he received then was Harpers Ferry: a garrison of mostly new regiments, in a town commanded on three sides by ground higher than itself.

His orders were to hold the heights. Testimony taken afterwards said he had not fortified Maryland Heights as instructed, and that hill fell to Lafayette McLaws's division on 13 September 1862.

Two days later, with Confederate guns firing into the camps from Maryland Heights, Loudoun Heights and School House Ridge, Miles agreed to surrender.

A shell fragment struck his left leg as the white flag went up. He died of the wound; accounts differ on whether it was that day or the next.

The Harper's Ferry Military Commission convened in Washington on 25 September 1862 under Major General David Hunter and collected some 275 pages of testimony.

It found that Miles had disregarded his instructions about the heights and had allowed prisoners to pass out of his lines toward the enemy, and it described his incapacity in terms that have followed his name ever since.

The officers arrested with him, Brigadier General Julius White among them, were released and their conduct vindicated. White went on to serve as a major general in the Army of the Ohio.

Miles was buried in a churchyard at Monkton, Maryland. This pin stands instead on the plateau he was holding, where the Park Service panels explain the surrender and say comparatively little about the man who signed it.

📸 Cover: Colonel Dixon S. Miles, carte-de-visite, 1862, Liljenquist Family Collection, Library of Congress — public domain via Wikimedia Commons. The card carries M. B. Brady's copyright line and names no photographer.