Iowa's Forgotten General

Matthew Mark Trumbull was a Londoner who immigrated at the age of twenty. Within ten years of his arrival in America, he had become a lawyer in Butler County, Iowa; two years later a member of the state legislature; and two years after that a captain in the Union Army. By the end of the Civil War, he was a brevet brigadier general, and in his later years he was an author and lecturer. Kenneth Lyftogt’s biography details the amazing life of this remarkable man, also shedding light on the histories of the Third Iowa Volunteer Infantry and the Ninth Iowa Volunteer Cavalry.

Kenneth Lyftogt is a lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Northern Iowa. He has walked all the major battlefields of the Civil War and participated in reenactments. He is editor of Left for Dixie and the author of From Blue Mills to Columbia: Cedar Falls and the Civil War (Iowa, 1993) and the novel Road Freaks of Trans-Amerika.