William Selby Harney (August 22, 1800 – May 9, 1889) was a Tennessee-born cavalry officer in the US Army, who became known during the Indian Wars and the Mexican–American War for his brutality and ruthlessness. One of four general officers in the US Army at the beginning of the American Civil War, he was removed from overseeing the Department of the West because of his Southern sympathies early in the war, although he kept Missouri from joining the Confederacy. Under President Andrew Johnson, he served on the Indian Peace Commission, negotiating several treaties before spending his retirement partly in St. Louis and partly trading reminiscences with Jefferson Davis and Ulysses S. Grant in Mississippi. Early life Born on August 27, 1800, in Haysborough (Haysboro), a community on the Cumberland River (then a few miles above Nashville, Tennessee, now incorporated in the city), Harney attended a local private academy. His father Thomas Harney had been an army officer. Early military career In 1817, Harney's brother, Dr. Benjamin F. Harney, an Army surgeon in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, asked Andrew Jackson, a hero of the War of 1812 and the current commander of the Army of the South, to write a letter to the Secretary of the Navy to ask for Harney's acceptance into the Navy, which occurred July 23, 1817. Harney visited his brother and met high-ranking military officers. He so impressed them that they arranged a commission for him as a U.S. Navy second lieutenant, which President James Monroe signed. However, Harney chose to serve under Jackson in the army. His first military assignment under Jackson was in 1818, as a second lieutenant in the 1st U.S. Infantry. He helped to force the pirate Jean Lafitte to move his operations from the Louisiana Territory to the Spanish Main. Harney began his many years of interactions with Native Americans on the Great Plains in 1825, when he accompanied Colonel Henry Atkinson and Benjamin O'Fallon on an expedition to sign treaties with the Upper Missouri tribes. In 1832, Harney fought in the Black Hawk War against the Sauk and Fox tribes, serving as General Zachary Taylor's assistant inspector. There he met, fought, and befriended Jefferson Davis, Taylor's son-in-law and a fellow army officer. Murder of Hannah In June 1834, while he was a major in the Paymaster Corps, Jefferson Barracks, St. Louis, Missouri, Harney was charged with beating an enslaved woman, Hannah, to