Henry Lawrence Burnett

Henry Lawrence Burnett (December 26, 1838 – January 4, 1916) was an American lawyer and, after serving as a major in the Cavalry Corps (Union Army), he was a colonel and Judge Advocate in the Union Army during the American Civil War. He was a prosecutor in the trial that followed the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He was appointed to the grade of brevet brigadier general of volunteers in 1866, to rank from March 13, 1865.

Early life Burnett was born in Youngstown, Ohio, in 1838. He was the son of Henry Burnett (1801–1876), an abolitionist, and Nancy (née Jones) Burnett (d. 1880). His paternal grandfather, Samuel Burnett, a native of Morristown, New Jersey, was well educated and at one time was prominent and influential. He had a considerable fortune, but lost most of his property during the Revolutionary War, along with Robert Morris, He was also a descendant of William Burnett, a colonial governor of New York and New Jersey. After being trampled by a horse and seriously injured in 1863, however, he transferred to the Judge Advocate General's Corps of the Department of the Ohio, working for Joseph Holt, the Judge Advocate General of the U.S. Army. They were executed July 7, 1865. Surratt was the first woman in American history to be executed. O'Laughlen died in prison in 1867. Arnold, Spangler, and Mudd were pardoned by Andrew Johnson in early 1869.

Following the completion of the trial, in October 1865, Burnett asked to be mustered out on December 1, 1865, which was granted. Senator John Sherman and Holt asked for him to be appointed a brevet brigadier general, which he accepted in May 1866.

Post-Civil War career In late 1865, he moved to New York City, where he resumed the practice of law with Judge Thomas W. Bartley, former Justice of the Ohio Supreme Court and governor of Ohio, until 1869. Following his practice in New York, Burnett and his second wife moved back to Ohio, where he then practiced law with Jacob Dolson Cox, another former governor, and John F. Follett, who later served as a U.S. Representative, until 1872, when he started a practice in New York with Edwin W. Stoughton. which litigated for and against the Railways, Emott, Burnett & Kidder (with Camillus George Kidder in 1877), Bristow, Peet, Burnett, & Opdyke (with Benjamin Bristow, a former Secretary of the Treasury, William Peet, and W. S. Opdyke in 1878), and Burnett & Whitney (with Edward Baldwin Whitney in 1883). Upon completion of his four-year term, he was reappointed by McKinley's successor, Theodore Roosevelt, for another four-year term in 1901, which he served in until his retirement in 1906.

Grace Hoffman Burnett (1860–1945), who married Baron Victor Siegmund von Oertzen (1854–1934), a Maj. Gen. in the Imperial German army, in 1878. (His sister, Baroness Felicioas von Oertzen was married to William H. Barber in 1890. ) She died, childless, in Bad Doberan. Lansing Burnett (1869–1893), who died unmarried. on January 31, 1882, at the Church of the Ascension at Fifth Avenue and 10th Street in Manhattan. She was the daughter of Edward Neufville Tailer, a prominent New York merchant and banker, and the granddaughter of Thomas Suffern and Edward Neufville Tailer Sr. (descendants of William Tailer, colonial governor of Massachusetts). The guests at their wedding included Mr. and Mrs. William H. Vanderbilt, William and Alva Vanderbilt, Cornelius and Alice Claypoole Vanderbilt, William Seward and Eliza Vanderbilt Webb, Gen. James Watson Webb, Ogden and Mary Wilson Goelet, Col. and Mrs. Delancey Kane, and others. Edward Neufville Tailer Burnett (1885–1966), a Yale University graduate who moved to Coachella, California. He had been ill for the previous year with pneumonia, traveling between his city home and country home. After a large funeral, he was interred in Slate Hill Cemetery in Goshen.

Society life In 1892, both Burnett and his wife Agnes were included in Ward McAllister's "Four Hundred", purported to be an index of New York's best families, published in The New York Times. Conveniently, 400 was the number of people that could fit into Mrs. Astor's ballroom.

He was a member of the Metropolitan Club, the Century Association, Union Club, the Colonial Club, and the Goshen Driving Club. He also served as past president of the Ohio Society of New York, for four years,

Published works Some Incidents in the Trial of President Lincoln's Assassins (1888) Hancock's Relation to the Trial and Execution of Mrs. Surratt (1888) The Controversy between President Johnson and Judge Holt (1889)