Pvt. Oscar Montgomery Lieber (CSA)

https://www.scencyclopedia.org/sce/entries/lieber-oscar-montgomery/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Montgomery_Lieber

Oscar Montgomery Lieber (8 September 1830, Boston, Massachusetts - 27 June 1862 Richmond, Virginia) was a United States geologist.

Biography

He was a son of jurist Francis Lieber. He was educated at the universities of Berlin and Göttingen, and the Freiberg School of Mines. He was state geologist of Mississippi from 1850 to 1851, engaged in the geological survey of Alabama from 1854 to 1855, and from 1856 until 1860 held the office of mineralogical, geological, and agricultural surveyor of South Carolina.

His first annual report of the last-mentioned survey was published in 1857, and the fourth and last in 1860. In 1860, he accompanied the American astronomical expedition to Labrador as geologist. At the beginning of the Civil War, he joined the Confederate army, and died of wounds that he received in the Battle of Williamsburg.

Works

The Assayer's Guide (Philadelphia, 1862)

The Analytical Chemist's Assistant, translated from the German of Friedrich Wöhler's Beispiele zur Uebung in der analytischen Chemie, with an introduction (1852)

Der Itacolumit, seine Begleiter und die Metallführing desselben (1860)

He was the author of various articles on mining in New York Mining Magazine.

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https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/93374207/oscar-montgomery-lieber

Born in Boston, Oscar Lieber was the oldest of Francis Lieber's three sons. The family moved to Columbia, South Carolina in 1835 when Dr. Lieber began his 21-year academic stint at South Carolina College, the present-day University of South Carolina. At age nine, Oscar joined relatives in Hamburg, Germany, where he attended private schools for six years. On returning to South Carolina, he assisted the state geologist Michael Tuomey with a geological and agricultural survey of the state. In 1847 he departed again for Germany where he remained for three years, studying theoretical mathematics and chemistry at the universities in Berlin and Göttingen and practical metallurgy and mining at the School of Mines in Freiberg, Saxony. While a student in Germany, he supported the abortive democratic revolutions there, participating for some days in street actions in Berlin and Dresden.

During the 1850s, Oscar Lieber worked as a geologist. He assisted the state geologist of Mississippi, and engaged in a geological survey of Alabama. In 1855, the South Carolina legislature authorized a new four-year geological survey of the state and elected Lieber "Geological, Mineralogical and Agricultural Surveyor." In that office, he published four annual reports devoted chiefly to characterizing potential mining areas in the state. In 1860 Lieber served as geologist for the two-month U.S. Coast Guard Geodetic Survey expedition to Labrador to observe a solar eclipse.

After South Carolina seceded from the United States in December 1860, Oscar quickly enlisted in the Confederate army, cementing a widening rift with his family. His father was committed to the Union cause and had abolitionist sympathies, and both of his younger brothers, Hamilton and Norman, served in the Union army. Oscar was critically wounded in the Battle of Williamsburg in May 1862 and died about seven weeks later in Richmond. Several months earlier, his brother Hamilton had lost an arm fighting on the Union side in the Battle of Fort Donelson, the Union's first great strategic victory. Hamilton retired in the rank of captain after the war. Oscar's best known publications are The Assayer's Guide (1852) and The Analytical Chemist's Assistant (1852). The former work, which was continually reprinted for four decades after the author's death, is a manual for assayers, miners, and smelters in the testing and assaying of ores, coins, and alloys. The Analytical Chemist's Assistant is a similar guide for analyzing natural and inorganic compounds. Ostensibly a translation of Friedrich Wöhler's well-known volume of 1849, Beispiele zur Uebung in der analytischen Chemie, Lieber's guide is a considerable expansion of the German original.

Geologist. Born in Boston to German emigre parents and educated in Europe, Lieber had an affinity for the American South, where his father had taught at South Carolina College (now the University of South Carolina)and he had spent a portion of his childhood. Beginning in 1850 he conducted geological surveys in Mississippi and Alabama. In 1855 he was appointed Geological, Mineralogical and Agricultural Surveyor of South Carolina. He joined a multidisciplinary scientific team for a two-month expedition to Labrador in 1860, primarily for the study of a total solar eclipse. There he recorded his observations of geological formations and native people. Amid the tensions leading to the Civil War, he was unable to find a publisher for his manuscript. In 1861 he witnessed the attack on Fort Sumter and joined the Confederate army as a private. His two younger brothers joined the Union army and his father, the scholar and jurist Francis Lieber, became a legal advisor to President Abraham Lincoln. While serving with the Washington Light Infantry Company of Hampton's (South Carolina) Legion, he was mortally wounded at the Battle of Eltham's Landing in Virginia on May 7, 1862. He died several weeks later while under medical care in Richmond.