Edmund Kirby Smith was a career United States Army officer and educator who served as a general in the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War and was notable for his command of the Trans-Mississippi Department of the Confederacy after the fall of Vicksburg. After the war, he was active in the telegraph business and education. From 1866 to 1868, he was president of the Atlantic and Pacific Telegraph Company. When that effort ended in failure, he started a preparatory school in Newcastle, Kentucky. In 1870, he combined efforts with former Confederate general officer Bushrod Johnson and became president of the University of Nashville. In 1875, he left that post to become professor of mathematics at the University of the South at Sewanee from 1875 to 1893. At the time of his death in Sewanee, he was the last surviving man who had been a full general in the war, and he is buried in the University Cemetery at Sewanee.