John A. Dahlgren - Personal Life

Personal Life

Admiral Dahlgren had three sons from his first marriage to Mary Bunker (1839). Admiral Dahlgren's eldest son, Charles Bunker Dahlgren, was an engineer and captain in the Union Navy. After his father's death, he would write and present many technical papers on military weaponry, including the Dahlgren gun. Ulric Dahlgren (1842-1864) was a soldier in the Union Army and was killed in an unsuccessful mission to liberate Federal prisoners in Libby Prison and Belle Isle. Another son, Paul Dahlgren, also in the army, died in 1874.

In 1865, Dahlgren married his second wife, Sarah Madeleine Vinton, daughter of Congressman Samuel Finley Vinton and Romaine Madeleine Bureau, and the widow of Daniel Convers Goddard, first Assistant Secretary of the newly-created U.S. Department of the Interior. Madeleine was a well-known author in her own right. Their children were John Vinton Dahlgren, who married Elizabeth Wharton Drexel; Eric Bernard Dahlgren, Sr., who married Lucy Wharton Drexel; and Ulrica Dahlgren, who married Josiah Pierce, and was the grandmother of Romaine Dahlgren Pierce, wife of David Mountbatten, 3rd Marquess of Milford Haven.

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