Early Life and Education
Beauregard was born at the "Contreras" sugar-cane plantation in St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana, about 20 miles (32 km) outside New Orleans, to a Creole family. Beauregard was the third child of Jacques Toutant-Beauregard, of French and Welsh lineage, and Hélène Judith de Reggio Toutant-Beauregard, a descendant of an Italian noble family that had migrated to France. He had three brothers and three sisters. Beauregard attended New Orleans private schools and then went to a "French school" in New York City. It was during his four years in New York, beginning at age 12, that he first learned to speak English, as French was his first language.
He trained at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York. One of his instructors was Robert Anderson, who would later become the commander of Fort Sumter and surrender to Beauregard at the start of the Civil War. Upon enrolling at West Point, Beauregard dropped the hyphen from his surname and treated Toutant as a middle name, to fit in with his classmates. From that point on, he rarely used his first name, preferring "G. T. Beauregard." He graduated second in his class in 1838 and excelled both as an artilleryman and military engineer. His Army friends gave him many nicknames: "Little Creole", "Bory", "Little Frenchman", "Felix", and "Little Napoleon".
Read more about this topic: P. G. T. Beauregard
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early, life and/or education:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“The science, the art, the jurisprudence, the chief political and social theories, of the modern world have grown out of Greece and Rome—not by favor of, but in the teeth of, the fundamental teachings of early Christianity, to which science, art, and any serious occupation with the things of this world were alike despicable.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“... the whole tenour of female education ... tends to render the best disposed romantic and inconstant; and the remainder vain and mean.”
—Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797)