Fayette Hewitt

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Fayette Hewitt (1831–1909) was an American educator, postmaster, Confederate captain, and later a Kentucky state official and banker. He was born October 15, 1831, in Hodgenville, Kentucky, the eldest son of Eliza Ann Chastain and Robert Hewitt. His father, a teacher, moved the family to Elizabethtown, where he became principal of the Hardin Academy. After his father’s death, Hewitt ran the academy for eight years and helped expand it into the Elizabethtown Female Seminary.

Hewitt moved to Louisiana for his health and, in 1859, was appointed by the Postmaster General to a desk job in Washington. He left that position in Montgomery, Alabama to join the Confederate Army in December 1861 as an assistant adjutant-general with the rank of captain. He worked for General Albert Pike, then for Major Generals Hindman, Holmes, and Walker in the Trans-Mississippi Department. In March 1863 he joined the staff of Generals John C. Breckinridge and then Benjamin Helm of the First Kentucky Brigade (the Orphan Brigade), where he served until the end of the war.

After the war, Hewitt returned to Kentucky and became principal of the Elizabethtown Female Seminary. He could not practice law until a repatriation law was repealed. In October 1867, Governor John W. Stevenson named him quartermaster-general of the Kentucky militia. In this role, he helped recover millions of dollars spent by Kentucky to arm Union soldiers.

Hewitt was elected Kentucky State Auditor in 1879 and served for ten years, winning re-election twice. In 1888 he was censured by the General Assembly for neglect of duty, but he was not implicated in the state treasury theft by James “Honest Dick” Tate. In 1887 he donated the papers of the First Kentucky Brigade to the U.S. War Department; the collection—thousands of orders and reports—now rests in the National Archives and was used by historian Ed Porter Thompson.

After his auditor-term, Hewitt became president of the State National Bank of Frankfort and led the Frankfort Safety Vault & Trust Company and the Kentucky Investment & Building Association. In 1904 he joined the Frankfort Equal Rights Association.

Fayette Hewitt died January 26, 1909, in Frankfort, Kentucky, and was buried in Elizabethtown City Cemetery. The Sons of Confederate Veterans in Frankfort named a camp in his honor, and a Confederate marker was placed on his grave in Elizabethtown in 1994.