Born in Paris, Raleigh Edward Colston was the son of the Duchess of Valmy, divorced wife of Napoleon’s Marshal Georg Kellermann. While adopted by (and named after) her husband, Virginia doctor Raleigh Edward Colston, it is not known who Colston’s real father was. Attending the Virginia Military Institute, Colston remained after graduation, teaching French and military science. In fact, Colston and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, another professor at VMI, were both commissioned as colonels in the Virginia troops on the same day. Colston was in charge of the Confederate district across from Newport News during the historic 1862 battle between the Monitor and the Virginia. (He witnessed the confrontation, and later wrote about it in an article for the Century Magazine entitled “Watching the Merrimac.”) In December, he was promoted to the rank of brigadier general, and during the war, served on the Peninsula, at Chancellorsville, and at Petersburg. At the end of the war, Colston was in command of Lynchburg, Virginia. At war’s end, he returned to academia, running two different military preparatory schools. Brought to Egypt as a professor of geology, Colston, like Chaillé-Long, was far more valuable as an explorer. He surveyed and mapped the deserts of the Kordofan region along the Sudanese Nile, dug wells, and collected specimens. Like a number of the Americans serving in Egypt, Colston became ill, struck by paralysis while in the desert outside El Obeid. He spent the better part of a year as an invalid. While he eventually recovered, he became permanently semiparalyzed in 1886. On his return home, Colston wrote several articles on Egyptian and North African affairs. (Two are available online: The Land of the False Prophet, The Century Magazine, March, 1885, and The Rescue of Chinese Gordon, The Century Magazine, September, 1884.) After losing all the money he earned in Egypt, Colston was forced to work as a clerk and translator in the Surgeon General’s office. He died in the Confederate Soldier’s Home in Richmond in 1896, and is buried at Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, near George Pickett. VMI maintains a chronology of Colston’s life at their VMI Civil War Generals site. Colston was recently portrayed by actor J. Scott Watkins in the 2003 Civil War epic Gods and Generals.