Ulric Dahlgren (April 3, 1842 – March 2, 1864) was a colonel in the Union Army during the American Civil War. He was the son of Union Navy Rear Admiral John A. Dahlgren and nephew to Confederate Brigadier General Charles G. Dahlgren. Ulric Dahlgren was a brilliant, ambitious young man who became the youngest full colonel in the United States Army at the age of twenty-one, yet died before his twenty-second birthday.
He fought in several key battles in the Eastern Theater of the American Civil War and had his leg amputated below the knee after being wounded at the Battle of Gettysburg. He returned to military service and was killed in 1864 during the Battle of Walkerton while leading a raid on the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia.
Confederate
forces found documents on Dahlgren with orders to free Union prisoners from Belle Isle, burn the city
of Richmond and assassinate Confederate President Jefferson
Davis and his cabinet. The documents were published in the Richmond
newspapers and caused outrage in the South with accusations that the orders
came from President Lincoln. Union newspapers claimed the papers were forged
and reports of mistreatment of Dahlgren's corpse inflamed public opinion in the
North. The controversy became known as the Dahlgren
Affair.
As he was only twenty-one-years-old when he died, his signature is very rare.