Major General Winfield Scott Hancock (1824-86), one of twin brothers born near Lansdale, Pennsylvania, graduated from West Point in 1844. He had served in Mexico, where he had earned brevets for gallantry and was wounded. In the post Mexico years he served in Missouri, Florida, Kansas, the "Mormon War," and finally California, where he was stationed when the Civil War began. He devoted the eleven years between 1850 and 1861 to the preparation for the responsibilities of high command should he ever receive it. He was so thorough that army detail work, which provoked some and baffled others, neither irritated nor bogged him down. He was one of the great soldiers of American history, he never had the opportunity to command his own army, mainly because no commander of the Army of the Potomac from the Peninsula to Appomattox could do without him for an instant.

Hancock got a late start in Civil War service, but he did not suffer from it. Because of his great reputation he received a promotion to brigadier general of volunteers and command of a brigade in September 23, 1861. He commanded brigades of the Fourth and Sixth corps through the Peninsular campaign in 1862, where Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan had referred to him as "Hancock the Superb" in tribute to his leadership at the battle of Williamsburg. He received command of the First Division, Second Corps, at Antietam after Major General Israel B. Richardson's fatal wound, was promoted to major general on November 29, 1862, and led his division at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. He became a corps commander after Chancellorsville when Major General Darius N. Couch resigned command of the Second Corps out of disgust with Hooker. He took command of the Second Corps on May 22, 1863.

Hancock was an officer whose maturity and self-assurance enabled him to feel secure in his assignment and to exercise his rank with zest and skill. He was genial, outgoing, and well versed in army profanity; he had the full confidence of his subordinates and of General Meade as well. Hancock's officers and men turned to him instinctively. "One felt safe to be near him," said a junior. Young Frank Aretas Haskell wrote, "the tallest and most shapely" and "I think that if he were in citizens' clothes, and should give commands in the army to those who did not know him, he would be likely to be obeyed at once."

Rarely in warfare has the arrival of a single officer on a battlefield been more timely and important than Hancock's at Gettysburg. One of his subordinates gave the picture of what was going on near the end of the first day's battle at Gettysburg before he arrived on the field, "wreck, disaster, disorder, almost the panic that precedes disorganization, defeat and retreat were everywhere." After he appeared on Cemetery Hill, "soldiers retreating stopped, skulkers appeared from under their cover, lines were re-formed" in place of a rabble seeking Cemetery Hill as a sanctuary, an army with a purpose under a leader who could lift it to extraordinary efforts, confronted the Confederates.

There was something dominating and inspiring about Hancock. The men of his corps were essentially the same as those of any other, but at the end of the war they could say that the Second had captured more enemy guns and more enemy colors than all the rest of the army combined. After Grant had taken command and had gone through the Wilderness, Hancock could tell him proudly that the corps had never lost a color or a gun, though more often and more desperately engaged than any other. Grant was to use the corps cruelly at Cold Harbor, but it nevertheless finished the war, and with a record of a larger number of engagements and more killed and wounded than any other corps in the Northern armies.

In 1866, after the war, Hancock became a major general, commanding the Department of Missouri and participating in campaigns against the Native Americans there. He was then transferred to the South to supervise the rehabiliation of Louisiana and Texas. The moderation of his measures was opposed in Washington, D.C., and in 1867 he was relieved at his own request and assigned to command the Military Division of the Atlantic. Hancock was active in the Democratic Party; in 1880 he ran for the presidency on the Democratic ticket, but was narrowly defeated by the Republican candidate, James Garfield.