Colonel Samuel H. Lockett was a Virginia native who grew up in Alabama. He graduated from Howard College (now Samford University) at age 16 and went on to the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1859, where he graduated second in his class.
During the Civil War, he served as an engineer with the Confederate army, rising to the rank of colonel and chief engineer of the Army of Tennessee. He is best known for designing and constructing the defenses in Vicksburg and for his invention of the odograph, a surveying instrument for measuring distance. He was also an artist and writer. After surrendering with his detachment to General Canby, he went back to Marion, Alabama, to become professor of mathematics and natural sciences at Judson Institute. In January 1867 he was elected professor of mathematics and engineering in the State University of Louisiana.
During a truce for burial of the dead in the Civil War, he had met General Sherman, commander in chief of the US Army. When the Khedive of Egypt wrote to Sherman asking for the nomination of an American officer to be chief engineer to the Egyptian Army, which he was trying to modernize, Sherman recommended Lockett. The challenge and the offer of an annual salary of $2,500 in gold convinced Lockett to go to Egypt to serve in the Egyptian Army in 1875. While there he served under Charles Pomeroy Stone, also a graduate of West Point, who had been the first soldier of the Union’s volunteer army.
In 1877 Lockett returned from Egypt and was appointed professor of mathematics at UT, a post he kept until 1883, when the board first asked for his resignation (they got it) and then urged him to accept reappointment. The following year he worked again with Charles Stone as principal assistant engineer in the construction of the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty (dedicated October 28, 1886). He made all the surface maps and working drawings for the pedestal and also designed the mounting of the statue on the pedestal now in use.
In 1885 he was twice asked to become president of UT and twice declined, because, he explained, his practice as a consulting engineer was prospering and he could not afford the financial sacrifice of accepting the presidency. In 1886 the university awarded him the UT degree of civil engineer pro merito. In 1888 he went to Chile, where he secured for the North and South American Construction Company a twenty-million-dollar railroad contract. He died in Bogota in 1891.
In the Vicksburg National Military Park, the US War Department erected bronze portrait tablets to the three chief engineers of the siege of Vicksburg—Generals Prime and Comstock, United States Army, Grant’s engineers, and Colonel (then Major) Lockett, Confederate States Army, who constructed the line of defense.