Lieutenant Colonel Franklin Gaillard is not known to fame by his military record alone, but was known and admired all over the State as the writer of the fiery editorials in the “Carolinian,” a paper published in Columbia during the days just preceding Secession, and noted for its ardent State Rights sentiment.  These eloquent, forcible, and fearless discussions of the questions of the day by young Gaillard was a potent factor in shaping the course of public sentiment and rousing the people to duty and action, from the Mountains to the Sea.  Through the columns of this paper, then the leading one in the State, he paved the way and prepared the people for the great struggle soon to take place, stimulating them to an enthusiasm almost boundless.

He was in after years as fearless and bold with the sword as he had been with the pen.  He was not the man to turn his back upon his countrymen, whose warlike passions he had aroused, when the time for action came.  He led them to the fray—­a paladin with the pen, a Bayard with the sword.  He was an accomplished gentleman, a brave soldier, a trusted and impartial officer, a peer of any in Kershaw’s Brigade.

Colonel Gaillard was born in 1829, in the village of Pineville, in the present County of Berkeley.  In his early childhood his father, Thomas Gaillard, removed to Alabama.  But not long thereafter Franklin returned to this State, to the home of his uncle, David Gaillard, of Fairfield County.  Here he attended the Mount Zion Academy, in Winnsboro under the distinguished administration of J.W.  Hudson.  In the fall of 1846 he entered the South Carolina College, and graduated with honor in the class of 1849, being valedictorian of the class.  Shortly after graduation, in company with friends and relatives from this State and Alabama, he went to California in search of the “yellow metal,” the find of which, at that time, was electrifying the young men throughout the States.

After two or three years of indifferent success, he returned to this State once more, making his home with his uncle, in Winnsboro.  In 1853 (or thereabout) he became the proprietor of the “Winnsboro Register,” and continued to conduct this journal, as editor and proprietor, until 1857, when he was called to Columbia as editor of the “Carolinian,” then owned by Dr. Robert W. Gibbes, of Richland, and was filling that position at the time of the call to arms, in 1861, when he entered the service in Captain Casson’s Company, as a Lieutenant, and became a member of the renowned Second Regiment.

In March, 1853, he was married to Miss Catherine C. Porcher, of Charleston, but this union was terminated in a few years by the death of the wife.  Colonel Gaillard left two children, one son and one daughter, who still survive, the son a distinguished physician, of Texas, and the daughter the wife of Preston S. Brooks, son of the famous statesman of that name, now of Tennessee.

Colonel Gaillard was a descendant of a French Huguenot emigrant, who, with many others, settled in this State after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in 1685.