Alexander Augusta moved to Canada to earn his medical degree before returning to serve as the Union Army's highest-ranking Black Officer during the Civil War. Born to free African American parents, Augusta worked as a barber in Baltimore while persuing a medical education. Denied entry into the University of Pennsylvania, he studied privately with a faculty member until he married and moved to Toronto, Canada to obtain a degree from the University of Toronto in 1856. He then became head of the Toronto City Hospital.   A supporter of the American antislavery movement, he returned to Baltimore at the beginning of the Civil War in 1861 and wrote to President Abraham Lincoln, offering his services as a surgeon. He received a major's commission as head surgeon in the 7th U.S. Colored Infantry, the Army's first African American physician out of eight in the Union Army-and its highest ranking African American officer. After the war, he practiced medicine and became the first Black medical professor and one of the original faculty members of the new medical collage at Howard University, where he stayed until 1877. When he died in 1890, he was the first Black officer to be buried in the Arlington National Cemetery.