Joseph Cabell Breckinridge, Sr. (1842–1920) was a Union Army officer from Kentucky during the American Civil War. In later life, he became a brigadier general in the U.S. Regular Army and Inspector General of the Army as well as a major general of volunteers in the Spanish-American War. His cousin, John C. Breckenridge, a Confederate major general and former Vice President of the United States and his two oldest brothers fought for the Confederacy, while he and another younger son of Robert Jefferson Breckinridge, a Presbyterian minister, politician, public office holder and abolitionist, fought for the Union.