RATING:
A Mathew Brady portrait of Philip Sheridan. NATIONAL ARCHIVES AND RECORDS ADMINISTRATION
In an era and a war in which it was common for men, Union and Confederate, to be commissioned as general officers based on their political connections, Philip Henry Sheridan rose to top command strictly on his merits as a warrior and leader of warriors. Trained as an infantry officer, he ended up reinventing the Union cavalry, raising it to a level that challenged the vaunted Confederate cavalry while also radically revising its mission from reconnaissance, screening, and guarding trains and rear areas to more strategic attack roles, especially as shock troops directed against the enemy army and civilian population. In this redesign of the cavalry mission, he had mixed success, especially in Grant’s Overland Campaign, in which his neglect of the traditional cavalry functions almost certainly deprived Grant and Army of the Potomac commander George G. Meade of vital battlefield intelligence when it was most needed. On the other hand, his use of mixed cavalry and infantry in the Shenandoah Campaign introduced scorched-earth “total warfare” tactics that presaged William T. Sherman’s more famous “March to the Sea” and proved both cruel and effective. He would reprise these, most controversially, in his postwar assignment as chief architect of the Indian Wars in the West.
Despite the mixed results of his approach to cavalry and the moral ambiguity (in the Indian Wars verging on genocide) of his policy of waging war on civilians, it cannot be denied that Sheridan was a superb leader of troops, a fine tactician, and an aggressive fighter, who was especially effective in forcing Lee to surrender his Army of Northern Virginia in the closing weeks of the Civil War.
Principal Battles
PRE–CIVIL WAR
Rogue River War, 1855–1856
Yakima War, 1855–1858
Civil War
POST–CIVIL WAR
Occupation of Texas, 1865–1866
Military governor, Fifth Military district, 1867
INDIAN WARS
He was hardly the image of the powerful soldier that he in fact was. Five-foot-five with an outsized bullet head that made him appear even smaller, he looked up to most men and way up to Abraham Lincoln, who described him as a “brown, chunky little chap, with a long body, short legs, not enough neck to hang him, and such long arms that if his ankles itch he can scratch them without stooping.” But within that unprepossessing frame were the mind, the heart, and the sheer energy that make up the kind of senior combat commander rare in any war and in especially short supply, on both sides, during the Civil War.
The iconic moment, the occasion that showed it all, came on October 19, 1864, when, confident he had whipped the wily Confederate raider Jubal Early, Sheridan, long in the field, was taking a precious opportunity to touch base with Washington. He was resting en route at a house in Winchester, Virginia, when an aide woke him early with news of artillery fire back at Cedar Creek, where he had camped his men. Sheridan dressed, mounted up, and began to ride the twenty miles back to Cedar Creek. It was a comfortable trot until, as he later described, “the appalling spectacle of a panic-stricken army—hundreds of slightly wounded men, throngs of others unhurt but utterly demoralized . . . burst upon our view.” All were “pressing to the rear in hopeless confusion.”
Sheridan broke into a gallop and was soon met by Major General William Emory riding in the opposite direction. A division of his corps, he panted, was all set to cover a mass retreat of the Army of the Shenandoah.
Sheridan locked eyes on Emory.
“Retreat, hell! We’ll be back in camp tonight.”
With that, Sheridan rallied and re-formed his army.
“We’ll raise them out of their boots before the day is over!” he promised his soldiers. And by late afternoon, Jubal Early, scourge of the Valley, was finished as a force in the Civil War.
No one has ever quite pinned down the facts of Philip Henry Sheridan’s humble pedigree. It is generally accepted that he was born on March 6, 1831—a date he himself mentioned several times—but other dates have also been suggested. In his own memoirs, he claimed to have been born in Albany, New York, but other birthplaces have been suggested as well. It is known that he was the third child of six born to John and Mary Meenagh Sheridan, second cousins who had wed in their home parish of Killinkere, County Cavan, Ireland, then, like so many others, immigrated to the American promised land. And, like so many others, found that the promise made far exceeded the promise kept. Having struggled as tenant farmers in Ireland, they arrived in Albany only to discover that jobs were scarce. Hearing, however, that work gangs were needed for the National Road that was being cut from the Chesapeake Bay to the Mississippi River, they moved west to Somerset, Ohio. Here Philip Sheridan grew up, raised mostly by his mother while his father was away at work on the road and, later, on canal and railroad projects.
The boy started school when he was ten and left when he was fourteen, typical for the time and place. He worked hard as a helper and clerk in Somerset’s general stores and, in his teen years, found a steady job as head clerk and bookkeeper in a dry goods establishment. As an Irish Catholic, Sheridan might have expected to run into trouble, but Somerset had a fairly large Catholic community into which the family fit. The scrapes he did get into as a youngster mostly had to do with his short yet gawky frame. According to his own recollections, the necessity of dealing with bully boys moved him to develop fighting skills. He decided to tolerate abuse from no one, to make no threats, but to respond to any attack swiftly and fiercely, preferably when his adversary least expected it. In this way, he built a local reputation that gained him a good deal of respect, even if some of it was grudging.
Like small-town lads everywhere, young Sheridan became restless and longed to see more of the wider world. He relished tales his father and other workers brought with them from the West, and he became especially excited by what he heard and read of the U.S.-Mexican War (1846–1848), which seemed to him a great adventure. He learned of West Point and imagined it as his portal to a bigger life. But poor, first-generation Irish Catholic immigrants lacked the political pull needed to cajole a senator or a congressman into a nomination. Sheridan’s prospects looked dim until he heard that the nominee from his district had been disqualified for failing the math portion of the entrance exam and displaying an all-around “poor attitude.” Pouncing on the opportunity, long shot though it was, Sheridan wrote to Congressman Thomas Ritchey, asking for the still-vacant slot. To his surprise, the reply came quickly. Sheridan was nominated, passed the entrance exam, and was duly enrolled in the Class of 1852. Although Sheridan’s sketchy educational preparation was typical of nineteenth-century small-town America, it was significantly below the level of most West Point cadets. At first, Sheridan struggled academically and was grateful for the tutoring and coaching offered by his roommate, a sophisticated cadet from New York named Henry Slocum. Yet Slocum’s friendship proved to be the exception for Sheridan. He was by nature pugnacious and argumentative, he was physically odd, and he was Irish Catholic. None of these characteristics made him popular among his classmates. On September 9, 1851, in his third year, he responded to an insult—probably less real than perceived—from Cadet William R. Terrill by proposing to run him through with a bayonet. As the two squared off, a cadet officer intervened, thereby preventing what might otherwise have been a beating (Terrill was by far the bigger of the two) or murder (Sheridan had the bayonet). What he did not prevent was a sentence of suspension from classes, which compelled Sheridan to repeat his third year and meant that he would graduate in 1853 rather than with the rest of his class in 1852. Although the combination of Slocum’s tutelage and his own hard work had earned him respectable grades, his collection of demerits—mostly related to exercises of ill temper—put him thirty-fourth in a class of fifty-two.
Brevet Second Lieutenant Sheridan was assigned to the 1st U.S. Infantry regiment at Fort Duncan, Texas. It was, for the most part, an uneventful assignment, and he occupied his time in learning the countryside. He devoured maps, and where adequate maps didn’t exist, he drew his own. He understood intuitively that prevailing in battle required intimate, firsthand knowledge of the topography. The idea was to enlist the land as an ally, and this is what he practiced.
Promoted to regular army second lieutenant in November 1854, he was transferred to the 4th U.S. Infantry at Fort Reading, California. The gold rush of 1848–1849 having rapidly populated the country, the army was faced with the mission of policing it, which mostly meant dealing with clashes between white settlers and local Indians. Sheridan’s interest in maps led to his being attached to a topographical survey mission in the Willamette Valley in 1855, but this soon segued into a combat mission when the survey team got into scrapes with Indian warriors during the Rogue River War (1855–1856) and Yakima War (1855–1858). The second lieutenant became adept at small-unit tactics, but he also learned—on the job—the delicate, dangerous, and often cynical art of negotiating with tribes. On March 28, 1857, at Middle Cascade, Oregon Territory, Sheridan suffered his first combat wound when an Indian rifle bullet grazed his nose. Like many soldiers stationed in remote outposts of the tiny U.S. Army of the time, Sheridan took an Indian lover, living for a time with Sidnayoh—whites called her Frances—the daughter of a Klickitat chief.
Fresh out of West Point, Brevet Second Lieutenant Philip Sheridan, 1st Infantry Regiment, was photographed about 1853 or 1854. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
The enormous manpower demands of the Civil War would lead, on both sides, to the creation of many “political generals,” men elevated to high military office on the strength of who, not what, they knew. While some of these men would rise to their responsibilities, becoming competent, even excellent officers, most remained mediocrities at best. Sheridan, born poor and thoroughly unconnected, was the diametric opposite of the political general. He would rise on his military merit, which began to be recognized very early. Promoted to first lieutenant in March 1861, on the eve of the Civil War, he was jumped to captain in May, just after the fall of Fort Sumter.
Sheridan was no abolitionist—the issue of slavery moved him neither one way nor the other—but he was passionate about the preservation of the Union, and he was eager to get into the fight. In September 1861, he was ordered to the 13th U.S. Infantry at Jefferson Barracks, Missouri. This meant an arduous journey from Fort Yamhill, Oregon, overland to San Francisco, where he boarded a ship bound for the Isthmus of Panama. Crossing this disease-ridden jungle overland, he took another ship bound for New York City. After a brief home leave in Somerset, Ohio, he boarded a train for St. Louis. Before reporting to Jefferson Barracks and his ordered assignment, he paid what he apparently intended as nothing more than a courtesy call on Major General Henry W. Halleck, who had just relieved John C. Frémont as commanding officer of the Department of the Missouri. Halleck effectively hijacked his visitor, assigning the mathematically adept former clerk and bookkeeper to audit the byzantine financial records that Frémont, who had badly mismanaged the department, had left behind.
The task, which proved herculean, Sheridan tackled single-handedly. Amazed and delighted by the results, Halleck marked Sheridan out as prime staff officer material. It was hardly a job he sought, but he threw himself into it nonetheless, and in December, he was appointed chief commissary officer of the Army of Southwest Missouri. Apparently seeking to make the most of the desk job he didn’t want, Sheridan also talked Halleck into making him quartermaster general as well.
In January 1862, while serving in his staff posts, Sheridan was assigned to duty under Major General Samuel Curtis. Although he saw action at the Battle of Pea Ridge (March 6–8, 1862), his true maiden battle was fought on another field and against a Union commander, not a Confederate one. In his roles as departmental commissary officer and quartermaster, he discovered that war profiteering was rampant among many officers, and Curtis was doing nothing to stop it. The scam was both brazen and simple. Officers stole horses from civilians, turned them over to Curtis’s army, then demanded payment from quartermaster Sheridan. Clearly, he was expected to play along. When he refused, Curtis demanded that he pay. To this general, the captain responded, “No authority can compel me to jayhawk or steal.”
Taken aback, Curtis ordered Sheridan’s arrest for insubordination and prepared a court-martial. Halleck intervened before charges were actually brought, and he saw to Sheridan’s expeditious transfer from Curtis’s command back to his own headquarters. While once again a staff officer for Halleck, Sheridan served during the “Siege” of Corinth (April 29–May 30, 1862) after Halleck, having effectively relieved Brigadier General U. S. Grant, took personal command of Grant’s troops and moved with such dilatory deliberation as to allow P. G. T. Beauregard to slip out of Corinth with his army intact.
Thus Sheridan experienced firsthand the corruption and incompetence that pervaded much of the Union army, reaching to the highest levels of command. Although he found some satisfaction as an assistant to the Department of the Missouri’s topographical engineer, he longed to get into meaningful combat. Fortunately for him, while serving on Halleck’s staff, he met Brigadier General William T. Sherman, who tried to obtain for him a colonelcy of an Ohio infantry regiment. As it turned out, Sherman could not deliver on this, but the momentum of his attempt led to other influential individuals petitioning Governor Austin Blair of Michigan to appoint Sheridan colonel of the 2nd Michigan Cavalry on May 27, 1862.
That Sheridan was not trained as a cavalryman did not discourage him from jumping at the appointment. On June 11, the commander of the brigade of which the 2nd Michigan Cavalry was a part received a promotion, catapulting Sheridan into command of the entire brigade. He moved immediately to create a leadership bond with his men. As a former quartermaster, he knew how to get the best available food and clothing for his troops. He did so now. He also closely supervised the layout of encampments to ensure proper sanitation. He avoided assigning busy-work details to his command—“needless sacrifices and unnecessary toil”—so that “when hard or daring work was to be done, I expected the heartiest response and always got it.”
On July 1, at the Battle of Booneville, Mississippi, Sheridan led his brigade against a number of regiments of Confederate cavalry under Brigadier General James R. Chalmers. Acting to protect the main force, he blunted Chalmers’s attempt at a flanking attack with a diversionary maneuver, hitting the enemy’s rear, then dashing off and following up with a quick and daring frontal attack. Stunned, Chalmers’s men broke and ran. As for Sheridan, he returned to division with detailed reconnaissance of the Confederate positions.
Coming, it seemed, out of nowhere, Sheridan created a sensation among the Union division commanders, including Brigadier General William S. Rosecrans, who would soon relieve Don Carlos Buell to become commander of a force designated as the Army of the Cumberland. In a virtually unprecedented action, the division commanders wrote an appeal to Halleck, “respectfully” begging him to “obtain the promotion of Sheridan. He is worth his weight in gold.” Halleck not only obliged them, but he saw to it that the promotion, approved in September, was made retroactive to July 1 specifically in recognition of Sheridan’s achievement at Booneville.
Now a brigadier general, Sheridan was given command of the Eleventh Division, III Corps, in what was at the time Major General Don Carlos Buell’s Army of the Ohio, and, on October 8, led the division in the Battle of Perryville.
Ordered by III Corps commander Major General Charles Gilbert to transport much-needed water from nearby Doctor’s Creek, Sheridan dispatched a brigade under Colonel Daniel McCook to do the job. After McCook skirmished with Confederates and secured the water, Gilbert ordered McCook to hold his position while his cavalry attacked. Hearing the fire of battle, Sheridan rode to the sound of the guns with another brigade. The cavalry Gilbert had sent failed to secure the heights in front of McCook, but the brigade Sheridan led drove the Confederates from the field, discouraging Major General Leonidas Polk, the Confederate commander, from mounting an offensive.
Despite Sheridan’s demonstrated willingness to seize and hold the initiative, General Buell did not commit his division to the main fighting at Perryville. A frustrated Sheridan later wrote that time and energy had been wasted in unnecessary maneuvering instead of directed toward a “skillful and energetic advance” that could have “destroyed the enemy before he quit the state.” President Lincoln seems to have agreed, since he ordered the relief of Buell by Rosecrans, who became commander of the Department of the Cumberland and its field force, now designated as the Army of the Cumberland.
Now serving under Rosecrans, one of the generals who had petitioned for his promotion, Sheridan fully revealed his intuitive grasp of a given tactical situation and his equally instinctive impulse to act with proactive aggression. At Stones River, near Murfreesboro, Tennessee, he accurately anticipated a Confederate attack and, on December 31, deployed his division to prepare for it. He was thus able to delay the enemy’s advance all along his front until dwindling ammunition forced him to withdraw. Despite having to pull back, Sheridan had bought Rosecrans the time he needed to re-form at a stronger defensive position. Because he knew where to be and when, and because he was willing to hold a position against a superior enemy force, Sheridan was promoted to major general on April 10, 1863, retroactive to the day of the battle, December 31, 1862.
Sheridan’s rise had been meteoric—first from poor immigrant’s son to West Point graduate, and then, in the space of half a year, from captain to major general. Now he found himself thrust into a critical role in the Battle of Chickamauga. Operating in supremely difficult terrain, which caused great operational confusion, Rosecrans, erroneously believing that there was a gap in his line, moved to plug it. In so doing, however, he created the very gap he had sought to close up. Perceiving this, Confederate commander Braxton Bragg launched an attack at the weak point on September 20, 1863. It so happened that, as part of Rosecrans’s misguided maneuvering, Sheridan’s division was positioned behind the Union battle line precisely where Bragg was concentrating his attack. Sheridan immediately took up a position on Lytle Hill and made a stand against an entire Confederate corps led by Lieutenant General James Longstreet.
As it turned out, Sheridan’s most immediate problem was not the vastly superior numbers of the enemy, but the onrushing tide of panic-stricken Union soldiers in retreat. As those troops smashed into his, the confusion exceeded even Sheridan’s ability to restore order, and Longstreet drove his division from the field.
Unwilling to join Rosecrans and other principal commanders in headlong retreat, Sheridan fell back toward Chattanooga in good order, gathering up as many men as he could along the way and doing his best to inspirit and inspire them. Before he had gone very far, word reached him that Major General George H. Thomas had not joined the rout, but, on the contrary, was leading his XIV Corps in the stand on Snodgrass Hill that would, by battle’s end, earn him the title of the “Rock of Chickamauga.” Sheridan decided right then and there to cast his lot with Thomas, and he ordered his division back to the fighting. Although they did not arrive in time to participate in Thomas’s counterattack, the fact that he had rallied his troops and was returning them to the field was sufficient to ensure that he was not, like Rosecrans, tainted and relieved of command.
The Army of the Cumberland withdrew to Chattanooga and fell under siege by Bragg. At this time, Rosecrans was relieved and replaced by George Thomas, and as Grant closed in on Bragg’s besieging army from the outside, Sheridan’s division was part of an Army of the Cumberland force detailed to attack it from the inside, its assigned mission to capture Confederate rifle pits on Missionary Ridge.
Preparing to launch the charge on November 25, Sheridan called out to his men: “Remember Chickamauga!” In return, they shouted his name as they began their assault. It was a dangerous uphill climb, with the enemy, well dug in, firing from above. Sheridan was heard to exclaim “Here’s at you!” when he saw a clutch of Confederates silhouetted against the crest of the ridge. As if in response, a shell burst nearby, showering him with clods of earth. “That’s damn ungenerous!” the gallant commander retorted. “I shall take those guns for that!”
Sheridan’s men broke through the Confederate lines, and captured the rifle pits as they had been assigned to do. But spurred on by the momentum of vengeance for Chickamauga, they refused to stop until they had driven Bragg’s entire army off Missionary Ridge.
“To Sheridan’s prompt movement,” Grant wrote in his official report of the engagement, “the Army of the Cumberland and the nation are indebted for the bulk of the capture of prisoners, artillery, and small arms that day. Except for his prompt pursuit, so much in this way would not have been accomplished.”
Shortly after he was elevated to general-in-chief of all the Union armies on March 12, 1864, Ulysses S. Grant summoned Sheridan to Washington to tell him that he was now chief of cavalry and was in command of a separate “Cavalry Corps” of the Army of the Potomac. (Although Grant, in his Personal Memoirs of 1885, wrote that Sheridan was the very man he wanted, he had actually first chosen Major General William B. Franklin, but allowed Chief of Staff Henry W. Halleck to persuade him to give the job to Sheridan instead.)
Sheridan and his generals, 1864. Left to right: Wesley Merritt, David McMurtrie Gregg, Sheridan, Henry E. Davies (standing), James H. Wilson, and Alfred Torbert. NATIONAL ARCHIVES AND RECORDS ADMINISTRATION
Until this point in the war, the Union army had made less use and far less effective use of cavalry than the Confederate army did. Grant wanted to change that, and Sheridan was ready to do so, but while Grant was general-in-chief and traveled with the Army of the Potomac, that army’s designated commander was George Gordon Meade. A conventional officer, Meade was not interested in expanding the role of cavalry beyond its traditional functions of screening, providing reconnaissance, and guarding trains and rear areas—the types of missions cavalrymen had been performing so far in the Union army. Understandably, Sheridan chafed under Meade’s command.
In the Battle of the Wilderness (May 5–7, 1864), it was not Meade but the densely forested terrain that precluded a significant role for cavalry, and what assignments Sheridan’s troopers did have, they discharged poorly. Tasked with clearing the road from the Wilderness toward Spotsylvania Court House, they failed, which meant that the Confederates came to control the important crossroads at Todd’s Tavern.
Justifiably angered, Meade summoned Sheridan to a tongue lashing, accusing him of neglecting his assigned duties of screening and reconnaissance. Sheridan responded as no junior should ever respond to a senior: “I could whip Jeb Stuart if you would only let me. But since you insist on giving cavalry directions without even consulting or notifying me, you can command the cavalry corps yourself. I will not give another order.” Muttering something about resigning, he turned his back on Meade and stormed out of his command post.
Meade went to Grant, looking to him for support in bringing charges of insubordination. When Grant asked Meade to repeat what Sheridan had said—“I could whip Jeb Stuart if you would only let me”—he questioned him: “Did he really say that?” Receiving a response in the affirmative, Grant calmly observed, “Well he usually knows what he’s talking about. Let him go ahead and do it.”
At Grant’s request, Meade sent Sheridan and his cavalry on a raid toward Richmond from May 9 to 24, 1864. Grant put him in the position of directly challenging the Confederate cavalry, and although the raid, as a whole, was much less productive than had been hoped for, the Union cavalry more than held its own against the storied Confederate horsemen. Most important, at the Battle of Yellow Tavern on May 11, six miles north of Richmond, Sheridan not only defeated Jeb Stuart, but a dismounted Michigan cavalry trooper managed to shoot and kill him.
The death of Stuart was a tremendous blow to Robert E. Lee, yet the strategic wisdom of Sheridan’s raid remains highly doubtful. Because Sheridan neglected the traditional cavalry role of reconnaissance, Grant and Meade were left without critical intelligence for the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House, which put the Army of the Potomac at a severe disadvantage. Sheridan had proved his point about the fighting capacity of the Union cavalry, but, inadvertently, he had also bolstered Meade’s traditional approach to the use of cavalry. Indeed, while Sheridan loudly trumpeted the performance of his Cavalry Corps during the Overland Campaign in his official reports, putting the heaviest emphasis on Yellow Tavern and the death of Stuart, the strategic value he claimed was slight. He came out ahead at the Battle of Haw’s Shop (May 28) but suffered heavy casualties while also exposing Union troop dispositions to Confederate cavalry reconnaissance. Although the Cavalry Corps did seize a critical crossroads at the start of the Battle of Cold Harbor (May 31–June 12) and held its own against repeated assaults there, this action had no influence on the costly outcome of the battle. And in action against the Virginia Central Railroad, Sheridan was intercepted and defeated at the Battle of Trevilian Station (June 11–12, 1864), his raid coming to naught.
Certainly, Sheridan’s performance in the Overland Campaign did not change Meade’s opinion of the proper role of cavalry, and as Grant settled in for what would be the long siege of Petersburg in the summer of 1864, he looked for a new mission to hand Sheridan. It had to be something that would both vindicate Sheridan’s concept of the strategic cavalry raid and separate Sheridan from Meade’s interference.
Since the early days of the war, Confederate armies had been using the Shenandoah Valley as a backyard entrance into Maryland and Pennsylvania and, most of all, as a means of threatening Washington, D.C. So far, Union commanders had been unable to disrupt this pattern, and now, Lieutenant General Jubal A. Early, looking to draw off pressure from Lee at Petersburg, was using the Valley to attack frighteningly close to Washington and to raid towns in Pennsylvania. Pressured by Lincoln and others to protect the capital, Grant grudgingly created the Middle Military Division, which was given control of a field force dubbed the Army of the Shenandoah. Over objections from Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, Grant assigned command of both the Middle Military Division and its army to Sheridan.
Thus Grant had liberated Sheridan wholly from Meade and had given the thirty-three-year-old general command of both a department and an army. Taking charge of his new force at Harpers Ferry on August 7, 1864, Sheridan was tasked with three objectives: defeating Early once and for all, permanently closing off the Shenandoah as an invasion route, and executing upon the lush Shenandoah Valley, celebrated as the “breadbasket of the Confederacy,” a scorched-earth policy intended to bring the South to the brink of starvation. “Give the enemy no rest,” Grant instructed Sheridan. “Do all the damage to railroads and crops you can. . . . If the war is to last another year, we want the Shenandoah Valley to remain a barren waste.”
Despite the ruthless tone of his orders to Sheridan, Grant advised proceeding with caution, warning him to avoid launching an offensive “with the advantage against you,” yet complaining when Sheridan failed to move quickly and aggressively. At last, with Lincoln’s reelection quite possibly hanging in the balance, Grant conferred with Sheridan on September 16 at Charles Town, and the two agreed that he would launch his major attacks within four days.
Sheridan met and defeated Early in the Third Battle of Winchester (Virginia) on September 19. He kept the pressure on, exploiting this victory on September 22 at the Battle of Fisher’s Hill, which Sheridan also won. As the battered Early attempted to regroup his forces, Sheridan turned away from him to begin raking the Shenandoah Valley countryside, appropriating or killing livestock, commandeering whatever provisions the Army of the Shenandoah needed for itself and destroying the rest. Factories, mills, farms, and railroads—all were ruined in a total-war campaign waged as relentlessly as anything Sherman would do to Georgia in his more infamous March to the Sea. Those who lived in the Valley dubbed Sheridan’s operations simply and terribly “The Burning.”
To Sheridan’s stunned surprise, the badly battered Jubal Early did not regard himself as beaten. After receiving reinforcements, he attacked Sheridan’s army on October 19 at Cedar Creek, Virginia, while Sheridan, suspecting nothing, was en route to Washington, D.C., to meet with high command. At Winchester, where he had spent the night on the way to the capital, an aide informed Sheridan of the distant thunder of artillery, and the general immediately rode to the sound of the guns. When he encountered panic-stricken troops and their officers in retreat toward Winchester, he spurred his horse to a gallop and reached the Cedar Creek battlefield by 10:30 a.m.
Instantly, he set about rallying his troops, riding up and down the line, exhorting and inspiring his men. Early’s army was, in fact, suffering from acute hunger and exhaustion. His soldiers were less interested in scoring a glorious victory than in pillaging abandoned Union encampments. The Confederates were disorganized, having become more of a mob than an army. Sheridan, through the force of his powerful command presence and with the aid of Major General Horatio G. Wright commanding VI Corps, succeeded in reminding his men that they were an army. Once he had restored discipline and esprit, the tide at Cedar Creek quickly turned. By about four that afternoon, Early was whipped, his army neutralized as an offensive force for the rest of the war.
The Shenandoah Campaign earned Sheridan the personal thanks of Abraham Lincoln and a promotion to major general in the regular army, elevating him to a position behind only Grant, Sherman, and Meade. “Sheridan’s ride,” which turned the tide at Cedar Creek, inspired a poem of that title by Thomas Buchanan Read, and that martial lyric did much to stimulate Republican turnout in the November general election, which comfortably propelled Lincoln to a second term and ensured that the president’s policy of total victory would be pursued. The Confederacy had lost its last hope for a negotiated peace.
BATTLE OF CEDAR CREEK - OCTOBER 19, 1864
After the Shenandoah Campaign, Sheridan fought more or less desultory skirmishes. Grant gave him a loose set of directions, which included choosing either to link up with William T. Sherman in North Carolina or to return to Winchester. Winchester was in Virginia, and, for Sheridan, this was enough of an excuse to turn away from North Carolina and instead join the Army of the Potomac at Petersburg. In his memoirs, he frankly conceded his motive for the move, which was by no means contemplated in Grant’s orders: “Feeling that the war was nearing its end, I desired my cavalry to be in at the death.”
What had been desultory skirmishing now became intense campaigning. En route to Petersburg, he fought the Battle of Waynesboro (March 2, 1865), enveloping and destroying what little remained of Jubal Early’s army. On April 1, he definitively severed Lee’s line of supply and communications at the Battle of Five Forks, giving him no alternative but to evacuate Petersburg.
On April 6, at the Battle of Sayler’s Creek, he scored a victory against Lee’s limping Army of Northern Virginia that resulted in the surrender of nearly a quarter of the men remaining in that force. After the battle, he sent Lincoln a telegram, which the president quoted in one he sent to Grant on April 7: “Gen. Sheridan says ‘If the thing is pressed I think that Lee will surrender.’ Let the thing be pressed.” At the Battle of Appomattox Court House (April 9), Sheridan blocked the only remaining route through which Lee could escape, and, that afternoon, the Confederate commander surrendered the shell that was the Army of Northern Virginia.
“I believe General Sheridan has no superior as a general, either living or dead, and perhaps not an equal,” Grant would later remark.
The surrender of Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia was followed by that of Joseph E. Johnston and the Army of Tennessee on April 26, 1865. The end of the Civil War was a foregone conclusion, but Edmund Kirby Smith still led a Confederate army in Texas. Appointing Sheridan commander of the Military District of the Southwest on May 17, 1865, Grant ordered him to engage and defeat Smith so as to restore Texas and Louisiana to Union control.
By the time Sheridan had gotten as far as New Orleans, word came that Smith had surrendered. Grant then directed Sheridan to occupy Texas with a large force so as to discourage a possible exploitive incursion by some of the forty-thousand French troops stationed in Mexico to prop up the government of Austrian Archduke Maximilian, a puppet of France’s Napoleon III. Sheridan quickly mustered fifty-thousand men and sent them to occupy key Texas cities and to patrol the Mexican border. Thanks to Sheridan’s quick action in this show of force, coupled with U.S. diplomatic pressure and an increasingly successful Mexican independence movement led by Benito Juárez, Napoleon III withdrew his troops in 1866, and fears that the French would collaborate with Confederate diehards to seize Texas came to an abrupt end.
In March 1867, Sheridan was appointed military governor of the Fifth Military District, which encompassed Texas and Louisiana. He introduced a harsh Radical Republican Reconstruction regime, essentially assuming dictatorial authority and disqualifying former Confederates from voting or serving in most government offices. Although he had not entered the war as an abolitionist or a Radical Republican, his experience had hardened him against the Confederate movement, and he soon fell to disputing with President Andrew Johnson over many aspects of the Military Reconstruction Acts. Johnson removed Sheridan in August 1867, ordering him to change places with Winfield Scott Hancock, Hancock to become the new military governor of the Fifth Military District and Sheridan to take over as commander of the Department of the Missouri headquartered at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
Sheridan’s new command put him front and center in the Indian Wars. His assignment was to “pacify” the Plains, which essentially meant herding recalcitrant Indians into reservations. Those who refused to live where they were assigned were to be regarded as hostile. Sheridan faced two major problems in his new assignment. The first were uncertain, changeable, and contradictory federal policies with regard to the Indians, with control of Indian affairs continually seesawing between the U.S. Army and the Department of the Interior. The second problem was the diminutive size of the army after it had been demobilized following the Civil War. The troops broadcast throughout far-flung Western outposts were less an army than a small police force.
Lacking the manpower to fight Indian warriors whenever and wherever they showed themselves, Sheridan planned a campaign that drew on his Civil War experience in the Shenandoah Valley. He decided to attack during the winter, the season that was hardest on the Indians and one in which they generally preferred to avoid fighting. His principal targets in 1868 and 1869 were the Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Comanche tribes, and his objective was to destroy their stored crops, their food reserves, and their livestock. Sheridan also promoted civilian hunting of bison herds on the Great Plains, even to extinction. The absence of this staple animal, he reasoned, would leave the starving Indians no choice but to accept a government-subsidized existence on reservations.
Besides the Winter Campaign of 1868–1869, Sheridan planned and ordered the Red River War (1874) and the Great Sioux War of 1876–1877 as well as other campaigns. By the 1880s, the Indian Wars were largely a matter of history. Sheridan’s uncompromising “total war” approach in these conflicts led to semi-justified accusations of a policy of genocide, and Sheridan would be stigmatized in popular culture as the man who blithely declared, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” The origin of this phrase was a reported remark by Chief Tosawi (Silver Knife) of the Comanche who was said to have introduced himself to Sheridan in 1869 by saying, “Me Tosawi. Me good Indian.” Sheridan supposedly shot back: “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.” Sheridan repeatedly denied having uttered anything of the kind, and it is most likely that a remark made earlier in 1869 by U.S. Representative James M. Cavanaugh, “I have never seen in my life a good Indian . . . except when I have seen a dead Indian,” was misattributed to Sheridan. Given the general’s unrelenting total war policy, however, the persistent error is understandable.
Promoted to lieutenant general on March 4, 1869, Sheridan was sent by President Ulysses Grant to observe the Franco-Prussian War of the following year. His official report was terse. To be sure, he wrote, the Prussians were “very good brave fellows [but] there is nothing to be learned here professionally.”
As commanding general of the army west of the Mississippi, Sheridan’s headquarters were in Chicago. He was living in the city when the great fire of 1871 broke out on October 7. At the mayor’s request, the devastated city was put under martial law, with Sheridan in command. Although he received high praise from the mayor and the city’s citizens, especially for the humanitarian relief work his troops carried out, he clashed with the governor, who believed that the federal intervention was an unconstitutional usurpation of the state’s authority.
In the years following the Civil War, after he was comfortably established in his Chicago headquarters, Sheridan grew stout, gouty, and took eagerly to all the trappings of high command. FROM PERSONAL MEMOIRS OF P. H. SHERIDAN (1888)
Sheridan succeeded William T. Sherman as Commanding General, U.S. Army on November 1, 1883, but it was not until June 1, 1888, that he was promoted to general in the regular army. The promotion was in large part motivated by the news that Sheridan had suffered a serious heart attack. Members of Congress were eager to honor him and to ensure that his widow—should he succumb—would be amply provided for. A second heart attack, on August 5, 1888, proved fatal. He was only fifty-seven, but when his wife, thirty-three-year-old Irene Rucker Sheridan, was asked whether she planned to remarry, she replied, “I would rather be the widow of Phil Sheridan than the wife of any man living.”