George Henry Thomas

• 1. Introduction

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  George Henry Thomas was born on the 31st of July, 1816, into a plantation family in Southampton County, Virginia, five miles from the North Carolina border. When Virginia seceded from the Union in 1861, his family turned his portrait against the wall, destroyed every letter he had written them, and never spoke to him again. After the war, when Thomas sent money to his sisters during hard times in the South, they sent it back. They declared they had no brother.

  Thomas had chosen to remain in the United States Army rather than follow his home state into the Confederacy. That choice cost him his family permanently and shadowed every promotion he earned in the war that followed. Yet the soldiers he commanded called him "Pap Thomas." And when he died in 1870, Generals Grant and Sherman, who had both accused him of being slow, were reported to have wept visibly at his funeral.

  How does a man become the savior of an entire army at Chickamauga, receive the Thanks of Congress for destroying Hood's army at Nashville, appear on United States paper currency, and still fail to enter the popular consciousness the way his contemporaries did? The life of George Henry Thomas is a story about loyalty, reputation, silence, and what happens when a man refuses to fight for his own legacy.

• 2. Virginia Roots, Union Loyalties

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  Nat Turner's rebellion of 1831 shook Southampton County, Virginia, when Thomas was around 13 years old. His father, John Thomas, had died that same year in a farm accident, leaving the family in financial difficulties. Thomas, his sisters, and his widowed mother fled their home and hid in nearby woods while the uprising unfolded around them.

  What Thomas took from that experience became a matter of historical dispute. Benson Bobrick argued that Thomas concluded slavery was so destructive an institution that it had driven men to violence. Christopher Einolf countered that Thomas's personal experience of the rebellion actually reinforced his view that slavery was necessary as a means of social control. Thomas left no written record of his own opinion, and Einolf noted that Thomas owned slaves during much of his life.

  A traditional story holds that Thomas taught as many as fifteen of his family's enslaved people to read, violating Virginia law and acting against his father's wishes. Whether from conscience, curiosity, or both, the man who would later use troops to protect freedmen from Ku Klux Klan violence during Reconstruction seemed to be working out a moral position across the span of his life rather than inheriting one.

  A key figure in Thomas's early formation was Congressman John Y. Mason, who appointed him to West Point in 1836 with a warning: no nominee from his district had ever graduated successfully. Thomas graduated 12th in a class of 42 in 1840, and counted William T. Sherman among his roommates and closest friends from those years.

• 3. The Making of a Soldier

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  Fort Lauderdale, Florida, was a primitive outpost in 1840, and it was Thomas's first assignment after graduation. He served in the Seminole Wars there, leading infantry patrols and earning a brevet promotion to first lieutenant on the 6th of November, 1841.

  The Mexican-American War gave Thomas his first sustained combat experience and a set of commanding officers whose names would later appear across both sides of the Civil War. He served with Captain Braxton Bragg during the fighting, distinguishing himself at Fort Brown, Resaca de la Palma, Monterrey, and Buena Vista. At Buena Vista, Brigadier General John E. Wool wrote that without the artillery Thomas was part of, the Union position could not have been held for a single hour. Thomas's own battery commander wrote that his "coolness and firmness contributed not a little to the success of the day."

  Back at West Point as a cavalry and artillery instructor in 1851, Thomas worked alongside Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee, the academy superintendent, developing what became a close professional and personal relationship. He grew concerned about the poor treatment of the academy's aging horses and moderated the tendency of cadets to overwork them during drills. That caution earned him another nickname: "Slow Trot Thomas."

  On the 26th of August, 1860, Thomas was wounded during a clash with a Comanche warrior at Clear Fork, Brazos River, Texas. An arrow passed through flesh near his chin and lodged in his chest. He pulled it out himself, had a surgeon dress the wound, and continued leading the expedition. It was the only combat wound he received in a military career spanning more than two decades.

• 4. The Moment He Chose

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  When the Civil War began, nineteen of the thirty-six officers in Thomas's regiment, the 2nd U.S. Cavalry, resigned to join the Confederacy. Among them were three of Thomas's direct superiors: Albert Sidney Johnston, Robert E. Lee, and William J. Hardee. Thomas struggled with his decision. His Northern-born wife, Frances Lucretia Kellogg, whom he had married on the 17th of November, 1852, probably helped him decide where his loyalty lay.

  The suspicion that followed him was not entirely without basis in the record. On the 18th of January, 1861, a few months before the firing on Fort Sumter, Thomas had applied for the position of commandant of cadets at the Virginia Military Institute. That application was never answered, or at least never acted upon. What settled the question of his true loyalty was his refusal of Virginia Governor John Letcher's offer to become chief of ordnance for the Virginia Provisional Army.

  His former student and fellow Virginian, Confederate Colonel J.E.B. Stuart, wrote to his wife on the 18th of June, 1861: "Old George H. Thomas is in command of the cavalry of the enemy. I would like to hang, hang him as a traitor to his native state." Thomas had already done something to earn that fury. Before the war, he had traveled to Washington and personally warned General-in-Chief Winfield Scott that Major General David E. Twiggs, commanding in Texas, harbored secessionist sympathies and could not be trusted. Twiggs did surrender his entire command to Confederate authorities shortly after Texas seceded.

  Thomas was rapidly promoted in the early weeks of the war, replacing Robert E. Lee as lieutenant colonel and Albert Sidney Johnston as colonel in quick succession.

• 5. Rock of Chickamauga

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  Mill Springs, Kentucky, in early 1862 gave Thomas the first important Union victory of the war in the western theater, defeating Confederate Brigadier Generals George B. Crittenden and Felix Zollicoffer and lifting Union morale nationally. That victory established a pattern Thomas would repeat across the next two years: a decisive result at a moment when Union forces desperately needed one.

  At the Battle of Stones River, Thomas held the center of a retreating Union line and once again prevented Braxton Bragg from turning a setback into a catastrophe. The ability to hold ground under pressure was becoming his most recognizable attribute.

  The Battle of Chickamauga on the 19th of September, 1863, brought that quality to its highest test. While the Union line on his right collapsed completely, Thomas, now commanding the XIV Corps, rallied broken and scattered units together on Horseshoe Ridge. Future president James Garfield, then a field officer for the Army of the Cumberland, visited Thomas during the battle carrying orders from General Rosecrans to retreat. When Thomas said he would have to stay to ensure the army's safety, Garfield returned to Rosecrans and told him that Thomas was "standing like a rock." The nickname the Rock of Chickamauga spread from that report.

  Within weeks, Thomas succeeded Rosecrans in command of the Army of the Cumberland. At the Battles for Chattanooga, November 23-25, 1863, his troops took Lookout Mountain, then the following day stormed Missionary Ridge. When the Army of the Cumberland advanced beyond what had been ordered, Grant asked Thomas directly who had ordered the advance. Thomas replied: "I don't know. I did not."

• 6. Nashville and the Delayed Promotion

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  Hood's army arrived at Nashville in the winter of 1864 expecting to besiege Thomas. Thomas declined to attack until his army was properly organized and until the ice covering the ground had melted enough for men to move. General Grant, now general-in-chief of all Union armies, grew impatient. He sent Major General John A. Logan west with orders to replace Thomas, then started traveling from City Point, Virginia, to take command himself.

  Thomas attacked on the 15th of December, 1864. The Battle of Nashville destroyed Hood's army in two days. Thomas's telegram to his wife, Frances Lucretia Kellogg Thomas, is the only surviving correspondence between them: "We have whipped the enemy, taken many prisoners and considerable artillery."

  The Thanks of Congress followed, addressed to Thomas and the officers and soldiers under his command for their "skill and dauntless courage" in signally defeating and driving Hood's army from Tennessee. Thomas also received a new nickname: "The Sledge of Nashville."

  His promotion to major general in the regular army, dated from the Nashville victory, made him junior in date of rank to Sheridan. Upon receiving the telegram announcing it, Thomas told Surgeon George Cooper: "I suppose it is better late than never, but it is too late to be appreciated. I earned this at Chickamauga." Sherman, in 1887, wrote that Thomas's service during the war was "transcendent," and argued that he deserved a monument alongside Grant, comparing both men to Nelson and Wellington.

• 7. Silence and Legacy

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  Thomas commanded the Department of the Cumberland after the war, covering Kentucky, Tennessee, and at times West Virginia, Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama through 1869. During Reconstruction, he set up military commissions to enforce labor contracts and used troops to protect communities threatened by Ku Klux Klan violence. In a report from November 1868, he wrote about former Confederates working to cast the Confederacy's defeat as a blow to liberty. He called this effort "a species of political cant, whereby the crime of treason might be covered with a counterfeit varnish of patriotism."

  President Andrew Johnson offered Thomas the rank of lieutenant general, intending to eventually use him to replace Grant as general-in-chief. Thomas asked the Senate to withdraw his name. He refused to be a tool in that political maneuver.

  He died of a stroke on the 28th of March, 1870, at the Presidio of San Francisco. He had been writing a reply to an article criticizing his military career when the stroke came. The article had been written by John Schofield, the same officer Thomas had recommended for expulsion from West Point and who later served as a corps commander under Thomas in the Franklin-Nashville Campaign. Sherman personally carried the news to President Grant at the White House. None of Thomas's blood relatives attended the funeral.

  Thomas had destroyed his private papers, saying he did not want his life hawked in print for the curious. He published no memoirs. Grant's own memoirs minimized his contributions, calling his movements "always so deliberate and so slow, though effective in defence." Without memoirs to push back, and with most of his campaigns in the Western theater where press attention was thinner, Thomas never entered the popular consciousness the way Grant and Sherman did.

  His portrait appeared on United States paper currency in 1890 and 1891. The $5 Thomas note of 1890, with an estimated 450-600 surviving examples out of 7.2 million printed, ranks as number 90 in the book compiled by Bowers and Sundman listing the hundred greatest American currency notes. In 1879, the veterans of the Army of the Cumberland commissioned the equestrian statue of Thomas at Thomas Circle in Washington, D.C. His gravestone in Oakwood Cemetery in Troy, New York, sculpted by Robert E. Launitz, is a white marble sarcophagus topped by a bald eagle.