John Schofield

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 2nd of July, 1892, John McAllister Schofield awarded himself the Medal of Honor. He was Commanding General of the United States Army. The award recognized conduct in a Missouri battle in August 1861. The citation described him as "conspicuously gallant in leading a regiment in a successful charge versus the enemy." Historian Benson Bobrick later called the self-recommendation troubling and noted the vagueness of those words. He was born on the 29th of September, 1831, in Gerry, New York. He died on the 4th of March, 1906, in St. Augustine, Florida, and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery. The career between those dates is more complicated than a Medal of Honor citation typically suggests.

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• 2. A Troubled West Point

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  The Reverend James Schofield was a Baptist minister who became a domestic missionary. He moved his family from Sinclairville, New York, first to Bristol, Illinois, and then to Freeport. John was twelve when they settled in Freeport in 1845, where the elder Schofield became the town's first Baptist minister. John attended local public schools and helped his family farm and build their home. He later surveyed land in northern Wisconsin before spending a year teaching school in Oneco, Illinois.

  U.S. Representative Thomas J. Turner secured him an appointment to West Point. Schofield sold land to cover his travel expenses and reported to the academy on the 1st of June, 1849. In his final year, while working as a teaching assistant in the mathematics section, he was accused of allowing other cadets to make offensive jokes and drawings on the blackboard. He was dismissed.

  Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas became involved in his appeal. Schofield carried his case to the Secretary of War, who referred it to a Board of Inquiry at West Point. A majority voted to rescind the expulsion. One of the two officers who voted to sustain it was a cavalry and artillery instructor named Lieutenant George H. Thomas. Schofield's eventual memoir would not mention Thomas's role on that board. His persistent criticism of Thomas's military judgment in later years may reflect this early encounter.

  He graduated in 1853, ranking seventh in his class, and was commissioned a brevet second lieutenant in the artillery. His first posting was at Fort Moultrie in South Carolina. He later noted that the same guns stationed there were used to fire on Fort Sumter in 1861. After service in Florida during the armed truce with the Seminole Nation, he contracted fevers and dysentery. He was evacuated with the assistance of a future Confederate general, A. P. Hill, and recovered at Culpeper, Virginia.

  Schofield returned to West Point as assistant professor of natural and experimental philosophy from 1855 to 1860. When his career seemed to stall, he took a leave and accepted a position as professor of physics at Washington University in St. Louis. Several of his brothers had already settled there, following the path of the eldest, the Reverend James Van Pelt Schofield. When the Civil War came, he was already living in Missouri.

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• 3. Missouri's Disputed Ground

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  Major General Nathaniel Lyon commanded the Federal forces trying to hold Missouri in the Union when the Civil War began. Schofield became a major in the 1st Missouri Infantry Regiment and served as Lyon's chief of staff. Lyon was killed at the Battle of Wilson's Creek on the 10th of August, 1861, with Schofield beside him. Schofield was recognized for his conduct in that engagement and promoted to brigadier general of volunteers on the 21st of November, 1861.

  Department commander Samuel Ryan Curtis organized the Army of the Frontier in October 1862 and placed Schofield in command. James G. Blunt led the 1st Division, James Totten the 2nd, and Francis J. Herron the 3rd. The full force numbered 20,000 men, though roughly 14,000 were fit for duty. Schofield crossed into northwest Arkansas on the 17th of October. Blunt's division pushed west into Indian Territory and won the Battle of Old Fort Wayne on the 22nd of October. Confederate forces under Thomas C. Hindman clashed with Schofield's remaining divisions and retreated south on the 29th of October. On the 4th of November, with Curtis's approval, Schofield withdrew two divisions northeast to Springfield, Missouri, while Blunt held position in Arkansas. His altercations with Curtis over these and other decisions eventually led him to request his own relief.

  He returned to Missouri in May 1863 as commander of the Department of Missouri, and a more public controversy found him there. After a massacre at Lawrence, Kansas, pro-Union residents wanted forces to pursue the attackers across the state line. Schofield refused. A delegation of pro-Union Missourians traveled to Washington in October to demand his removal, arguing he had sympathized with Confederate-aligned marauders attacking loyal citizens. Lincoln backed Schofield's position. He attributed the violence to wartime conditions rather than to Schofield's command. Lincoln instructed Schofield to respect civil liberties unless assemblies or newspapers were working palpable harm to the military.

  In 1864, Major General William T. Sherman gave Schofield command of the Army of the Ohio. The Atlanta campaign would bring both military action and fresh disputes.

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• 4. Nashville and the Intrigue

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  Major General John Palmer resigned from his command in the summer of 1864 rather than serve under Schofield. Palmer led the US XIV Corps and believed his rank was superior to Schofield's. Sherman disagreed and backed Schofield. Together, Schofield's XXIII Corps and Palmer's former corps spent weeks before Atlanta and East Point. The results were ones Sherman found unsatisfying. When Sherman moved to flank the Confederate position, Schofield's forces were sent to cut off General Hardee's retreat at Jonesboro. They failed to move in time. A further dispute arose on the 30th of August, 1864, when Schofield was placed temporarily under General Stanley of the IV Corps.

  When Atlanta fell, Sherman took the bulk of his army on a march through Georgia. Schofield's Army of the Ohio was sent north to join Major General George H. Thomas in Tennessee. Confederate General John Bell Hood invaded Tennessee and nearly encircled Schofield's command at Spring Hill. Hood chose to press the attack at the Battle of Franklin, and that assault proved costly. On the 15th and the 16th of December, 1864, Schofield took part in Thomas's victory at Nashville. Hood's Army of Tennessee was decisively defeated and ceased to function as a fighting force for the rest of the war.

  George H. Thomas, the same officer who had voted to sustain Schofield's West Point expulsion decades earlier, was now his senior commander. During the buildup to Nashville, Schofield fed General Grant false information about Thomas's command. His aim was to position himself to succeed Thomas. For his services at Franklin, Schofield was promoted to brigadier general in the regular army on the 30th of November, 1864. He received a brevet promotion to major general on the 13th of March, 1865.

  Ordered to join Sherman in North Carolina, Schofield moved his entire corps by rail and sea to Fort Fisher in seventeen days. He occupied Wilmington on the 22nd of February, 1865. He fought at Kinston on the 10th of March and joined Sherman at Goldsboro on the 23rd. On the 26th of April, he accompanied Sherman to Bennett Place to meet Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston. At Schofield's suggestion, the agreement was extended with additional terms. Confederate soldiers were permitted to return to their homes, with their private property rights protected and transportation provided.

  Two days after the Bennett Place meeting, Sherman departed Raleigh. He left Schofield in charge of the Department of North Carolina, responsible for governing a state that had no functioning civil authority.

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• 5. Governing a Defeated South

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  the 28th of April 1865, found Schofield in sole command of North Carolina. With no functioning Confederate civil government and no Unionist authority ready to replace it, he governed the state under martial law. Even before the formal handover, he had issued two general orders. The first declared the end of the state of war in North Carolina. The second declared the freedom of every enslaved person in the state.

  General Johnston met Schofield in Greensboro on the 2nd of May to work through arrangements for paroling Confederate soldiers. Schofield also met North Carolina Governor Zebulon Vance and informed him his governing mandate was voided. He declined to arrest Vance, saying he had no instructions to do so. With 46,000 troops at his disposal, Schofield ordered his forces to spread across the state. Their orders were to visit every part of North Carolina, disperse or capture guerilla bands, and collect military arms not exempted by the surrender terms. He also directed the creation of civilian police forces in each county, authorized to hand criminals to military tribunals.

  Schofield complained of inadequate direction from President Andrew Johnson and the federal government on the question of the newly freed population. Taking matters into his own hands, he issued an order that defined the responsibilities of freed people and their former masters. Adult freed people assumed responsibility for their own families. If freed parents were absent or unavailable, former slaveholders became the legal guardians of freed children, the elderly, and the ill. Former masters were barred from evicting such dependents. Able freedmen were barred from vagrancy and expected to seek employment, though with modest wages for the near future. Since the Freedmen's Bureau had not yet been established in North Carolina, Schofield directed each district commanding officer to appoint personnel to help refugees return home, distribute aid to the homeless, and mediate disputes involving freed people.

  On the 4th of June, Schofield wrote to General Grant reporting the state to be peaceful and requesting leave of his post. He handed command to General Jacob D. Cox on the 20th of June.

  President Andrew Johnson then sent Schofield to France on a diplomatic mission to press for the withdrawal of French troops from Mexico. Johnson later appointed him military governor of Virginia. Confederate President Jefferson Davis was incarcerated in Norfolk and awaiting trial. The judge in the case, John Curtiss Underwood, simultaneously chaired the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1868 and maintained close ties to Congressional Republicans. Schofield oversaw elections in Virginia in which Black and white voters participated. When radical delegates moved to disenfranchise former Confederates, Schofield voiced his concerns about corruption to Congress and to General Grant. When President Johnson forced Edwin M. Stanton out of the War Department, Schofield replaced him. Stanton had been serving as Secretary of War since 1862. Schofield held the post from June 1868 to March 1869. During that tenure, he filed the Medal of Honor recommendation for his own prior service.

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• 6. The Schofield Brothers

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  John Schofield married Harriet Whitehorn Bartlett, whose father William H. C. Bartlett chaired the Department of Philosophy at West Point. Together they had two daughters and four sons. Two sons died before reaching adulthood: John in 1868 and Henry in 1863. After Harriet died in 1888, she was buried alongside her father and son John at the West Point Post cemetery.

  At age sixty, Schofield remarried on the 18th of June, 1891, in Keokuk, Iowa. His new wife was Georgia Wells Kilbourne, twenty-seven years old, a native of Keokuk and the daughter of George Kilbourne. Together they had a daughter, Georgiana. Despite his reputation as a reform advocate, Schofield was dogged throughout his career by accusations of favoritism toward family members.

  George Wheeler Schofield, born in 1833, volunteered with the 1st Missouri Volunteer Infantry in November 1861. He rose through several artillery commands and after the Civil War served in the 10th and 6th Cavalry on the Western Frontier. His frontier service led to the naming of the .45 caliber Smith and Wesson Schofield revolver. Brother Charles Brewster Schofield graduated from West Point in 1870. He served as an aide to General John Schofield during the Indian Wars from 1878 to 1885. He rose to the rank of captain during the Spanish-American War and died of a heart attack in Matanzas, Cuba, in 1901. Charles Brewster Schofield was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. A third brother, Elisha McAllister Schofield, was serving as assessor for the City of Richmond, Virginia, during John's time as military governor of that state. On the 26th of April, 1870, Elisha was among those killed when a State Capitol balcony collapsed. The disaster struck during a session of the Virginia Court of Appeals.

  His son-in-law, Brigadier General Avery D. Andrews, and his wife Mary Campbell Schofield Andrews were also buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

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• 7. Shaping the Army's Future

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  In 1873, Secretary of War William Belknap gave Schofield a secret assignment. He was to investigate the strategic potential of a United States presence in the Hawaiian Islands. Schofield's report came back with a specific recommendation: establish a naval port at Pearl Harbor.

  Schofield became superintendent of the United States Military Academy in 1876. He made reducing hazing a central focus and worked to raise professional standards. In 1878, President Rutherford B. Hayes asked him to revisit the court-martial of Major General Fitz John Porter. Porter had been convicted of cowardice and disobedience at the Second Battle of Bull Run. Schofield's review board gathered new evidence from Confederate generals who had participated in that engagement. The board found that Porter had been wrongly convicted. The board concluded his actions may have prevented a complete Union defeat. That near-disaster, it found, was caused by Major Generals John Pope and Irvin McDowell. Radical Republicans did not welcome the verdict.

  The case of Johnson Chesnut Whittaker ended Schofield's time as superintendent. On the 5th of April, 1880, Whittaker, an African American cadet, was found bruised and beaten in his cot at West Point. He said he had been attacked by fellow cadets. The academy's administration contended he had staged the assault to win sympathy. Whittaker was court-martialed and expelled for supposedly fabricating the attack. A congressional investigation into how the case was handled led to Schofield's removal from the superintendent post in 1881.

  He commanded the Department of the Gulf starting in 1881. He subsequently led the Military Division of the Pacific, the Military Division of the Missouri, and the Military Division of the Atlantic. He also traveled to France to observe military maneuvers and became the first president of the Army and Navy Club, founded in 1885. When General Philip Sheridan died in 1888, Schofield's seniority in rank made him Commanding General of the United States Army. He held that post until 1895.

  Schofield used the position to press for changes. He advocated for the army's subordination to the civilian Secretary of War and pushed for promotions based on seniority rather than political connections. He introduced performance reviews to limit the role of patronage. Writing from South Dakota, he seconded a report from General Thomas H. Ruger urging the federal government to honor its treaty obligations with Native Americans. During the Pullman Strike, he served in a quiet advisory role for President Cleveland. He was promoted to lieutenant general on the 5th of February, 1895. He retired on the 29th of September, 1895, having reached the mandatory retirement age of sixty-four.

  Secretary of War Elihu Root's reform agenda drew Schofield's active support in retirement. He testified before congressional committees in support of the Army Reorganization Act of 1901 and the Dick Act of 1903. The Dick Act established the United States National Guard. His memoir, Forty-six Years in the Army, had appeared in 1897. A graduation address he had given nearly two decades earlier would prove even more durable.

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• 8. Words That Outlive the Man

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  In 1879, Schofield delivered a graduation address at West Point. One passage from that speech is now required memorization at four military institutions. They are West Point itself, The Citadel, Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, and the United States Air Force Academy.

  Schofield's opening claim is about discipline: it "is not to be gained by harsh or tyrannical treatment." Such treatment, he argued, was "far more likely to destroy than to make an army." He identified two voices a commander might use with subordinates. One produces "an intense desire to obey." The other "cannot fail to excite strong resentment and a desire to disobey." The difference between these modes, he argued, comes from the spirit inside the commander. "He who feels the respect which is due to others cannot fail to inspire in them respect for himself." The reverse was equally certain: whoever "feels, and hence manifests, disrespect towards others, especially his subordinates, cannot fail to inspire hatred against himself."

  Schofield Barracks in Hawaii, named in his honor, became one of the United States Army's major installations. Before his death, Schofield had become the last surviving member of Andrew Johnson's cabinet. He had also served as commander-in-chief of the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States from 1899 to 1903. Both the Civil War Campaign Medal and the Indian Campaign Medal were created in 1907, a year after his death. He was posthumously entitled to each.

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