Philip Sheridan

• 1. Introduction

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  Philip Henry Sheridan was born on the 6th of March, 1831, the third of six children of Irish Catholic immigrants from Killinkere parish in County Cavan, Ireland. He grew up in Somerset, Ohio, and stood only 5 feet 5 inches tall. Abraham Lincoln, who would one day rely on him to win a war, described him with a wry affection: "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."

  That description was meant as a joke, but it captures something true about Sheridan. He was easy to underestimate. In six months during the Civil War, he rose from the rank of captain to major general. He turned near-disasters into victories on multiple battlefields. He burned the Shenandoah Valley so thoroughly that, as he himself reported, a crow flying across it would need to carry its own rations. He outlasted generals more celebrated than himself and died in 1888 as one of only a handful of men ever to hold the rank of General of the Army.

  How did a short-statured son of Irish immigrants, nearly expelled from West Point for threatening a classmate with a bayonet, become one of the most consequential military figures of the nineteenth century? And how do we reckon with a legacy that spans protecting Yellowstone National Park and conducting one of the war's most ruthless campaigns of destruction against civilians?

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• 2. A Rocky Start

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  Before Sheridan ever commanded a regiment, he was nearly thrown out of West Point. In his fourth year at the academy, he was suspended for a year after fighting with a classmate named William R. Terrill. The day before the fight, Sheridan had threatened to run Terrill through with a fixed bayonet over a perceived insult on the parade ground.

  He graduated in 1853, ranked 34th out of a class of 52. His appointment to the academy itself had come through an indirect route: a customer at the dry goods store where he worked as a head clerk and bookkeeper was U.S. Congressman Thomas Ritchey, whose original candidate had been disqualified for failing a mathematics examination and reportedly showed a "poor attitude".

  After commissioning, Sheridan's early assignments sent him to Fort Duncan in Texas and then to the Pacific Northwest, where he conducted a topographical survey of the Willamette Valley in 1855 and became involved in the Yakima War and Rogue River Wars. On the 28th of March, 1857, a bullet grazed his nose at Middle Cascade in Oregon Territory. His years on the frontier gave him experience leading small combat units and, notably, some diplomatic skill in negotiations with Native tribes. When the Civil War began in 1861, Sheridan was still a first lieutenant, promoted to captain only weeks after Fort Sumter.

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• 3. The Making of a General

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  On the 1st of July, 1862, at the Battle of Booneville, Mississippi, Sheridan commanded his regiment in combat for the first time. He held back several Confederate cavalry regiments, deflected a flanking attack with a noisy diversion, and provided critical intelligence on enemy positions. The division commanders, so impressed, sent a petition to General Halleck that read: "Brigadiers scarce; good ones scarce.... The undersigned respectfully beg that you will obtain the promotion of Sheridan. He is worth his weight in gold."

  His promotion to brigadier general was approved, backdated to July 1 as recognition for Booneville. One of his fellow officers gave him the horse he rode throughout the Civil War, naming it Rienzi after a skirmish in Mississippi.

  At the Battle of Stones River on the 31st of December, 1862, Sheridan anticipated a Confederate assault and positioned his division accordingly. His men held the line until their ammunition was exhausted, buying the Union army time to regroup at a strong defensive position. That single day of fighting earned him a promotion to major general. From captain to major general in six months.

  At Missionary Ridge on the 25th of November, 1863, his division participated in a wild charge that exceeded the orders of both George Thomas and Ulysses S. Grant. Before the advance, Sheridan told his men, "Remember Chickamauga." When an exploding Confederate shell sprayed him with dirt, he shouted, "That's damn ungenerous! I shall take those guns for that!" Grant later credited Sheridan's pursuit that day with being responsible for the bulk of the prisoners, artillery, and small arms captured.

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• 4. The Burning Valley

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  In August 1864, over the objection of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who believed Sheridan too young for a high command, Grant placed him at the head of the newly formed Army of the Shenandoah. His orders were stark. Grant told him: "The people should be informed that so long as an army can subsist among them recurrences of these raids must be expected... Give the enemy no rest... If the war is to last another year, we want the Shenandoah Valley to remain a barren waste."

  On the 19th of September, armed with intelligence from Rebecca Wright, a unionist sympathizer and Quaker teacher, Sheridan defeated Confederate General Jubal Early at Third Winchester. A follow-up victory came three days later at Fisher's Hill. Then the systematic destruction began. Sheridan's cavalry rode as far south as Waynesboro, seizing or burning livestock, barns, mills, factories, and railroads. The operations rendered over 400 square miles uninhabitable.

  Residents called it "The Burning." Sheridan's own soldiers wrote home about what they had done. One soldier told his family he had personally set 60 private homes on fire. Sergeant William T. Patterson wrote that "the whole country around is wrapped in flames, the heavens are aglow with the light thereof... such mourning, such lamentations, such crying and pleading for mercy... I never saw or want to see again." Sheridan himself recorded the scale in official language: "I have destroyed a thousand barns filled with wheat, hay, and farming utensils. Have driven in front of the army four thousand cattle and have killed not less than three thousand sheep."

  On the 19th of October, Early launched a surprise attack at Cedar Creek while Sheridan was ten miles away in Winchester. Hearing distant artillery, Sheridan rode hard back to the front, reaching the battlefield around 10:30 in the morning. His return helped rally his men and the Union ultimately won. Lincoln sent him a personal letter of thanks, and Congress authorized a hundred-gun salute. A poem by Thomas Buchanan Read, "Sheridan's Ride", became so popular that it was used extensively in Republican campaign efforts; some credited it with contributing to Lincoln's margin of victory. Sheridan renamed his horse from Rienzi to "Winchester" in the poem's honor.

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• 5. The Plains Wars

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  In September 1866, Sheridan took command of the Department of the Missouri, a vast administrative area encompassing over one million square miles between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains. He inherited a situation badly damaged by his predecessor, Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock, whose mishandling of Plains Indian relations had led to retaliatory raids on mail coaches, railroad workers, and frontier settlers.

  Sheridan adapted the tactics he had used in the Shenandoah Valley. In the Winter Campaign of 1868-69, which included the Battle of Washita River, he attacked Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Comanche tribes in their winter quarters, stripping their supplies and livestock and driving survivors back onto reservations. His stated goal was to force the tribes to abandon their traditional way of life.

  A story widely repeated holds that the Comanche chief Tosawi told Sheridan in 1869, "Tosawi, good Indian," to which Sheridan replied, "The only good Indians I ever saw were dead." Sheridan denied making the statement. Biographer Roy Morris Jr. notes that the exchange, as recounted in Dee Brown's 1970 book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, attributed the source to a Lieutenant Charles Nordstrom, and the quote appears to have been first printed more than a hundred years after the alleged event.

  Sheridan's own recorded words complicate the caricature. He acknowledged: "We took away their country and their means of support... and against this they made war. Could anyone expect less?" He also stated that Congress bore responsibility for failing to provide adequate food to the tribes placed on reservations. His department conducted the Red River War, the Ute War, and the Great Sioux War of 1876-77, which resulted in the death of Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer.

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• 6. Reconstruction and Removal

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  After the Civil War ended, Grant sent Sheridan to Texas to counter 40,000 French troops propping up the puppet regime of Austrian Archduke Maximilian in Mexico. Sheridan assembled 50,000 men in three corps, occupied Texas coastal cities, spread inland, and patrolled the Mexico-United States border. He later admitted in his memoirs that he had covertly supplied arms and ammunition to the forces of Benito Juarez, leaving them at "convenient places on our side of the river to fall into their hands." The French withdrew by March 1867, and by June 19 of that year, Mexico's republican army had captured, tried, and executed Maximilian.

  In March 1867, Sheridan was appointed military governor of Texas and Louisiana. His rulings were sweeping: he severely limited voter registration for former Confederates, ruled that only registered voters could serve on juries, dismissed the mayor of New Orleans, the Louisiana attorney general, and a district judge after an inquiry into the 1866 New Orleans riot that had killed 34 Black residents. He also forced the desegregation of New Orleans streetcars when railroad company leaders tried to persuade him to preserve the "star car" segregated system.

  President Andrew Johnson removed Sheridan within months, declaring to an outraged Grant that Sheridan's rule had been "one of absolute tyranny, without references to the principles of our government or the nature of our free institutions." Sheridan, for his part, had earlier wired Grant about the New Orleans massacre: "It was no riot; it was an absolute massacre."

  Sheridan famously quipped about Texas: "If I owned Texas and Hell, I would rent Texas and live in Hell." He returned to Louisiana twice more during the Grant administration, including in January 1875 when federal troops intervened after Democrats attempted to seize disputed legislative seats, and again in 1876 to keep order after the disputed presidential election.

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• 7. Saving Yellowstone

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  In 1870, Sheridan authorized Lieutenant Gustavus Doane to escort the Washburn Expedition into Yellowstone, and the following year he authorized Major John W. Barlow to escort the Hayden Expedition. Barlow named Mount Sheridan, overlooking Heart Lake in Yellowstone, for the general in 1871.

  By 1875, Sheridan was actively lobbying for military protection of the park. When the Department of the Interior granted the Yellowstone Park Improvement Company rights to develop 4,000 acres in 1882, with plans to build a railroad and sell land to developers, Sheridan organized direct opposition. He lobbied Congress for military control, expansion of the park boundaries, reduction of the permitted development footprint to just 10 acres, and a ban on leases near park attractions. He also arranged an expedition to the park for President Chester A. Arthur, bringing influential men into the territory to see it firsthand.

  The lobbying worked. A rider added to the Sundry Civil Bill of 1883 gave Sheridan and his allies nearly everything they had sought. In 1886, after a succession of ineffectual and sometimes criminal park superintendents, Sheridan ordered the 1st U.S. Cavalry into Yellowstone. The military operated the park from that year until the National Park Service took it over in 1916. His advocacy is noted in the PBS documentary The National Parks: America's Best Idea, which describes him as an "unlikely ally" alongside journalist George Bird Grinnell in the fight against railroad development.

  Sheridan even proposed expanding Yellowstone's boundaries to better protect elk and buffalo, a suggestion that Western politicians immediately opposed on the grounds that the park was already too large.

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• 8. Final Years and Legacy

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  On the 1st of November, 1883, Sheridan succeeded William T. Sherman as Commanding General of the U.S. Army. He held that position until his death. In 1888, suffering a series of massive heart attacks two months after sending his memoirs to the publisher, he was moved from Washington to his summer cottage in the Nonquitt enclave of Dartmouth, Massachusetts. Congress quickly passed legislation promoting him to General of the Army on the 1st of June 1888, the same rank previously held by Grant and Sherman. He received the news from a congressional delegation, reportedly with joy despite his pain. He died on the 5th of August, 1888.

  He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery on a hillside facing the capital city, near Arlington House. His wife Irene, whom he had married on the 3rd of June, 1875, outlived him and never remarried. She said: "I would rather be the widow of Phil Sheridan than the wife of any man living."

  The scope of his commemoration is remarkable: counties in five states, communities in at least nine states, an M551 tank, an equestrian statue in Chicago by Gutzon Borglum (who also sculpted Mount Rushmore), two mountains in two different states, a glacier outside Cordova, Alaska, and a perpetual yacht-racing trophy on Geneva Lake trace their names to him. He appeared on U.S. Treasury notes in 1890 and 1891, and his bust reappeared on a silver certificate in 1896. John Philip Sousa published a descriptive band piece in 1891, "Sheridan's Ride", with six musical sections commemorating the Cedar Creek ride. The sculptor Samuel James Kitson, an Englishman, executed the work on his Arlington grave marker, and the burial itself, historians note, helped elevate Arlington National Cemetery to national prominence.

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