Terrible Swift Sword (2 page)

But then, on October 12, Early's army had suddenly reappeared at Strasburg, just a few miles south of the Yankee positions. Sheridan had already sent VI Corps marching east to join Grant. He ordered it to return.

On October 16, Union signalmen intercepted a Rebel communication indicating that Lieutenant General James Longstreet's I Corps was marching to Early's aid. A courier had overtaken Sheridan on his way to Washington. After reading the message and obtaining intelligence on recent enemy movements, Sheridan concluded that it was a red herring (it was). But he was unable to rid himself of nagging second thoughts, and he had returned as quickly as possible.

When Sheridan left his army, the Rebels occupied Fisher's Hill, about ten miles south of Cedar Creek.

But today the Rebels were no longer at Fisher's Hill.

 

LIKE MANY CIVIL WAR generals, Sheridan had risen fast, after being stuck in rank at lieutenant for eight years in the peacetime army. He was still just a captain in 1862 when he was given his first field command, the 2nd Michigan Cavalry in Mississippi. His career had taken off with a series of battlefield promotions. He was now responsible for parts of three infantry corps and the Cavalry Corps.

In December 1862 at Stones River, Sheridan's division had slowed the Confederate onslaught long enough to save Major General William Rosecrans's Army of the Cumberland from destruction. In 1863, his division had reached the crest of Missionary Ridge first and pursued Braxton Bragg's retreating army the longest. In May 1864, Sheridan's Cavalry Corps had defeated the Rebel cavalry at Yellow Tavern and mortally wounded the celebrated Jeb Stuart.

When Jubal Early threatened Washington in July 1864, President Abraham Lincoln, General Ulysses Grant, and War Secretary Edwin Stanton decided that the Shenandoah Valley had to be cleared of Rebel armies. They combined four military departments and made Sheridan commander of some of the best fighting men in the Union army.

Sheridan had impressed Grant at Missionary Ridge and later, too, when he transformed the Cavalry Corps into a mobile strike force. He was increasingly seen as a man who got things done fast, a man who could think on his feet.

He was small, five foot five at most, and thin but wiry and broad shouldered; his men called him “Little Phil.” On horseback, Sheridan appeared larger because his torso and arms were disproportionately long, and his legs were short. He possessed incredible stamina that enabled him to function at a high level without sleep or food.

For a man of slight stature, Sheridan's appearance was striking. With his heavy, arched brows, piercing, Tartar-like hazel eyes, chin beard, and curling moustache, he bore a strong resemblance to a Mongolian horse soldier. He kept his hair cropped short because he hated his curls; someone once observed that his hair looked painted on. A Southern civilian declared Sheridan the most savage-looking man he had ever seen—but then related a kindness that Sheridan had shown him.

In the Shenandoah Valley, Sheridan became a favorite of Lincoln and Grant—not only because he struck hard and won battles but also because he believed, as they did, in ruthlessly waging a “total war” on all of the Confederacy's resources. They, along with Major General William Tecumseh Sherman, believed that destroying the enemy's army, burning his farms, killing his livestock, hanging his guerrillas, and freeing his slaves would win the war quicker and save lives.

 

AS HE RODE THROUGH Winchester's streets on Rienzi, his big warhorse—seventeen hands high, or nearly six feet at the withers—Sheridan noticed that townswomen were standing in their windows and doors, “shaking their skirts at us and . . . . otherwise markedly insolent in their demeanor.” Initially, he thought nothing of their behavior.

But when the sound of artillery fire grew louder at the edge of town, he began to wonder whether the women had been “in raptures over some good news, while I as yet was utterly ignorant of the actual situation.” He knew that a XIX Corps detachment was conducting a reconnaissance that morning, but the gunfire seemed to suggest a large-scale engagement, not a skirmish.

Sheridan was correct in surmising that the Rebel women knew something that he did not. Mrs. Hugh H. Lee wrote in her diary that earlier that morning, the “glorious news” that Early had routed two-thirds of Sheridan's army had reached Winchester.

After riding a short distance farther, Sheridan “leaned forward and listened intently,” wrote Major George A. “Sandy” Forsyth, an aide. He was trying to locate and interpret the gunfire. Then, he dismounted and placed his ear near the ground, “seeming somewhat disconcerted as he rose again and remounted.”
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Alarming signs began to appear as they traveled south on the Valley Turnpike. A supply train bound for the front lines was stopped in the road, “seemingly in great confusion.” Sheridan sent Forsyth ahead to find out what was wrong. The quartermaster told Forsyth that an officer from the front had warned him to turn back—the army had been attacked and was being driven down the Valley.

From the crest of the next ridge, everything became shockingly evident. Spread before them was “the appalling spectacle of a panic-stricken army.”

Sheridan ordered most of his escort to remain on the ridge. He sent instructions to Colonel Oliver Edwards, who commanded a VI Corps brigade in Winchester, to deploy a “straggler line” across the Valley Turnpike to stop fleeing soldiers, yet to allow wagons to pass through so they could park north of town.
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Then, with Major Forsyth, Captain Joseph O'Keefe, and a dozen troopers, Sheridan rode on at a fast trot, gray dust rising in a plume in their wake.

They met a flood of men and wagons headed toward the rear and soldiers who had stopped beside the road to brew coffee. Sheridan shouted to them, “Turn back, men! Turn back! Face the other way!”

When the soldiers saw the towering charger bearing the familiar, fierce-featured man in the flat-brimmed hat, an “echoing cheer” arose.

“God
damn
you, don't cheer me!” Sheridan shouted at them. “If you love your country, come up to the front! God
damn
you, don't cheer me! There's lots of fight in you men yet! Come up, God damn you! Come up!”
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Wild enthusiasm traveled from regiment to regiment along the Valley Pike. “Flags were waving, men were throwing their hats high in the air, shouting for joy, for now we had a leader,” wrote Frank Flinn of the 38th Massachusetts Infantry. “We . . . . knew now that there was to be no more retreat.”
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The men began chanting, “Sheridan! Sheridan!” They “swung their hats in glee,” and by the hundreds and then the thousands, they began to follow him back to the front.

Forsyth was astonished by the effect that Sheridan had on the men. “It is no exaggeration to say that as he dashed on to the field of battle, for miles back the turnpike was lined with men pressing forward after him to the front.”
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Sheridan was going to attempt what no commander had ever done during the war: to lead an army beaten in battle to victory on the same day.

 

IN SHERIDAN CIRCLE IN Washington, DC, stands the iconic equestrian statue of Phil Sheridan, green with age. Reaching backward with his hat in hand, Sheridan rallies his men at Cedar Creek. He and Rienzi are action incarnate, captured in medias res. The sculpture accurately depicts a man who led from the front and believed it was almost always best to take the offensive.

Phil Sheridan's legacy, of course, is richer and more complex than a statue representing him at a climactic moment can convey. Cedar Creek was only one point along an ascending line that ended with Sheridan becoming the Union commander most responsible for bringing Robert E. Lee to bay—as well as Grant's most trusted troubleshooter.

At the war's conclusion, Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan were recognized as the Union's victorious triumvirate, forever linked by their invaluable collaboration in defeating the Confederacy.

Supremely confident that Sheridan could rise to any challenge, Grant gave him a broad spectrum of postwar assignments that tested and stretched his abilities. They ranged from governing defiant Louisiana and Texas, to waging the nation's first “cold war,” to subduing the Plains Indians. In suppressing the Indians, Sheridan conceived the idea of striking their winter camps—a ruthless strategy that succeeded brilliantly.

When Grant became president in 1869, he pulled Sherman and Sheridan up with him, with Sherman becoming general of the army and Sheridan taking Sherman's old position as commander of the Division of the Missouri. The three remained close friends and allies until the end of their days. Sheridan succeeded Sherman upon his retirement.

Scores of biographies have been written about Grant and dozens about Sherman. But Sheridan has remained somewhat of an enigma, the reason being that all of his
diaries, journals, personal papers, and documents were destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

With his source material gone, Sheridan had difficulty writing his
Personal Memoirs
, and it is no wonder that biographers have struggled too. The inner man remains indistinct, although his letters and reports, as well as the accounts of contemporaries, provide glimpses of him.

One thread running through Sheridan's life was his readiness to defend what he believed needed protecting, utilizing every available resource. After fighting to save the Union, he defended black freedmen against ex-Rebels in Texas and Louisiana; settlers against pillaging Indians; reservation Indians against corrupt agents and contractors; and Yellowstone National Park against vandals, poachers, and corporate exploiters.

He believed ends justified practically any means, no matter how harsh. In Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, Sheridan's name will always be associated with “the Burning”—his systematic destruction of Virginia's breadbasket. In some parts of the West, his name evokes images of bloody daybreak attacks on Indian villages in wintertime.

However, his friends and comrades, Grant and Sherman, believed there was no better military leader than Sheridan. In 1876, then president Grant spoke to Representative George F. Hoar of Massachusetts with unusual feeling on the subject: “I believe General Sheridan has no superior as a general, either living or dead, and perhaps not an equal. People think he is only capable of leading an army in battle, or to do a particular thing when he is told to.” According to the president, however, those people were wrong. Sheridan was capable of directing “as large a territory as any two nations can cover in a war.”
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1831–1862

PHILIP HENRY SHERIDAN'S birthplace is a rare opacity in an otherwise transparent life spent largely in uniform. Four versions exist. In his
Personal Memoirs
, Sheridan states that he was born in Albany, New York, on March 6, 1831—fittingly, the month of Mars, the Roman god of war. Somerset, Ohio, the village where he grew up, claims Sheridan as a native son. Strangely, no written record of Sheridan's birth exists in either place.

Sheridan's mother once said that Philip was born at sea during the family's migration from Ireland to America, but in 1888 she insisted that his birthplace was Somerset and named the priest who had baptized him. Others have asserted that he was born in County Cavan, Ireland; a stone marker in front of a stone house in Killinkere reportedly commemorates the event.

Not in dispute is that Sheridan's father, John Sheridan, was a County Cavan tenant farmer who claimed lineage from Irish kings and married his second cousin,
Mary Meenagh. Together they worked John Sheridan's lease holding on the Cherrymount estate near Killinkere in north-central Ireland.

In 1831, the family immigrated to America at the urging of John Sheridan's uncle, Thomas Gainor, an émigré who lived in Albany. The Sheridans loaded a horse cart with their worldly possessions, and a neighbor drove them to Dublin. Historian Eric Wittenberg writes that the neighbor reported that Mary Sheridan held young Philip in her arms. In Dublin, the Sheridans booked passage on a ferry to Liverpool, where they boarded a packet ship to America with their two older children, Patrick and Rosa, and possibly Phil too. Rosa died during the ocean voyage and was buried at sea.
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Some historians have suggested that Sheridan pointedly claimed Albany as his birthplace because he entertained presidential ambitions, and being foreign-born would have made him ineligible. But this seems far-fetched, because Sheridan never evinced the slightest interest in seeking any elective office.

More plausibly, if Sheridan did lie about his origins, he probably was trying to distance himself from the Irish immigrants swamping Boston and New York in the wake of the potato famine just as Sheridan was matriculating at West Point in 1848. Between 1847 and 1854, the arrival of nearly 1.2 million Irish—at least one-sixth of Ireland's population—aroused widespread xenophobia and helped inspire the rise of the nativist Know-Nothing Party. Albany may have been Sheridan's self-inoculation against the intense hostility toward Irish immigrants.
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JOHN SHERIDAN DID NOT linger in Albany. Lured by the prospect of steady work, he moved on to Somerset, a village of 1,400, southeast of Columbus, Ohio. He got a job building the National Road, a federal project to link the Potomac and Mississippi Rivers. Later, he became an independent contractor for the National Road, the Hocking Valley Canal, and the Zanesville and Maysville Turnpike in Ohio.
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