Terrible Swift Sword (3 page)

Because John Sheridan's work often kept him away from home, Mary Sheridan raised Phil, his three brothers, and his surviving sister. Mrs. Sheridan was a devout Catholic in a village that was overwhelmingly Catholic because of its large Irish immigrant population.
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A small boy with long arms and a bullet-shaped head, Sheridan belonged to the west-side Pig Foots, one of Somerset's two warring factions of boys (the other being the east-side Turkey Foots), and was a respected street fighter, although not a boy who started fights. He and his friend Henry Greiner liked to play hooky and go fishing and swimming.

In 1840, Colonel Richard M. Johnson of Kentucky campaigned in Somerset while challenging President Martin Van Buren for the Democratic nomination.
Most of Somerset's Democrats turned out to meet Johnson, the man reputed to have killed Shawnee Indian chief Tecumseh at the Battle of the Thames in 1813.

Sheridan and some other boys who claimed Whig affiliation hung back, but when Johnson approached to shake their hands, the boys shoved Sheridan to the front of the crowd. When Johnson offered his hand, Sheridan refused to shake it. Johnson asked him why. “Because I am a Whig!” Sheridan replied. Johnson said that it didn't matter, but Sheridan would not relent. Finally, Johnson, laughing along with the crowd, said, “Boys, give way and let the little Whig out. We can't force or coax him to shake hands with a Democrat.”
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When he was fourteen, Sheridan left school and took a job at John Talbot's grocery and hardware store for $24 a year. After one year, Sheridan quit Talbot, known as a humorless skinflint, to work in David Whitehead's store for $60. A few months later, Sheridan again changed jobs—going to Finck & Dittoe dry goods for $124 a year. As head clerk and then bookkeeper, Sheridan displayed an aptitude for creating order and keeping track of things.
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Sheridan first considered a military career during the Mexican War, after reading newspaper reports about the exploits of a local volunteer company, the Keokuk Rifles. The boys who were too young to enlist formed their own unit, the Kosciuszko Braves; they wore green uniforms gaudily trimmed in plaid and turbans with black plumes.

The uniforms and the battle accounts ignited Sheridan's new ambition to attend the US Military Academy at West Point. A cadet was often seen in Somerset courting a girl attending St. Mary's Female Academy, and Sheridan and Greiner enjoyed spying on them. The cadet was William Tecumseh Sherman, and the girl was his future wife, Ellen Ewing.
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At Finck & Dittoe's, Sheridan became acquainted with Congressman Thomas Ritchey, who sometimes handed out apples from his orchard to the store employees. Sheridan asked Ritchey to secure an appointment for him at West Point. Ritchey had already selected another boy, but when that boy failed his entrance examination, Ritchey recommended Sheridan in his place.

After a few months of intensive studying and tutoring by the local schoolmaster, Sheridan boarded a train to West Point. He easily passed the entrance exam and was admitted to the Corps of Cadets on July 1, 1848.

 

WEST POINT'S INFLUENCE WAS becoming strongly felt throughout the US Army. Established under a law signed by President Thomas Jefferson nearly fifty years earlier, it was modeled upon France's L'École Polytechnique. West Point was not only the army's institution of higher learning but also its proving ground for tactics and
new weapons and war materials, such as cast-iron gun carriages, pontoon bridges, and breech-loading pistols. During the Civil War, nearly 450 West Point graduates served as Union or Confederate generals.

Sheridan found the course work challenging, but he was fortunate in his assigned roommate—Henry W. Slocum. A former schoolteacher, Slocum would later serve as a Union corps commander at Gettysburg and during Sherman's march through Georgia. After “Taps” at 10 p.m., Slocum draped a blanket over their window and, by candlelight or whale oil lamp, tutored Sheridan in algebra and other subjects with which he struggled.
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In an attempt to compensate for his uneven academic background, Sheridan read widely during the weekends, when cadets were permitted to use the academy library for recreational reading. The records show that among other items, he withdrew four books on Napoleon and his campaigns; biographies of Samuel Johnson, Lord Byron, and Mohammed; works on the geography of Ireland, Greenland, California, and Oregon; and Sir Walter Scott's Waverly novels.
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ANTEBELLUM WEST POINT HAD an unofficial caste system. At its pinnacle were the Southern Episcopalians, with Virginians occupying the very top echelon. Sheridan and the other Irish American Catholics from the North ranked far down in the pecking order, an arrangement that was amenable to those on top and resented by those who were not.
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On the West Point parade ground one day in September 1851, at the beginning of Sheridan's fourth year, a sergeant cadet from Virginia, William Terrill, peremptorily ordered him to “dress,” or step closer to the man beside him. Sheridan, who believed that he was already properly closed up, snapped.

Crying, “God damn you, sir, I'll run you through!” he charged Terrill with his bayonet lowered. Before Sheridan could make good this threat, however, a dawning awareness of what he was about to do caused him to stop and return to the ranks, where he continued to berate and menace Terrill.

Terrill rightly put Sheridan on report, which only stoked Sheridan's anger further—precipitating an explosion the next day when Sheridan encountered Terrill on the barracks steps. With a curse, Sheridan clouted Terrill in the head. Terrill fought back. The larger Virginian had the upper hand over the former Pig Foot scrapper when an officer separated them.

After the cadets submitted their respective explanations for the altercation, Sheridan, who admitted to starting the fight, was suspended from West Point for one year. In choosing to suspend rather than expel Sheridan, which he would have been
justified in doing, Superintendent Henry Brewerton taught Sheridan a lesson in self-control that he took to heart during the long months that he spent in Somerset, working at his old job of keeping the books at Finck & Dittoe's.
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SHERIDAN RETURNED TO WEST Point during the summer of 1852 to complete his senior year. His former classmates—who included Slocum; another ex-roommate, George Crook; and Alexander McCook, Sheridan's future corps commander—had graduated and left for their first postings as commissioned officers. Sheridan joined the 1853 class of James McPherson, John Bell Hood, John Schofield, and Terrill, his nemesis. His new roommate was Joshua Sill, and Robert E. Lee was the new superintendent.

Sheridan was not an exemplary cadet; he graduated in the bottom third of his class with plenty of demerits. But one important lesson stuck with him down the years—an abiding belief in offensive warfare. It was the central lesson of Dennis Hart Mahan's six-lesson “Science of War” seminar, a springtime pregraduation rite for West Point first classmen.

Mahan, toting the iconic umbrella that he carried in all weathers, spent his entire teaching career at West Point. The cadets nicknamed him “Old Cobbon Sense,” because he emphasized common sense and suffered from a chronic nasal infection.

Mahan's senior-year class in civil engineering, draftsmanship, military engineering, and the building of permanent and field fortifications was the capstone of a cadet's academic career. West Point was essentially an engineering school whose top graduates went into the Corps of Engineers, while those in the bottom tier became infantry officers.

In his warfare seminar, Mahan, a devotee of Napoleon and French military theorist Antoine Jomini, literally shaped the antebellum graduates' tactical and strategic military philosophy. A leader, he said, should make it his object to destroy the enemy's army and not simply to capture territory. Furthermore, he wrote, war must be carried into the enemy's homeland to make the civilian population suffer—the very definition of “total war.” Always concentrate one's forces and attack the enemy's flanks, Mahan counseled, and then relentlessly pursue him when he is beaten.

“Successful warfare is almost always offensive warfare,” Mahan wrote in his slender booklet with a long title, “Elementary Treatise on Advanced-Guard, Out-Post, and Detachment Service of Troops, and the Manner of Posting and Handling Them in the Presence of the Enemy.” During the coming conflagration, Mahan's six lessons would become integral to the battle plans of both sides, and his booklet would occupy a place in the saddlebags of both Union and Confederate officers.
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HAVING GRADUATED IN THE bottom third of his class, Brevet Second Lieutenant Sheridan did not bother to apply for assignment to a particular branch of the army; he knew he was unlikely to get it. He was sent to the 1st US Infantry at Fort Duncan, Texas, on the Rio Grande. It was a relief to put West Point behind him and to be “looking forward with pleasant anticipation to the life before me.”
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Sheridan reached western Texas in March 1854. On his two-hundred-mile overland journey from Corpus Christi to Fort Duncan, he marveled at the big, open country and its abundant wildlife. In Laredo, he rode out a “blue norther'”—heavy rains followed by three days of strong, northerly winds and piercing cold.

Because of recent Comanche and Lipan raids, Sheridan was sent to Camp La Pena sixty miles east of Fort Duncan for scouting duty with Company D of the 1st Infantry. Throughout the spring and summer, he was on the move almost continually, tracking and chasing small bands of Indians without ever engaging in direct combat.

He made maps, learned some Spanish from the Mexican guide, and trapped and studied the bright-colored birds whose migrations brought them through the Rio Grande Valley. He learned to stalk, kill, butcher, and dress game. He and his hunting companion kept Sheridan's company supplied with meat.

One of Sheridan's duties as company subaltern was to ensure that each morning the soldiers drank their ration of pulque. Pressed from the maguey plant and left to ferment in bottles, it was repulsive, vile tasting, and sulfurous smelling. But it inoculated the troops against scurvy in a place where fresh vegetables and fruit were rare. Sheridan learned to gulp it down as quickly as possible.

The soldiers went into winter quarters at Fort Duncan. Sheridan and the other young officers passed many pleasant evenings attending dances across the Rio Grande in Piedras Negras at the home of the Mexican commandant. The commandant's family invited the town's upper-class young women to dance with the American officers. Light refreshments were served, and the occasions, wrote Sheridan, were marked by “the greatest decorum.”

In November 1854, Sheridan was promoted to second lieutenant, without the “brevet,” or provisional, designation, and was transferred to the 4th US Infantry in California. The following spring, he left for Fort Reading.
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MARCH 26, 1856–WASHINGTON TERRITORY—At the bustling Fort Vancouver dock, Second Lieutenant Phil Sheridan and his forty dragoons, with a small iron
naval cannon in tow, were poised to board the steamer
Belle
and sail up the Columbia River to rescue white settlers barricaded in the Middle Cascades blockhouse. Hundreds of US Army regulars were urgently collecting food, weapons, and clothing, as steamers stood ready to take them upriver. It was reminiscent of Fort Vancouver's heyday, back when it was an important Hudson's Bay Company trading center for the upper Oregon Territory.

Indians had massacred seventeen white settlers at the Cascades of the Columbia, midway between the fort and the Dalles's churning rapids. The survivors had taken refuge in the old military blockhouse at the Middle Cascades.

Nearly all of the Washington Indian tribes, angry over white encroachments on their lands, were on the warpath. Men, women, and children had been murdered in their cabins and settlements.

The previous fall, tribal leaders had ceded the lands and agreed to move to reservations. Under the agreement, whites could not move into the areas until Congress had ratified the treaty. However, the settlers and gold prospectors had not waited. Washington Territory's governor, Isaac Stevens, had encouraged the flouting of the treaty, declaring the lands open for immediate settlement. When gold was discovered in the Colville mines during the summer of 1855, the rush was on.

As so often happened in the collision of the white and Indian cultures, the tribal leaders had signed the 1855 treaty without their people's consent, during secret negotiations with Washington Territory leaders. When the tribal members learned about the treaty, they rejected it and warned that there would be a war if whites encroached on their lands.