Terrible Swift Sword (62 page)

On August 8, Sheridan's remains were placed aboard a special train with an honor guard escort from two veterans' groups: the Grand Army of the Republic and the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States. As the funeral train rolled slowly toward Washington, people lined the tracks to pay tribute to Sheridan, and church bells tolled in towns along the way.

Sheridan's body lay in repose in Washington at his parish church, St. Matthew's Catholic Church, until his funeral on August 11. President Cleveland, his cabinet, the justices of the Supreme Court, congressmen and senators, diplomats, and military officers attended. Before the altar, blue and yellow flowers were arranged in the shape of a four-star general's shoulder strap. Prominently displayed was Sheridan's red-and-white swallowtail pennant, whose presence on battlefields in another era had assured victory.

Among Sheridan's pallbearers were a few surviving commanders from the war: Generals William Sherman, Wesley Merritt, and Christopher Augur. Dominican priests from a monastery near Sheridan's childhood home in Ohio chanted the ancient Office of the Dead. Cardinal James Gibbons delivered the homily, closing with the words, “Comrades and companions of the illustrious dead, take hence your great leader. . . . . Though you may not hope to attain his exalted rank, you will strive at least to emulate him.”
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After the service, the coffin was laid on a caisson as the Marine Band played “Nearer My God to Thee.” To the beat of muffled drums, the procession passed slowly through Washington's streets and across the Potomac River to Arlington National Cemetery. Sheridan's gravesite, located on a hillside near Robert E. Lee's former home, looked east toward Washington.

After the seventeen-gun salute, the final services, and the lowering of the remains into the earth, the mourners dispersed—all but one. The last to leave Sheridan's gravesite was Sherman.
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SHERIDAN'S DEATH INSPIRED AN outpouring of eulogies from colleagues, former soldiers, Northern newspapers, and ordinary people. His improbable victory at Cedar Creek was usually invoked as proof of his greatness. His actions there were even retold in verse in “In Memoriam”: “His plume alone, where 'er it shone,/Was worth ten thousand men;/'Twas he snatched victory from defeat,/Our hearty commander still;/When 'er we meet, his name we'll greet,/Our matchless Little Phil.”
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In the former Confederacy, few mourned his passing. The
Clarke Courier
wrote, “It is not to be expected that any lamentations shall be heard in the Valley of Virginia over the death of this officer. . . . . They can never forget as long as they live that he resorted to the use of the torch in order to bring them into subjection.”
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IRENE SHERIDAN NEVER REMARRIED. She and her daughters later moved to another home on Massachusetts Avenue, just a block from Sheridan Circle. There she died in 1938—fifty years after her husband's death. Friends said that she often remarked, “I would rather be Phil Sheridan's widow than any living man's wife.”

A May 19, 1930,
Time
magazine article reported that Senate Bill No. 319 proposed increasing Mrs. Sheridan's annual pension from $2,500 to $5,000, but the Senate Pensions Committee had reduced the amount to $3,600. Senator Lawrence Phipps of Colorado rose and protested the committee action, and the full Senate overrode the committee's recommendation, giving Mrs. Sheridan the $5,000 pension.

The Sheridans' three daughters, Mary and twin sisters Louise and Irene, proved as devoted to their father as was Mrs. Sheridan; they never married and continued to live in the Massachusetts Avenue house until their own deaths—Louise being the last to die, in 1969. It was said that each morning, the sisters would lean out the window of their home and call out “Good morning, Papa!” to the equestrian statue within hailing distance in “Papa's Circle.”

Phil Sheridan Jr. graduated from West Point in 1902 and was an aide to President Theodore Roosevelt before going on to serve on the army's general staff. He died in 1918 at the age of thirty-eight, holding the rank of major. Young Sheridan, like his mother and sisters, is buried near his father in the family plot at Arlington National Cemetery.
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SEVEN CITIES AND FIVE counties are named for Sheridan. So, too, were an army tank and a fort outside Chicago. In 1890 and 1891, the government issued $10 treasury notes featuring Sheridan's image and, in 1896, a $5 silver certificate. In 1937, he appeared with Sherman and Grant on a commemorative stamp—one in a series honoring army and navy heroes.
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HENRY DAVIES, A FORMER Sheridan staff officer and Union general, wrote that at the start of the Civil War, Sheridan was just another “solitary and friendless second lieutenant” of infantry. His career really began when he was named commander of the 2nd Michigan Cavalry in Mississippi in 1862.
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His talents quickly attracted the notice of superiors. They saw that Sheridan planned carefully, but more importantly, he remained alert to opportunities that he might exploit. His rare ability to improvise quickly when conditions changed
set him apart from other generals. Benjamin Crowninshield, a former Sheridan aide, wrote that Sheridan was continually “watching the troops in battle, seeing for himself what was done and taking advantage of the chances that offered.”
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Sheridan's promptness at Stones River, Missionary Ridge, Yellow Tavern, Cedar Creek, Five Forks, and Appomattox Court House had redounded to the Union's great advantage. Sheridan also transformed the Cavalry Corps into a lethal offensive weapon that combined daunting firepower and mobility. Its development began at Yellow Tavern and continued in the Shenandoah Valley, before being showcased at Five Forks and during the pursuit of Lee's army to Appomattox.

Nearly alone among Civil War generals, Sheridan conducted operations in which cavalry, infantry, and artillery supported one another. British military historian Colonel G. F. R. Henderson wrote in
The Science of War,
“With one single exception . . . . [American] generals seem to have been unequal to the task of handling the three arms together on the field of battle. The single exception was Sheridan, and his operations, both in the Shenandoah Valley and during the ‘last agony' of the Confederacy, are well worth the very closest study.”

Seventy years later, the pioneers of armored warfare did study the cavalry and the combined operations of Sheridan and other nineteenth-century practitioners. From their efforts emerged a new template for battle, the blitzkrieg, which also incorporated a new element that Sheridan and his contemporaries never could have imagined—the warplane.
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Another Sheridan legacy—strategic and tactical aggressiveness—remains a cornerstone of US military doctrine today. He articulated this view in evaluating the Army of the Potomac before Grant took command: “The army was all right; the trouble was that the commanders never went out to lick anybody, but always thought first of keeping from getting licked.”

Sylvanus Cadwallader, the newspaper correspondent who traveled with Grant and observed Sheridan on the battlefield many times, wrote, “Probably no living soldier was ever more terrible in battle. . . . . I think it no exaggeration to say that America never produced his equal, for inspiring an army with courage and leading them into battle.” Despite his repeated exposure to danger, Sheridan led a charmed existence: he was never wounded. His ethos of offensive warfare inspired generations of imitators and innovators like him, including Theodore Roosevelt, Douglas McArthur, George Patton, and, arguably, the entire Marine Corps command.
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A LESS PRAISEWORTHY LEGACY is Sheridan's heritage of “total war,” which he waged against the Confederacy and, later, the Plains Indians. Sheridan, Grant, Sherman, and President Abraham Lincoln came to believe that to win the war, they must destroy everything that sustained the Confederacy—and not shrink
from extending the destruction to Southern civilians. Total war, as practiced by Sheridan in Virginia and Sherman in Georgia, proved diabolically successful.

By waging this pitiless kind of warfare, Sheridan and his small frontier army also crushed the Plains Indians. His army campaigned in the wintertime, burned the Indians' homes and possessions, and harried them until they gave up and returned to the reservations. The slaughter of buffalo to near extinction ensured that the Indians stayed there.

When Sheridan introduced the Prussian army to total war in 1870, he never imagined that his brutal prescription for suppressing French guerrillas would snowball into a murderous pathology during Germany's twentieth-century wars. “The people must be left nothing but their eyes to weep with after the war,” Sheridan memorably told Prime Minister Otto von Bismarck and his staff when they asked him how to counteract the
francs-tireurs
during the Franco-Prussian War. His suggestion of reprisals against civilians initially shocked the Prussians, who believed that civilians should be exempted from war's killing and destruction.

But Bismarck saw the sense in this approach and adopted Sheridan's proposed countermeasures. Villages that harbored suspected guerrillas were reduced to ashes. “No laziness in killing” must be allowed, Bismarck told the Prussian army command.

The draconian measures inspired by Sheridan became German army doctrine in the early 1900s. “When you meet the foe, you will defeat him. No quarter will be given and no prisoners will be taken,” Kaiser Wilhelm II told German troops about to embark from Bremerhaven for China and the Boxer Rebellion in July 1900. During the Boxer uprising, no European army matched Germany's 17,000 troops in the ruthlessness of their “cleansing operations.” From December 1900 into 1901, German soldiers burned twenty-six villages and murdered, raped, and plundered the Chinese.
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In the new German General Staff manual issued two years later,
The Law of War on Land
, the harsher policy toward civilians was made explicit. “A war conducted with energy cannot be directed merely against the combatants of the enemy States and the positions they occupy, but it will, and must, in like manner seek to destroy the total intellectual and material resources of the latter,” the manual stated. “Certain severities are indispensable to war, nay more, that the only true humanity very often lies in a ruthless application of them,” because it shortens war's duration—exactly what Sheridan had told Bismarck. The manual liberated German soldiers from the Geneva Conventions with the words, “What is permissible includes every means of war without which the object of the war cannot be obtained.”
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The German troops that invaded neutral Belgium in 1914 included detachments equipped with incendiary bombs—for burning villages and homes with people inside. A German officer concisely summed up the army's policy toward Belgian civilians,
whom the invaders derisively called
schweinhundes
(pig dogs): “The innocent must pay with the guilty.”
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A total of 5,521 Belgian civilians perished at German hands, according to historian Hew Strachan. German soldiers burned to the ground an estimated 25,000 homes and other buildings in 837 Belgian communities, including the cathedral city of Louvain.
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L. H. Grondys, a Dutch neutral who observed the German invasion, wrote, “By their coldly calculated methods they have made war, that splendid and terrible phenomenon, a thing of sickening horror.”
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During World War II, Germany waged total war on a vast scale, killing millions of civilians in Europe and Russia and annihilating 6 million Jews as part of Adolf Hitler's mad scheme of genocide. Assuredly, Sheridan cannot be blamed. But he planted the seed of an idea with Bismarck and his staff that later bore terrible fruit.

 

SEEMINGLY CONTRADICTORY TO EVERYTHING Sheridan represented was his fierce defense of Yellowstone National Park. He not only saved Yellowstone from commercialization but created the template for managing future national parks across the United States. Remarkably, Sheridan also understood that a park's ecosystem might surpass its boundaries and should be protected when possible. While he failed to convince Congress to expand Yellowstone's boundaries by 3,444 square miles, others recognized the wisdom of his vision; today, Yellowstone is bordered by national forests, wilderness areas, and Grand Teton National Park—which together largely comprise the ecosystem that Sheridan envisioned.

“The place is worthy of being a National Park, the geyser phenomena and the Yellowstone Canyon having no parallel in any nation,” Sheridan wrote in his report on the 1882 expedition. Protect the park's game, he urged. “Let its life be made safe while in the National Park.”
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IN I908, PRESIDENT THEODORE Roosevelt dedicated a fourteen-foot-high equestrian statue of Sheridan and Rienzi in Sheridan Circle, six blocks from the home where Irene and the three Sheridan daughters then lived. The secretary of war, the army chief of staff, and members of the diplomatic corps were joined by thousands of people, who filled the grandstands erected for the occasion. Lieutenant Phil Sheridan Jr. pulled the cord to unveil his father's statue, as the Marine Band struck up “The Star Spangled Banner,” and field guns fired a salute. Created by Gutzon Borglum years before he began his monumental work at Mount Rushmore, the statue shows Sheridan astride Rienzi, in the act of waving his hat to urge his men to follow him back to Cedar Creek.

“Not only was he a great general, but he showed his greatness with that touch of originality which we call genius,” the president told the large crowd. “Indeed,
this quality of brilliance has been in one sense a disadvantage to his reputation, for it has tended to overshadow his solid ability. We tend to think of him only as the dashing cavalry leader, whereas he was in reality not only that, but also a great commander.” Among other things, Roosevelt credited Sheridan with developing “the system of campaigning in winter, which, at the cost of bitter hardship and peril, finally broke down the banded strength of those formidable warriors, the horse Indians.”