Photo of the Day: General Thomas Bust, Grant’s Tomb, NYC

The Battle of Nashville, concluded 150 years ago today, also ended, for all intents and purposes, any significant opposition to the Union cause in the Western theater of operations. Within a week, William Tecumseh Sherman would finish his legendary “March to the Sea” in Savannah, and by the following spring Robert E. Lee would be surrendering at Appomattox.

I wrote about this decisive battle five years ago, so I direct your attention to this prior post about this campaign. But I find that there’s still more to be said about the victorious general at Nashville, George H. Thomas.

In a way, this bust of the general, which I photographed while visiting Grant’s Tomb last spring, is symptomatic of the fate of this neglected Union commander in the Civil War. Had he chosen to cast his lot with his native Virginia, you would undoubtedly see beautifully preserved equestrian statues all over the South erected in his memory, as friend and fellow Virginian Robert E. Lee has at Washington and Lee University and on Monument Avenue in Richmond.

Instead, Thomas languishes largely as an afterthought in the North. Sure, there is an equestrian statue—some say, the finest—in Washington, D.C., erected in his memory, in 1879. But the thousands of daily motorists in Thomas Circle are too busy to think about the hero commemorated by sculptor John Quincy Adams Ward.

Aside from that, what do you have? In Grant’s Tomb, this bust, one of five in the dark crypt surrounding the sarcophagi of Ulysses S. Grant and wife Julia carved by two artists employed by the New Deal's Works Progress Administration, Jeno Juszko and William Mues. These figures were the commander in chief’s key lieutenants in the war: Thomas, Sherman, Philip H. Sheridan, James B. McPherson, and Edward Ord. Over the years, the federal government has been so unmindful of the man who helped make sure that there even remained a federal government that they had to be shamed into preserving his tomb. Why should subsidiary figures such as Thomas deserve better?

In Thomas’ case, because he risked even more than his life to save the Union: he put on the line his posthumous reputation. In its zeal for the Lost Cause, the postwar South honored men far less able than this Virginian, all because they could not forgive him. Even his sisters broke off ties with him, from the outbreak of the war and even until his death in 1870.

Thomas was treated even more shabbily in the North. While acknowledging the stubborn courage that gave him the nickname “The Rock of Chickamauga,” Grant and Sherman left him with an undeserved reputation as strictly a superior defensive commander. In fact, as Ernest B. Furgurson related in a March 2007 article for Smithsonian Magazine, Thomas was a master of logistics and organization.

From the American Revolution to the War on Terror, American soldiers have paid the price for vainglorious commanders who squandered their men’s blood too easily. Thomas was a conspicuous exception. As the sesquicentennial remembrance of the Civil War winds down, the accomplishments of this intelligent, loyal and brave general should be celebrated far more often.

This Day in Civil War History (Thomas Annihilates Former Student Hood at Nashville)

November 16, 1864—Union General George H. Thomas (pictured left) had not lost a battle in the Civil War—and despite the anxieties of commander-in-chief Ulysses S. Grant, who wasn’t about to do so this day, either.

With an aristocratic Southern background that led many northerners to distrust his loyalty to the Union, and a sense of preparation so methodical he would not change even to accord with his superiors in the East, the general had taken his time to spring a trap on his former West Point student, Confederate General John Bell Hood. When the two-day Battle of Nashville was over, Hood’s brave but exhausted, underfed and underclothed army was on the run in pitch-black darkness and pouring rain.

Grant need not have worried: “Old Slow Trot” (a reference to Thomas’ gentle treatment of his horses—perhaps necessitated by a painful back injury) had, for all intents and purposes, defeated the Army of Tennessee so thoroughly that it ceased to exist as a fighting force.

As I mentioned in a prior post on the Battle of Chickamauga, Thomas has never received his due as a commander. Part of this related to his unflappable personality; part of it to the fact that his commanders regarded his destruction of the Confederate Army in Tennessee as a sideshow to William Tecumseh Sherman’s “March to the Sea” and Grant’s siege of Petersburg, both occurring at the same time.

But part of it, it must be said, related to Grant’s at times grudging account of his success. Grant’s Personal Memoirs still sounds annoyed, two decades after the campaign, on the events leading up to the battle:

“Hood was allowed to move upon Nashville, and to invest that place almost without interference. Thomas was strongly fortified in his position, so that he would have been safe against the attack of Hood. He had troops enough even to annihilate him in the open field. To me his delay was unaccountable—sitting there and permitting himself to be invested, so that, in the end, to raise the siege he would have to fight the enemy strongly posted behind fortifications.”

The next couple of sentences in the memoir—about the falling, freezing rain that made it difficult for armies to move—sounds like a perfunctory nod to reality. But Thomas, on the spot, rather than away in Virginia like Grant, was in a far better position to know the true state of affairs on the ground—particularly as it related to the battered forces of the enemy and the particular psychology of Hood.

Thomas had been an artillery and cavalry instructor of Hood’s at West Point. He probably knew enough about him from there, as well as his recent reckless Atlanta campaign against Sherman, to understand the nature of this brave, but now dangerously impetuous, opponent.

In the summer of 1864, Jefferson Davis replaced Joseph E. Johnston with Hood in an attempt to take the battle to Sherman for Atlanta. Sherman—who had been repulsed continually by Johnston, even as he kept grinding toward the Southern communications and commercial center—was delighted by this move, as Hood hurled himself against the Union commander, incurring stiff losses he could ill afford while losing the city in the bargain.

Wounded badly in love, and even more horribly in battle (his left arm was severely damaged at Gettysburg, and his right leg was amputated at the Battle of Chickamauga), Hood made a great impression with what Southern diarist Mary Chesnut called his “sad Quixote face, the face of an old Crusader.”

Over time, however, others weighed in with less romanticized viewpoints on him. In his vivid narrative history of the Tennessee campaign, Embrace an Angry Wind, Wiley Sword is unsparing about this fine brigadier elevated beyond his capacity: “a disabled personality prone to miscalculation and misperception…a fool with a license to kill his own men.”

After the Union capture of Atlanta, Hood decided to fall upon Sherman's supply lines extending all the way back into Tennessee. Sherman had a bigger game in mind that simply putting an entire army out of existence—he wanted to break the Southern will to resist—so he took most of the choice troops in his army for the “March to the Sea” and left Thomas to deal with Hood.

Hood’s campaign met with grave misfortune even before Thomas delivered the coup de grace. A miscommunicated order led to an unnecessary loss at Spring Hill. The Battle of Franklin was less forgivable: an assault ordered in a fit of pique, leading to what has been called “the Gettysburg of the West” because of the fearful casualty rate against an entrenched foe.

Still, Hood kept moving toward Thomas—a movement that deeply concerned Grant. So deep was the Union commander's anxiety that over six days, he issued three separate orders relieving Thomas from command. He was talked out of it the first two times by President Lincoln and his chief of state, General Henry Halleck, after receiving assurances from Thomas that, once he’d built up his forces sufficiently, he’d strike Hood.

The third time, despite believing that a commander on the spot was the best judge of his situation, the President reluctantly acceded to Grant’s urging to remove Thomas.

Grant went to his hotel in Washington to pack for his trip to Nashville, where he would take charge of the situation in person and replace Thomas with General John Schofield.

Instead, an entire campaign changed on the whim of an telegraph operator. This operator decided not to wire Grant’s order until he’d heard the latest news from Nashville.

It turned out to be fortuitous. Thomas proved as good as his word—and then some. Earlier in the day, when the ice storm had abated, he attacked Hood at last with a crunching, unexpected blow.

And now, we come to what may be the most fascinating aspect of Thomas’ attention to detail. It is, of course, inconceivable that the Confederate miscommunication at Spring Hill would have occurred on his watch. But he was at this point also prepared to use African-American troops to undermine their former oppressors.

Bob Redman has a fascinating piece on how Thomas deployed the African-American troops in small sorties with white troops, where they could gain useful experience, rather than parade ground drills. The Virginian watched carefully how they handled these duties, then gave two African-American brigades a key assignment: they would hold most of a Confederate corps on the right, while Thomas, with 40,000 men, fell upon it from the left.

The plan worked, to the great delight of Grant—who still couldn’t resist the inclination to tell Thomas to keep pursuing Hood. “The Rock of Chickamauga,” who’d been praised even by Grant for his incredible stand in that bloody 1863 battle, had now been transformed into the “Sledge of Nashville.”

Hood ordered new works to be erected to await Thomas’ next assault. Thomas repeated his stratagem of the 15th—use the African-American troops as a diversion while the main force fell on the left. This time, two Confederate corps were put out of commission.

Even though icy weather stymied Thomas in his attempt to cut off Hood, it didn’t matter. Having suffered 23,000 casualties out of the 38,000 troops before the Nashville campaign, the Hood was in no position to do anything. Thomas had achieved something that Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, and other Northern generals had not achieved: the destruction of an entire army.

As Grant, dying of cancer, came to the end of his memoir, he may have felt a more charitable tone was in order toward Thomas. His final judgment doesn’t take back what he said about the former subordinate he second-guessed from hundreds of miles away, but he does temper it with praise for his qualities as human being and defensive tower of strength.

“Sensible, honest and brave,” Thomas, according to Grant, “gained the confidence of all who served under him, and almost their love. This implies a very valuable quality. It is a quality which calls out the most efficient services of the troops serving under the commander possessing it.”

Grant still couldn’t admit that Thomas’ preparation for Nashville had sealed victory so completely: “I do not believe that he could ever have conducted Sherman’s army from Chattanooga to Atlanta against the defenses and the commander guarding that line.”

Undoubtedly cognizant of how this sounded, Grant immediately followed this with a more more generous view: “On the other hand, if it had been given him to hold the line which Johnston tried to hold, neither that general nor Sherman, nor any other officer could have done it better.”

This Day in Civil War History (Battle Gives Rise to “Rock of Chickamauga”)

September 19, 1863—The bloodiest two days of the Civil War began as Union forces under General William Rosecrans clashed with Confederates under Braxton Bragg at the Battle of Chickamauga in northern Georgia.

By the time the battle ended, 35,000 men had been killed, wounded or missing, depleting each army by one-third. It could have been far worse for the Union—its Army of the Cumberland was saved from annihilation only by the heroic stand of perhaps the greatest unsung commander of the war on either side: General George H. Thomas.

One of the best things about writing this blog—in my opinion, anyway—is the opportunity to spotlight a person or event that deserves more notice. General Thomas is a classic example.

It was Thomas’ misfortune to be consistently underestimated, even by otherwise intelligent leaders who should have known better. Underneath his seemingly phlegmatic exterior beat a formidable intelligence joined to an indomitable heart. They didn’t call him “The Rock of Chickamauga” for nothing.

Soliders assigned even more nicknames to Thomas than the normally high number that commanders earn. One of his earliest (and most enduring) was “Slow Trot.” One explanation for this one was that Thomas urged his equestrian students at West Point to treat their much-put-upon animals more gently. The nickname also hinted at his even, unflappable temperament.

But Thomas’ size – two hundred-plus pounds in a six-feet frame that, a soldier said, “gradually expands upon you, as a mountain which you approach--testified to something else about the man—enormous force held in reserve—and God help you if he used it against you.

The most telling anecdote I ever read about Thomas—I believe it was in John Bowers’ article in Military History Quarterly in the early 1990s—is this: At West Point, some fool made the mistake of taunting the young cadet. The wretch continued this tomfoolery until the burly object of his scorn, without saying a word, suddenly got hold of his tormenter, lifted him by the ankles, and held him out the window. Word soon got around—you didn’t mess with Thomas.

In the Civil War, Thomas proved it over and over again by never losing a battle. Even Grant and Sherman, the friends and Thomas superiors who gain the lion’s share of historians’ attention, couldn’t claim the same thing.

The problem was that Thomas was the Union Army’s answer to Robert E. Lee: a slaveholding Virginian faced with the decision on where to stand in the war. Lee’s decision earned him no opprobrium from his neighbors; Thomas’ earned him nothing but that. Even his sisters wouldn't speak to him again.

Many in the North questioned his loyalty. His old classmate, Sherman, had to vouch personally for him with Lincoln. Later, the President—who, as the war went on, became an increasingly shrewder judge of ability--even struck his name from a promotion list, saying, “Let the Virginian wait.”

Over the course of the war, at Munfordville and Stones River, Thomas would save inferior commanders from their worst mistakes. He’d win important victories at Kenesaw Mountain, and, in independent command, at Franklin and Nashville, where he defeated John Bell Hood so soundly that the latter’s army ceased to exist as a fighting unit.

Particularly in the last couple of battles, Thomas’ extremely methodical approach nearly led to his removal by Grant, who had actually written a telegram replacing him before he got the news that the Virginian had given Hood a master class in command of armies.

But nowhere was Thomas’ brilliance more needed than at Chickamauga. The battle was fought amid dense woods and thick underbrush, making it hard for generals to monitor their men or the course of battle.

On the second day of battle, his commander, William Rosecrans, had become so unnerved when James Longstreet tore through an open hole in the Union line that, like General Horatio Gates at the Battle of Camden in the American Revolution, he abandoned the field of battle. Thomas not only had to cope with the steep losses in killed and wounded, but another portion of the army that had fled with Rosecrans.

The entire Confederate Army was bearing down on Thomas at this moment—an even more desperate situation than Oliver Hazard Perry had faced in the Battle of Lake Erie, when the entire British fleet on the lake had come after his flagship. His men were low on ammunition and, midway through the second day, exhausted and fearful.

Knowing that one of the Confederacy’s best generals, Longstreet, was facing him, Thomas personally rode among his enlisted men, quietly but firmly steeling them for what lay ahead. “This point must be held,” he told one of their leaders, Col. Emerson Epdycke. The latter knew what was required: “We will hold this ground, or go to heaven from it.”

On Snodgrass Hill, Thomas formed a line. Again and again, the rebels threw everything they had at him—seven times. Each time Thomas fought back until, toward the end of the day, he made an orderly retreat that allowed the Union to limp back to Chattanooga where it could lick its wounds.

Chickamauga is an Indian word for “River of Blood,” and seldom has a place so lived up to its billing. But it had also given rise to one of the greatest examples of imperturbability in the face of disaster ever witnessed by the U.S. Army.

Even Lincoln came around. His post-battle assessment had become characteristically pungent and wise. Rosecrans needed to be replaced because he had acted “confused and stunned, like a duck hit on the head.” This was in direct contrast to Thomas: “It is doubtful whether his heroism and skill, exhibited last Friday afternoon, has ever been surpassed in the world.”