March 6, 1831–August 5, 1888
HIGHEST RANK:
Union Officer
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN:
Pisces
NICKNAMES:
Little Phil
WORDS TO REMEMBER:
“If I owned hell and Texas, I’d rent out Texas and live in hell!”
In May 1865, virtually everyone who was anyone in the victorious Union army was preparing to march through Washington in the Grand Review of the Armies. And Phil Sheridan was certainly someone. Of the three Federal generals to emerge from the conflict with the most laurels, the plucky little Irishman had done more at the eleventh hour than either William Sherman or Ulysses Grant to checkmate Robert E. Lee. But Sheridan, much to his dismay, was not slated to participate in what was surely going to be one of the most memorable parades in American history. Instead, he’d been ordered west of the Mississippi by Grant to secure the surrender of Edmund Kirby Smith and the only Confederate force of any size still fighting. Sheridan was the man for the job if Smith was really a serious threat—which he wasn’t. As many people have since speculated, it seems more likely that Grant was less concerned with running Rebels to the ground in the West than he was with facing the prospect of inviting Sheridan to the Washington fete. Doing so would have meant putting him in the same reviewing stand with Army of the Potomac commander George Meade—and Meade, like a few other Northern officers, was as likely to chew coal slag as sit next to Phil Sheridan.
Philip Sheridan was notorious for his violent temper. In one of his more famous outbursts, he literally threw a rude conductor off a train before calmly resuming his conversation with a friend.
Another one of those officers was Gouverneur Warren, a hero of Gettysburg whose corps at the 1865 Battle of Five Forks failed to move quickly enough for Sheridan, who promptly destroyed Warren’s career by sacking him on the spot. Warren had to wait fourteen years to clear his name: An 1879 inquiry exonerated him of any culpability at Five Forks and impugned the decision to relieve him, a verdict that couldn’t reverse years of undeserved infamy. Then there’s William Woods Averell, a previously wounded Indian fighter and respected cavalryman who attracted the unwanted attention of Sheridan in the wake of the Battle of Fisher’s Hill in 1864. While Averell was regrouping his troopers after the stunning Union victory, Sheridan was wondering why he wasn’t off bagging Rebels on the run, famously giving him the order to engage in “actual fighting, with necessary casualties.” Averell, whose victory at Kelly’s Ford the previous year was widely credited with having turned the tide against Southern cavalry, found himself exiled to West Virginia for his alleged lethargy. He also strove to undo the damage done his good name by “Little Phil,” to no avail.
Fortunately for Sheridan’s reputation, he was harder on the enemy than he was on his fellow officers. The diminutive, short-tempered son of an immigrant Irish laborer, Philip Henry Sheridan seemed innately confrontational—a quality that, when properly harnessed, would take him from painfully humble origins to the dizzying heights of power. He was born in Albany. Or Boston. Or was it County Cavan, Ireland? The fact is, we may never know. He grew up believing he’d been born in Ohio, but his mother later told him that it was Albany. Still later she is known to have told others that Phil had been born at sea on the trip from Ireland. In any event, he grew up in Somerset, Ohio. After an obstreperous, demerit-filled stint at West Point, he graduated in 1853 and was stationed at Fort Duncan, Texas, where he was quickly instructed in the morally ambiguous, casually violent chaos of the frontier. Once, after watching a young herder get massacred by Lipan Indians on a cattle raid, he and a company of troopers gave chase, only to see the murderers slip to safety over the nearby Mexican border. That night, Sheridan ran into the raiders during a dance at a local rancher’s house, very nearly ending the evening with an explosion of violence. Living so close to the natives of America’s trackless West was the source of two very different reactions from Sheridan. On the one hand, he sincerely mourned the passing of the ancient way of life, but on the other, he dismissed the native people as “red savages” in need of civilizing. After moving on to Fort Reading in the Pacific Northwest, Sheridan turned heads even in Washington, D.C., for his expansive attitude toward local Indian nations as well as for his coolness under fire when tracking down hostiles. It was during such a campaign that Sheridan received his first and only battle wound: a nick across the bridge of his nose from a bullet that killed the enlisted man next to him.
Like many officers stuck on the perimeter of the country when the Civil War broke out, Sheridan was desperate to get posted back east and get into the action. The only wound he was likely to receive during his first real assignment, however, was a paper cut. In St. Louis, Major General Henry Halleck lassoed Sheridan to sort through the Byzantine accounting mess left by his predecessor, John Frémont. Even in an army rife with systemic embezzlement, the labyrinth of misappropriations bequeathed by Frémont to his successor ranked as “a system of reckless expenditure and fraud perhaps unheard of before in the history of the world.” Relying on skills he had acquired as a store clerk during his adolescence, Sheridan managed to audit the Department of the Missouri out of its bookkeeping nightmare, making a valuable and lasting ally out of Halleck.
By May 1862, having labored manfully through a series of quartermastering jobs, Sheridan was convinced he would never see duty at the front. His break came when the governor of Michigan went looking for an officer in the regular army to lead his state’s Second Cavalry Regiment. Sheridan’s name floated upward, probably by way of Gordon Granger, the unit’s previous commander, and the eager Irishman was chosen. Phil Sheridan had his foot in the door.
He soon knocked the door right off its hinges. After borrowing the eagle-inscribed shoulder boards of a colonel from Gordon Granger’s uniform, Sheridan hit the ground running (galloping?) and, after playing a major role in a raid south of Corinth, Mississippi, was appointed to command the whole brigade. A promotion to brigadier general followed after a decisive skirmish with Rebel cavalry at Booneville. And the following October, he traded in his cavalryman’s spurs for command of a division in the Army of the Ohio.
What could account for such a meteoric rise? Sheridan had leadership ability, to be sure. But despite his churlishness, he also had a few friends (namely Halleck, whose recent promotion to commander in chief made him a functionary in Lincoln’s tight circle). And he had married that old instinct for confrontation to his thirst for advancement, birthing a potent gift for intraservice politics. Plus he was able to exhort the men under his command to great things with his combustive severity (in time he would become notorious for having laggard officers publicly “drummed out” of camp before the assembled ranks of their units). The combination of these qualities allowed him to pummel his way into greatness.
Sheridan and his division did well enough at the confused and indecisive Battle of Perryville; the following December, however, they made history at the Battle of Murfreesboro. The former quartermaster was as assiduous in preparation as he was aggressive in battle, preparing his men the night of December 30 for a Confederate assault he assumed, via reliable intelligence, was coming early the next morning. When the storm broke as he’d predicted, Sheridan’s division was the only one targeted by Braxton Bragg’s oncoming Rebels to keep its cohesion and offer a stiff resistance. Confronted by a furious onslaught and surrounded by fleeing bluecoats, Sheridan, steadfast, directed his men through one of the most exquisite fighting retreats of the entire war. A difficult maneuver to perform under the kindest of conditions, it prevented the disintegration of the Union position, which staved off further attacks the next day and convinced Bragg to give up and pull out.
If Sheridan’s performance at Murfreesboro was heroic, his showing at Chickamauga was awful—a failure somewhat tempered by the fact that nearly everyone in the Union Army of the Cumberland performed miserably that day except George Thomas, the “Rock of Chickamauga.” Forced back to Chattanooga by Bragg, the Federals waited for William Sherman to arrive with reinforcements while their Confederate pursuers besieged the city from the heights of Missionary Ridge. Then, commanded by the newly arrived Grant, they struck. On November 25, 1863, streams of Federal soldiers spontaneously went beyond their objectives at the foot of Missionary Ridge and assaulted the slopes themselves, carrying the fortified Rebel position and routing its defenders in one of the most sensational and unexpected victories of the war. Sheridan’s division was as prominent as any that day—a fact not lost on Grant, who watched the whole thing in befuddled amazement. From that moment, Phil Sheridan’s future was assured.
His reward was as surprising as it was considerable: command of the Army of the Potomac’s cavalry corps. Grant may have thought him more than adequate for the job, but many had their doubts—including Army of the Potomac commander George Meade, who kept a tight leash on Sheridan and used his horsemen for everything except the sort of lightning-quick strikes they were trained for. The mounting tension between the two soon came to a head during the Wilderness campaign in May, when Meade quite rightly gave Sheridan a lashing for using his cavalry clumsily and holding up the advance of the infantry. In the heated argument that followed, Sheridan openly accused his superior of interfering with the proper use of the army’s troopers. All he wanted, he insisted, was to be given an opportunity to prove what he knew he was capable of: whipping Jeb Stuart, the dashing bane of Federal cavalry. After the tête-à-tête, an enraged Meade went to Grant in the hopes of having the commander of his cavalry arm slammed with insubordination. But Grant, intrigued by Sheridan’s claim that he could defeat Stuart if given the chance, merely dismissed Meade and told him to allow Sheridan an opportunity to make good on his boast. And so Sheridan, by turning a legitimate gripe about his own incompetence into a convenient change in tactics, had laid the groundwork for one of the most memorable events of the war: the raid at Yellow Tavern. Riding south toward Richmond with a concentration of cavalry unusual for the Army of the Potomac, he drew the audacious Stuart out, roundly defeated his force, and killed him for good measure.
Sheridan was later checked in a clash at Trevilian Station, but was soon given an independent command of enormous significance: the Shenandoah Valley, verdant birthplace of legends. His orders from Grant were twofold: clear the valley of anything even remotely useful to the enemy, and get south of Confederate general Jubal Early to “follow him to the death.” Early would live to a ripe old age, but everything else about Sheridan’s campaign went splendidly—once he got moving. After what seemed to many in Washington an interminable delay, Sheridan acquired accurate intelligence about Early’s weakened force with the help of an industrious pro-Union local named Rebecca Wright. Having readied his army and confirmed his superiority in numbers, Sheridan finally struck south, winning a costly victory at Winchester and blowing through the Rebels at Fisher’s Hill. The following October, Sheridan was summoned to Washington for a conference with Lincoln and Secretary of War Stanton. On his return journey, he spent the night of October 18 in Winchester, a few miles north of his army, and awoke the following morning to the distant thunder of battle. What he and his retinue saw as they rode closer to the noise was every commander’s worst nightmare: fleeing soldiers in blue, some wounded but most merely demoralized, all walking and limping in the opposite direction. Early had struck that morning in a surprise attack that sent most of Sheridan’s army, in his absence, flying north from the field.
Had anyone there predicted that the day would end in a stunning Union victory, they’d have been dismissed as a raving lunatic. But that is precisely what happened, giving Sheridan his finest hour. He was aided, ironically, by Jubal Early himself, who dithered incomprehensibly in the hours following his men’s extraordinary breakthrough. (Though Early himself denied it to his dying day, others claimed they heard him say something about having earned “enough glory for one day.”) As hungry Rebels fell to plundering the captured Union camp, Sheridan began to encourage his scattered forces for a counterstroke, at one point riding his horse, Rienzi, along the length of the reassembling line of infantry, hat in hand, to let them all see him. The troops, electrified by their general’s return, stole their last bit of strength for another fight. Within weeks, “Sheridan’s Ride” would be immortalized in a poem recited throughout the North. And within hours, Sheridan’s counterattack was sending Early’s routed Confederates back up the Valley Turnpike, their earlier triumph a distant memory.
The Battle of Cedar Creek sealed the fate of Jubal Early’s army and left the Shenandoah mostly in Northern hands, freeing Sheridan to complete the destruction he’d been wreaking since making his appearance. The year 1864 was a bad one to live in the valley. Though preceded by despoilers like David Hunter, Sheridan went about his beastly business with an especially dreadful thoroughness. No one’s property was safe, whether Rebel, Unionist, or even Quaker pacifist. If you grew, built, or owned anything in the Shenandoah that could possibly aid Confederate troops, you were going to lose it. Buildings were razed, crops were burned, animals were slaughtered. “The Burning,” as it came to be known, made a fitting backdrop to the merciless brand of warfare that both sides began waging. Southern guerrillas, particularly those under the ubiquitous John Singleton Mosby, made life hell for Union columns, which had no compunction retaliating without consideration for the Articles of War. Impromptu executions and lynchings (and worse), by both sides, became all too common. And Sheridan used it all as further proof of the need for more plunder.
Leaving a smoldering moonscape in his wake, he headed southeast for the endgame. After sending George Custer’s hardened cavalry to sweep Early’s remaining skeletons aside at Waynesboro, Sheridan arrived in the Petersburg theater and was given most of the Army of the Potomac’s cavalry, as well as Gouverneur Warren’s Fifth Corps. With this considerable host, Grant intended that Sheridan take Five Forks, a road junction west of the Confederate fortifications that, if seized, would put Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia in an untenable position. Sheridan did just that, defeating a Rebel force under George Pickett. Right on cue, Lee and his army fled west, the hope of hooking up with Joseph Johnston’s army quickly dissolving. Sheridan followed closely, destroying much of Richard Ewell’s corps at Sayler’s Creek and getting ahead of the quarry near Appomattox Court House until it seemed pointless for Lee to continue. The end had come.
Sheridan, thirty-four years old at Lee’s surrender, had already lived a lifetime. But the end of the war was merely the beginning for him. In the years that remained before his relatively young death, he would carve out a rather sensational career that was, in many ways, emblematic of nineteenth-century America itself—for good and ill. For twenty-six months, he reigned (and that is definitely the appropriate word) as military governor of Texas and Louisiana, during which time he intimidated Maximilian, French-backed puppet of Mexico, by secretly (and illegally) supplying his enemies with arms; made an ardent enemy out of President Andrew Johnson for routinely ignoring his policies; and frequently intervened scandalously in state politics, from dismissing legitimate court cases against occupying soldiers to removing freely elected governors. Years later, after Sheridan had moved on to a different and more agreeable post, President Grant would ask him to return to New Orleans as an unofficial observer of a contentious election season. While there, Sheridan would famously dismiss the opposition Democrats as “banditti” for whom the “what-do-you-call-it” (writ of habeas corpus) should be suspended.
If unreconstructed secessionists had a serious beef with Sheridan, many Native Americans would soon learn to speak his name with fear and loathing. In 1868, he assumed command over the Department of the Missouri, commencing a long stint as scourge of the Plains Indians. Adopting the strategy he had followed in the Shenandoah Valley, Sheridan sent his scant forces out to surprise and destroy Indian settlements in winter, when forage for their mounts was scarce. The death of women and children was considered regrettable, but acceptable—the belligerent native warriors had brought violence upon their people, not the soldiers under Sheridan’s command who were compelled to act. He also supported a policy that punished hostile action with death or imprisonment, rather than negotiation or treaty, insisting that Indians who went on the warpath were more like murderers than enemy combatants. His immediate superior for most of these years, William Sherman, was even more sanguinary; but Sheridan caught most of the heat from millions of Americans who looked at the whole bloody business as essentially genocidal. Whatever Sheridan’s merits or failings, the fact remains that few had as large a role as he in the “winning of the West.”
For a man who had craved and secured the thrill of absolute control in so many theaters, the ultimate reward from Sheridan’s country—promotion to commanding general of the United States Army in 1883—was conspicuous for its lack of real power. An appropriate fate, perhaps, for a man who had to be reminded on occasion of the Constitution’s insistence on civilian authority over the military. His final act was strangely incongruous. After a heart attack in 1888, Sheridan—his once lithe frame having ballooned from years of rich living—retreated to a small Massachusetts resort community named Nonquitt with Irene Rucker, his wife since June 1875. He eventually died on August 5 in an environment of peaceful quiet that couldn’t have been less like the long angry melee that had been his life.
AT ARM’S LENGTH
Phil Sheridan was short, with a bullet-shaped head that made it difficult for him to wear a hat. As for the rest of him, perhaps it’s best to rely on a description by Abraham Lincoln. Little Phil was “a brown, chunky little chap,” said the president, “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.”
FIGHTIN’ PHIL
Sheridan graduated from West Point in 1853—five years after he had entered. Why the extra year? During his third year, the bilious young Sheridan ran into the sort of trouble that usually cuts careers short. Insulted somehow by the tone of an order given by Cadet Sergeant William Terrill during an exercise, Sheridan shouted, “Goddamn you, sir, I’ll run you through!” and charged the stunned Terrill with his fixed bayonet. The attacker was brought under control and no harm was done. When Sheridan came across Terrill sitting alone the next day, he shouted, “Goddamn you!” and laid a haymaker on the cadet’s head that sent him sprawling. The two then fell into a scuffle that finally exhausted the patience of the academy’s authorities, who decided to suspend the hotheaded Sheridan for nine months. Sheridan’s hiatus did nothing to cool his jets: He earned more demerits in his final year than he had in the previous three combined.
Needless to say, Sheridan didn’t mellow with age. In the summer of 1863, Little Phil was conducting an inspection tour by train with General George Thomas when an unusually long delay held up the schedule. When Sheridan got up to question the civilian conductor, he was dismissed without an adequate explanation. The general then ordered the fellow to get the train moving and was met with another snide retort that, it is safe to say, the fellow should have seriously reconsidered. Sheridan promptly unleashed a storm of flying fists upon the conductor, then physically threw him off the train before returning to his conversation with Thomas as if nothing had happened.
California Girl
In 1869, Phil Sheridan arrived in Washington, D.C., to confer with his friend, newly elected president Ulysses Grant. With the possibility of his reassignment hanging in the air, Sheridan insisted that he not be sent to the Pacific Northwest. His reason was Sidnayoh, daughter of Klikitat Indian chief Quately. Sheridan had lived with her during his years at Fort Reading in northern California. “Frances,” as her white friends called her, had visited Sheridan in Washington at the conclusion of the Civil War, but had since married a Canadian fur trapper. Citing “personal reasons” that he knew Grant would understand, Sheridan wanted to avoid any chance of opening that wound, and he stayed in the Division of the Missouri.
WINDY CITY BLUES
In October 1871, Chicago nearly burned to the ground in one of the greatest conflagrations in American history. With his division headquarters stationed there, Phil Sheridan found himself smack dab in the middle of what has come to be known as the Great Chicago Fire. Predictably, he helped fight the inferno with impressive gusto, particularly during demolition efforts to stem the spreading flames. But it was during the fire’s aftermath that Sheridan truly came into his own, assuming martial law by order of the city’s mayor and organizing whatever troops and volunteers he could lay his hands on to restore order in the city. Unfortunately, having droves of armed toughs roaming the streets coiled for action can lead to trouble—as it did the night city prosecutor Thomas Grosvenor was shot dead by a young buck in the “Sheridan Guards,” an ad hoc volunteer regiment. John McAuley Palmer, governor of Illinois, had never authorized the decision for martial law in the first place; upon hearing of Grosvenor’s death, he started firing some shots of his own. Palmer sought to have Sheridan and Mayor Roswell B. Mason indicted for murder, but failed to get a grand jury to charge anyone in the case.
ROYAL PAIN IN THE ASS
Considering all the violent moments Phil Sheridan passed through, it is perhaps a miracle that his worst wound was a scratch on the nose from a Yakima Indian’s bullet. Even stranger is the fact that one of his closest brushes with death came years after the lethal maelstroms of Murfreesboro and Chickamauga. In 1872, Grand Duke Alexis, heir to the Russian throne, was paying a visit to America and had voiced interest in taking part in a real buffalo hunt. Phil Sheridan was more than happy to oblige, and he arranged the whole affair. Several days out of Omaha, the hunting party—which, in addition to Sheridan and his Romanov guest, included such notables as George Custer and “Buffalo Bill” Cody—arrived at a herd and began dropping the great beasts with their giant-caliber hunting rifles. After being thrown from his new mount a couple of times, a bruised Sheridan decided to set off on foot with a friend to go after some wounded buffalo he had spotted. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, Custer and the duke came charging over the hill from the opposite direction, blasting away at the same buffalo Sheridan had eyed. After hitting the deck and waiting for the bullets to stop flying, Sheridan stood up and, flushed with fury, began giving Custer and the eager young Romanov a profoundly vulgar piece of his mind. It may not have been the manner in which the grand duke was accustomed to being addressed, but one can hardly fault Sheridan under the circumstances.
DEAD INDIANS AND SUCH
“The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” Though Phil Sheridan never said that, he almost certainly did say, “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.” It was addressed to a Comanche chief named Tosawi, who, during a meeting with Sheridan, described himself as a “good Indian,” inspiring the general’s infamous retort. Though Sheridan did express a degree of heartfelt respect for the Plains Indians and their right to fight for the preservation of their culture, particularly later in his life, his actions as the country’s principal general of the West bespeak a brutal severity that is hard to dismiss merely as nineteenth-century racism. One example is particularly telling. Conscious of the Indians’ reliance on buffalo hunts, the Texas legislature once considered passing a law that would outlaw poaching on native lands. Sheridan, convinced that killing off the herds was a valuable tactic in the war to break native spirit, felt strongly enough about the subject to make a personal appearance before the legislators. Instead of punishing poachers, he argued, the state should give them a medal featuring a dead buffalo on the front and a despondent Indian on the reverse.