A Civil General. David Stinebeck

fill the hollows, huddling together.

      At the height of that first day at Chickamauga, frightened horses run in every direction, and the dead and wounded cover the riverbanks. The dead bodies are piled upon each other to make room for columns heading to the front. And Chickamauga Creek is red with blood. I have never seen anything like it, and the battle at Stone River was bad.

      That day, of all days, he did not win or even control the fighting—it had a mind of its own, and a crazy one at that. He lost thousands of men to wounds and death on September 19th, 1863. It was not his finest hour, that had come a day later, or at Missionary Ridge in November, or Nashville the next year.

      That first day, when he sent Croxton at the very beginning to capture an isolated cavalry brigade only to discover five or six brigades that our scouts had missed, and Croxton came back to the general and said, “General, I would have brought them in if I had known which one you wanted,” Thomas just smiled and said nothing. He did not even seem disappointed. It was as if his mind was moving forward to the next task, the next maneuver. And Croxton, like the rest of us, knew how the general would react, that he would not throw a fit or criticize our failures. Croxton merely turned back to the front, to resume his work.

      And there is another story about Thomas and General Sheridan at the end of that first day. They were sitting on a fence rail watching their exhausted men return to camp. Thomas seemed spent and said little or nothing about the day, one of the wildest of the war. When Sheridan made a move to return to his troops, Thomas suddenly offered him some brandy from a flask in his saddlebags. The orderly brought the flask and Thomas took very little, giving the rest to Sheridan—a man, by the way, who later curried favor with Sherman and Grant at Thomas’ expense. Sheridan paused again, but Thomas still said nothing about the fight. And Sheridan rode off in silence. Then, a few minutes later, in my own presence, General Thomas took the hand of a passing private and thanked him for his valor and steady courage. The soldier’s response was remarkable, especially compared to Sheridan’s silence a half hour earlier: “George Henry Thomas has taken this hand! As good a man as ever was! I will knock down any mean man that offers to take it hereafter!”

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       We knew we were in the company of a great general—but it was more than that. We loved him, those of us who fought and died for him. If we fell off our horses, he would wait for us, patiently, to get up; or to return like Croxton; or to pass by like the private. He never lost sight of us for a minute.

      He was the most successful general in the war, more than Grant and Lee and Sherman. But he is being forgotten—an injustice I must try to correct, twenty years after his death.

      His life itself was unjust. His family in Virginia disowned him when he chose to fight for the North; his superiors distrusted him, and delayed his promotions; and he died defending himself against the scurrilous attacks of a fellow general.

      I was a newspaperman before and after the war, so I knew the public followed his exploits and trusted him with their sons. He was revered for his victories, and for his determination to lose fewer men than the other side.

      But his truest public recognition came only in death, when President Grant and his cabinet and a hundred and forty carriages of dignitaries met the train bringing his body from San Francisco to Troy, New York and accompanied the casket to the cemetery. No one from his family was there. But ten thousand other Americans were.

      Perhaps he saw in us, his men, the expression of what he most wanted, to his own detriment. Some of the promotions he was offered he turned down. He refused to curry favor with politicians and generals higher up the ladder. His victories were tempered by the horrors of war. He always seemed alone. But before Chickamauga he took me into his confidence and I came to understand him. And that understanding changed my life.

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      I saw him for the first time on the last day of 1862, at Stone River, six months before Gettysburg in the East.

      He had won the first Northern victory in the West at Mill Springs at the beginning of the year. But this was the first big battle in the Western campaign for Atlanta, and it was very big. Even with the fighting at Mill Springs and Perryville, the Union men who joined after Shiloh knew they had not really been in an all-out fight. They did not know what that meant; the battles in the Mexican War that some had seen were no bigger than Perryville.

       We knew how large the two armies were that were facing each other in Tennessee, maybe fifty thousand men each. You would go see friends in other regiments and it would take hours to find them, passing through brigade after brigade. Of course, our generals always insisted that the Rebs had more men than we had, that they were defending their own slave territory in Tennessee, even if half the population still supported the Union. So we pictured how many men were out there and we could imagine what it might be like if they all flew at each other at once.

      What we could never imagine was how completely out of control it would be when it finally happened, how totally subject to luck and chance the outcome would have been without General Thomas. Maybe that was his genius: nothing he did ever seemed to be a matter of chance.

      At seven in the morning on December 31st, 1862, the cavalry regiment of Indiana boys I had organized in May approached Stone River on the edge of Murfreesboro, Tennessee. We were not yet part of the Army of the Cumberland. Rosecrans had asked for more cavalry assistance, since the Confederates were always running rings around our troops with Forrest’s and Morgan’s cavalry, and we were sent over from Carter’s forces at the Cumberland Gap. As we got closer to Murfreesboro, we found the entire corps we were attached to—Thomas’ corps—was moving forward like some giant machine with people as its working parts. As far as the eye could reach, both in front and behind, the road was packed with men. A dozen bands played martial airs, while the morning sun reflected off thousands of muskets and the air blew through hundreds of American flags. You would think we were all pushing, crowded, to some Fourth of July celebration at the next field over. It was cold, of course, but just the anticipation of something important happening made us warmer.

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      My four hundred men were walking their horses until it would get so crowded that, to save space for the infantry, we would mount up and get a clear view of the grand size of the forces we were sending into this first big battle to control the roads and railways to Knoxville, Chattanooga, and Atlanta. The country before us was unexplored by our side, and every ear was open to catch the sound of the first gun. The conviction that a big battle was coming kept the men steady and in line. You could feel their nervousness.

      As we passed the fine houses and well-improved farms in the area, there were few white people to be seen. The Negroes appeared to have entire possession. I cannot speak for my men, but it raised my spirits to see such people in charge of their master’s property.

      A young and very pretty white girl stood in the doorway of one handsome farmhouse and waved the Union flag, a sympathizer perhaps or just trying to save her home. Cheer after cheer rose along the lines, officers saluted and soldiers waved their caps, and the band played both “Yankee Doodle” and “Dixie,” as if to show that it did not matter what we played, we were going to take the day. That girl won a thousand hearts, men who would fall in battle that day, dreaming of her and home.

      We turned a bend and a number of our East Tennessee cavalry were engaged in firing the houses along the roadside that had been abandoned by their disloyal occupants. They informed us that our troops on the right had already been surprised this morning by the enemy and routed. In their anger the Tennessee boys were doing the only thing they could think of.

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      Then we began to hear the rumble of the battle in the distance. Our pace imperceptibly quickened and we found ourselves trotting and veering down roads to the left, as if to stay ahead of the sounds moving in from the right.

      As we approached the strife, the number of stragglers, refugees, and baggage wagons retreating in confusion so obstructed the road that we could barely make our way to the front, while the roar of artillery, the rattle of musketry, and the shouts of contending parties could