Confederate Waterloo: The Battle of Five Forks, April 1, 1865, and the Controversy that Brought Down a General

By Michael J. McCarthy

“Engrossing . . . A lengthy review of the events of the final days of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and the road to Appomattox” (Mark Silo, author of The 115th New York in the Civil War).
 
The Battle of Five Forks broke the long siege of Petersburg, Virginia, triggered the evacuation of Richmond, precipitated the Appomattox Campaign, and destroyed the careers and reputations of two generals. Michael J. McCarthy’s Confederate Waterloo is the first fully researched and unbiased book-length account of this decisive Union victory and the aftermath fought in the courts and at the bar of public opinion.
 
When Gen. Phil Sheridan’s forces struck at Five Forks on April 1, the attack surprised and collapsed Gen. George Pickett’s Confederate command and turned General Lee’s right flank. An attack along the entire front the following morning broke the siege and forced the Virginia army out of its defenses and, a week later, into Wilmer McLean’s parlor to surrender at Appomattox.
 
Despite this decisive Union success, Five Forks spawned one of the most bitter and divisive controversies in the postwar army when Sheridan relieved Fifth Corps commander Gouverneur K. Warren for perceived failures connected to the battle. McCarthy’s Confederate Waterloo is grounded upon extensive research and a foundation of primary sources, including the meticulous records of a man driven to restore his honor in the eyes of his colleagues, his family, and the American public. The result is a fresh and dispassionate analysis that may cause students of the Civil War to reassess their views about some of the Union’s leading generals.
 
“A detailed, scholarly analysis of one of the final battles of the American Civil War . . . A studious, unbiased account of the entire affair.” —Midwest Book Review

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781611213102

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Many years after the fighting at Five Forks and the close of the Civil War, a former Confederate general named Thomas Munford wrote the following:

It was at the battle of Five Forks, on the evening of April 1, 1865, that the sun of the Southern Confederacy went down and the star of its destiny set. No military event since the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown has exercised greater influence on the fate of America, or civilization itself, than that disaster which destroyed the power of the South and blasted her hopes of independence. Compared with such battles as Malvern Hill, Sharpsburg, 2nd Manassas, or Gettysburg, it could be classified as a mere skirmish, but no other fight of the entire four years’ struggle was followed by such important consequences. It was to the United States as Waterloo to Europe. It made the United States a nation. It was the immediate cause of the precipitate removal of President Jefferson Davis and his governmental officials from the Capital at Richmond, and it forced Gen. Robert E. Lee to evacuate his old fortifications before he was ready to do so, and to retreat towards Appomattox. It extinguished the campfires of the hitherto invincible army and was the mortal wound which caused the Southern Confederacy to perish forever.¹

As Munford’s summation illustrates, for a small battle Five Forks proved decisive and generated enormous controversy, anger, dejection, and exhilaration. The Waterloo of the Confederacy was the Civil War’s last significant pitched clash of arms that included infantry, cavalry, and artillery. All subsequent fighting consisted of skirmishes that represented the closing of a drama already well past its climax, its outcome certain. The struggle to determine the fate of the American experiment was over, but the contest to control the interpretation of that conflict still raged. On both sides men would argue and fight over how to allocate the credit and blame for actions taken that influenced the outcome of the war.

Many men of that era prized honor more than life itself. For Philip H. Sheridan and Gouverneur K. Warren, their personal struggle to protect or redeem their honor, respectively, constituted part of the clash to control the legacy of Five Forks, i.e., how history would remember the battle. Each wanted history to reflect his respective perceptions of what happened that day. Both men believed other forces were conspiring to distort the true record of the battle.

During the postwar years, while men still lived who cared deeply about the controversies swirling around Five Forks, the battle drew in the attention of participants and contemporary historians. William Swinton, a highly regarded writer and one of the war’s earliest chroniclers, proclaimed that Five Forks was one of the twelve decisive battles of the Civil War.²

Warren pressed his case for vindication until the end of his life, and his close associates and family attempted to clear his name long after his death. Toward the end of his life, Bvt. Maj. Gen. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, a recipient of the Medal of Honor for his role at Gettysburg and a participant of the Five Forks combat, wrote about the final days of the war and his service in Warren’s V Corps. His account included a comprehensive assessment of Five Forks. Chamberlain’s was the final significant first-person account that sought to ensure that the memory of Five Forks included proper credit to Gouverneur Warren and his men of the V Corps.³

Time dimmed the fading memories of old controversies, and historians turned to other events in the long and bloody war. When historians wrote about the battle and the issues surrounding it, they tended to rely upon sources from the most prominent soldiers who had assessed it. On the Union side, this invariably meant the writings of Philip Sheridan, Ulysses S. Grant, and their subordinates. Both these men had participated in relieving Warren of his V Corps command, so their views tended to be critical of him and even of the corps itself.⁴

For example, Joan Waugh in her 2004 essay Ulysses S. Grant, Historian, used Grant’s published memoir to report, Sheridan had relieved Warren of his command just before the battle of Five Forks in March 1865 with Grant’s approval. She went on to quote Grant’s analysis of Warren’s leadership flaws without comment or critique, leaving the impression that Grant’s unsupported assertions (he presented not a single example of Warren’s faulty actions) accurately depicted reality.⁵ Waugh’s description of Warren’s relief is also factually inaccurate: He was relieved after the battle and the battle occurred on April 1, 1865, not in March). Although Grant’s incorrect depiction of Five Forks borders on fiction, Waugh understandably accepted him as an authoritative source for an event he took pains to describe in some detail. In her volume about Civil War memory, she inadvertently acknowledged that, at least in regard to one event and one military leader’s reputation, the established consensus is that Warren’s long effort for vindication, for the most part, failed. He could not overcome his famous opponents’ more powerful moral and political forces. With the exception of Douglas Southall Freeman, whose work focused on the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, most historians who have mentioned Five Forks have never seriously questioned Sheridan’s and Grant’s depiction of the battle or Warren’s role therein.⁶

Five Forks has not been a topic of importance for many years. Despite its well-understood significance as the last substantial battle of the war and the combat that made holding Richmond and Petersburg no longer possible, historians skip past it as uninteresting. Gettysburg is the recipient of many books each year, and Civil War books on every conceivable topic continue to pour forth in large numbers. To date, however, only one full-length study (and a short one at that) has appeared: Ed Bearss’s and Chris Calkins’s 1985 The Battle of Five Forks.⁷ This study relied substantially on the official reports of the battle and did not consider the extensive materials Warren had gathered, or the vast record of the Warren Court of Inquiry. Although reasonably balanced in its treatment of the controversies between Sheridan and Warren, it did not focus on them. And there the matter rested for about a decade.

In the late 1990s, attention to some of the controversies surrounding Five Forks began to stir anew. Although no new complete history of the battle appeared, several writers incorporated discussions of it in broader works, including Noah Andre Trudeau in Out of the Storm: The End of the Civil War, April-June 1865; Stephen W. Sears in Controversies and Commanders: Dispatches from the Army of the Potomac; Lesley J. Gordon in General George E. Pickett in Life and Legend; Eric J. Wittenberg in Little Phil: A Reassessment of the Civil War Leadership of Gen. Philip H. Sheridan; and David M. Jordan in Happiness is not My Companion: The Life of General G. K. Warren.⁸ These historians looked at the battle from several perspectives, and their works provide interested readers with at least the basic facts of the event. Certainly the principal issues of the battle have been sufficiently discussed that errors in fundamental description should no longer appear in print. Relying on one-sided primary sources, however, will continue to reflect inaccuracies.⁹

The recently published Civil War biography of Maj. Gen. George Armstrong Custer by Thom Hatch illustrates this point. Custer was a significant participant in the battle of Five Forks, so Hatch, in an attempt to describe his role, offers an interpretation of the Sheridan-Warren dispute. Relying on sources such as Sheridan’s memoirs, Hatch depicts Warren as a serious bungler and Sheridan as the hero of Five Forks. Ironically, Hatch seems not to have consulted Custer’s own complimentary view of Warren’s performance there, content instead to trust Sheridan’s obviously biased assessment. In his effort to correct the record for Custer, Hatch made no attempt to provide a fair critique of either Warren or Sheridan.¹⁰

Although my study examines the battle in some depth, I also concentrate on the battle after the battle—the fight between a solitary Union general and the top leadership of the US Army to preserve an accurate memory of those events so long ago. Although this fight after the fight addresses military issues, its essence is in fact political. The combatants used the written word—broadsides, pamphlets, and memoirs—to maim and injure, and politics played a large role in the manner in which the proceedings unfolded.

It is especially worth weighing not just the physical conflict of April 1, 1865, but the postwar struggle to ensure that the honors of war resulting from that fight, and the blame for defeat, are properly distributed. As Tom Munford’s opening summation illustrates, for a small battle Five Forks generated enormous consequences on and off the battlefield. The last major battle of the Civil War may also have been the only one that resulted in senior commanders from both armies losing their commands as the result of perceived poor performances. General Robert E. Lee and others never forgave Maj. Gen. George E. Pickett for what he believed was dereliction of duty. Some Confederate officers—particularly Munford and those with whom he shared his story—went to their graves believing Pickett and his comrades Fitzhugh Lee and Thomas Rosser would have faced court-martial and possibly even execution had the Confederacy survived and the facts of that day become known to General Lee.

On the Union side, Warren spent the rest of his life haunted by the personal imperative to clear his name from the disgrace of having been relieved of command by Phil Sheridan. His quest for vindication resulted in one of the most historic American military legal proceedings of the nineteenth century. In the Warren Court of Inquiry belatedly ordered by President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1879, the second highest-ranking officer in the United States Army, then-Lt. Gen. Phil Sheridan, would be called upon to defend his actions. The original presiding officer of the panel, Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock, resigned in 1880 to accept the Democratic nomination for president of the United States. Key witnesses included Sheridan, former president Ulysses S. Grant, ex- governor of Maine Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, numerous other luminaries in the US Army, and a series of prominent former Confederate officers—as exotic a combination as ever graced a military court.

These features and others make the struggle to control the memory of Five Forks—a story decades in the making—in and of itself an event worthy of study. Several historians have investigated the manner in which certain groups, such as Southern whites, African-Americans, ex-soldiers and their heirs, women, etc., have viewed the Civil War from their own unique perspectives and contributed to the rich tableau we now consider Civil War memory. Warren’s personal struggle enriches our understanding of the war in two important ways. First, it sheds a unique light on the personalities and capabilities of men well known in history, but maybe not fully understood. Second, it provides insight into the manner that power, in this case political power, can be a staunch ally in shaping historical memory, and how its lack presents a nearly insurmountable obstacle.

Joan Waugh quoted Grant biographer Brooks D. Simpson as having described Grant as simple and straightforward. Although this was clearly a description Grant worked strenuously to cultivate, his use of Sheridan as a tool to relieve Warren of command when he had had months of opportunity to do it himself, calls that simplicity into question. Since Grant later became president, an understanding of the complexity of his personality is critical to not only a proper appraisal of an administration that had more than its share of unfortunate events, but of his leadership style during the war. As one recent Grant historian noted, Serious failings . . . highlighted by favoritism . . . worked against Union success. Grant demonstrated this trait at Five Forks. This aspect of his character contributed mightily to his performance as a general and as a president. A better understanding of this characteristic will enrich our knowledge of the Civil War and the postwar era.¹¹

The bulk of recent scholarship on General Grant has focused so intently on his abilities that the flaws making him truly human and worthy of study are more often than not downplayed. Most recent biographies or studies are relatively uncritical in their appraisals of the man and rely often upon his own memoirs as the sole source for many important events of the war—as if to counter earlier works dubbing him a butcher, a drunkard, and a naïve victim of unscrupulous grafters. William S. McFeely’s study, now more than three decades old, is somewhat more balanced, while Joseph A. Rose’s revisionist evaluation accentuates Grant’s flaws and the literature that purports to study him honestly.¹²

One component of Grant’s personality particularly relevant to Five Forks is his relationship with Sheridan. That peculiar long-lasting friendship had a tremendous impact on Southern reconstruction, various wars with Indian tribes, and the evolution of the US Army as an institution. As with Grant, our understanding of Sheridan’s personality and generalship lacks essential refinement. After an apparently inexhaustible series of biographic treatments extolling his brilliance, incomparable aggressiveness, effective use of resources, shared understanding with Grant about how to fight modern war, and his unsurpassed battlefield presence, it seemed as though historical consensus had been achieved. Despite the inconsistencies in the way his contemporaries viewed him, the overwhelming historical view branded Sheridan’s detractors as jealous rivals for glory or dejected Confederates. Generally, they agreed that Grant had assessed Sheridan fairly when he wrote, I rank him with Napoleon, Frederick, and the great commanders of history.¹³

Eric J. Wittenberg’s recent reappraisal of Sheridan in Little Phil: A Reassessment of the Civil War Leadership of Gen. Philip H. Sheridan challenges this predominant view.¹⁴ In pointing out many of Sheridan’s flaws, Wittenberg opened the door to a better understanding of Five Forks and the actions Sheridan took before, during, and after the battle as he sought to protect his reputation inside and outside the Army.

Perhaps the most compelling element of the controversies surrounding the battle of Five Forks is the manner in which these conflicts illustrate the importance nineteenth century soldiers gave to the concept of honor. In his undying quest that might today be considered obsessive, Warren made it his lifelong ambition to correct the public record about Five Forks. His relief from command of his corps after the victory had been won stained his honor, and he felt compelled to remove the stigma. His decision to place the restoration of his honor above his personal comfort and health might seem quixotic to a modern American, but in the post-Civil War era, when war (for all its horror) retained a certain romantic tinge, no one regarded such a view as extreme.

Warren’s outlook was consistent with the views of many of his compatriots, from admirers like Joshua Chamberlain to enemies such as Phil Sheridan. In fact, Sheridan and Warren shared a highly developed perception of the importance of honor even if they differed in their definition of the term.

1 Draft, Thomas T. Munford, n. d., 73-74; Ellis-Munford Papers, Thomas T. Munford Division, Box 19, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University.

2 William Swinton, The Twelve Decisive Battles of the War: A History of the Eastern and Western Campaigns, in Relation to the Actions that Decided Their Issue (New York, 1867), reprinted as Decisive Battles of the Civil War (New York, 1992).

3 Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, The Passing of the Armies: An Account of the Final Campaign of the Army of the Potomac, Based Upon the Personal Reminiscences of the Fifth Army Corps (1915, reprint New York, 1992).

4 Books written about Sheridan persistently cite sources from the cavalry that reflect his view of Five Forks. See, for example, Richard O’Connor, Sheridan the Inevitable (Indianapolis, IN, 1953) and Stephen Z. Starr, The Union Cavalry in the Civil War, 3 vols. (Baton Rouge, LA, 1981).

5 Joan Waugh, Ulysses S. Grant, Historian, in The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture, Alice Fahs and Joan Waugh, eds. (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004), 29.

6 Douglas Southall Freeman, Lee’s Lieutenants: A Study in Command, 3 vols. (New York, 1944), 3:655-75. For an example of the short shrift given to the battle, see Bruce Catton, Grant Takes Command (1968, reprint New York, 2000), 444-45. Catton covers the battle in two sentences, but spends more than three paragraphs on the much less significant battle of White Oak Road waged the previous day. Warren, he concluded, sealed his own fate on March 31, when he let his 15,000 be defeated by Lee’s 5,000, and now was the time for generals who knew how to smash things. It was too bad, but it was inevitable.

7 Ed Bearss and Chris Calkins, The Battle of Five Forks (Lynchburg, VA, 1985). Contrary to its title, Robert Alexander’s Five Forks: Waterloo of the Confederacy, a Civil War Narrative (East Lansing, MI, 2003), is not a historical study of the battle. Rather, Alexander uses the battle as an allegory to examine various Civil War themes. It is not a comprehensive assessment of the battle or the court of inquiry that followed some years later.

8 Noah Andre Trudeau, Out of the Storm: The End of the Civil War, April-June 1865 (Boston, 1994); Stephen W. Sears, Controversies and Commanders: Dispatches from the Army of the Potomac (Boston, 1999); Lesley J. Gordon, General George E. Pickett in Life and Legend (Chapel Hill, NC, 1998); Eric J. Wittenberg, Little Phil: A Reassessment of the Civil War Leadership of Gen. Philip H. Sheridan (Washington, DC, 2002); David M. Jordan, Happiness is not My Companion: The Life of General G. K. Warren (Bloomington, IN, 2001).

9 Through the years, writers have published a surprising amount of erroneous information about this battle and the events surrounding it. These errors range from mistaking the date to claiming that Sheridan dismissed Warren because he had allowed the V Corps to be counterattacked by Pickett and driven back to Dinwiddie Court House. An egregious and recent misinterpretation appears in Brian John Murphy, Ulysses S. Grant: Commanders in Focus (London, 2004), 95-96. Sheridan, sick of waiting for the main body of Warren’s corps to arrive, Murphy writes, took the V Corps infantry already at hand, Brigadier General Romeyn Ayres’s division, and launched his attack in the late afternoon. The remainder of Warren’s divisions arrived piecemeal. Elements of two divisions, to avoid cross-fire, were marching away from the battlefield. Sheridan made good progress in the afternoon, but as night drew on he still lacked a division of Warren’s—and Warren himself! Sheridan finally found Warren, relieved him on the spot, assigned Brigadier General Charles Griffin to V Corps command and continued his attack. Stephen Z. Starr’s three-volume study of the Union cavalry provides a similarly inaccurate account. See Starr, The Union Cavalry in the Civil War, 2:443-50.

10 Thom Hatch, Glorious War: The Civil War Adventures of George Armstrong Custer (New York, 2013), 293-94.

11 Waugh, Ulysses S. Grant, Historian, 15; Joseph A. Rose, Grant Under Fire: An Expose of Generalship & Character in the American Civil War (New York, 2015), 3. Rose’s work is a deeply researched and serious (if occasionally strident) effort to strip away the whitewash coating Grant’s military career and present the general, warts and all, in accordance with the evidence. This trend of reevaluating Grant is also evident in Frank P. Varney, General Grant and the Rewriting of History: How the Destruction of William S. Rosecrans Influenced Our Understanding of the Civil War (Savas Beatie, CA, 2013).

12 William S. McFeely, Grant: A Biography (New York, 1982); Jean Edward Smith, Grant (New York, 2001); Geoffrey Perret, Ulysses S. Grant: Soldier & President (New York, NY, 1997); Brooks D. Simpson, Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph over Adversity, 1822-1865 (Boston, MA, 2000).

13 John Russell Young, Around the World with General Grant: A Narrative of the Visit of General U. S. Grant, Ex-President of the United States, to Various Countries in Europe, Asia, and Africa, in 1877, 1878, 1879, to Which Are Added Certain Conversations with General Grant on Questions Connected with American Politics and History, 2 vols. (New York, NY, 1879), 1:296-99.

14 Eric J. Wittenberg, Little Phil: A Reassessment of the Civil War Leadership of Gen. Philip H. Sheridan (Washington, DC, 2002).

CHAPTER 1

Setting the Stage

With the approach of spring 1865, knowledgeable observers had concluded that the life span of the Confederacy was ebbing inexorably. Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s troops reached Savannah in December 1864, and Maj. Gen. George H. Thomas’s army had crushed Confederate Gen. John Bell Hood’s Army of Tennessee at Nashville. More Union troops threatened to strike the Southern heartland than the Confederacy could field to oppose them. ¹ With Northern forces victorious throughout the rest of the South, the standoff around Petersburg and Richmond had become almost secondary in military importance. As the headquarters of Gen. Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia, the personification of Confederate resistance—Petersburg—however, still held vital psychological significance. To destroy the Confederacy, Federal forces would have to defeat Lee.

General Lee had already concluded that the Confederate cause was hopeless. On February 20, 1865, the last comprehensive enumeration of Confederate forces at Petersburg (the Army of Northern Virginia) fielded about 55,000 effective troops in the Richmond-Petersburg lines. From then until the end of March, best estimates indicate the army lost some 4,000 men from desertion and another 5,000 as the result of the attack against Fort Stedman, which reduced their strength at the beginning of the spring campaign to about 46,000 men.

General Robert E. Lee, commander of all Confederate forces.

Library of Congress

On March 31, Lee directly faced Ulysses S. Grant’s two Federal armies, a separate cavalry corps, and additional detached forces totaling some 128,000 men.² Farther south in North Carolina, Gen. Joseph E. Johnston had managed to pull together about 40,000 troops, many of whom were home defense forces and convalescents, to face Sherman’s armies totaling 90,000 veterans.

Lee offered a thoughtful, accurate assessment of the deteriorating military situation in several letters to President Jefferson F. Davis and Secretary of War John C. Breckinridge. On March 26, 1865, he wrote:

I fear now it will be impossible to prevent a junction between Grant and Sherman. . . . I cannot reasonably expect him [Gen. Johnston] to bring across the Roanoke more than ten thousand infantry, a force that would add so little strength to this army as not to make it more than a match for Sherman, with whom to risk a battle in the presence of Grant’s army, would hardly seem justifiable. . . . Their two armies united would therefore exceed ours by nearly a hundred thousand.

If the two enemy armies maneuvered properly, he added, it would render it impossible for me to strike him [Sherman] without fighting both armies.³

Grant, the commander of all US armies, believed the defeat of the Army of Northern Virginia was as much a psychological necessity as a military one. He realized that Lee, despite his understanding of the hopelessness of his situation, would only relent when compelled to do so. Lee’s conception of honor, deeply ingrained by his upbringing and his military training, allowed him no other course of action.⁴

Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant, commander of all U. S. Forces.

Library of Congress

Years later, both Grant and Maj. Gen. Phil Sheridan acknowledged that Sherman could easily have swept up behind Lee’s army and forced its surrender.⁵ Grant’s desire to root Lee from his entrenchments and force his capitulation before Sherman provided the overwhelming force to handle the job stemmed from the personal, social, and political forces that had swirled around the Eastern armies since the days when the cry of On to Richmond! haunted them. Despite the near certainty that trapping Lee and his forces between two numerically superior and better equipped army groups would have resulted in a decisive victory, Sheridan strongly encouraged Grant to undertake offensive operations without waiting for Sherman. With unbounded confidence in his cavalry leader, Grant acceded to his exhortations with little resistance. Years later, both men agreed that their motivation for this decision was to protect the feelings of the long-frustrated soldiers of the Army of the Potomac.⁶

For the spring campaign, Lee planned to break away from his lines and move west and then south by forced march to link up with Johnston’s forces in North Carolina. Hoping to get a lead on the pursuing Federal troops, he and Johnston (with a maximum combined force of 85,000) would try to overwhelm Sherman’s army and then turn against Grant. In an effort to facilitate his escape by forcing Grant to shorten his lines, Lee assaulted an area of the Union line centered at the strong point of Fort Stedman in the early morning hours of March 25, 1865. The desperate assault overran the Yankee picket lines and captured the fort and some of its supporting batteries, but the Confederates lacked the power to sustain the offensive. Counterattacks evicted the Rebels with heavy losses, particularly in the number of men captured.⁷

With the stifling of this significant Confederate offensive thrust, Grant determined to complete the destruction of his foe. Fundamentally an improvisational general, he never set forth his plans in detail. Instead, he provided an outline of movements subject to adjustment as Lee responded. His outline for breaking the Confederate lines at Petersburg called for one of the two infantry corps in the Army of the James to shift south from the lines around Richmond to Petersburg. Once reinforced, the Army of the Potomac would then shift westward (left) in an effort to turn the Confederates right flank and make Petersburg untenable.

Major General Philip Sheridan and staff (left to right): Sheridan, Col. James Forsyth, Maj. Gen. Wesley Merritt (seated), Brig. Gen. Thomas Devin, and Maj. Gen. George Custer.

Library of Congress

Grant chose Phil Sheridan to conduct the widest sweep with the army’s Cavalry Corps, freshly returned from routing Lt. Gen. Jubal A. Early’s forces in the Shenandoah Valley. Of all the men Grant had advanced during the war, none progressed more rapidly nor engendered more controversy than Little Phil Sheridan. Plucked from relative obscurity as an infantry division commander in the Army of the Cumberland to become Cavalry Corps Commander in the East, Sheridan owed his entire career after the battle of Chattanooga in November 1863 (when Grant first observed his performance) to Grant’s support. When Sheridan retired in 1885 as the highest ranking officer in the US Army, it was clear how effective that patronage had proven to be.

Most who knew him well credited Sheridan with an intensity of belligerence that made him an effective military commander, especially when he possessed substantial advantages in men and materiel. His aggressive swagger could inspire men on the battlefield to rise to the occasion better than almost any other officer. At the battle of Cedar Creek in October 1864, he earned renown by riding at a gallop from miles away to revive his men’s morale and turn pending defeat into decisive victory. Brigadier General Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain called his manner of fighting and leading less cerebral but more spirited than was common in the Army of the Potomac.⁸ These traits, however, did not add up to Sheridan’s being the greatest general of that or any previous time (as Grant would describe him).⁹

Grant enjoyed a much closer relationship with Sheridan than he had with his other ranking Eastern generals, all of whom had preceded Grant and Sheridan in the Virginia theater armies. Of those who had commanded at the corps level or higher when Grant arrived in Virginia in 1864, only Maj. Gen. George G. Meade still held his position when Lee surrendered in April 1865. Meade criticized Grant intensely in letters to his wife, however, closing his Civil War correspondence with her by lamenting, I, however, now give up on Grant.¹⁰

Historians have not been shy in criticizing Grant. His characterization as a blundering butcher emanated from the Confederate side before the war ended and has been repeated in various forms by many historians. The large number of senior subordinate commanders Grant reassigned or sent home because of their inability to satisfy his demands, however, has been little noticed until recently.¹¹ Some of these men were incompetent or worse, but Grant did not confine his disfavor to the bumblers.

In fact, Grant had difficulty even with highly competent subordinates like Maj. Gen. George H. Thomas. Often ranked as one of the finest commanders of the Civil War, Thomas fought directly under Grant’s command in several battles in the Western Theater, most notably in the great Union victory at Chattanooga. In that critical struggle, it was Thomas’s men from the Army of the Cumberland who had made the assault up Missionary Ridge that carried Union forces to triumph. Thomas never seemed to gain Grant’s confidence, however. When Grant assigned Thomas to defend Tennessee in late 1864 from John Bell Hood’s advancing Confederate army, Grant so doubted Thomas’s abilities that he nearly relieved him just before the battle of Nashville. More than 1,000 miles away from the action in Tennessee and ignorant of the tactical situation, Grant still felt competent enough to make a judgment that would have jeopardized the Yankee defense of Nashville and devastated Thomas’s military career. Based on a secondhand evaluation of the Nashville situation and his own previous observations in which he had judged Thomas as slow, Grant barely avoided a disaster. Just hours before the orders relieving him arrived, Thomas won a crushing victory that saved him from humiliation and, not incidentally, saved Grant from making a serious blunder.¹² Rather than acknowledge the obvious, however, Grant in his autobiography did his best to justify his view that Thomas had been too slow at Nashville. Thomas had made an absolutely correct assessment of the situation, and his preparations resulted in one of the most overwhelming Union victories of the war.¹³

Major General George Meade, commander of the Army of the Potomac.

Library of Congress

Grant also often found fault with Maj. Gen. Gouverneur K. Warren, the Army of the Potomac’s V Corps commander. Second in the 1850 graduating class at West Point, Warren had demonstrated remarkable scientific and analytical skills years before the war. In the 1850s he made several important exploratory trips into the Western Plains and Rocky Mountains, cataloging flora and fauna, studying native tribes, evaluating geologic formations, and producing state-of-the-art maps. In 1854, he prepared a comprehensive analysis of potential routes for a transcontinental railroad under the auspices of Secretary of War Jefferson Davis. Warren’s superiors and the scientific community considered his study the model of precision. Years later his cartographic skills and meticulous record keeping led to his election to membership in the National Academy of Sciences, an unusual honor for an active duty army officer. A mathematics professor at West Point when the war started, Warren resigned to become the lieutenant colonel of the 5th New York Volunteer Infantry (Duryea Zouaves), one of the most highly regarded units in the Union army. By the time Grant arrived in the Eastern Theater, Warren had risen to command the V Corps. Despite his intelligence in the art of warfare, his widely recognized personal bravery, and his popularity with his soldiers, by the spring 1865 he seems to have become persona non grata with Grant for reasons that