THE UNION’S SOUTHERN ROCK

In America’s civil war, this Virginian remained loyal to the North and became one ot its finest generals

Born on 31 July 1816, and hailing from Southampton County, Virginia, George Henry Thomas won a seat at the United States Military Academy at West Point. Entering in 1836, his roommate there was William Tecumseh Sherman, a man whom he would one day serve alongside in the American Civil War of 1861-1865.

Graduating in the class of 1840, Thomas was commissioned as a second lieutenant of artillery and was soon in combat against the Seminoles, a tribe of Native Americans, in Florida. He would later serve as an artillery officer during the Mexican-american War (1845-1848). His handling of artillery was instrumental in enabling the capture of Monterey in September 1846, and earned him a promotion to captain. In February

1847, Thomas’s gunners prevented the collapse of the American flank at the Battle of Buena Vista, holding on long enough for reinforcements to arrive.

After the war, and now a major, Thomas went back to West Point in 1851 to serve as the head cavalry and artillery instructor. He would also marry, taking as his wife a

New York woman named Frances Kellogg. Thomas won the respect of the cadets for his evenhanded application of discipline.

Not all of them were pleased with his riding instruction, however. Thomas would not let his cadets let loose, insisting that they trot their horses instead of gallop, as they had expected, and wished. Thomas saw this as a chance to cultivate discipline in them, since they expected to charge. This insistence on obedience to orders was in line with Thomas’s own approach to war: disciplined, detailoriented, prepared and thorough.

Thomas was subsequently posted to command an artillery battalion at Fort Yuma in the blisteringly hot Arizona Territory, in 1854, followed by a stint in command of the Second Cavalry Regiment, with whom he battled Kiowa and Comanche Native Americans in Texas.

The Civil War begins

Thomas had so far spent his adult life in the military, proving himself to be a capable and conscientious soldier, never entering into the realm of politics. By 1860, however, politics would intrude upon his life. Stark, irreconcilable regional differences over slavery had boiled over with the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency that November. Several Southern states seceded from the Union, though his home state of Virginia had yet to do so.

With the firing on the Federal-held (Union)

Fort Sumter on 12 April 1861 by South Carolina state troops, and President Lincoln’s call for 75,000 volunteers to put down the incipient rebellion, Virginia also seceded. The 44-year-old Thomas had to choose between his home and the oath he had made to the US Army. Would his loyalty be to his state or his country?

Thomas decided that he must remain true to the United States. This decision would see him vilified by other Southerners, and derided as a ‘Virginia renegade’. His principled stand would also create an unhealable rift between him and his pro-secession sisters back in

Virginia. They refused forever after to speak to their brother again, and turned his portrait to face the wall of their home.

Thomas was a stark, albeit not unique, anomaly. Like General Winfield Scott, also a native of Virginia, and supreme commander of the United States (Union) Army at the war’s start, he was a Southerner fighting against the South. Against the rebellious Confederates, Thomas showed steel. Dispatched to the battleground state of Kentucky by Lincoln after Sherman had personally assured the president of his loyalty, Thomas, a brigadier general, engaged a Confederate army at Mills Springs on 19 January 1862. Thomas’s soldiers worsted the enemy, who fled, winning eastern Kentucky for the Union.

At the Battle of Stones River (Murfreesboro) in Tennessee on 31 December 1862, Thomas, now a major general, commanded the centre of the Federal line, which he skilfully held.

After a day’s ferocious fighting, he attended a war council with his superior, Major General William Rosecrans. When Thomas heard the word ‘retreat’ spoken, he growled back, “This army does not retreat.”

Neither would Rosecrans countenance a withdrawal, and the next day found the Confederate commander, General Braxton Bragg, being nonplussed by the failure of the Federals to depart, as he had made no plans to continue the fight. The stubborn Union army hung on until Bragg began his own retreat south on 3 January 1863.

Bragg eluded Rosecrans’s pursuit after Stones River, leaving Tennessee almost