Kirby Smith. Each man’s career would end
in failure. Johnston was removed from
command by Jefferson Davis after failing to
prevent Union General William Tecumseh
Sherman’s relentless advance to Atlanta.
Hood was similarly dismissed and reduced
in rank to lieutenant general after dismally
losing the Battles of Franklin and Nashville
in the late fall of 1864. Smith had the dis-
tasteful task of surrendering the Confeder-
acy’s last Trans-Mississippi army at Galve-
ston, Texas, in June 1865. Serving as
Confederate major generals during the war
were William Hardee, Fitzhugh Lee, and
Charles Field.
Along with Albert Sidney Johnston, Jeb
Stuart and Earl Van Dorn also died in the
Civil War. Stuart was killed by Union cav-
alry at the Battle of Yellow Tavern, Vir-
ginia, in the spring of 1864. One year ear-
lier, Van Dorn, a notorious womanizer, was
shot and killed in his tent by a jealous hus-
band at Spring Hill, Tennessee, an inglori-
ous end to his once promising career.
Union Army veterans of the prewar west-
ern cavalry units also provided a mixed bag
of victories and defeats. George McClellan,
whose service with the frontier cavalry was
mainly on paper (he resigned his commis-
sion in 1857 to go into the railroad busi-
ness), later rose to command the Union
Army of the Potomac against Robert E.
Lee, winning the crucial Battle of Antietam
in September 1862 before being sacked by
an exasperated Abraham Lincoln shortly
afterward for insufficient aggressiveness
(and a too prominent Democratic Party
affiliation). In 1864, McClellan ran for
president against Lincoln and lost in a land-
slide, helped in large part by the failure of
his former cavalry comrades Joseph E.
Johnston and John Bell Hood to prevent
William T. Sherman from capturing
Atlanta a few weeks before the election.
Edwin Vose Sumner, the rough-hewn
commander of the 1st Cavalry, served as a
corps commander under McClellan at
Antietam, where he ironically was criticized
for leading his division “like a colonel ofcavalry” instead of remaining at the rear
like other two-star major generals. Stung
by the criticism, Sumner asked to be
relieved of active duty. He died of pneu-
monia a few months later, drinking a final
toast to the United States while he lan-
guished on his deathbed.
George H. Thomas, one of the few native
Southerners from the western cavalry to
remain in the Union Army during the Civil
War, won fame as “the Rock of Chicka-
mauga,” where his stubborn stand helped
save the Union Army of the Cumberland
from total destruction. Thomas later led
the same army to a smashing victory over
his old comrade-in-arms John Bell Hood at
the Battle of Nashville. His unfortunate
knack for alienating his superiors contin-
ued, and Thomas’s postwar career lan-
guished under the baleful gaze of now-Pres-
ident Ulysses S. Grant, who banished
Thomas to the Pacific coast, where in 1870
he died of a stroke aggravated by his frus-
tration at being underappreciated for his
Civil War service.
Fellow 1st Cavalry Major John Sedgwick
later served as a major general in the Union
Army of the Potomac, where he achieved a
certain mordant immortality at the Battle
of Spotsylvania in May 1864, shaming his
soldiers for ducking and dodging Confed-
erate sniper fire. “They couldn’t hit an ele-
phant at this distance,” Sedgwick scolded.
An instant later a bullet struck him flush in
the face, killing him instantly. His last
words were shortened, falsely but memo-
rably, to: “They couldn’t hit an elephant at
this dis—.”
Major General Samuel Sturgis, who
served as a captain under Sedgwick in the
1st Cavalry, won a signal victory for the
North at the Battle of Pea Ridge,
Arkansas, in March 1862, a victory that
preserved Union control of Missouri for
the remainder of the war. Other Union
major generals who had served on the
western frontier included George Stone-
man, Thomas J. Wood, and David S.
Stanley—the same Stanley whose life Jeb
Stuart saved at the Battle of Solomon’s
Fork in 1857, when Stuart nearly lost his
own in the process.JEFFERSON DAVIS
Continued from page 41a violation of the agreement between the
two nations relative to prisoners,
responded to the threat by ordering that
800 Confederate prisoners be selected and
held as hostages for the safety of the loyal
Alabamians, thereby saving them from the
hangman’s noose.
In 1865, despite Brig. Gen. Judson Kil-
patrick’s efforts to prevent it, the 1st
Alabama burned Barnwell, South Carolina.
According to Confederate Colonel Charles
C. Jones, “The conduct of Sherman’s army
and particularly of Kilpatrick’s cavalry and
the numerous parties swarming through
the country in advance and on the flanks of
the main columns during the march from
Atlanta to the coast, is reprehensible in the
extreme. The Federals on every hand and
at all points indulged in wanton pillage,
wasting and destroying what could not be
used. Defenseless women and children and
weak old men were not infrequently driven
from their homes, their dwellings fired, and
these noncombatants subjected to insult
and privation. The inhabitants, white and
black, were often robbed of their personal
effects, were intimidated by threats—and
occasionally were even hung up to the
verge of strangulation to compel revelation
of the places where money, plate and jew-
elry were buried, or plantation animals
concealed—horses, mules, cattle and hogs
were either driven off, or were shot in the
fields, or uselessly butchered in the pens.”
In March 1865, the 1st Alabama finished
the war in North Carolina skirmishing
with Confederate cavalry led by Generals
Wade Hampton and Joe Wheeler. After the
war, Spencer settled in Alabama and won
election to the United States Senate. It is fair
to say that few if any former Confederates
voted—or were even allowed to vote—for
Spencer. Henceforth, the struggle would
move from the military to the political
realm, and conservative “redeemers” ulti-
mately would reclaim the region for the
former slave owners and their supporters.
In a sense, Southern Unionists helped win
the war, only to lose the peace.
SOUTHERNERS
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