"The Rock of Chickamauga"

Native born Virginian, and confidant of General Robert E. Lee, Thomas fought for the Union which cost him his family!

(1816-1870) He was born at Newsom's Depot, Southampton County, Virginia, which was five miles from the North Carolina border, and his family led an upper-class plantation lifestyle owning 685 acres and slaves. George Thomas, his sisters, and his widowed mother were forced to flee from their home and hide in the nearby woods during Nat Turner's 1831 slave rebellion. He taught as many as 15 of his family's slaves to read, violating a Virginia law that prohibited this.

He graduated in the West Point class of 1840, and was known to his fellow cadets as "Old Tom," and he became instant friends with his roommates, future Union Civil War generals' William Tecumseh Sherman, and Stewart Van Vliet. He was appointed a cadet officer in his second year, and graduated 12th in a class of 42 and upon his graduation was appointed second lieutenant, Company D, 3rd U.S. Artillery.

His first assignment out of the academy began with his artillery regiment serving at the primitive outpost of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, during the Seminole Indian Wars, and Thomas was appointed a brevet first lieutenant for gallantry while successfully leading his men. From 1842 until 1845, he served at posts at New Orleans, La., Fort Moultrie in Charleston Harbor, and Fort McHenry in Baltimore harbor where Francis Scott Key wrote our national anthem, "The Star Spangled Banner." His regiment was ordered to Texas in 1845, and in the Mexican War, he led a gun crew with distinction at the battles of Fort Brown, Resaca de la Palma, Monterrey, and Buena Vista, receiving two more brevet promotions to captain and major. At Buena Vista, General Zachary Taylor (future U.S. President) reported that "the services of the light artillery, always conspicuous, were more than unusually distinguished" during the battle. General John E. Wool wrote about Thomas that "without our artillery we would not have maintained our position a single hour." Thomas's battery commander wrote that Thomas's "coolness and firmness contributed not a little to the success of the day. Thomas more than sustained the reputation he had long enjoyed in his regiment as an accurate and scientific artillerist." During the Mexican War, Thomas served very closely with an artillery officer who would become a principal antagonist in the Civil War, Captain Braxton Bragg, a future Confederate General. He returned to West Point as a cavalry and artillery instructor, where he established a close professional, and personal relationship with another Virginia officer, Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee, the Academy superintendent, and future commander of the famous Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. His appointment at the academy was based in part on a positive recommendation from Braxton Bragg. Two of Thomas's students who received his recommendation for assignment to the cavalry, J.E.B. Stuart and Fitzhugh Lee, became prominent Confederate cavalry generals. On May 12, 1855, Thomas was appointed a major of the 2nd U.S. Cavalry, later re-designated the 5th U.S. Cavalry, by Jefferson Davis, then U.S. Secretary of War. Once again, Braxton Bragg had provided a recommendation for George H. Thomas's advancement. There was a suspicion as the Civil War drew closer that Jeff Davis had been assembling, and training a combat unit of elite U.S. Army officers who harbored Southern sympathies, and Thomas's appointment to this regiment implied that his colleagues assumed he would support his native state of Virginia in a future conflict. Thomas resumed his close ties with the second-in-command of the regiment, Robert E. Lee, and the two officers traveled extensively together on detached service for court-martial duty. In October 1857, Major Thomas assumed acting command of the cavalry regiment, an assignment he would retain for 2 1/2 years. On August 26, 1860, during a clash with a Comanche warrior, Thomas was wounded by an arrow passing through the flesh near his chin area, and sticking into his chest at Clear Fork, Brazos River, Texas. Thomas pulled the arrow out and, after a surgeon dressed the wound, he continued to lead the expedition. Thomas's antebellum career had been distinguished and productive, and he was one of the rare officers with U.S. Army field experience in all three combat arms of service; the infantry, cavalry, and artillery. On his way home to southern Virginia, he suffered a mishap in Lynchburg, Virginia, falling from a train platform and severely injuring his back. This accident led him to contemplate leaving military service and caused him pain for the rest of his life. Continuing to New York to visit with his wife's family, Thomas stopped in Washington, D.C., and conferred with General-in-Chief Winfield Scott, advising Scott that General David E. Twiggs, the commander of the Department of Texas, harbored secessionist sympathies, and could not be trusted in his post. Twiggs did indeed surrender his entire command to Confederate authorities shortly after Texas seceded, and later served as a general in the Confederate Army.

At the outbreak of the Civil War, 19 of the 36 officers in the 2nd U.S. Cavalry resigned, including three of Thomas's superiors; Albert Sidney Johnston, Robert E. Lee, and William J. Hardee. Many Southern-born officers were torn between loyalty to their states, and loyalty to their country. George Thomas struggled mightily with the decision, but decided to remain loyal to the United States. His Northern-born wife probably helped influence his decision. In response, his family turned his picture against the wall, destroyed his letters, and never spoke to him again. During the economic hard times in the South after the war, Thomas sent some money to his sisters, who angrily refused to accept it, declaring they had no brother! Thomas was one of the ablest Union commanders during the Civil War, and he saw action at Mill Springs, Shiloh, Corinth, Perryville, Stone's River, and Franklin & Nashville. However, his finest moment came during the battle of Chickamauga. His heroic stand on Horseshoe Ridge earned him the sobriquet of "The Rock of Chickamauga." Thomas had succeeded General William S. Rosecrans, in command of the Army of the Cumberland, shortly before the Battles for Chattanooga, on November 23–25, 1863, a stunning Union victory that was highlighted by General Thomas's troops taking Lookout Mountain, and then storming the Confederate line on Missionary Ridge. During General William Tecumseh Sherman's advance through Georgia in the spring of 1864, the Army of the Cumberland numbered over 60,000 men, and Thomas's staff did the logistics, and engineering for General Sherman's entire army group, including developing a novel series of pontoon bridges. At the Battle of Peachtree Creek, on July 20, 1864, Thomas's severely damaged General John Bell Hood's army in its first attempt to break through the siege of Atlanta. When General Hood broke away from Atlanta in the autumn of 1864, and menaced Sherman's long line of communications, and endeavored to force Sherman to follow him, but Sherman cut his communications, and embarked on his infamous "March to the Sea." General Thomas stayed behind to fight Hood in the Franklin-Nashville Campaign, and with a smaller force, raced with Hood to reach Nashville. At the Battle of Franklin, on November 30, 1864, a large part of Thomas's force, under command of General John M. Schofield, dealt Hood a strong defeat, and held him in check long enough to cover the concentration of Union forces in Nashville. General Thomas attacked General Hood on December 15, 1864, and the Battle of Nashville effectively destroyed Hood's army in two days of fighting. Thomas, sent the following telegram, "We have whipped the enemy, taken many prisoners and considerable artillery." Thomas was appointed a major general in the regular army, with date of rank of his Nashville victory, and received the Thanks of Congress in the following message:

"to Major-General George H. Thomas and the officers and soldiers under his command for their skill and dauntless courage, by which the rebel army under General Hood was signally defeated and driven from the state of Tennessee. General George H. Thomas also received another nickname from his victory, "The Sledge of Nashville."

After the end of the Civil War, General Thomas commanded the Department of the Cumberland in Kentucky and Tennessee, and at times also West Virginia and parts of Georgia, Mississippi and Alabama, through 1869. During the Reconstruction period, Thomas acted to protect freedmen (ex-slaves) from white abuses. He set up military commissions to enforce labor contracts since the local courts had either ceased to operate or were biased against blacks. Thomas also used troops to protect places threatened by violence from the Ku Klux Klan.

In a November 1868 report, General Thomas noted efforts made by former Confederates to paint the Confederacy in a positive light, stating: The greatest efforts made by the defeated insurgents since the close of the war have been to promulgate the idea that the cause of liberty, justice, humanity, equality, and all the calendar of the virtues of freedom, suffered violence and wrong when the effort for southern independence failed. This is, of course, intended as a species of political cant, whereby the crime of treason might be covered with a counterfeit varnish of patriotism, so that the precipitators of the rebellion might go down in history hand in hand with the defenders of the government, thus wiping out with their own hands their own stains; a species of self-forgiveness amazing in its effrontery, when it is considered that life and property—justly forfeited by the laws of the country, of war, and of nations, through the magnanimity of the government and people—was not exacted from them. George Henry Thomas, November 1868.

President Andrew Johnson offered Thomas the rank of lieutenant general—with the intent to eventually replace Grant, a Republican and future president, with Thomas as general in chief—but the ever-loyal Thomas asked the Senate to withdraw his name for that nomination because he did not want to be party to politics.

In 1869, he requested assignment to command the Military Division of the Pacific with headquarters at the Presidio of San Francisco. He died there of a stroke on March 28, 1870, while writing an answer to an article criticizing his military career by his wartime rival John M. Schofield. Sherman, by then general-in-chief, personally conveyed the news to President Grant at the White House. None of Thomas's blood relatives attended his funeral as they had never forgiven him for his loyalty to the Union. He was buried in Oakwood Cemetery, in Troy, New York.

Authentic 1800's period portrait engraving of Thomas in an oval format, in uniform, with rank of Major General. Overall size is about 7 x 10. Engraved by H. Wright Smith, From a Photograph. Printed signature of Thomas at the bottom of the piece. There is a small tear in the paper at the upper left corner. It has been repaired on the verso with archival document tape. It is in that little white area at the upper left, and it does not touch upon the dark background area. Very nice Civil War era likeness of General George H. Thomas, "The Rock of Chickamauga."