Reply #16: George Thomas

[Two Americas]

Has to be Virginian George Thomas - unrecognized hero of the Union army in many ways, and villified in the South, especially after his death. When Sherman ran into Thomas in Washington right before hostilities, he asked "so Tom where are you headed?" Thomas said "I am going South, Cump." Sherman assumed that Thomas, like almost all of the West Point graduates from the South, was going to enlist in the Confederate army and said "not you too?" Thomas said "at the head of a Union army, I hope."

"At the start of the war, Winfield Scott was the most celebrated Southerner to side with the Union. By the conflict's end, that distinction belonged to George Thomas. Thomas knew that his decision to bear arms against the South had subjected him to savage attacks by supporters of secession. In a March 2, 1867, piece in the Army and Navy Journal, he expressed anger at the way former Confederates had successfully stigmatized Unionism: "loyalists to the whole country are called d--d Yankees and traitors, and over the whole great crime with its accursed record of slaughtered heroes, patriots murdered because of their true-hearted love of country, widowed wives and orphaned children, and prisoners of war slain amid such horrors as find no parallel in the history of the world, they are trying to throw the gloss of respectability, and are thrusting with contumely and derision from their society the men and women who would not join hands with them in their work of ruining their country." Thomas wrote out of personal experience, for his own actions and character were the subject of a vicious campaign of rumor-mongering, distortions, and lies. Such attacks continued, even intensified, after his death."

"On March 28, 1870, Gen. George Thomas died in San Francisco, succumbing to what doctors diagnosed as an attack of apoplexy. Flags from Maine to California flew at half mast. Throughout the North, tributes flowed in from politicians, veterans, and newspaper editorialists. Gen. William T. Sherman wrote that the Civil War found his West Point classmate 'at his post true and firm, amid the terrible pressure he encountered by reason of his birthplace, Virginia.' The New York Times spoke of Thomas's 'unflinching loyalty,' and the Boston Daily Advertiser observed "he never seems to have hesitated for an instant as to his duty to stand by the flag."

http://www.aotc.net/Antithomasspin.htm