Critic's Corner

Riding with Sheridan

By Stephen Davis · Originally published December 2017 · pp. 32–33

When an historical event is passing into legend, it helps to have a poem written about it. Thus we have Thomas Buchanan Read’s “Sheridan’s Ride,” based on the battle of Cedar Creek, Va., fought on Oct. 19, 1864. “Up from the south at break of day/Bringing to Winchester fresh dismay,” the poem begins. The “fresh dismay,” to the Northern versifier, was Jubal Early’s surprise dawn attack on Philip Sheridan’s forces camped at Cedar Creek, south of Winchester. The Confederates overwhelmed and routed the Federals, then Early called off the pursuit around 10 a.m. Sheridan was twenty miles away at Winchester during the battle. He could hear the sound of distant fighting: “And louder yet into Winchester rolled/The roar of that red sea uncontrolled/ Making the blood of the listener cold.” “Little Phil”—he was all of 5’ 5” tall—saddled up Rienzi, his black charger, and started riding toward his embattled army. At first he saw groups of blueclad stragglers, then retreating masses. Faced with his panicked troops, he determined to rally them for a counterattack. “What was done? What to do? A glance told him both,” as Read’s verse puts it. The rattled retreaters took heart and halted. Sheridan then formed them for a counterstroke, with the general at one point riding the entire length of his cheering ranks: “He dashed down the line, ‘mid a storm of huzzas.” Finally, around 4 p.m., Union infantry and cavalry attacked Early’s left flank and began rolling it up. Now it was the Rebels’ turn to run, which they did. Pursuing Union horsemen scooped up a thousand prisoners, two dozen pieces of artillery, small arms, and wagons. Sheridan’s victory was complete. “Hurrah! hurrah for Sheridan!/Hurrah! hurrah for horse and man!” Read exclaims, closing with paeans for both Sheridan and Rienzi, “the steed that saved the day.” The general died in August 1888, having just finished his reminiscences, which were published by Charles Webster in two volumes later that year. Sheridan was proud of his war record, especially his dramatic triumph at Cedar Creek. In his Personal Memoirs he noted that General Grant ordered a hundred-gun salute in celebration of the victory, and that President Lincoln sent him a special letter of thanks (reproduced in vol. II, p. 91).1

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But in his description of the battle itself, and his ride to rally his troops, he was rather laconic. Not so his biographers. Rushing into print the very year of the general’s death was Frank A. Burr and Richard J. Hinton’s “Little Phil” and his Troopers. The Life of Gen. Philip H. Sheridan. The Romance and Reality: How an Humble Lad Reached the Head of an Army. In it Sheridan’s ride from Winchester is, of course, dramatically related. “Who, knowing the quality of the man,” they chirp, “cannot picture the restless rider urging his horse to his utmost speed to reach the field where the fate of his army was still pending in the hazard of war.” Burr and Hinton not only print Read’s “Sheridan’s Ride” in full, they tell the story of its first public reading at a Cincinnati opera house Nov. 1, 1864—just a week and a half after the event. The reader was one James E. Murdoch, friend of the poet, who recalled that the recited verses brought down the house (“cheer after cheer went up from the great concourse that shook the building to its very foundation”).2 Another early biographer, however, tried to tamp the whole thing down. Henry E. Davies, writing in 1895, reminded readers how “historic facts often destroy the romance and splendor with which a poetic imagination can invest the realities of actual life.” True, Sheridan’s troops had been routed; the general rode forth and rallied them; the Federals charged and won the day. Yet Davies sought to dispel the rosy glamour that had settled upon the ride, imparted at least partly by Read’s poem. “Upon General Sheridan’s authority,” the biographer explains, “it appears that the thrilling story of Sheridan’s Ride is a poetic conception, with as little foundation of truth as the heroic figure of Barbara Frietchie.”3 A generation later, Joseph Hergesheimer cast some scholarly detachment on the ride in his Sheridan (1931) by holding the general’s account up to other sources. No one, however, could disagree with the conclusion: “when General Sheridan did arrive upon the battle-field at Cedar Creek, an enormously improved spirit and steadiness instantly pervaded the Union army.”4 Richard O’Connor, biographer of George Thomas (1948) and John B. Hood (1949), turned his attention in 1953 to Sheridan (and his ride). “Sheridan’s 14mile ride to the battlefield at Cedar Creek became the subject of heated controversy almost as soon as the clatter of the hoofs died down on the flint-hard Valley Pike,” he asserts. It was glorified by the poem of T. Buchanan Read (which made the general’s horse Rienzi almost as famous as his rider), it was given a muck-raking by historians of a more skeptical era, it was argued in the newspapers and at veterans’ reunions for years afterward. There were those who said it was only a curious canter, and there were others who contended it was the maddest gallop since the headless rider pursued Ichabod Crane. O’Connor concludes simply, “it was good hard ride, everything considered.”5 It seems that Thomas Buchanan Read’s poem casts its shadow on virtually all narratives of Cedar Creek. An example comes from Edward J. Stackpole’s Sheridan in the Shenandoah (1961). The author of books on Gettysburg (1956) and other eastern theater campaigns, Stackpole took upon himself the estimation of how fast Little Phil rode from Winchester to the battlefield. “A simple calculation on the distance covered, approximately 12 miles from Mill Creek to the position where he came up with his disorganized army 1 ½ miles north of Middletown,” the author reasons, “proves rather conclusively that he did not proceed at an extended gallop, as the poet would have us believe.” Stackpole, as you see, did not name “the poet.” At this point in the literature, he really didn’t need to.6 In the past three decades, no fewer than five works on Sheridan have appeared. Paul Andrew Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army (1985) concerns the general’s campaigns against the Indians after the Civil War, summarizing his life before 1867 in fewer than thirty pages.7 Roy Morris Jr. is known as editor of America’s Civil War magazine and author of books on subjects as varied as Walt Whitman (2000) and the election of 1876 (2003). In his biography of Sheridan (1992), he seems to have some fun with Read’s poem. In the usual progress of worldly fame, the sublime soon gave way to the ridiculous. A minor poet named Thomas Buchanan Read, at the urging of retired actor James E. Murdock, who had visited Sheridan’s campaign a year earlier at Chattanooga to claim his son’s body, unburdened himself of a sixty-three line poem, written in galloping octometer, on the subject of “Sheridan’s Ride.” The poem was considerably short of a masterpiece, the best lines going to the horse Rienzi, but as a piece of Republican campaign rhetoric it was unexcelled. Debuted by Murdock at Cincinnati’s Pike Opera Hall on Nov. 1, 1864, “Sheridan’s Ride” took the North by storm and made its bemused subject even more of a household name. When Lincoln swamped McClellan in the presidential election a week later, many observers credited Read’s poem— as much as its inspiration’s achievements on the battlefield—with swelling the rout. Sheridan himself, perhaps ironically, renamed Rienzi “Winchester” in honor of the poem’s famous refrain: “Winchester, twenty miles away.” Morris suggests that had it not been for Read’s poem, Sheridan’s ride would have been consigned, well, to the dustbin of history. “[G]enerations of schoolchildren as yet unborn would stand before blackboards in northern cities reciting Read’s anthropomorphic epic.” Indeed, the poem won “a place in every elementary school primer for the next fifty years.”8 Eric Wittenberg, historian of Union cavalry, stands apart from the rest of the literature in what Jeffry D. Wert has called “a scathing indictment of Sheridan’s record,” his Little Phil: A Reassessment of the Civil War Leadership of Gen. Philip H. Sheridan (2002). Chapter titles alone indicate the author’s caustic perspective: “Sheridan as Cavalry Corps Commander: Mediocrity Reigns;” “Little Phil in the Shenandoah Valley: A Victorious Campaign Bereft of Decision;” and “Sheridan’s Disobedience of Orders.” As balance to all of this—you guessed it—Wittenberg’s opening pages reprint the complete text of Read’s “Sheridan’s Ride.”9 David Coffey, in Sheridan’s Lieutenants (2005), makes at least passing reference to Read’s poem.10 So does Joseph Wheelan in his biography of Sheridan (2012), adding that Read’s poem was “widely reprinted in newspapers across the North.”11 You get the idea. I happen to be a fan of Western films, including John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). One of its characters famously declares, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” In the case of Sheridan at Cedar Creek, biographers and military historians have detailed the memorable events of Oct. 19, 1864. But one may argue that it was Thomas Buchanan Read’s famous poem that allowed Sheridan’s ride to pass from fact into legend. 1. Personal Memoirs of P. H. Sheridan. General United States Army, 2 vols. (New York: Charles L. Webster & Co., 1888), II, 74-92. 2. Frank A. Burr and Richard J. Hinton, “Little Phil” and his Troopers. The Life of Gen. Philip H. Sheridan. Its Romance and Reality: How an Humble Lad Reached the Head of an Army (Providence R.I.: J.A. and R.A. Read, 1888), 233-36. 3. Henry A. Davies, General Sheridan (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1895), 182-87. 4. Joseph Hergesheimer, Sheridan: A Military Narrative (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1931), 250-54. 5. Richard O’Connor, Sheridan the Inevitable (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1953), 226. 6. Edward J. Stackpole, Sheridan in the Valley: Jubal Early’s Nemesis (Harrisburg Penn.: Stackpole Co., 1961), 323. 7. Paul Andrew Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), 2-27. 8. Roy Morris Jr., Sheridan: The Life and Wars of General Phil Sheridan (New York: Crown Publishers, 1992), 220. 9. Eric J. Wittenberg, Little Phil: A Reassessment of the Civil War Leadership of Gen. Philip H. Sheridan (Washington: Brassey’s, 2002), vi-viii.

10. David Coffey, Sheridan’s Lieutenants: Phil Sheridan, His Generals, and the Final Year of the Civil War (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 94. 11. Joseph Wheelan, Terrible Swift Sword: The Life of General Philip H. Sheridan (New York: Da Capo Press, 2012), 156. Steve Davis of Atlanta is a regular contributor to Civil War News and is the Book Review Editor. His book, A Long and Bloody Task: The Atlanta Campaign from Dalton through Kennesaw Mountain to the Chattahoochee River May 5-July 18, 1864, was published as part of Savas Beatie’s Emerging Civil War paperback series. The companion volume, All The Fighting They Want: The Atlanta Campaign From Peachtree Creek To The City’s Surrender, July 18-September 2, 1864, was published this Spring.