Phil Sheridan: A Good Cavalry Commander?

hanna260

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My apologies. I know this question has been asked many a time, but I'm curious about peoples opinions about his skills and his weaknesses as a cavalry commander under Grant all on one thread. How does he compare to other cavalry commanders? I know where I stand but what about all of you? :smile:
 
He was a 'good' cavalry commander, not a 'great' one. I think, he was an infantryman at heart, i.e., getting the maximum number of fighting men from point A to point B as quickly as possible was the name of his game..
 
I'm awaiting Eric Wittenberg's answer to this one (duck and cover)! In the meantime, his book about Trevillian Station, Glory Enough for All, will give you a fair idea. Or this video, speciically about Sheridan, in two parts:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?x-yt-cl=84503534&x-yt-ts=1421914688&v=twIU47rbPUs#t=1853
(Not too sure what I did here….)

Since I grew up in the western US, studying Western US history (mostly post-Civil War), my opinion of Sheridan as an Indian fighter is not quite printable. I do give him credit, though, for saving Yellowstone Park from commercial exploitation. But that's off-topic here.
 
Everything that I have to say can be heard in that video. And believe me, none of it is good.

He was a wretched, atrocious, mendacious, grossly insubordinate cavalry commander.

I agree completely if we're talking about the classical view of the cavalry.

My hypothesis is that Sheridan rebuilt the Army of the Potomac's cavalry into something else entirely. It was a mobile striking force. I think the best way to think about it is as mounted infantry, though that's also an imperfect metaphor.

Sheridan wasn't interested in doing reconnaissance for the army. He wasn't interested in protecting the flanks of the army. Essentially, he wasn't interested in doing anything the cavalry was normally used for. Instead, my reading indicates to me that he wanted to use the cavalry to strike hard against the enemy's army.

Whether or not this was a good thing is hard to say for certain. Sometimes it was good, sometimes it wasn't. If the cavalry's not going to do recon, that means the infantry has to do it, and that often led to trouble for the infantry. If the cavalry's not going to protect the flanks or screen the army, that means the infantry is going to have to do it, and that often led to trouble for the infantry. Sheridan doesn't seem to have cared about that. He definitely was not a team player, which is quite usually a bad thing in the military.
 
In other circumstances, Sheridan would have made an excellent slave driver on a plantation. However, that's not the issue. He was insubordinate (viz. his direct refusal to obey Grant's order to consolidate with Sherman); he was late at Spotsylvania when reconnaissance and screening were not issues at all; he got steamed about criticism and Grant made his careless remark that sent Sheridan off to Yellow Tavern and the accidental killing of JEB Stuart before scuttling to Ben Butler, a la Kilpatrick; he was caught napping in the Valley before managing to turn things around against a seriously depleted foe.

Actually that last shows a better side of him; he was more at home with a combined force of infantry, cavalry and artillery - a role in which he was infinitely more useful at Petersburg than he was/would have been as a cavalry commander (under Grant or under Sherman in the Carolinas).

FWIW (nothing at all) Snooks has this to say of their first meeting:

He stepped away to set his minions to work and I considered how to play this stroke of luck. If he’d heard of me, I couldn’t say the same of him. At this first meeting all I could see of Little Phil was a ferocious bantam in his late thirties, short of leg and long in body and arm. His clothes looked as if he had them laundered while he yet stood in ’em, dispensing impatient orders to the world. With dark hair and a no-nonsense moustache set in a tanned face, he brought to mind a particularly persistent gypsy hawker. Unpublished manuscript
 
I agree that he was best on the offensive in command of large all-arms forces. Not unlike Irwin Rommel, another infantryman turned mobile tactician, i.e. not being a cavalryman, he expected all his forces to perform infantry missions and tended to be as hard on his men(and officers) as on the enemy.
It was no accident that Sheridan and his striking force was exactly where Grant needed him to finally turn Lee's flank, nor that Grant gave Sheridan command of his mobile forces including senior corps commanders to get the job done.
It is doubtful that no one but Sheridan could have driven the vital pursuit to get ahead of Lee's crippled Army at Appomattox(i.e., when the crunch came, Grant went to the one commander he brought with him from the armies of the West.
 
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