George H. Thomas: The Virginian Whose Family Turned His Portrait Away

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George Henry Thomas was born in 1816 in Southampton County, Virginia, to a wealthy plantation family of Welsh and French Huguenot ancestry, and as a teenager fled into the woods with his mother and sisters during Nat Turner's rebellion in 1831. This episode follows him from West Point, where he graduated 12th in a class of 42 in 1840, through artillery service under Zachary Taylor in the Mexican-American War and a cavalry posting where his refusal to overwork the academy's aging horses earned him the nickname Slow Trot Thomas. When secession came in 1861, he held to his oath to the United States while 19 of the 36 officers in his regiment, including Robert E. Lee and Albert Sidney Johnston, went south, and his family responded by erasing him.

At Chickamauga in September 1863, after William Rosecrans fled the field, Thomas anchored a defense on Horseshoe Ridge and became the Rock of Chickamauga. In late 1864 he rebuilt an army at Nashville from clerks, recruits and Black regiments, waited out an ice storm while Ulysses S. Grant drafted orders to relieve him, and then destroyed John Bell Hood's Army of Tennessee on December 15. During Reconstruction he used military commissions against biased local courts, deployed troops against the Ku Klux Klan and condemned the Lost Cause narrative in an 1868 report, before dying of a stroke in 1870 with his private papers already destroyed.

• A Comanche arrow passed through his chin and into his chest in Texas in 1860; he pulled it out himself and kept directing the mission.
• He had instructed and recommended J.E.B. Stuart and Fitzhugh Lee for cavalry posts, and Stuart later wrote that he wished to see Thomas hanged as a traitor.
• His family returned the money he later sent them and declared they had no brother.
• He asked the Senate to withdraw his name when Andrew Johnson offered him a promotion to lieutenant general as a rival to Grant.
• Grant's popular memoirs described him as sluggish, and with no autobiography of his own, that portrait endured.