1 of our greatest generals – nearly murdered at 15

One of the circles near downtown Washington, D.C., is named in his honor and features his equestrian statue.

He was surely one of the greatest generals in American history, known best as “The Rock of Chickamagua.”

A new Simon and Schuster biography entitled “Master of War,” by Vermont’s Dr. Benson Bobrick, is the life of Gen. George H. Thomas.

This is an undeniably interesting and generally well-documented history, which I read with general appreciation.

I do regret, however, the considerable number of times in which this author strongly criticizes two of Gen. Thomas’ superior and better known general officers, because, Bobrick contends: “The deliberate suppression of Thomas’ fame by the best-known soldiers of the Union, Sherman and Grant, is a continuing national tragedy that must be set right.”

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Dr. Bobrick contends, repeatedly, that during the Civil War only one Union general never lost a battle. That may indeed be true, but the value of Grant and Sherman in winning the war should not, in my view, be so repeatedly devalued.

It is true that from Gen. Thomas engineering one of the first significant Northern victories at Mill Springs, to his final and ultimate victory in devastating Confederate Gen. John Bell Hood’s forces outside Nashville, Thomas was a superb military leader who needs to be remembered.

But one of the most significant and terrifying events in Gen. Thomas’ life took place when he was 15 years old. On his family’s plantation in Virginia, he was very nearly murdered during what is known to history as “Nat Turner’s Rebellion.”

“He was nearly cut to pieces” writes Bobrick, “in Nat Turner’s great slave revolt.”

Then, this author devotes six pages of near-adulation to Nat Turner – “Preacher Nat who had learned to read and write with remarkable ease, singularity of manners and intelligence … grew to manhood with the words of the prophets roaring in his ears.”

There is no mention of which prophet allegedly roared into Nat Turner’s ear to do what he did on April 23, 1831.

But after he did it, he told his defense counsel: “Was not Christ crucified?”

“When it was all over,” writes Bobrick, “some 60 whites and 200 blacks (most by reprisal killings) lost their lives.”

That this historian would use the term “60 whites” – with no mention whatsoever of Encyclopedia Britannica’s notation that Turner’s band “butchered 13 men, 18 woman and 24 children” is an omission that is so appalling as to provide a major undercutting of the credibility of this book. So, for that matter, is his failure to mention whether or not any black children died in the reprisals for this horror in American history.