Little Phil: A Reassessment of the Civil War Leadership of Gen. Philip H. Sheridan (review)

For nearly 140 years, historians have heralded Philip Henry Sheridan as one of the Union Army's four greatest generals, ranking him alongside Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman, and George H. Thomas. Sheridan is usually depicted as the North's greatest cavalryman and the charismatic, hard-driving army commander who chased Lt. Gen. Jubal A. Early out of the Shenandoah Valley.

In Little Phil: A Reassessment of the Civil War Leadership of Gen. Philip H. Sheridan, Eric J. Wittenberg argues, "Sheridan does not deserve the lofty reputation bestowed upon him by history" (p. xix). Wittenberg claims that Sheridan was usually a mediocre general, as well as a petty, hypocritical, and deceitful man whose most outstanding talents lay in the art of self-promotion.

A prolific chronicler of cavalry operations in the Eastern Theater, Wittenberg succeeds in demonstrating that Sheridan did not enjoy uninterrupted success during his tenure as commander of the Army of the Potomac's Cavalry Corps in the spring and summer of 1864. He is also correct in saying that Sheridan's subsequent leadership of the Army of the Shenandoah was characterized by bouts of excessive caution and lost opportunities. Yet even Wittenberg has to admit that Sheridan made a masterful use of large cavalry and infantry formations in the combined arms pursuit that resulted in Gen. Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox.

For all Wittenberg's passion, Little Phil is not without flaws. A lawyer by training, Wittenberg conducts his examination of Sheridan's military career as if it were a prosecution. His goal is not to understand Sheridan, but to convict him. Instead of letting readers draw their own conclusions from the evidence, the book bombards them with pejorative rhetoric, including such chapter titles as "Little Phil's Cavalier Destruction of Lives and Careers" and "Sheridan's Mendacity."

Wittenberg's bibliography contains many conspicuous omissions. He makes no mention of Paul Andrew Hutton's Phil Sheridan and His Army, the most scholarly examination of Sheridan's flexible ethics and opportunistic personality. Wittenberg also neglected to examine many pertinent materials in the George Armstrong Custer papers at the New York Public Library and Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument.

Finally, Wittenberg fails to perceive why Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant considered Sheridan one of the Civil War's best commanders. Like Grant, Sheridan may not have scored a brilliant success in every battle, but by converting the Army of the Potomac's cavalry into an independent strike force, he drew his Rebel counterparts into a battle of attrition they could not afford. By the time Sheridan went to the Shenandoah Valley, the North was poised to win the struggle for mounted supremacy in the Eastern Theater. The impotence of the Army of Northern Virginia's remaining cavalry by the spring of 1865 contributed enormously to Sheridan's ability to trap Lee at Appomattox.