Sheridan's Ride

The works of Anna Hyatt Huntington (1876-1973) are a cut above this. Her genius was for subtle, vivid small animal sculptures, and she is not forgotten: the National Museum of Women in the Arts sells online a reproduction of her Yawning Jaguar in genuine hydrostone for $99.99, shipping and handling extra. However, Huntington’s large sculptures combine her superb technique with overblown romantic bombast. She studied with Gutzon Borglum, whose megalomaniac later works include Mount Rushmore and the Confederate monument on Stone Mountain, GA. (Borglum began what became the world’s largest bas-relief, three acres of Lee, Jackson and Davis on horseback, all at least nine stories high.)

In 1923, Anna Hyatt married Archer Milton Huntington, who bankrolled the Hispanic Society of America. Understandably, then, her flamboyant El Cid Campeador dominates the society’s forecourt at Audubon Terrace, between 155th and 156th Sts. An admirer wrote, "The Cid gloriously bestrides his mount, he carries himself with exactly the flourish that is associated with his legend, and from the tips of his feet to the hand clenching the staff of his flaunting banner he is magnificently alive." Mrs. Huntington added four statues of seated warriors about the base, surrounded by heraldic lions, stags, does, bears, jaguars, vultures and wild boars, and then, energies unquenched, designed the bases of two nearby flagpoles, carved with "muscular men and frantic horses entangled in desperate struggle, kneeling monks and churchmen, and statuettes symbolic of the arts." On the rear walls of the forecourt are equestrian bas-reliefs of Don Quixote and of Boabdil, Granada’s last Muslim king, who has reined up to turn and gaze at his lost city. On its base is engraved a verse by Mr. Huntington:

If memory serves, a Tex-Mex restaurant once advertised: "Too much ain’t enough!" Sometimes, it is. Mrs. Huntington’s sculpture, at least en masse as at Audubon Terrace, overwhelms: it seems, as Henry James said of "the exclusive estheticism" of the Italian poet-adventurer D’Annunzio, "bound, sooner or later, to spring a leak." Yet, if Mrs. Huntington had sculpted Sheridan’s statue in Christopher Park, we would recognize the subject. Even kitsch requires technical skill.

Sheridan is better represented in the bravura statue by Borglum at Massachusetts Ave. and 23rd and R Streets in Washington: having pulled up his warhorse Rienzi, Sheridan is turning in the saddle, hat crumpled in his gloved right hand, ready to turn the tide at Cedar Creek.

Philip Henry Sheridan–"Little Phil," who never lost a battle–was short, about 5 feet 5 inches tall, with a long torso, stumpy legs and, as Lincoln said, "such long arms that if his ankles itch he can scratch them without stooping." After eight years’ active duty, Sheridan was still only a second lieutenant in 1861. Within a year he would be a general. Like most great American commanders of the past, he would be unwelcome in today’s Army, corrupted by Robert McNamara and his successors into a puddle of political correctness. Sheridan was quick-tempered and blunt: West Point suspended him for a year after he assaulted a cadet officer with a bayonet and his fists. Ten years later, Maj. Gens. Sheridan and George H. Thomas, who was called the Rock of Chickamauga, were conferring in a day coach when a Southern railroad conductor spoke to Little Phil with "less than adequate respect." Sheridan wordlessly rose, beat the conductor senseless, threw him off his own train, returned to his seat and resumed the conversation, "no explanation given and none required."

Yet Sheridan’s planning reflected a deliberate, thoroughly professional mind. He had been a quartermaster, one who marshals men and supplies, and the discipline took. His commands fought hard, but never without food, clothing, shelter or ammunition.

Perversely, he became immortal for the day he was surprised. Before dawn on Oct. 19, 1864, the Confederate Army of the Valley, Lt. Gen. Jubal A. Early commanding, fell upon Sheridan’s encamped army at Cedar Creek, VA. Little Phil was at Winchester, VA, returning from a conference in Washington. Early shattered the Union left and center. The entire Eighth Corps, nine thousand strong, panicked and ran. The attack happened so quickly many federal troops fled in their underwear. The rebels were looting Sheridan’s tents as the sun rose over the Shenandoah Valley.

Thomas Buchanan Read’s most famous poem, "Sheridan’s Ride," begins here:

Like Sheridan, Early was tough, irritable and profane. Always outnumbered, always outgunned, Early was audacious and imaginative. He terrified the Union when he slipped his command through the Army of the Potomac to Washington’s gates on July 11, 1864. Early had hoped to draw Sheridan from the Burning, his campaign to ravage the Shenandoah. He failed. Little Phil was ordered by Gen. U.S. Grant to transform the breadbasket of the Confederacy into a wasteland, where "crows flying over it for the balance of this season will have to carry their own provender."

When called at dawn on Oct. 19, in Winchester, "twenty miles away," Sheridan heard distant artillery fire. He thought it part of a reconnaissance in force he had ordered before departing for Washington. He stepped outside around 9 a.m. The guns seemed louder. He mounted Rienzi and met his cavalry escort. Then, puzzled, he dismounted and put his ear to the ground. What the ex-Indian fighter heard was the continuous roar of full battle and the sound was approaching. His army was in retreat. Now he trotted forward. As he crested a rise, Sheridan suddenly saw, in Maj. George "Sandy" Forsyth’s words, "hundreds of slightly wounded men, throngs of others unhurt but utterly demoralized, and baggage-wagons by the score, all pressing to the rear in hopeless confusion." He received reports as Rienzi walked forward at a measured pace. A conventional commander might have regrouped just outside Winchester, gathering stragglers into a defensive line. Instead, he ordered the stragglers collected and funneled back up the turnpike toward the front.

Then he spurred Rienzi toward the sound of the guns. At his right, an orderly carried Sheridan’s personal battle flag, bearing the two stars of a major general.

It was a brilliant Indian summer morning. Rienzi stretched his legs, leaving most of the escort in the dust. The Newtown crossroads were jammed with supply wagons and caissons. Sheridan took Rienzi over the wall and into the fields.

Sheridan thundered through the files of retreating men, most wounded only in their pride. He roared, "Come on back, boys, face the other way, we’ll give ’em hell, God damn them, we’re going to lick those fellows out of their boots," among other things. A witness of Sheridan’s verbal skills wrote he "didn’t spare anybody in the bunch and included all their kinfolk, direct and collateral. It was a liberal education in profanity to hear him." And it worked. Thure de Thurlstrup’s painting, Sheridan’s Ride, now at Brown University, shows Sheridan at full gallop, the pennant whipping in the breeze, as the stragglers stop, stare, begin cheering and turn around.

South of Newtown, he regained the road to find the Sixth Corps standing fast in line of battle. Not everyone had run away. Gen. Alfred Torbert rode up, saluted, and said, "My God, I’m glad you’ve come." Sheridan rode out before the troops, wheeled Rienzi and shouted, "Men, by God, we’ll whip them yet. We’ll sleep in our old tents tonight." The men roared back. He found his three corps commanders conferring nearby. Brig. Gen. Emory murmured that his men were ready to cover the retreat. Sheridan spat his reply: "Retreat! Hell, I just got here!"

It was 10:30 a.m. His men hungry and exhausted, Early’s assault had bogged down. Maj. Gen. John Brown Gordon, who had broken Sheridan’s left that morning, begged to renew the attack. Early replied, "This is glory enough for one day." Sheridan brought up his reserves and regrouped. At noon, he rode the length of his own front, as biographer Roy Morris Jr. put it, "swinging his hat in his right hand to give the soldiers a glimpse of his familiar bullet-shaped head." Their thunderous cheers rolled down the line with him. At 4 p.m., 200 Union buglers sounded the charge. Sheridan smashed into the Confederate left, turned it and then rolled up Early’s line. By 5:30, the fighting was over. Sheridan’s horsemen pursued the rebels into the night. Cedar Creek was Sheridan’s greatest triumph. At 9 a.m., he was beaten; by sundown, he had driven the enemy from the field. Within a week, Read’s poem was a bestseller. The horse gets the best lines:

"Sheridan’s Ride" was recited in high schools for nearly a century.

On April 1, 1865, Sheridan personally commanded the charge at Five Forks, leaping Rienzi over the rebel breastworks into, as Morris noted, "a group of astonished southerners like the angel of death," forcing Gen. Robert E. Lee from Richmond. On April 6, he forced six generals and 10,000 men to surrender at Sayler’s Creek. On April 8, he blocked Lee’s last line of retreat. Around 1 p.m. on April 9, Grant and Sheridan rode up to Wilmer McLean’s home at Appomattox Court House, VA. Lee waited in the parlor.

The performance of Sheridan and his men during the first nine days of April 1865 is nearly unparalleled. As Grant said, "Sheridan has no superior as a general, either living or dead, and perhaps not an equal." Little Phil was then 34 years old.

Rienzi died in 1878. Sheridan had his body preserved. Today, in the Smithsonian’s Hall of Armed Forces History, Rienzi stands, saddled as he was that golden October morning: