Thread by @EricColumbus

THREAD: Here's a statue honoring a Civil War general from Virginia that will remain. He fought for the North. His story matters now. (1/35)

2. George Thomas grew up in a slaveholding family near North Carolina and in adulthood employed a couple of slaves as domestic servants.

3. Yet he played a key role in winning the war that ended slavery. Besides Grant and Sherman, few if any Union generals were as important.

4. Thomas served under his fellow Virginian Robert E. Lee at West Point, where he was an instructor while Lee was Superintendent.

5. Lee was offered a top command in the Union Army but chose instead to lead Virginia’s troops and later all Confederate forces.

6. Thomas, in contrast, decided to fight for the Union and to uphold the oath he had sworn upon entering the U.S. Army.

7. He saw secession as invalid except in case of tyranny & said of fellow Southerners that “the tyranny did not exist & they well knew it."

8. His wife was from the North, but he was a son of the South, and his sisters never spoke to him again.

9. One fellow Virginian, Confederate General J.E.B. Stuart, wrote that he would “like to hang, *hang* him as traitor to his native state.”

10. Nevertheless, he persisted. Leading the Army of the Cumberland, Thomas was essential to the Union’s success in the western theater.

11. When the war began, Thomas’s views on race seem to have been typical of his time and place. But the war changed him.

12. He supported the enlistment of black soldiers but, like most Southern whites, initially doubted their prowess in battle.

13. Experience taught him differently. At the crucial Battle of Nashville, Thomas for the first time depended heavily on black troops.

14. Their discipline and courage exceeded some of the white units, despite suffering heavy casualties, and helped rout the Confederates.

15. “Gentlemen, the question is settled,” Thomas said to his staff officers. “Negroes will fight.”

16. After the war, Thomas helped lead the military occupation of the defeated South, as commander of the Department of the Cumberland.

17. He worked to protect the rights of blacks in Tennessee and Kentucky in the face of white hostility and limited military resources.

18. He received little help from President Andrew Johnson, a Tennessean, who took office days after the war’s end due to Lincoln’s murder.

19. Johnson frequently wrote Thomas to object to black troops serving in the occupied South.

20. Thomas tactfully pushed back, emphasizing the importance of black troops in keeping the peace and ensuring justice for black freedmen.

21. Thomas was facing down an erratic, blustering president who wanted to kick a minority group out of the military. Sound familiar?

22. He was often mentioned as a possible presidential candidate in 1868, he had no interest in politics. He died two years later.

23. In 1879, this statue was erected in Washington, about a mile from my house and half a mile from the White House.

24. It stands as a rebuke to Lee, his fellow Virginian.

25. It demonstrates that we can honor southern white heritage without exalting those who tried to rip apart our nation for slavery’s sake.

26. The statue led me to books. I’m indebted to Thomas biographies by Christopher Einolf and Brian Steel Wills. In the words of Einolf:

27. "[W]hen circumstances gave Thomas the opportunity to rethink his racial views, he took that opportunity & made the right decision. . . .

28. “That he did so demonstrates that people do have freedom to make moral choices despite prejudices they acquire from their culture. . . .

29. "That so few Southern whites made the same decision demonstrates how difficult this choice can be."

30. Some who would preserve Confederate statues insist that opponents are imposing modern-day standards on people of a different time.

31. It’s true that we claim moral superiority over our ancestors at our peril. We don’t know what we would have done in their shoes.

32. But we should honor those who made the right choices, even if – especially if – they were imperfect people.

33. And even if – especially if – we might not have had the courage or wisdom to do what they did.

34. When my kids are old enough to understand, I’ll take them to this statue and tell them that this was one such man.

END OF THREAD