Who was George Henry Thomas?

[David Lockmiller]

When George Henry Thomas was a teenager in southern Virginia, he and his family were forced to run for their lives and hide in the woods from Nat Turner’s rebellion of enslaved people in 1831. Though many Southern enslavers responded to the rebellion by clamping down even harder on the enslaved, at least one of Thomas’s biographers thinks he had an almost opposite reaction, permanently turning against the myth of the “happy slave.”

Decades later, Thomas was a former U.S. Military Academy instructor and close friend of Lee’s when the war broke out. Many assumed he would join the Confederacy, but he didn’t. In fact, Thomas and the Union men he commanded ended up saving the day in a number of key battles. He even defeated a former student, the Confederate general John Bell Hood. Thomas paid a personal price for his loyalty: His Virginia family, including his sisters, reportedly never spoke to him again.

Washington Post April 9, 2023 "The Southern generals who stuck with the Union in the Civil War" by Gillian Brockell, staff writer for The Washington Post's history blog, Retropolis.