Personal Memoirs of P. H. Sheridan, General, United States Army — Volume 1

Philip Henry SheridanProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 4.3
Word count
616K words
Chapters
62

Tags

English Originals Political and Military LeadersMilitary Military HistoryMilitary StrategyArmy of the PotomacMilitary CommandersHeroismCivil War MemoirDocumentary NarrativeSocial Observation

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Personal Memoirs of P. H. Sheridan, General, United States Army — Volume 1Author: Sheridan, Philip Henry, 1831-1888,Language: English, Class: E456: History: America: Civil War period (1861-1865), Release Date: Mar 27, 2005

Editor's review

This is the first volume of General Sheridan's personal memoirs, a source text on the American Civil War. Its value lies not in literary style but in a frontline commander's firsthand account of marches, deployments, supply, and battles—concrete in detail, practical in tone, with occasional blunt assessments of colleagues and superiors. Readers see how military decisions are made on incomplete information, and sense the expressive habits of nineteenth-century American officers. As a public-domain electronic text, it suits source study or writing reference rather than casual cover-to-cover reading. Read with maps and a timeline at hand, and look up names and places as you go; the returns will be markedly different.

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Reading tips

  1. Read the volume's introduction or preface first to establish the timeline and main battles, then enter the text.
  2. Keep a map of the American Civil War at hand and mark routes and battle sites as you read.
  3. Jot down names and unit designations as they appear; the relationships will be clearer on review.
  4. No need to read every page; select by battle or theme and use it as a source reference.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
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  31. 31
  32. 32
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  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
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  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
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  44. 44
  45. 45
  46. 46
  47. 47
  48. 48
  49. 49
  50. 50
  51. 51
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  55. 55
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FAQ

Is this the complete memoir or one volume of it? This is the first volume of Sheridan's personal memoirs, not the whole. It covers his early years and part of his military career; for the full arc you need the later volumes, so a single volume should not be taken as a panoramic biography.
Can I read it without basic knowledge of the American Civil War? You can, but it is difficult. The text assumes familiarity with numerous names, unit designations, and places. Supplement it first with an outline timeline and main battles of the war, or you will lose your bearings in the details.
How reliable is it as a historical source? Memoirs carry the author's standpoint and the limits of later memory, so it should not be treated as neutral archive. Read it against other sources and note whether his assessments of colleagues carry a defensive or partisan bent; treat it as one perspective, not the only conclusion.
Is the English original hard to read? Nineteenth-century military memoirs have long sentences and many military terms and place names, posing a threshold for non-native readers. It suits those with intermediate or better English who are willing to look up proper nouns; otherwise, read relevant Chinese scholarship first as groundwork.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Philip Henry Sheridan Author · American · 1831–1888

Philip Henry Sheridan (1831–1888) was a celebrated Union cavalry general during the American Civil War and a graduate of West Point. In 1864 he commanded the Army of the Shenandoah, inflicting heavy defeats on Confederate forces at battles such as Winchester and Cedar Creek. He later served as general-in-chief of the U.S. Army and was promoted to the rank of four-star general. The library holds nine of his works, all different volumes and parts of his Personal Memoirs. Written from a first-hand perspective, the book recounts marches, battles, and command decisions of the Civil War in a direct style rich in detail. It combines military historical value with the immediacy of personal recollection and is an important source for studying the Civil War, especially cavalry operations and the Shenandoah campaign. Beyond his life and works, public information on his early years, specific postings, and the making of the memoirs is limited, so no conjecture is offered here.