Symposium 2026 Spotlight: Not with a Sword, but with a Pen

Welcome back to our spotlight series, highlighting speakers and topics for our upcoming symposium. Over the coming weeks, we will continue previewing of our speaker’s presentations for the 2026 Emerging Civil War Symposium. This week we feature Joseph Ricci‘s topic:

Though John M. Schofield is largely an unknown name outside Civil War circles, George Thomas has enjoyed a resurgence of interest in recent years. While many of Thomas’s defenders allege that Ulysses S. Grant, Phillip Sheridan, and William T. Sherman tarnished the Virginian’s reputation, they tend to overlook Thomas’s wartime rival, Schofield. The controversy between the two began after Thomas voted to uphold Schofield’s expulsion from the United States Military Academy at West Point. Though he was readmitted, Schofield saw Thomas’s decision as a personal affront and never forgave him. By 1864, fate and the Confederate Army of Tennessee placed them as central figures in the Tennessee Campaign of 1864. Thomas, the commander of the Army of the Cumberland and charged with the defense of Nashville, oversaw operations in Middle Tennessee while Schofield assumed command of a delaying force tasked with slowing Gen. John Bell Hood and his army’s northern progress. Though the war ended, their rivalry did not. Schofield and Thomas’s post-war careers saw their relationship only further disintegrate as the U.S. Army downsized and command placements became scarce and driven by partisan politics. Schofield launched an offensive in the newspapers and anonymously authored letters that reached a fever pitch in 1870. On March 28, Thomas suffered a massive, fatal stroke. The last words he ever read came in the form of a criticism penned by Schofield. Did John Schofield kill George Thomas? Not with a sword, but with a pen.