Forty-Six Years in the Army (1897)

In Forty-Six Years in the Army, John M. Schofield, Union Army general and post-Civil War commander of the U.S. Army, provides provocative views of General William T. Sherman’s campaign against Atlanta and army operations in the late nineteenth century. In the postwar years he became secretary of war under Andrew Johnson, and he held various commands until 1888, when he succeeded General Philip Sheridan as commander of the army. As William M. Ferraro notes in his foreword, Schofield offers valuable insight not only into Sherman’s campaign and Civil War battles but also into such postwar concerns as Reconstruction, diplomacy, Indian affairs, the sensational case at West Point involving black cadet Johnson C. Whittaker, the Fitz-John Porter court martial, and labor unrest.