George Henry Thomas Shotgun Thomas command wagon CLASS OF 1840 Commissioned first in the artillery, Thomas was rewarded for bravery in the Seminole War and in the Mexican War. In 1855 he joined the newly organized 2nd Cavalry regiment, a breeding ground of Confederate generals—Albert Sidney Johnson (Class of 1826), Robert E. Lee (1829), William J. Hardee (1838), Earl Van Dorn (1842). John Bell Hood (1853), and Fitzhugh Lee (1856). Thomas, too, became a general, but in the Union army. Nicknamed “Rock of Chickamauga” for his heroic stand amid the wreckage of a defeated Union army in 1863, he won one of the great Union victories of the war in 1864, shattering the last Confederate army in the West at the Battle of Nashville. Loyalty to the Union had its costs. Thomas’s sisters in Virginia turned his picture to the wall and never spoke to him again. NEXT John Clifford Pemberton Alfred Mordecai 1804–1887 Class of 1823 George Henry Thomas 1816–1870 Class of 1840 John Clifford Pemberton 1814–1881 Class of 1837 Robert Anderson 1805–1871 Class of 1825 Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard 1815–1893 Class of 1838
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