Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,783
By This is the grave of John Schofield.
Born in 1831 in Gerry, New York, Schofield grew up the son of a Baptist minister and missionary. The lattermeant a lot of moving around and they ended up in Freeport, Illinois for Schofield’s teenage years. After school, Schofield spent some time surveying land in Wisconsin and then became a school teacher back in Illinois. He really wanted to go to West Point and managed to get in. In his senior year there, he was a teaching assistant for some kind of introductory math course and he was accused of allowing other cadets to make offensive drawings on the chalkboard (this was the early 1850s, so maybe they were hilarious Fillmore jokes). He was going to be dismissed for this violation of the code of conduct, but Stephen A. Douglas intervened after Schofield issued personal appeal to the senator. The review of the expulsion did work for Schofield, but not unanimously and one of the people who wanted him gone was George Thomas, who would have contempt for him for the rest of his life.
Schofield finished at West Point in 1853 and was commissioned as a second lieutenant. He was down in Florida mopping up the Seminole War when he got sick from tropical diseases and had to be sent home for a good long time. He then got a job teaching philosophy at West Point. But he left the Army in 1860, seeing no good career path ahead. He got a job teaching physics at Washington University in St, Louis.
But when the Civil War started, Schofield was immediately ready to fight. He first helped ensure Missouri stayed in the Union. He became a major in the 1st Missouri Infantry and was right there with Nathaniel Lyon in the early battles of the war in the West, including at Wilson’s Creek, where the latter was killed. He became brigadier general of volunteers later in 1861 and was in the Trans-Mississippi for the next couple of years, mostly commanding out of St. Louis. He was promoted to major general late in 1862 and was involved in mostly pushing the Confederates out of southern Missouri.
In 1863, Schofield requested a transfer out of Missouri due to the mutual hate between him and his superior officer, Samuel Curtis. He was in the Army of the Cumberland for awhile and then was back in Missouri later that year. He got his first taste of political controversy there, when he was accused by abolitionists of pro-Confederate sentiments when he wouldn’t let Kansas radicals pursue some Confederate bushwhackers into Missouri. This went all the way to Lincoln, who backed his general, but accusations of Schofield being soft on traitors would become pretty common after the war. In 1864, Schofield was sent to work with William Tecumseh Sherman in the Atlanta campaign and then with his old nemesis George Thomas in Tennessee. Here, Schofield was a massive asshole. He wanted Thomas’ job and so he started lying to Ulysses S. Grant about Thomas’ performance to get him fired.
After the war, Schofield and Andrew Johnson became close. Johnson sent him to France to convince the French to get their troops out of Mexico. The French weren’t too interested and Schofield was no politician. Johnson then named Schofield Military Governor of Virginia during Congressional Reconstruction, ensuring someone as soft on traitors as possible was going to be in charge there if the Radical Republicans were going to force the issue. When Johnson finally forced Edwin Stanton out of the job of Secretary of War, leading to his legendary impeachment, he named Schofield to replace Stanton. He was Secretary of War for the last 10 months of Johnson’s term.
Schofield had stayed in the military while Secretary of War and so when Grant became president and certainly wasn’t going to keep him in the job, he reverted to active service and received a promotion to major general. He became head of the Department of the Missouri for a year and then was moved to commanding the Military Division of the Pacific upon the death of his old nemesis George Thomas, which I am sure he enjoyed. In 1873, Secretary of War William Belknap gave Schofield something to do–investigate whether the U.S. should consider annexing Hawaii for a naval port. Schofield visited the islands, saw Pearl Harbor, and recommended the idea.
In 1876, Schofield became superintendent at West Point. This allowed Schofield to really embrace his inner racist. There were two incidents over his five years there that showed what a scumbag he really was. First, Rutherford B. Hayes had him reopen the case against Fitz John Porter, courtmartialed after his epic failure at Second Manassas. What infuriated people who wanted a prosecution of Confederates is that Schofield just asked old Confederate generals what they thought and they were like, Porter was great! So Schofield exonerated him and eventually Grover Cleveland pardoned him. Worse, by this time, there were a couple of Black cadets. In 1880, some white cadets beat the living hell out of one of them in a racist attack. Schofield decided he did it to himself to frame whites and had him courtmartialed. This absurdity led to a congressional investigation of West Point and Schofield being fired from his job.
After this, Schofield, now pretty old, was given various posts that were high ranking but didn’t really account for much. There wasn’t really that much for the military to do in the 1880s anyway. In 1888, Phil Sheridan died. Schofield replaced him as commanding general of the Army. This wasn’t quite as powerful role as you might think–it was based on seniority alone. No one confused Schofield for Sheridan, but you also don’t get that far without a solid career. He remained reasonably important. He was less terrible on the Tribes than Genocide Sheridan, urging the government to actually honor the treaties (imagine that!). He worked to professionalize the military some and try to decrease the role of political patronage in promotions. This part was hilarious–he was frequently accused of playing massive favorites with his own family. Hate the game, not the player I guess. Was that phrase initially created for John Schofield? He also completely supported the Cleveland administration using the Army to crush the Pullman strike in 1894, again showing how loathed the idea of worker rights was for Gilded Age elites.
Schofield retired in 1895, having reached the mandatory retirement age of 64. He remained on the margins of things though, including working to create the National Guard in 1903, through the passage of the Dick Act, obviously my favorite bill in American history. In 1897, he published Forty-six Years in the Army, his memoir. By the time he died, 1906, he was the last surviving member of the Johnson Cabinet. But he was only 74 when he died, not some ancient.
John Schofield is buried on the confiscated lands of the Traitor Lee, Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia.
If you would like this series to visit other members of Andrew Johnson’s Cabinet–and what a bunch of special guys they were–you can donate to cover the required expenses here. William Evarts is in Windsor, Vermont and Orville Browning is in Quincy, Illinois. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.