Battle of Booneville: How a July Morning Made Philip Sheridan a General

On the first day of July, eighteen sixty-two, a thirty-one-year-old Union colonel named Philip Sheridan held a defensive position at Booneville, Mississippi. He had established his lines to the south of the town three days earlier, waiting for what he knew was coming. It came at eight thirty in the morning: a Confederate assault under Brigadier General James Chalmers, who threw his cavalry at Sheridan's regiment hard enough to push the flanks back.

Sheridan did not panic. Instead, he did something that would define his military career for the next three years. He sent a small detachment of cavalry on a wide flanking ride around the Confederate left, with orders to hit the enemy's rear and make as much noise as possible. The maneuver worked perfectly. Chalmers' attacking force, hearing gunfire at its back, assumed it was encircled and withdrew. The Battle of Booneville lasted most of the morning and ended in a clear Union victory.

The cost to the Confederacy was significant. The cost to the Union was the discovery of one of its most capable combat commanders. Sheridan's superior officers sent a telegram to Washington that essentially said: promote this man immediately. He was made a brigadier general, skipping ahead of dozens of more senior officers on the basis of what he had done at Booneville.

Three years later, Philip Sheridan would be one of the architects of Union victory, his cavalry charge at Five Forks in April of eighteen sixty-five helping to force Robert E. Lee out of Petersburg and toward Appomattox. The campaign that produced one of the war's most consequential generals began on a July morning in Prentiss County, Mississippi, when a young colonel decided to counterattack.