No Disgrace to My Country
Lt. John C. Tidball, circa 1850. USMA Archives.
THE LIFE OF JOHN C. TIDBALL
No Disgrace
to My Country
EUGENE C. TIDBALL
THE KENT STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
KENT & LONDON
2002 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number
2001002307
ISBN 0-87338-722-8
Manufactured in the United States of America
06 05 04 03 02 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tidball, Eugene C., 1930
No disgrace to my country : the life of John C. Tidball / Eugene C. Tidball.
p. cm.
Includes Bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-87338-722-8 (alk. paper)
1. Tidball, John C. (John Caldwell), 18251906.
2. United States. ArmyOfficersBiography.
3. SoldiersUnited StatesBiography.
4. GeneralsUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.
U53.T54 T54 2002
355.0092dc21
2001002307
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication data are available.
Portions of the following chapters of this book were originally published elsewhere, in earlier forms: , General Shermans Last March, Montana: The Magazine of Western History 44 (Spring 1994); Colorado History 1 (1997).
Designed by Will Underwood
Composed in Stone Print by Charles W. King
Printed & bound by Thomson-Shore, Inc.
to the artillerymen,
North and South,
who stayed with their guns
Contents
T HE WRITER of a historical narrative invariably incurs debts. The debit side of my ledger is filled with the names of librarians, archivists, historians, university teachers, and authors, all but a few of whom must remain anonymous.
Anyone writing about nineteenth-century American military history will find it necessary to round up the usual suspectsthat select group of scholars and archivists in possession of information and documents indispensable to the military historian. Among those who assisted me are Michael Musick and Michael Meir of the Old Military Records group at that splendid repository, The National Archives; Dr. Richard J. Sommers, notable Civil War scholar at the U.S. Army Military Institute; and Alan Aimone, senior special collections librarian, U.S. Military Academy Library, who was always courteous and helpful. The documentary spine of my narrative is composed of the memoirs and letters of John C. Tidball, the mother lode of which resides at the U.S. Military Academy Archives; I am greatly indebted to Suzanne Christoff and her willing and able staff at that institution.
David Hedrick, collections librarian at Gettysburg College, a longtime admirer of John Tidball, made available to me that institutions small but interesting collection of Tidball papers, and, with the help of archivist Karen Drickamer, assisted me in locating documents at other institutions. Numerous state historical societies, state archives, and libraries provided me with abundant information and advice, and many university teachers, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, gave me useful leads. Several historians with the National Park Service provided specialized information.
Fortunately, John Tidball wrote much about himself. Unfortunately, historians have ignored him, so nearly everything we know about him is what he has told us. Only two people before me, both professional soldiers, have written about him and, although they wrote very littleonly about a dozen pages in allthey wrote very well, indeed. One was Col. John Calef, who as a subaltern served in Tidballs horse battery during the war, and kept up a life-long friendship and correspondence with him. The other, Col. James L. Morrison Jr., former history teacher at the U.S. Military Academy and York College of Pennsylvania, edited Tidballs West Point memoirs more than twenty years ago; his perceptive commentary tells us that he understood his subject exceedingly well. Jim and I have corresponded for ten years, and his advice and encouragement have been an important motivation for me.
I should acknowledge the influence of the seminal writing courses I took at the University of Montanafrom H. G. Meriam, Chairman of the English Department, and especially from my mentor and old friend Walter Brown, whose instruction in composition of more than a half-century ago I remember vividly today.
My wife, Ardith Sehulster, who is a fine writer and enthusiastic student of American history, read and criticized my drafts and helped me bring them to a stage where I thought they were good enough to submit to the publisher. She is an exacting and relentless editor of first impression, and whatever merits this book is judged to have, it is better because of her essential contribution.
To John Hubbell, Director Emeritus of the Kent State University Press, I owe the greatest debt, because if it were not for his persistent cajoling I never would have undertaken this biography. At a time when I had not even thought about writing a book, and tried to convince him that I had neither the desire nor the stamina to do it, he persuaded me that John Tidball was bigger than life, and deserved full biographical treatment. I soon found myself intrigued, and then possessed by the subject, and worked steadily until the book was finished. Once the book was underway, John became my editor. A good editor is expert and forceful, yet restrained, and John is all of these; his deft, discreet intervention worked just right for me.
T HIS IS THE story of a nineteenth-century soldier, John Caldwell Tidball, a prototypical antebellum West Point graduate. It is also the story of many soldiers, because in his life can be traced the lives of hundreds of other men who graduated from the U.S. Military Academy in the fourth and fifth decades of the nineteenth century. They went on to serve at the four points of the national compass, trudging through the Florida swamps pursuing Seminoles, conquering Mexico, exploring the uncharted regions of the West, training for war, and then fighting in the bloodiest armed conflict known to the American republic. After that, the underpaid and now battle-toughened veterans again scattered across the continent, built and manned remote forts protecting the American domain, occupied a defeated South, and engaged in a prolonged, disheartening running battle with the native inhabitants of the West. All the while they dutifully trained for the next war and performed the other diverse but usually mundane chores of a small peacetime army.
In some ways John Tidball epitomized, and was representative of, these nineteenth-century professional army officers, but in many other ways in his rich and varied career he was exceptional. Geographically, his career arced from Los Angeles to Newport, from the Kissimmee River in Florida to Sitka, Alaska. Before the war his years of service in the Old Army included the usual tedious garrison duty, but there were remarkable exceptionssuch as when, as a young first lieutenant in 1853, he commanded the military escort for a Pacific Railway expedition to the West Coast. On that trip he sketched eight scenes of the Southwest that were published as lithographs or woodcuts with his final report. The disclosure of his artistic talent landed him a job heading the drawing division of the Coast Survey in Washington.
