As Sherman hinted, Thomas and Lee came from strikingly similar backgrounds. Both were natives of Virginia, born to prosperous, slaveholding families. Each graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and spent the entirety of their pre-Civil War careers in the U.S. Army. Each served with distinction during the Mexican War. The early 1850s found them back at West Point, Thomas as an instructor and Lee as superintendent. There they developed a personal friendship. By the late 1850s both were officers in the 2nd U.S. Cavalry on the Texas frontier. Their divergence came during the trying early months of 1861.
Soon after the surrender of Fort Sumter, Lee declined President Lincoln’s offer to command the main U.S. field army (Winfield Scott, another Virginian, commanded the entire U.S. Army in the early months of the war). Lee resigned his commission on April 20, 1861, and quickly offered his services to Virginia which soon thereafter seceded to join the Confederacy. Thomas faced a similar decision, being offered high ranking positions in the military forces of Virginia. He declined these offers and refused to resign his commission. Thomas and Lee’s respective decisions reflected internal conflicts of clashing loyalties that thousands of Americans faced.
Gary W. Gallagher argues Lee had three “levels of loyalty” before the war, namely, loyalty to Virginia, the United States, and Southern slave society.[5] “He strongly identified with the slaveholding South, and this loyalty, which aligned nicely with his sense of being a Virginian, helped guide him in the secession crisis,” notes Gallagher.[6] Lee’s loyalty to Virginia and Southern slave society eventually trumped his loyalty to the U.S., led to his resignation, and quickly developed into a fourth source of loyalty, the new Confederacy.
Thomas held similar beliefs to Lee argues Christopher J. Einolf noting both, “thought of themselves as Southerners, and both based their decisions on the particularly Southern moral values of honor and duty.” The difference came in the direction Thomas’s sense of “honor and duty” pointed. For Thomas “his oath as an army officer and the debt he owed his country were more important than his feelings of affection for his family and native state.”[7] And while emancipation and abolition were not official policy in 1861, Thomas knew serving under a Republican administration would, at the very least, entail restrictions on slavery. As the war transformed from a war for the Union to one dedicated slavery’s destruction, Thomas transformed as well.
Friends cursed Thomas and family disowned him following his decision. “I would like to hang, hang him as a traitor to his native state,” coldly proclaimed his former student and army comrade J.E.B. Stuart.[8] Thomas’s sisters turned his picture to the wall and broke off communication with him. Despite such heavy personal sacrifices, “whichever way he turned the matter over in his mind,” Thomas’s wife Frances later reflected, “his oath of allegiance to his Government always came uppermost.”[9]