Produced by David Widger
By Philip Henry Sheridan
When, yielding to the solicitations of my friends, I finally decidedto write these Memoirs, the greatest difficulty which confronted mewas that of recounting my share in the many notable events of thelast three decades, in which I played a part, without entering toofully into the history of these years, and at the same time withoutgiving to my own acts an unmerited prominence. To what extent I haveovercome this difficulty I must leave the reader to judge.
In offering this record, penned by my own hand, of the events of mylife, and of my participation in our great struggle for nationalexistence, human liberty, and political equality, I make nopretension to literary merit; the importance of the subject-matter ofmy narrative is my only claim on the reader's attention.
Respectfully dedicating this work to my comrades in arms during theWar of the Rebellion, I leave it as a heritage to my children, and asa source of information for the future historian.
Nonguitt, Mass., August 2, 1888
My parents, John and Mary Sheridan, came to America in 1830, havingbeen induced by the representations of my father's uncle, ThomasGainor, then living in Albany, N. Y., to try their fortunes in theNew World: They were born and reared in the County Cavan, Ireland,where from early manhood my father had tilled a leasehold on theestate of Cherrymoult; and the sale of this leasehold provided himwith means to seek a new home across the sea. My parents wereblood relations—cousins in the second degree—my mother, whosemaiden name was Minor, having descended from a collateral branch ofmy father's family. Before leaving Ireland they had two children,and on the 6th of March, 1831, the year after their arrival in thiscountry, I was born, in Albany, N. Y., the third child in a familywhich eventually increased to six—four boys and two girls.
The prospects for gaining a livelihood in Albany did not meet theexpectations which my parents had been led to entertain, so in 1832they removed to the West, to establish themselves in the village ofSomerset, in Perry County, Ohio, which section, in the earliest daysof the State; had been colonized from Pennsylvania and Maryland. Atthis period the great public works of the Northwest—the canals andmacadamized roads, a result of clamor for internal improvements—werein course of construction, and my father turned his attention tothem, believing that they offered opportunities for a successfuloccupation. Encouraged by a civil engineer named Bassett, who hadtaken a fancy to him, he put in bids for a small contract on theCumberland Road, known as the "National Road," which was then beingextended west from the Ohio River. A little success in this firstenterprise led him to take up contracting as a business, which hefollowed on various canals and macadamized roads then building indifferent parts of the State of Ohio, with some good fortune forawhile, but in 1853 what little means he had saved were swallowed up—in bankruptcy, caused by the failure of the Sciota and HockingValley Railroad Company, for which he was fulfilling a contract att