I Would Rather Be Phil Sheridan's Widow

Phillip Sheridan played a monumental part in winning the Civil War. Battles, campaigns depended on his leadership. It was no accident he was in the room with Grant, to witness Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House.

His wife, who was 24 years younger, was an Army brat, grew up around soldiers, the daughter of an officer.

She had been thought a great beauty and after he died, she was young and still beautiful and everyone from close friends to newspaper reporters asked her when she might marry again. She said, famously, "I would rather be Phillip Sheridan's widow than any living man's wife."

She died in 1917, during World War One, in a house just blocks from Sheridan Circle in Washington, DC, Phillip Sheridan's widow, a wizened little woman, grown old, alone.

Perhaps, she was simply a child of the nineteenth century, a woman who clung to those romantic notions of love and marriage we, in the 21st century, associate with times long gone. Perhaps there was something there we might today call psychopathology. A woman who would rather live with the dead than with the living. A sort of fulfilled Mrs. Haversham, not living in jilted bitterness, but in the past, nevertheless.

Or maybe, she was just saying, "I had a man with whom none other can compare. Why should I live with someone for mere companionship?"

I don't believe for a moment men or women of the 19th century really believed, in private, the myths of finding a soul mate who God intended for them to marry, or any of the socially useful delusions peddled at marriage ceremonies.

I suspect, but cannot know, this woman grew up in a culture which prepared her to admire certain characteristics in men: Courage, perseverance, tenacity, leadership, intelligence and honesty. Whatever his faults, Sheridan had all this in spades, and she could see it, recognize it and compare him to other men and say, "This man is the best man I have ever known, or likely ever will know."

Sheridan burned and pillaged farms throughout the Shenandoah Valley, and he took the skills and lessons he learned during the Civil War to Texas, after the Civil War and analyzed the problem white settlers were having with the Comanches. Just as the Shenandoah had been the breadbasket for Lee's army, the buffalo were the breadbasket for the Comanche Plains Indians. Eliminate the buffalo, he said, and you will bring the Comanches to their knees. So he arranged for the wholesale slaughter of the great buffalo herds and applied his burnt earth strategy to the war with the Comanche and won. "The only good Indians I saw," he said, "Were dead Indians."

So, he was not, by 20th century, multicultural, ecological standards, an example of enlightened thinking.

He was brutally honest.

His wife could see that.

She was no Jackie Kennedy.

I wonder how many 21st century women think this way. If any glimpse into the souls or minds of women can be gleaned from the New York Times Style section wedding "announcements" with the self serving stories of how women met their mates, and what attracted them, then one would have to conclude, women today, for the most part, do not look for men they admire. They look for men with good earning potential, or for men who might make good fathers while they pursue their own careers, or for any number of things, but not for a man who is a hero in any sense of the word.

I'm sure there are exceptions.

I suppose there are women who see men in the work place who are heroes, by today's standards. Those women may marry "for love," in the sense Mrs. Sheridan married. And with time and domesticity those heroes look less heroic. Apparently Phillip Sheridan did not look less heroic with time.

If it were a good thing for women to marry heroes, as a policy, that would leave a lot of unmarried women, because there are few heroes, in the Phil Sheridan sense, in these times. Even in his times.

But it does make one wonder about how marriage and what it means has changed through the years.

But whatever love is in the 21st century, I don't think it's based on what Mrs. Sheridan saw, on what moved her.