An impeccably researched, character-driven narrative history recounting the fascinating late-Reconstruction Era mission of General Philip Sheridan, a Union hero dispatched to the South ten years after the Civil War to protect the rights of newly freed black men, who were under siege by violent paramilitary groups like the White League intent on erasing their postwar gains.

Alongside Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, Philip H. Sheridan is the least known of the triumvirate of generals most responsible for winning the Civil War. Yet, before Sherman's famous march through Georgia, it was General Sheridan who introduced scorched-earth warfare to the South, and it was his Cavalry Corps that compelled Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox Courthouse. Sheridan's innovative cavalry tactics and "total war" strategy...