The final installment of Adolfo Ovies’s groundbreaking The Boy Generals trilogy races from the Shenandoah Valley to Appomattox with the rapidity of a headlong cavalry charge. The turbulent events of the closing months of the Civil War serve as a backdrop for the increasingly dysfunctional—and bitter—relationship between George Armstrong Custer and Wesley Merritt. The flamboyant Custer and the stoic Merritt were bound to clash. The Boy Generals scrutinizes their methods of discipline, their exercise of authority, and their “spirited rivalry.” It was an association that progressed from distaste to acrimony and finally to outright insubordination on Custer’s part. The boy cavalier was a firm believer in the shock value of the mounted charge. Merritt maintained that the horse was but a means of transporting the trooper to the battlefield, where he would fight on foot with his carbine. The difference in their tactical philosophies was highlighted by the bloody battles that ensued after Philip H. Sheridan’s ascension to command Union forces in the Shenandoah Valley in 1864. Meticulously researched chapters based on significant firsthand archival sources narrate the actions of the cavalry at Winchester, Tom’s Brook, Cedar Creek, and Waynesboro. The Boy Generals is an uncompromising examination of the darker aspects of the way the war in the Valley unfolded. General Ulysses S. Grant’s orders to Sheridan to “eat out Virginia clear and clean” fell on the shoulders of these two “boy generals.” The brutality of the irregular warfare that lurked in the rear of the Army of the Shenandoah is addressed in a blow-by-blow accounting of depredations and retailiations. Sheridan’s troopers rejoined Grant’s army around Richmond. Following the breakthrough at Petersburg on April 2, 1865, Sheridan’s cavalry struck west. The battles of Dinwiddie Courthouse (March 31), Five Forks (April 1), and Sailor’s Creek (April 6)—the latter referred to as “Black Thursday” in the annals of the Army of Northern Virginia—paved the way for the eventual surrender of Robert E. Lee’s Virginia army. The Boy Generals captures Merritt and Custer as they ride the crest of a wave of glory in one of the most dysfunctional yet influential relationships in the Army of the Potomac. It is impossible to fully understand cavalry operations in the Eastern Theater without understanding the dynamic between these two commanders.
