to move. The whole of the North, and even General Grant himself, were impatient of the delay. General Logan was sent with an order to supersede Thomas, and soon afterwards Grant left the Army of the Potomac to take command in person. Before either arrived Thomas made his attack (December 15th–16th, 1864) and inflicted on Hood the most crushing defeat sustained in the open field by any army on either side in the whole war. Hood’s army was completely ruined and never again appeared on the field. For this brilliant victory Thomas was made a major-general in the regular army and received the thanks of Congress. After the termination of the Civil War he commanded military departments in Kentucky and Tennessee until 1869, when he was ordered to command the division of the Pacific with headquarters at San Francisco. He died there of apoplexy, while writing an answer to an article criticizing his military career, on the 28th of March 1870.
Thomas was beloved by his soldiers, for whom he always had a fatherly solicitude. He was a man of solid rather than brilliant attainments; he remained in the army all his life, and never had any ambitions outside of it; the nickname of “Slow Trot Thomas” given him by the cadets at West Point characterized him physically and mentally; his mind acted deliberately, and his temperament was somewhat sluggish; but his judgment was accurate, his knowledge of his profession was complete in every detail, and when he had finally grasped a problem, and the time arrived for action, he struck his blow with extraordinary vigour and rapidity. The only two battles in which he was in chief command — Mill Springs and Nashville, one at the beginning and the other near the end of the war — were signal victories, without defect and above criticism. His service during the intervening three years of almost incessant conflict and manœuvring was marked by loyal obedience to his superiors, skilful command of his subordinates, and successful accomplishment of every task entrusted to him.
THOMAS, ISAIAH (1749–1831), American printer, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on the 19th of January 1749. He was apprenticed in 1755 to Zechariah Fowle, a Boston printer, with whom, after working as a printer in Halifax, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Charleston, South Carolina, he formed a partnership in 1770. He issued in Boston the Massachusetts Spy three times each week, then (under his sole ownership) as a semi-weekly, and beginning in 1771, as a weekly which soon espoused the Whig cause and which the government tried to suppress. On the 16th of April 1775 (three days before the battle of Concord, in which he took part) he took his presses and types from Boston and set them up at Worcester, where he was postmaster for a time; here he published and sold books and built a paper-mill and bindery, and he continued. the paper until about 1802 except in 1776–1778 and in 1786–1788. The S py supported Washington and the Federalist party. In Boston Thomas published, in 1774, the Royal American Magazine, which was continued for a short time by Joseph Greenleaf, and which contained many engravings by Paul Revere; and in 1775–1803 the New England Almanac, continued until 1819 by his son. He set up printing houses and book stores in various parts of the country, and in Boston with Ebenezer T. Andrews, published the Massachusetts Magazine, a monthly, from 1789 to 1793. At Walpole, New Hampshire, he published the Farmer’s Museum. About 1802 he gave over to his son, Isaiah Thomas, junr., his business at Worcester including the control of the Spy. Thomas founded in 1812 the American Antiquarian Society. He died in Worcester on the 4th of April 1831.
His History of Printing in America, with ct Biography of Printers, and an Account of Newspapers (2 vols., 1810; 2nd ed., 1874, with a catalogue of American publications previous to 1776 and a memoir of Isaiah Thomas, by his grandson B. F. Thomas) is an important work, accurate and thorough.
THOMAS, PIERRE (1634–1698), sieur du Fossé, French scholar and author, was the son of a master of accounts at Rouen. He was sent as a child to be educated at Port Royal, and there he received his final bent towards the life of a recluse, and even of a hermit, which drew him to establish himself in the neighbourhood of Port Royal des Champs. In 1661 he came to Paris, and in 1666 was arrested along with I. L. Le Maistre (de Sacy), and after a month in the Bastille was exiled to his estate of Fossé. He later made yearly visits to Paris. Apart from his collaboration with de Sacy, Thomas wrote some hagiographic works and left Mémoires (1697–1698 and again 1876–1879), which are highly praised by Ste Beuve as being a remarkable mirror of the life at Port Royal.
THOMAS, SIDNEY GILCHRIST (1850–1885), British inventor, was born on the 16th of April 1850 at Canonbury, London. His father, a Welshman, was in the civil service, and his mother was the daughter of the Rev. James Gilchrist. His father’s death leaving his family with a considerably reduced income, he gave up his original idea of becoming a doctor and obtained an appointment as a police court clerk, which he held till May 1879. During these twelve years, besides the work of a busy police court, which brought him into intimate contact with social problems, he found time to study chemistry, and attended lectures at the Birkbeck Institute. He set himself to solve the problem of eliminating phosphorus from iron by means of the Bessemer converter, and by the end of 1875 was convinced that he had discovered a method. He communicated his theory to his cousin, P. C. Gilchrist, who was chemist to iron works in Wales, and experiments were made, which proved satisfactory. Edward Martin, manager of the Blaenavon Works, gave facilities for conducting the experiments on a larger scale and undertook to help in taking out a patent. In March 1878, the first public announcement of the discovery was made at the meeting of the Iron and Steel Institute, but without attracting much attention; and in September a paper was written by Thomas and Gilchrist on the “Elimination of Phosphorus in the Bessemer Converter” for the autumn meeting of this institute, but was not read till May 1879. Thomas, however, made the acquaintance of E. W. Richards, the manager of Bolckow Vaughan & Co.’s works at Cleveland, Yorkshire, whom he interested in the process, and from this time the success of the invention was assured and domestic and foreign patents were taken out. The “basic process” invented by Thomas was especially valuable on the continent of Europe, where the proportion of phosphoric iron is much larger than in England, and both in Belgium and in Germany the name of the inventor became more widely known than in his own country. In America, although non-phosphoric iron largely predominates, an immense interest was taken in the invention. But Thomas had been overworking for years, and his lungs became affected. A long sea voyage and a residence in Egypt proved unavailing to restore his health and he died in Paris on the 1st of February 1885. He had what W. E. Gladstone, in a review of the Memoirs published in 1891, described as an “enthusiasm of humanity,” and he left his fortune to be used for the promotion of philanthropic work. A police court mission was endowed in his memory.
See Memoirs and Letters of Sidney Gilchrist Thomas (1891), ed. by R. W. Burnie.
THOMAS, THEODORE} (1835–1905), American musician, was born in Esens, Germany, on the 11th of October 1835. His early musical training was received chiefly from his father. At the age of five he made his first public appearance as a violinist. In 1845 he was taken to America by his parents, and became first violin in the orchestra that accompanied Jenny Lind in 1850, Sontag in 1852 and Grisi and Mario in 1854. In 1862 he began to organize his own orchestra, and from 1864 to 1878 were performed a series of symphony concerts inaugurated by him in Irving Hall, which were regarded as one of the great musical institutions of New York City. His “summer night” concerts begun in 1866 in Terrace Garden were continued in Central Park. From 1855 to 1868 he took part in a series of chamber music concerts in New York. In the latter year his orchestra made its first tour, and continued to give concerts in various American cities until it was disbanded in 1888. To Theodore Thomas is largely due the popularization of Wagner’s
