Battle Flag of General George G. Thomas

Union general George H. Thomas's unit battle flag that he flew at his headquarters during the Civil War is portrayed as a "relic" of the Union victory in this postwar photograph.

Thomas was assigned to command of the Department of the Pacific in 1869 and he died of a stroke in San Francisco, California, on March 28, 1870. Thomas was the first major Union general to die after the Civil War, and his coffin was greeted by crowds throughout its transfer back to the East. Former Union general-in-chief Ulysses S. Grant, then the U.S. president, and many senior government officials attended a large public funeral at Thomas's wife's church in Troy, New York. In 1879, veterans erected a monument in his memory in Washington, D.C., where it still stands at the center of Thomas Circle.