George Stoneman Jr. (August 8, 1822 – September 5, 1894) was a United States Army cavalry officer and politician who served as the fifteenth governor of California from 1883 to 1887.

At the Battle of Chancellorsville in 1863, under the command of Joseph Hooker, Stoneman failed in an ambitious attempt to penetrate behind enemy lines, getting bogged down at an important river crossing.

Shortly after the end of the American Civil War, Stoneman commanded occupying troops at Memphis, Tennessee, who were stationed at Fort Pickering.

He had turned over control of law enforcement to the civilian government by May 1866, when the Memphis riots broke out and the major black neighborhoods were destroyed.

He fought in the Yuma War and was responsible for survey parties mapping the Sierra Nevada range for railroad lines.

[5] Stoneman had a difficult relationship with McClellan, who did not understand the proper use of cavalry in warfare, relegating it to assignment in small units to infantry brigades.

At Fredericksburg, it formed part of Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker's Center Grand Division and helped drive back a Confederate assault during the battle.

Following Fredericksburg, Hooker became commander of the Army of the Potomac and decided to re-organize the cavalry into a single corps with Stoneman at its head.

As the army fought in the Atlanta Campaign under Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman, Stoneman commanded an unsuccessful raid of the infamous Andersonville Prison.

[10] However, the 5th Indiana Cavalry Regiment under Col. Thomas Butler made a valiant stand, allowing the rest of his forces to retreat.

[12] In March 1865, Stoneman took roughly 4,000 troops out of Knoxville, Tennessee, and led them on a raid of Virginia and North Carolina, the intent being to cripple Confederate infrastructure and demoralize the population.

A Democrat who was opposed to the radical Reconstruction, Stoneman pursued more moderate policies than the other Military Governors, which garnered him support among white Virginians.

Stoneman was relieved of his command due to controversies surrounding his handling of the region's Indians, including the Camp Grant massacre.

He and his wife settled in the San Gabriel Valley on a 400-acre (160 ha) estate called Los Robles, which is now a California Historical Landmark.

During his tenure, he advocated controlling the rates and limiting the power of the Southern Pacific Railroad; however, he was unsuccessful in his efforts against the railroad-controlled legislature.

[22] Stoneman's raids into North Carolina and Virginia in the last weeks of the war were memorialized by songwriter Robbie Robertson of The Band, in the 1969 song "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down".

Baez told Kurt Loder of Rolling Stone magazine that she had learned the song by listening to the track on The Band's album.

General Stoneman's name is engraved on the Sonoma Veterans Memorial Park Star of Honor due to his time there before the Civil War.