There is no doubt that Sherman’s campaign was a formidable military achievement, in terms of its logistics, organization, leadership, and the determination and collective willpower that made it possible. In six months, an army of sixty thousand marched through some seven hundred miles of hostile territory, wading through or building pontoon bridges across innumerable streams, swamps, and flooded major rivers, corduroying muddy roads and tracks with a relentless efficiency that astounded its opponents. For much of that time, Sherman’s army was entirely cut off from its line of supply and dependent for its survival on what it could take from the land and people along the route. Throughout these campaigns, its lines produced few stragglers and never lost their shape or coherence, despite marching in two separate wings for most of the time. The Confederates were powerless to stop its progress.
The strategic impact of these campaigns is more debatable. In a valedictory speech to the Army of the Tennessee on September 30, 1875, Sherman told his listeners, “The consequences of this march were felt all over the country. All acknowledged that when Savannah should be taken the road to Richmond was clear, and that the war was at an end. . . . Certain it is that this march was great in its conception and in its execution grand—that the blow was struck at the right moment and in the right direction.”1 This blow, Sherman explained, exposed the Confederacy as a “hollow shell” and demonstrated to Southerners and the wider world that its adherents were a defeated people with nothing left to fight for.
Others have similarly hailed the symbolic and psychological impact of Sherman’s campaigns. “The moral effect of this march . . . [through Georgia] was greater than would have been the most decided victory,” declared the Confederate general Edward Porter Alexander.2 For The Times of London, Sherman’s march proved that the Confederacy was “an egg, hard only on its shell or circumference, and utterly insubstantial within.” In 1876, Sherman’s pugnacious cavalry commander General Hugh Kilpatrick agreed: “The very fact that Sherman reached the sea, demonstrating the fact that a well-organized army, ably led, could raid the South at pleasure; there was not a man in all the land but knew the war was virtually over, and the rebellion ended.”3 Still others have pointed to Sherman’s destruction of Confederate war matériel, confiscation of foodstuffs, and disruption of transportation links, depriving the Army of Northern Virginia of much-needed food and supplies. For Ulysses Grant, the march destroyed the Confederate strategic reserve and left the rebellion “nothing to stand upon.”
These claims have not gone uncontested. The historian Alfred Castel, a stringent critic of Sherman’s generalship, has argued that his marches were strategically irrelevant and that the war might have ended even sooner if he had marched his army directly to Virginia instead of taking the longer route via Savannah.4 In his memoir Forty-Six Years in the Army, published in 1897, Hood’s nemesis at Franklin General John M. Schofield insisted that Sherman’s main objective had always been Lee’s army in Virginia, and that his intention was always to get his army to Richmond rather than to give a “manifestation of the power of the nation by destroying Southern property.”5
The latter strategy, Schofield suggested somewhat damningly, was emphasized retrospectively by Sherman only because his army failed to reach Richmond in time to assist Grant’s campaign. Given the intentions that Sherman outlined to Grant and his own subordinates before and during his campaigns, Schofield’s arguments do not seem entirely plausible. There is no doubt that Sherman ultimately intended to reach Virginia and help Grant “get Lee,” but his letters and telegrams consistently emphasize the damage that his army would inflict on Georgia and the Carolinas as sufficient justification for his campaigns in itself, whether the aim was destruction of war resources, reduction of civilian morale, or simply a just punishment for rebellion. “I regard my two moves from Atlanta to Savannah and Savannah to Goldsboro as great moves as if we had fought a dozen successful battles,” he told his wife on March 26, 1865.6
There is some anecdotal evidence to suggest that the morale of the Confederate army in Virginia was affected by Sherman’s marches. On February 15, 1865, the governor of North Carolina, Zebulon B. Vance, observed that “thousands and thousands” of Confederate soldiers were absent without leave, while “hundreds of thousands of bushels of grain now rot at various depots of the South for want of transportation”—a development that was at least partly due to Sherman’s destruction of the Georgia railroad network.7 That same month, Robert E. Lee wrote to Vance from Richmond: “Desertions are becoming very frequent and there is good reason to believe that they are occasioned to a considerable extent by letters written to the soldiers by their friends at home.”
Lee also commented on the absence of “the boldness and decision which formerly characterized” the defenders of Richmond—a development that he attributed to “the communication received from the men from their homes urging their return and abandonment of the field.”8 But desertions and demoralization were already evident in the Confederate armies long before Sherman’s armies entered Georgia, and it is difficult to establish a direct correlation between Sherman’s campaigns and the rate of desertions during the winter and spring of 1864–65. Coupled with Sheridan’s scorched-earth campaign in the Shenandoah Valley, Sherman’s campaigns certainly deprived the Army of Northern Virginia of food and munitions, at least temporarily, but Lee’s army was still being fed—admittedly on drastically reduced rations—when he surrendered to Grant at Appomattox.
It is also true that the presence of Sherman’s army in North Carolina blocked any possibility of a southern escape route for Lee’s army when Grant broke his line at Petersburg. The Confederacy conceivably might have dissolved its conventional forces and organized a campaign of guerrilla warfare in the spring of 1865, but this would have required a willingness to fight on, which was conspicuously absent. Sherman’s contribution to this demoralization is also open to question. The fact that so few Georgians responded to the exhortations from Confederate generals and politicians to wage a Russian-style partisan war suggests that the appetite for resistance was already minimal. Even before the army left Atlanta, the state governor, Joseph Brown, was in negotiations with Sherman about the possibility of withdrawing the state from the rebellion, and the ease with which Sherman’s forces sliced through Georgia and captured Savannah certainly did not encourage resistance in the Carolinas.
Sherman’s reference to the timing is significant. After nearly four years of brutal warfare, his campaign clearly had an impact very different from the one it might have had if such a strategy had been carried out earlier. Ultimately the extent to which his campaigns actually contributed to the military collapse of the Confederacy must remain something of an open question. However, the stature of Sherman’s campaigns as an iconic episode in American military history is due not only to what they actually achieved, but also to what they were believed to have achieved—and even more to the persuasive idea they gave rise to, that in certain circumstances, civilian society could be legitimately targeted and punished in order to achieve both military and broader psychological and political effects. These campaigns cannot be understood or assessed only in terms of their contribution to the end of the war. For Sherman, destruction was always a calibrated and pragmatic measure that could be intensified or reduced in order to achieve strategic objectives that were not limited to the war itself, but were also concerned with what came afterward.
The Peacemaker
In 1903 Sherman was honored with an equestrian statue created by the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Ninth Street in New York, which bears its subject’s observation that THE LEGITIMATE OBJECT OF WAR IS A MORE PERFECT PEACE. Visiting the monument soon afterward, the novelist Henry James was unimpressed, considering it a “perversity” and “ambiguity” that failed to capture the “Sherman of the terrible march” and the “misery, the ruin, and vengeance of his track.”9 But the destruction that Sherman left in his track was by no means incompatible with his commitment to a “more perfect peace.”
Sherman often qualified even his most extreme threats and pronouncements with the proviso that the South could avoid such consequences by abandoning the rebellion, and he was always prepared to show magnanimity once his objectives had been achieved. This pragmatism was already evident in 1862, when he became military governor of Memphis. Though he was prepared to visit harsh collective punishment on the population in order to eliminate guerrilla activity, he also followed the model established by the Duke of Wellington in the post-Napoleonic occupation of France by allowing the city to run its own affairs as long as it didn’t interfere with Union military operations. On arrival in the city on July 21, he found “the place dead; no business doing, the stores closed, churches, schools, and every thing shut up. The people were all more or less in sympathy with our enemies, and there was a strong prospect that the whole civil population would become a dead weight on our hands.”10
These institutions were quickly reopened, and the day-to-day management of the city was handed over to the civil authorities, so that “very soon Memphis resumed its appearance of an active, busy, prosperous place.” Sherman also ordered his quartermasters to distribute food from army stores to eight hundred destitute women and children and to provide food and medicines for the local asylum and hospitals, “as a pure charity to prevent suffering just as we would to Indians on the frontier or to shipwrecked people.” He adopted a similarly light touch at Savannah. No sooner had his army entered the city than he ordered its shops, churches, and schools reopened and ensured that food supplies were shipped from the North and distributed to the city’s inhabitants. As in Memphis, the mayor and city council were allowed to exercise their functions, and the population was allowed to choose whether to remain in the city or be transported behind Confederate lines. Though newspapers were “held to the strictest accountability” and threatened with severe punishment “for any libelous publication, mischievous matter, premature news, exaggerated statement,” they were allowed to publish.
Some two hundred people left the city for Charleston or Augusta, but the majority remained and, in Sherman’s own judgment, “generally behaved with propriety, and good social relations at once arose between them and the army.” Sherman also placed his army under strict orders of good behavior. In addition to ensuring security in the city, his soldiers entertained the local population with “guard-mountings and parades, as well as the greater reviews,” which “became the daily resorts of the ladies, to hear the music of our excellent bands.” In this way, normality was quickly restored to the point when Rear Admiral J.A. Dahlgren, commander of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron, visited Savannah at the beginning of January 1865, he reported to the secretary of the navy, Gideon Welles, “I have walked about the city several times, and can affirm that its tranquility is undisturbed. The Union soldiers who are stationed within its limits are as orderly as if they were in New York or Boston.”11
Such discipline was conspicuously absent in South Carolina but reinforced in North Carolina when Sherman’s army occupied Raleigh and Chapel Hill. “Now that the war is over, I am as willing to risk my person and reputation as heretofore to heal the wounds made by the past war, and I think my feeling is shared by the whole army,” he wrote to Joe Johnston, following Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. Such declarations reflected Lincoln’s own policy of “malice toward none, with charity for all” as a basis for postwar reconciliation. But Sherman went further than his political masters during the surrender negotiations with his great adversary at Daniel Bennett’s farmhouse. Without consultation with Washington, Sherman presented a set of “general propositions” to Johnston and his co-negotiator John Breckinridge, which guaranteed Southerners who signed loyalty oaths “their political rights and franchises, as well as their rights of person and property” and the reconstitution of state governments.
Sherman later claimed that this agreement was in keeping with Lincoln’s own intentions, but its de facto guarantee of the right of slavery shocked many members of his administration, particularly Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who assumed temporary control of the government following Lincoln’s assassination. To Sherman’s Republican critics, his agreement with Johnston constituted an illegitimate intervention into politics by a military commander, which reflected his own pro-Southern sentiments. Though Stanton and some Northern newspapers suggested that Sherman harbored dictatorial ambitions, the most likely explanation for his political largesse was his desire to end the war without provoking his defeated opponents into a guerrilla campaign, coupled with an overweening self-confidence that made him believe he was able to do anything he wanted.
Whatever Sherman’s motives, there is some irony in the fact that the man suspected of treason by Northerners would later be more despised by Southerners than any other Union general. Even his staunch friend Grant believed that Sherman had gone beyond his authority, and on April 24 he traveled to Raleigh and ordered him to reopen negotiations. Two days later, Sherman and Johnston met again at Bennett Place, and Johnston agreed to a strictly military surrender without the previous political guarantees.
This agreement satisfied Sherman, who told his wife, “The mass of the people south will never trouble us again. They have suffered terrifically, and I now feel disposed to befriend them—of course not the leaders and lawyers, but the armies who have fought and manifested their sincerity though misled by risking their persons.”12 But Sherman was bitter and angry at his treatment in Washington, which confirmed his loathing of politicians, and he was dismayed by the vengeful mood that he detected there. “I confess, without shame, that I am sick and tired of fighting—its glory is all moonshine,” he wrote to a friend in May, “even success the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies, with the anguish and lamentations of distant families, appealing to me for sons, husbands, and fathers . . . as far as I know, all the fighting men of our army want peace; and it is only those who have never heard a shot, never heard the shriek and groans of the wounded and lacerated (friend or foe), that cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation. I know the rebels are whipped to death.”13
Sherman’s error of judgment, if such it was, was soon forgotten, and his status as a national hero remained undiminished by it. For the North, the end of the war unleashed pent-up energies that found an outlet in completion of the transcontinental railroad, settlement of the West, and the rapid industrial and urban expansions that brought on America’s Gilded Age. In the South, however, the end of the war brought poverty and economic collapse, whose consequences were often particularly dramatic in the states that Sherman’s armies had passed through.
Aftermath
In 1866, the English baronet and future Conservative politician Sir John Kennaway (1837–1919) visited Georgia and South Carolina with a party of Oxbridge students as part of an educational tour to observe the effects of the Civil War. Traveling by train from Chattanooga to Atlanta, Kennaway observed “stations destroyed or gutted all along the line and charred ruins met the gaze wherever human habitations had been.”14 In Marietta, formerly “one of the prettiest and most rising towns in Cherokee Georgia,” he said, “Little now remained of it but blank walls and skeleton houses.” In Atlanta, all five railroad lines destroyed by Sherman’s army were back in operation, and new wooden workhouses were springing up on the sites of demolished foundries, yet lawlessness and robbery were so common that Kennaway and his companions were obliged to observe a ten o’clock curfew, with military patrols on the streets to enforce it.
Traveling in a windowless train through central Georgia, Kennaway concluded through conversations with fellow passengers and his own observations of the postwar devastation still visible along the route of the railroad that the state was a shadow of its prewar prosperity, whose “country is devastated, its stock destroyed, its currency worthless. Labor is scarce and crops scanty; and above all, a moral depression hangs over the soil, and seems for a time to forbid exertion.” South Carolina presented a similar picture of desolation. On June 1, 1865, Mary Chestnut wrote of “three days of travel, over a road that had been laid bare by Sherman’s torches. Nothing but smoking ruins was left in Sherman’s track. That I saw with my own eyes. No living thing was left, no house for man or beast.” Returning to her home in Charleston from Greenville at the end of 1865, the novelist Caroline Howard Gilman wrote of “Sherman’s Desolation,” in which “Scarcely a farm house, not an elegant and hospitable plantation residence on the way, all ruin, ruin; and in Columbia the last rays of twilight were on the ruins.”15
Much of this destruction was restricted to a limited geographical area, and most of Georgia and the Carolinas remained untouched.16 Despite the destruction and confiscation of food supplies and livestock, there was no evidence of famine or starvation. The abundant Georgia crop of 1864 that fed Sherman’s armies also kept the population alive, even during the tough winter of 1864–65. Some civilians survived by living on scraps from abandoned Union camps, while others were helped by friends and relatives. “Every one we meet gives us painful accounts of the desolation caused by the enemy. Each one has to tell us his or her own experience, and fellow-suffering makes us all equal and makes us all feel interested in one another,” wrote Dolly Lunt Burge.
Georgians and Carolinians were also fed by Union soldiers, who sometimes distributed rations to the same communities they had so recently wrecked. In May 1865, Brigadier General E.F. Winslow estimated that 25,000 to 50,000 destitute people had been fed by his soldiers in and around Atlanta, some of whom walked forty miles to get food. Between January and April 1866, the newly created Freedmen’s Bureau distributed food to destitute blacks and whites in Georgia and South Carolina. Although the population did not starve, there was nevertheless considerable distress and hardship in both states. One Savannah landowner claimed that it would be easier “to go into the wild wilderness and clear the forest than attempt the reclamation of my lands.” In May 1865, the Episcopal Diocesan Records at Orangeburg reported that “most of the few who were well off among his parishioners are now poor; that widows and orphans, who had saved a little from the wreck of their property in the low country, are stripped of that little, and that defenseless females were living on the scraps left by those who had taken from them their supplies for domestic use.” Writing in March 1866, the poet Henry Timrod (1828–67), who lost his source of income when the newspaper office of the South Carolinian was destroyed during Sherman’s capture of Columbia, told a friend, “You ask me to tell you my story for the last year. I can embody it all in a few words: beggary, starvation, death, bitter grief, utter want of hope!”17
Poverty was often particularly difficult to bear for wealthy Southerners who had lost their slaves and servants and sometimes had to work for the first time in their lives. In July 1865, Grace Elmore complained that she and the other women of her household were no longer “ladies of leisure” and were “left without means, forced to work without hope for country, and only to obtain bread.”18 On September 13, the New York Times estimated that out of $400 million of property in South Carolina at the beginning of the war, “only something like fifty millions now remained in shape.”19 This list of property that had been “destroyed or swept away” during the war included household furniture, farming implements, animals, slaves, and plantation houses. Some of this destruction was due to Sherman’s armies, but there is no evidence that Sherman’s campaigns crippled the economic development of Georgia or the Carolinas in the long term.
John Kennaway’s descriptions of his train journeys make it clear that the destruction of the railroad system was less systematic than Sherman himself believed. Atlanta was soon repopulated, and the city continued to grow exponentially, attracting some eight hundred thousand visitors to the Cotton States and International Exposition in 1895. Columbia was also rebuilt and generated a small construction boom in the immediate postwar years. But economic recovery did not mean that the South was pacified or that Southerners had reconciled themselves to the new order. Within a few years of Sherman’s marches, both Georgia and the Carolinas were caught up in a new struggle between the former slave states and the federal government, in which Southern whites sought to reestablish their former dominance over the freed slaves using their own strategies of terror.
Reconstruction
In The Art of War, Antoine de Jomini warned that wars involving “the occupation or conquest of a country whose people are all in arms” rarely produce positive outcomes. Such occupations require an army to “make a display of a mass of troops proportional to the obstacles and resistance likely to be encountered, calm the popular passions in every possible way, exhaust them by time and patience, display courtesy, gentleness, and severity united, and particularly, deal justly.”20 The most successful American military occupations have generally been carried out in accordance with these principles, from Winfield Scott’s brief occupation of Mexico in 1847 to the more ambitious postwar social transformations and reconstruction programs overseen by the U.S. military in Germany and Japan after World War II.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, much of the South was placed under military occupation, but the rapid demobilization of the Union Army soon reduced the overall military presence in the former Confederate states to only six thousand soldiers, which soon proved singularly inadequate in dealing with a turbulent and often openly seditious white population that was determined to reassert its dominance over the freed blacks. Responsibility for defending black lives and property and managing the incorporation of some 4 million former slaves into the new political and economic order fell primarily to the newly formed Freedmen’s Bureau, under the direction of Sherman’s former subordinate General Oliver Otis Howard. Inadequately staffed and funded and with little support from Lincoln’s successor, President Andrew Johnson, Howard’s organization struggled to cope with the complex challenges of enforcing black civil rights as reconstructed state governments sought to reimpose the prewar racist order in a new form. No sooner had the war ended than many Southern states imposed stringent vagrancy laws and black codes in an attempt to force freed slaves to remain on the plantations.21
These efforts were accompanied by official and unofficial acts of violence and punishment that included lynchings, floggings, imprisonment, chain gangs, and random murders of “insolent” blacks or black soldiers. In Georgia, John Kennaway heard frequent stories of attacks on freedmen in remote country districts and wrote of “murders, whippings, tying up by the thumbs” in South Carolina. Such acts were rarely punished, and violence became more systematic and organized as white Democrats sought to deprive freed slaves of the rights that accompanied national citizenship and to intimidate Republican politicians, Northern carpetbaggers, and Southern scalawags.
In the immediate postwar period, the federal government was either passive or complicit in this process. In September 1865, President Johnson rescinded Sherman’s “forty acres and a mule” policy, and the abolitionist Howard was given the bitter task of informing its beneficiaries in South Carolina that their lands were to be returned to their former white owners. Johnson’s reversal was a concession to an emerging counterrevolution in the South that increasingly resembled a covert insurgency. In a report to President Johnson from South Carolina that year, Major General Carl Schurz described a level of “aversion and resentment” toward the army and the North throughout the South that resulted from “the animosities inflamed by a four years’ war, and its distressing incidents.” Schurz also cited a report from one of his officers at Winnsboro, South Carolina, on July 19, which noted, “The spirit of the people, especially in those districts not subject to the salutary influence of General Sherman’s army, is that of concealed and, in some instances, of open hostility. . . . A spirit of bitterness and persecution manifests itself toward the negroes. They are shot and abused outside the immediate protection of our forces by men who announce their determination to take the law into their own hands, in defiance of our authority.”22
At first sight, this observation suggests that Sherman’s campaign of destruction had succeeded in dissuading some sections of the population from war and sedition, but the “spirit of bitterness and persecution” was soon so generalized throughout the South that it is difficult to reach such conclusions. When Radical Republicans in Congress challenged Johnson’s lenient hands-off policy in the South and pushed the government to take a more proactive position on black civil and political rights, Southern whites unleashed what Eric Foner calls a “wave of counterrevolutionary terror” aimed at the disenfranchisement of the black population and the destruction of the Republican party apparatus in the South. Between 1868 and 1871, the Ku Klux Klan, White Liners, Red Shirts, and other paramilitary groups assassinated black and white politicians and carried out full-scale military-style assaults on government buildings and black schools and churches in a campaign of murder, assassination, and torture that exceeded anything carried out by Sherman’s armies in terms of its casualties and its level of cruelty and sadism. Black and white Republican politicians, white teachers who taught in black schools, and ordinary black men and women were shot in their homes, kidnapped and mutilated, drowned, raped, and beaten with almost complete impunity throughout the Deep South.
In Georgia, the Freedmen’s Bureau reported 336 cases of murder or attempted murder of freedmen between January 1 and November 15, 1868. In October 1870, a mob of 2,500 armed whites drove 150 blacks from their homes in Laurens County, South Carolina, killing nine Republicans. Torchlight parades, the white cassocks of the Ku Klux Klan, drums and military displays, and exemplary public killings were all part of the pageantry of terror that white “Redeemers” imposed on the South. In South Carolina, Sherman’s former adversary Wade Hampton commanded a Red Shirt militia with some thirty thousand armed members, many of whose units were led by former Confederate officers. In 1871 Ulysses Grant declared a number of districts in South Carolina to be in a “state of rebellion” and enacted the Third Enforcement Act, known as the Ku Klux Klan Act, which empowered the army to carry out mass arrests of Klan members.
The subsequent trials succeeded in curbing Klan activity temporarily in some parts of the state. In 1877, however, the last occupying troops left the South, a triumph for the racist order that would keep Southern blacks disenfranchised for nearly a century. In 1919, the British journalist and World War I veteran Stephen Graham followed the route of Sherman’s march through Georgia, where he found former slaves living in conditions that were “poorer and barer than the average you would see in Russia.”23 In effect, the South did “trouble” the North again and regained much of what it had lost during the war in a different form, thus rendering America’s first attempt at postwar social transformation a spectacular failure.
The Indian Fighter
Sherman had little involvement with these developments. Though he did not favor a permanent army of occupation in the South and was personally opposed to giving voting rights to blacks, his attention was mostly focused elsewhere. In 1865 he was appointed commander of the newly created Military Division of the Missouri, with a much reduced force of six thousand soldiers tasked with protecting settlers from “hostile” Indians on the Western frontier and overseeing the completion of the transcontinental railroad network. Sherman had once described the Civil War as a “big Indian war,” and his new command coincided with a period of renewed resistance to white settlement from the Indian tribes on the Great Plains and a new federal policy of forced assimilation.
The destroyer of Southern railroads took a keen personal interest in the Union Pacific Railroad, personally reconnoitering routes through the Rocky Mountains and assigning troops to protect its workers, many of whom included veterans from his campaigns in the Deep South. Sherman’s attitudes toward Native Americans were infused with a strong streak of racial Darwinism. Though he respected their bravery and recognized that they had legitimate grievances regarding their treatment by the government and white society, he regarded them as primitives and an impediment to progress and civilization. “The more I see of these Indians the more convinced I am that they all have to be killed or maintained as a species of paupers,” Sherman wrote to his brother in 1868. “Their attempts at civilization are simply ridiculous.”24
Sherman’s proclivity for extremist statements was often present in his observations on the “Indian troubles.” When a detachment of eighty soldiers was wiped out by a combined force of Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors near Fort Phil Kearny, Wyoming, on December 21, 1866, Sherman told Grant, “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women, and children.”25 These prescriptions were not put into practice, but Sherman’s response to Indian resistance drew heavily on the methods he had first observed in the Seminole War. Traditionally, the Plains Indians fought during the summer and withdrew to settled camps during the winter. Sherman ordered his troops to attack these camps outside the fighting season, when their war ponies were weak and the loss of their food supplies meant starvation or surrender.
As was often the case with Sherman, this strategy had a dual military and political purpose. With few troops at his disposal and faced with small bands of mounted warriors who specialized in rapid hit-and-run raids in a vast territory with limitless possibilities for escape, winter campaigning was a cost-effective alternative to allowing “fifty hostile Indians to checkmate three thousand soldiers.” At the same time, the destruction of their food supplies would target the whole population and facilitate the government’s assimilationist policy by driving Indians back into reservations. Sherman’s indispensable lieutenant during these campaigns was the bulldoggish Philip Sheridan, who commanded the Department of the Platte.
In the winter of 1868, U.S. Cavalry units attacked the Southern Cheyenne, the Kiowa, the Arapaho, and the Comanche in northern Texas and Oklahoma, burning their camps and destroying or seizing their ponies and food supplies. One of their commanders was the Civil War hero Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, who was ordered by Sherman to attack hostile tribes along the Washita River in order to “destroy their villages and ponies, to kill or hang all warriors, and bring back all women and children.” On November 26, Custer led 720 men from the Seventh Cavalry in a dawn attack on the snowbound camp of fifty-eight lodges led by the friendly Cheyenne chieftain Black Kettle on the Washita River. In a battle that quickly turned into a rout, Custer’s men killed over a hundred Indians, including Black Kettle and his wife. The majority of the dead were not armed warriors, but women and young children, most of whom, according to the writer and anthropologist George Bird Grinnell, a student of the Cheyenne, “were shot while hiding in the brush or trying to run away through it.”26
Custer’s raid against a widely respected Cheyenne chief received some criticism in the East, but Sheridan condemned such critics as “good and pious ecclesiastics . . . aiders and abetters of savages who murdered, without mercy, men, women and children.” Sherman declared himself “well satisfied” with Custer’s attack. In 1869 Philip Sheridan was appointed commander of the Military District of the Missouri, following Sherman’s promotion to commander in chief of the U.S. Army. Between 1869 and 1883, Sheridan’s forces fought 619 separate engagements with the Plains tribes, using a combination of offensive raids and winter campaigns that made little distinction between fighters and non-combatants. Writing to Sherman in 1873, Sheridan justified his methods in the following terms: “If a village is attacked and women and children killed, the responsibility is not with the soldiers but with the people whose crimes necessitated the attack. During the war did one hesitate to attack a village or town occupied by the enemy because women or children were within its limits? Did we cease to throw shells at Vicksburg or Atlanta because women or children were there?”27
During the Red River War of 1874–75, Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Comanche were starved into reservations along the southern plains as Sheridan’s commanders pursued them relentlessly, destroying their camps and deporting their leaders. Sheridan also attacked the material basis of Plains Indian society. In 1871, the hunting of buffalo herds by white hunters reached new heights following the discovery of a new way of making leather from buffalo hide. Between 1872 and 1874, an estimated 3,700,000 buffalo were slaughtered in the West, of which only 150,000 were killed by Indians. In 1875 Sheridan opposed an attempt by the Texas legislature to conserve the remaining buffalo, and praised the hunters “who have done more in the last two years, and will do more in the next years, to settle the vexed Indian question, than the entire regular army has done in the last thirty years. . . . They are destroying the Indians’ commissary, and it is a well-known fact that an army losing its base of supplies is placed at a great disadvantage.”28 For Sheridan, the extermination of the buffalo was “the only way to bring lasting peace and allow civilization to advance.”
By 1875, most of the tribes on the southern Plains had been forced onto reservations, and the focus of the “Indian question” shifted to the powerful Lakota Sioux in southern Dakota. When the Sioux rejected an offer from a government commission to buy the Black Hills, where gold had been discovered the previous year, Sherman authorized Sheridan to begin military operations against them, thus unleashing a chain of events that culminated in Custer’s defeat at the Battle of the Little Big Horn on June 25, 1876. A furious Sherman now declared that “forbearance has ceased to be a virtue toward these Indians, and only a severe and persistent chastisement will bring them to a sense of submission.” All reservations in Sioux country were now placed under military control and their inhabitants treated as prisoners of war. Indians outside these reservations were regarded as “hostiles” and hunted down remorselessly.
Throughout the winter of 1876–77, cavalry columns systematically pursued a policy of starvation against the Sioux and Cheyenne, burning their camps and seizing their supplies of dried buffalo meat, their ponies, and their buffalo robes, leaving their destitute inhabitants exposed in the mountains in below-zero temperatures. By May 1877, most of the Indians had come into the reservations. Despite sporadic resistance to white settlement over the coming years, the defeat of the Sioux effectively marked the end of America’s long conquest of the Native American population.
Sherman regarded his contribution to the settlement of the West as one of his greatest achievements. “I have been travelling, in three months, in beautiful cars abundantly provided with every comfort, over an extent of more than ten thousand miles of country, every mile of which is free from the danger of the savage and is being occupied by industrious families,” he wrote to his wife in 1883, during his last official trip to the West. “Every day I am reminded of little things done, or words spoken which have borne fruit. I honestly believe in this way I have done more good for our country and for the human race than I did in the Civil War.”29 Asked by a Denver Times interviewer for his views on the Indian question, he replied, “I do not see what is to prevent them from gradually becoming an extinct race, but in any event I don’t think they will ever again become a factor in the general policy of this country; the railroads have settled that.”30
In his memoirs, he attributed the completion of the Union Pacific Railroad to the Civil War, which “trained the men who built that national highway” and provided soldiers who were willing to “fight the marauding Indians just as they had learned to fight the rebels down at Atlanta.” For Sherman, both marauding Indians and rebels were obstacles to the advancement of an American civilization that he considered destined for international greatness. Yet he always remained wary of the fragility of this civilization and continued to rail at the “demagogues, dynamite fiends, fools, hypocrites and mischief-makers” whom he regarded as a threat to American stability during the Gilded Age. In 1877 he criticized a decision by Congress not to use federal troops to suppress “labor riots.” Ten years later, he warned, “I am not afraid of the red flag, if any disturbing element comes from abroad or within, we will squelch it quicker than we did the civil war.”31
Despite his reactionary political views, Sherman was never tempted to follow Grant and run for presidential office. Following his retirement in 1883, he spent much of his time attending army reunions and traveling back and forth across the country as a sought-after speaker and national celebrity. His appearance was invariably greeted by the strains of “Marching Through Georgia”—a song that he came to detest. He also traveled widely abroad, visiting London, Paris, Germany, Russia, and Cuba, where he told his wife that the Cubans praised “El Grande Marcha” (sic) and compared him to Hannibal and Julius Caesar.
On February 14, 1891, just after his seventy-first birthday, Sherman collapsed in his rocking chair while rereading Great Expectations and died shortly afterward. More than thirty thousand soldiers and veterans accompanied his coffin to the train in New York that took it to Saint Louis. There another twelve thousand veterans, soldiers, and local dignitaries accompanied his body on a seven-mile procession from the station to the Calvary Cemetery, where his son Tom read the funeral oration. In this way, America said farewell to the soldier who, in the words of the poet and Civil War veteran Richard Watson Gilder, “fought for freedom, not glory; made war that war might cease.”32