Two men locked in a long battle
A dual biography asks us to look again at Geronimo and Sherman
Both men lost their fathers at a young age. Both at first strayed little from their birthplaces. In the 1840s, one of them joined his band’s “council of the warriors” and the other battled Seminoles in Florida. Both were shaped by Andrew Jackson, and the seventh president’s determination to chase the continent’s native people beyond the established settlements of the time.
The author of other dual biographies — Douglas MacArthur and Harry Truman, John Brown and Abraham Lincoln — H.W. Brands is one of the country’s most prolific historians. In “The Last Campaign,” he bears down on an inter-racial struggle of Americans, placing William Tecumseh Sherman and Geronimo at the center of a cultural struggle, a military clash, and a moral test. The whites won the first two, lost the third, and, until recently, all but ignored the ethics and implications of their actions.
Brands argues that what he calls the “war for America” — the battle between clashing nations — was well underway before Europeans landed on the continent and joined (and also widened) the conflict.
He begins at the very last set of confrontations of the struggle, putting them in the widest possible perspective even as he examines them at the most intimate level.
The Apaches and the Americans were two great peoples, separated by language and outlook, joined together by their lust for military glory and in the worship of the land that would provide the fateful final battlegrounds for its possession.
Geronimo’s first fights were against Mexicans, and he developed a philosophical view of armed conflict: “If I am killed no one need mourn for me. My people have all been killed in that country, and I, too, will die if need be.” He swiftly developed into a military leader of vision — and victories. He possessed what Brands called “keen tactical sense,” fueled by a sense of revenge for the death of members of his family. After an 1859 battle with Mexicans, he said, “I gave orders for scalping the slain.”
Sherman’s baptism of fire came at Bull Run, he fought with Ulyss