A fresh look at Sherman, Geronimo
es Grant at Shiloh and Vicksburg, and drew fame (and obloquy) for his fabled, furious march through Tennessee and Georgia. “War is cruelty,” he said. “You cannot refine it; and those who brought war on our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out.” When Grant became president, Sherman became the country’s generalin-chief.
The Civil War punished the noncombatants — the Indians (the term Brands uses throughout the book) who had been the earlier occupants of both the North and South — for it prompted the withdrawal of federal troops from much of the West, exposing them to the rapacity of white settlers. “Troops on the frontier had often protected Indians from white settlers,” Brands tells us, “and the departure of the troops signaled to the settlers that they could invade Indian land, steal Indian property and even kill Indians without worrying about government sanction.” At the same time, the costs of the war led Washington to suspend the payments the federal government had been making as part of Indian land settlements.
When the Civil War ended, the Indians’ troubles only deepened, Brands argues, for it “left them to face the victorious Union army.” By then, the Americans were experienced in conflict and the end of the war brought a new surge of westward expansion. Then came the transcontinental railroad, which hastened settlement and disrupted hunting patterns.
When the Civil War ended, the Americans were experienced in conflict and the end of the war brought a new surge of westward expansion.
Sherman possessed some sympathy for native people; he loathed the corrupt white officials who dealt with them and, in the Black Hills, he warned whites not to breach Indian reservations in search of gold. But he was a hardliner in response to attacks upon whites. “No mercy should be shown these Indians, for they grant no quarter nor ask for it,” he told Grant. He generally spoke softly but carried a big stick, telling them:
“You depend upon whites for a living, and you get hats and clothes from the whites. All that you see white men wear, they have to work for. But you see they have plenty to eat, that they have fine houses and fine clothes. You can have the same, and we believe the time has come when you should begin to own these things, and we will give you assistance.”
But overall — even whites acknowledge this today — the goal was to take the Indian out of the Indian, for this was Sherman’s advice: “Choose your homes and live like white men, and we will help you all you want.”
Brand reminds us that the difference between the American Indians’ way of life and the whites’ reached into every aspect of their being. Here’s one example: “In the Indian model, the humans did the moving, going to where the meat was. In the whites’ version, the meat was moved to where the humans were.”
Geronimo eventually became a Christian but before he did, he spoke of his betrayal by whites:
“You told me that I might live in the reservation type same as white people lived. One year I raised a crop of corn, and gathered and stored it, and the next year I put in a crop of oats, and when the crop was almost ready to harvest, you told your soldiers to put me in prison, and if I resisted to kill me.”
The whites did not kill Geronimo, but his eventual surrender — marked by the playing of “Auld Lang Syne” by a military band — brought to an end the war for America, “the 10,000-year struggle for the territory that became the United States,” as Brands puts it, adding, “Of all the tribes that trod the land between the Atlantic and the Pacific, between the Rio Grande and the Lake of the Woods, one had finally conquered, dispersed or outlasted the rest. The invaders from across the eastern ocean had taken four centuries to establish their dominion, but the deed was done.”