The topic I gave was the genesis of the American Warfare State, which is kind of a big topic,
and there's a lot you can say about that, but since I've written a good bit about the
American Civil War era and some of the decades after that, I thought that would be appropriate
for a first talk in this event.
And if you've never read this essay, there's an essay that's online.
is called War is the Health of the State by Randolph Bourne, B-O-U-R-N-E.
And especially the students, if you're interested in this whole topic, you really must read
this essay.
It was published in the early 20th century, War is the Health of the State.
And it's one of the most insightful articles about the topic of war I've ever read.
And it's a real classic.
So I want to start out by encouraging you to read that essay to get interested in this
whole topic.
War certainly is the health of the state.
I'll give you some examples.
I'm gonna start with the American Civil War,
which I consider to be really the first,
the first, the creation of the American
military-industrial-congressional complex,
as we call it today.
More than 100 years before President Eisenhower
coined that phrase, military-industrial complex.
There were wars prior to that, of course,
but before the Civil War,
The US Army was relatively small. It was located in outposts, keeping an eye on Indians and
things like that. Many of the West Point graduates who became generals in the Civil War had retired
from the Army. General Sherman was a banker in Mississippi, for example, before he became
General Sherman. And so the military wasn't much. Hold your applause, please. And the
The average American citizen, by the way, paid federal taxes of about $45 a year, and the
only contact he ever had with the federal government before the Civil War was through
the post office, and that's about it.
And so it was a very different world back then, but it changed dramatically in a number
of ways.
We had the first income tax during the war, the first federal military conscription law.
There were pervasive excise taxes imposed on just about everything that financed the war.
The Internal Revenue Bureaucracy was created by the Lincoln administration during the war.
There were 10 tariff increases.
At the time, federal revenue was mostly tariff revenue on imports.
About 90% or so of all federal tax revenue was from tariffs on imports at the time.
And the Lincoln administration, Lincoln himself signed 10 tariff tax increases so that by
By the end of the Civil War, the average tax on imports was close to 50% and it remained
in the 40% to 50% range until 1913 when we got the income tax.
So that was a long-lasting tax increase there.
The writ of habeas corpus was suspended for pretty much the duration of the Civil War.
There were mass arrests of northern civilians by the tens of thousands.
in New York Harbor, there was a man named Dean Sprague who wrote a book called Freedom
Under Lincoln published by University Press who remarked that the only place in the northern
states during the Civil War where there was genuine free speech was in these prisons because
if you're already in prison for speaking freely in opposition to the government, what have
you got to lose?
What are they going to do?
Put you in prison?
And so, when I cited this in one of my books, I had emails from several people from Eastern
Europe who said, well, this sounds just like it was under communism, where the only place
you could speak freely was if you were in prison, if you were in the gulag for speaking
freely against the communists.
And so there are parallels there.
Hundreds of newspapers were shut down in the northern, so I'm not talking about the south,
I'm talking about the northern states, where I'm talking about the US Army here in my talk.
At the same time, Lincoln also issued an arrest warrant for the Chief Justice of the United
States, Roger B. Taney, after Taney issued an opinion that his suspension of habeas corpus
was unconstitutional.
Rather than challenging it in court, he issued an arrest warrant.
And the source of this was originally a lawyer and friend of Lincoln's named Ward Layman,
who wrote about it in his biography.
But then there are other sources too.
The mayor of Baltimore at the time was a personal friend of Judge Taney.
He wrote about it in his memoirs.
There's an official history of the US Marshals Service that mentions the arrest warrant for
Judge Taney.
And the justice of the Supreme Court who resigned after the Dred Scott decision wrote his memoirs.
And he said that he knew, that Taney knew, that there was an arrest warrant issued by
the Lincoln administration for him.
And so there was an attack on the separation of powers, in other words, with the intimidation
of Federal Judges.
And Tony was not the only federal judge who was intimidated in this way.
In my book, Lincoln Unmasked, I dug up out of the archives a letter from a federal judge
who wrote his fellow judges a letter explaining why he could not come to court that day to
issue a writ of habeas corpus to a young man who had been accused by the government of
criticizing the Lincoln administration.
He said when he got home, his home was surrounded by federal soldiers who literally held him
and Politically Connected People in Illinois of the day, and one of the things that sticks
out of my mind is that Abe Lincoln lived in the biggest house on old aristocracy row.
In his next door neighbor though, there's a plaque next to the house of his next door
neighbor was a tin cup manufacturer, and he sold tin cups.
He miraculously by sheer luck probably, I suppose, got the contract with the US government
to Supply Tin Cups to the U.S. Army.
And so that was sort of the start of the corrupt military industrial complex system that Bob
Higgs, our next speaker, has written about so much in many of his books and articles.
And so war certainly is the health of the state.
And these are just a few examples of what is meant by that.
That is always true that the healthier the state, the more unhealthy is the civil society,
the private enterprise system, and the degree of freedom in the country.
We've long ago passed the idea where we have the night watchman state, where the state
basically protects rights to life, liberty and property.
The budget for the US government to cover that was adequate under George Washington.
And ever since then, it's all been one big transfer society for the most part, as opposed
to a property rights protection society.
But what I'd like to get into now is talking about the way in which the waging of war was
established in America's first really big war, the American Civil War and the US government's
war.
So I'm not going to talk about the Confederate side of the war.
My subject here is the U.S. Army, and there's a book called The Hard Hand of War by Mark
Grimsley.
Mark Grimsley is a defense historian, he's a consultant to the Defense Department and
the Army, and he wrote this book, The Hard Hand of War, and I remember going to the beach
and reading this at the beach on vacation once, where everyone else is reading Us Magazine
and things like that, and I'm reading The Hard Hand of War, and here's one of the things
As he said, he said the Army of the Potomac, which was the US Army, possessed its full
quotient of thieves, freelance foragers, and officers willing to look the other way.
And it's a testament to Mark Grimsley that he can write this and still be a paid consultant
to the Defense Department, I suppose.
And so in other words, even the defenders and promoters of the US military establishment
have to admit certain truths, and another truth he admits to is that war was waged on the civilian population of the South from the very beginning in this war.
For example, to retaliate against Confederate army attacks, from the very beginning, one part of the routine was holding randomly chosen civilians as hostages,
sometimes shooting them and sometimes burning their houses to the ground.
For example, there was a colonel named John Beatty who warned the residents of Paint Rock, Alabama, this, these are his words,
Every time the telegraph wire is cut, we will burn a house. Every time a train is fired upon, we will hang a man.
And we will continue to do this until every house is burned and every man hanged between Decatur and Bridgeport, Alabama.
And he ended up burning the entire town of Paint Rock to the ground while seizing three hostages.
Hostages.
And there was also rampant vandalism by the U.S. Army during the war.
This is probably not news to a lot of South Carolinians, but if you ever saw the sequence
of movies starting with Gettysburg and then I think it was the Killer Angels, I think
was the first book that was made into a movie, and then the sequel to that, when I saw it,
I was shocked to notice that there was actually a scene of a looting of Fredericksburg, Virginia,
because that's really politically incorrect, to actually show U.S. Army soldiers looting
private homes in their own country.
But here's a firsthand account by a federal soldier of what happened, he said, this, boys
came in loaded with silver pitchers, silver spoons, silver lamps and casters, et cetera.
Great three-story houses furnished magnificently were broken into and their content scattered
over the floors and trampled on by the muddy feet of the soldiers. Splendid alabaster vases
and pieces of statuary were thrown at six and seven hundred dollar mirrors. Closets
of the very finest china were broken into and their contents smashed onto the floor
and stamped to pieces. Finest cut glass where cobblets were hurled at nine nice place-clad
windows, beautifully embroidered window curtains torn down, rosewood pianos piled in the street
and Burn, or soldiers would get on top of them and kick the keyboard and internal machinery all to pieces.
And so this was just a riot upon the civilian population.
And of course, the same sort of thing went on for four years, especially with Sherman's march through South Carolina.
And one of the neoconservative war apologists, who's one of my favorites, Victor Davis Hanson,
wrote about this once when he knows about all these stories of Sherman's bummers, as they were called,
and the destruction of personal property and the murder of civilians and he claims that
Sherman himself did this and tolerated this because he was such a racial egalitarian and
he was so hurt by the fact that there was racial inequality in the southern states that
that's what motivated him to burn the entire town of two-thirds of Columbia, for example.
And this is probably the dumbest remark ever made by a neoconservative, and that's naturally
saying something.
Because if you know anything about Sherman, I have some quotes from General Sherman that
I'm going to read to you later on that shows that he was as much a white supremacist as
any man of his age or any other age.
And so for someone like Victor Davis Hansen to say a statement like that is just patently
absurd.
But that's the type of thing you get when you read mainstream history books about this
This Period of History, Sherman himself, early in the war, before he became famous for his
famous march, in 1862, he was frustrated by his ability to subdue Confederate snipers
and sharpshooters, and so he took vengeance upon the civilian population.
He made speech after speech, claiming that it was the faulty logic, those were the words
General Halleck, Hold the Neighborhood, Fully Responsible, Men, Women, Children, Enemy Soldiers,
One of his subordinates, a Colonel Walcott, to burn the entire town down, but leave one
house standing as an example to mark the place where a town once was.
And Mark Grimsley, the historian I mentioned earlier, he defends this sort of thing by
saying this, quote, Sherman pursued a policy quite in keeping with that of other Union
commanders from Missouri to Virginia.
So they're all doing it.
So he says in one part of his book, The Hard Hand of War, you know, why is everybody so
critical of Sherman when they were all doing this?
They were all waging total war on civilians because that was the policy of the Lincoln
administration.
And so he damns him with faint praise and he damns all the other generals as well.
Here's how Sherman described his ultimate purpose in the war in a letter to his wife.
And this is his own words.
His purpose was, quote, extermination, not of soldiers alone, that is the least part
of the trouble, but the people, you know, the people, the extermination of the people
of the South.
His loving wife wrote back this, she said, she offered her sincerest wish that the war
would be a war of extermination, and that all southerners would be driven like swine
into the sea.
May we carry fire and sword into their states till not one habitation is left standing.
of the Sweetheart, Mrs. Sherman must have been, and you know, I was on Cape Cod a couple
years ago, and driving around, there's one of the main highways that goes all the way
across Cape Cod, Massachusetts, it's called Grand Army of the Republic, and it's sort
of sickened me, it ruined my vacation, I'm riding on the Grand, the Republicans started
calling themselves the Grand Old Party, because they're such a grand bunch, and of course
I think a more proper name would be the Grand Army of the Empire, not the Grand Army of
the Republic.
Here's what Sherman described when he described in his own words the destruction of Meridian,
Mississippi.
He said, for five days, 10,000 of our men worked hard and with a will in that work of
destruction with axes, sledges, crowbars, claw bars, and with fire.
And I have no hesitation in pronouncing the work well done, Meridian no longer exists.
And so they totally destroyed Meridian, Mississippi also.
Mark Grimsley writes about Grant, he said, quote, Grant had approved the Meridian Expedition
and it formed a good example of the sort of war he expected to conduct against the South.
And so it definitely was a war of terrorism and total war waged on the civilian population
from the very beginning.
And when Sherman got to Atlanta, the Confederate Army was gone, but they bombed the city of
of Atlanta for several days after the army had left.
And according to the official records,
there were about 4,000 private homes
in the city at that point.
And keep in mind, there's no Confederate army,
they think they're gone.
And they bombed for four straight days
so that there were only 400 left standing.
So they destroyed 90% of all the buildings in Atlanta,
including many churches.
And if you read, there's a book called,
The book on Waging War on Southern Civilians, and it's based on the government's official
records of the war, and it tells stories of how some of Sherman's artillerists were literally
using private homes for target practice.
They would wait until they saw a shadow or a figure, and it looked like someone was there,
And they would pinpoint that home and sort of compete with each other to see who could
put a shell through the window of that house.
And Sherman sat there approvingly the whole time.
And his defenders, by the way, when I write about these things in my books and articles,
I get emails from historians every once in a while defending Sherman by quoting his orders.
They'll quote some order of his and say, you know, we are not to disturb any houses, any
Private Homes, and then he sits on his horse and watches his artillerist destroy private
homes.
And so the proof that he didn't do this is supposedly that he issued orders at some point
to not do this, wink, wink.
And Grimsley downplays the suffering of the citizens of Atlanta.
After 90% of the buildings of Atlanta were destroyed, there were about 2,000 people left
there, and they were kicked out of their homes and forced to just become homeless in November.
And after two large armies had just eaten out the countryside by foraging, and Grimsley
downplays this by, he said that there were only, his words, only a few thousand people.
So you know, what's your complaint?
There was only a few thousand people that this was done to.
And by October of 1864, Sherman gave up all pretense of legality when he ordered the shooting
of Randomly Chosen Civilians in Retaliation for Attacks by Confederate Soldiers, who would
kill his soldiers, and if he couldn't apprehend the responsible parties, they would just randomly
apprehend civilians and murder them.
Here's one of Sherman's actual orders, these are his words, to a General Lewis Watkins,
cannot you send over about Fairmount and Adairsville, burn 10 or 12 houses of known secessionists,
Tell a few at random and let them know that it will be repeated every time a train is
fired upon from Rissaca to Kingston.
So that was part of the policy of the war also.
A biographer of Sherman named Lee Kennet, he wrote also something similar to what Mark
Grimsley wrote about some of the soldiers in Sherman's army.
He said this, the New York regiments were filled with big city criminals and foreigners
Fresh from the jails of the old world.
So in other words, some of the European governments empty their jails because the Lincoln administration
was hiring mercenaries by promising them land under the Homestead Act.
If you ever saw the movie Gangs of New York, there's a scene in there where these Irish
immigrants are getting off the boat from Ireland and they take about 10 steps and they sign
up for the U.S. Army, and I'm not sure it was that immediate, but a lot of that did
did happen.
A lot of that did happen.
And of course, you know, many hundreds or thousands of them were killed in Virginia.
Shortly thereafter, that sort of happened.
Clyde Wilson, the retired history professor from USC, he, one of his papers, he estimated
that there were some 200,000 mercenary, European mercenaries in the US Army during this time.
I don't know how accurate that is, but Clyde is a pretty renowned scholar.
And so it carries a lot of weight as far as that goes.
And of course, the slaves and free blacks were treated just as poorly as anyone else
was.
Grimsley says this, he says, with the utter disregard for blacks that was the norm among
Union troops, the soldiers ransacked the slave cabins, taking whatever they liked.
They often tortured or murdered slaves if they wouldn't tell them where the family valuables
and of course in South Carolina that was where Sherman was most eager to get to one of his captains said this the army burned everything it came near in the state of South Carolina a majority of the cities, towns, villages and county houses have been burnt to the ground this was one of Sherman's chaplains who wrote that and of course two thirds of Columbia was burned to the ground
If anyone wants to read about this, of course, there have been many accounts of this, but
one kind of interesting account, there was a young woman named Emma Laconte, L-E-C-O-N-T-E,
from Columbia, South Carolina, and I read across a book, Oxford University Press published
a book of hers in 1957 about the burning of Columbia, which she witnessed as an 18-year-old
woman, and so if you want to really read about that, I would recommend Emma Laconte's book
The Fire on Main Street was now raging, and we anxiously watched its progress from the
upper front windows.
In a little while, however, the flames broke forth in every direction.
The drunken devils roamed about, setting fire to every house the flames seemed likely to
spare.
They were fully equipped for the noble work they had in hand.
Each soldier was furnished with combustibles compactly put up.
They would enter houses and in the presence of helpless women and children, pour turpentine
on the beds and set them on fire.
Guards were rarely of any assistance.
Most generally they assisted in the pillaging and firing.
And so that's the sort of thing that went on.
Another famous general was Sheridan.
And again, like Sherman, after the Confederate army had vacated the Shenandoah Valley, he
He went on a looting, burning and murdering binge of the civilian population and became
quite famous for that.
It is said that after the war was over, Sheridan was invited to speak to the Prussian army in
Europe and even the Prussians were appalled at the stories that he told about the American
way of waging war.
Here's one example.
Here's a letter that Sheridan wrote to Grant in 1864 in the middle of his burning of the
Shenandoah Valley.
He said, the wheat, quote, had destroyed over 2,200 barns filled with wheat, hay, and farming
implements.
Over 70 mills filled with flour and wheat have driven in front of the army over 4,000
head of stock and have killed and issued to the troops not less than 3,000 sheep.
Tomorrow I will continue the destruction.
A federal officer said this describing the scene in the Shenandoah Valley, said,
The atmosphere from horizon to horizon has been black with smoke of a hundred conflagrations,
and at night a gleam brighter and more lurid than sunset has shot from every verge.
The completeness of the devastation is awful. Hundreds of nearly starving people are going
north. Our trains are crowded with them. They line the wayside. Hundreds more are coming,
so stripped of food that I cannot imagine how they escape starvation.
And one soldier wrote home, a federal soldier wrote home that he had personally burned more
than 60 private homes to the ground.
And he said this in his letter, it was a hard-looking sight to see the women and children turned
out of doors at this season of the year, end quote.
And again, it was October, November, winter was coming that this was happening.
And so that's the famous General Sheridan in his work.
And after Sheridan did that, of course, Lincoln famously extended to Sheridan his personal
thanks and the thanks of the nation.
Those are Lincoln's words for doing this.
And of course, this is also around the time when Lincoln was making speeches about malice
toward none, while congratulating his generals for doing this sort of malicious thing.
And all of this is why a Sherman biographer named Lee Kennet, who wrote a very favorable
biography of Sherman, as most all of them are.
They all tend to be hagiographies and these sort of hero worship books.
But he concluded, you know, after writing about all these facts based on the official
records kept by the government, he said this, he said, had the Confederates somehow won,
had their victory put them in position to bring their chief opponents before some sort
Excuses.
And I'll give you one example of what I'm talking about.
The historian Mark Neely, who I think he's the head of one of the numerous Lincoln Museums
in the country.
I think there are maybe 10 or 20,000 of these things, and they're just everywhere.
And he's the head, the director of one of them.
About Sherman in one of his books, he says, he said, Sherman and his fellow generals waged
war in the same way most Victorian gentlemen did, and other Victorian gentlemen in the
world knew it.
So he was a Victorian gentleman and he waged war and this statement by Neely is made in
a book that has essays by 31 different authors and the editor of that book, 31 different
authors, said that Neely must have been commenting on a different war than the other 30 authors
were commenting on to make a statement like this.
So that's the sort of thing you get into when you get into this literature that you can
You can get these facts in highly regarded university press books, but sometimes the
facts will be on one page and then there will be 30 pages of excuses in flim-flam like this.
And so sometimes you lose the facts because the context is so skewed.
There was also a major, another characteristic of the first major adventure of the U.S. military,
in the Civil War was a massive desertion by, there was desertion on both sides to be sure.
But there was a book on this, a very good scholarly book published by Ella Lahn, last
name is L-O-N-N, called Desertion During the Civil War.
And it's based mostly on the official government records and letters from the generals to Lincoln
and to Jefferson Davis and so forth.
So she, it's pretty well documented on desertion.
And on the Federal Army side, she says that although General McClellan had 180,000 men
on his roster, his official roster prior to the Battle of Antietam, who otherwise known
as Battle of Sharpsburg, he had no more than 90,000 during the battle itself.
So according to the official records, about half of the army just disappeared.
And that was pretty typical on the eve of battle, that sort of thing happened.
In June of 1862, General Buell reported from Tennessee that 14,000 officers and soldiers
were absent when General Hooker took command of the Army of the Potomac in 1863, January.
He wrote that, quote, desertions were occurring at the rate of several hundred a day, and
about 25% of the Army was absent, according to his letters in the official records.
And the response of the Lincoln administration was to execute deserters.
And there's kind of an interesting story about this.
There was a book published 10 or 12 years ago that was based mostly on a few letters
that Lincoln supposedly wrote that overturned an order to shoot some deserters.
And it was revealed just about a year ago that the letters were faked, that the person
who found the letters in the archives actually changed the writing around in the letters
And it sort of ruined his career, because I'd been reading, I'd read Ella Lahn's book and I'd been reading about desertions and the execution of deserters, and then I read this guy's book saying that Lincoln was a tender-hearted little pussycat and he was so gracious and full of grace that his mean generals wanted to execute deserters, but he stepped in and saved their lives. Not true, not true. Here's what Ella Lahn says based on the official records.
Executions of deserters were taking place almost daily in the Army of the Potomac.
General Halleck complained to Lincoln that hundreds of officers were almost continually absent from their commands,
and that about 200 more were absent without leave every month.
So there were, you know, there were 100,000 deserters from the Union Army in 1862.
So what did they do?
She writes that the Lincoln government, quote, had no compunction about shooting or hanging deserters who resisted arrest.
And here's how it worked. Here's how she describes the scene in a typical army encampment.
And I'm quoting, a gallows and shooting ground were provided in each corps, and scarcely a Friday passed during the winter of 1863, 1864,
that some wretched deserter did not suffer the death penalty in the army of the Potomac.
The death penalty was so unsparingly used that executions were almost daily occurrences
in most of the armies.
So this happened.
She goes on to write that the condemned men marched out between two ranks of the regiment,
preceded by the musicians, playing a funeral march.
The provost's guard, as an escort, carried the coffin.
The victim was conducted to the edge of the grave, which had already been dug.
After the sentence was read, he was seated, blindfolded and placed upon a board at the
The Method of Execution was generally shooting, but hanging sometimes seems to be unused occasionally.
And so that was what really happened with regard to deserters, many of whom were conscripts.
Of course, they were draftees.
That's why for many of these men, being drafted was worse than being a slave.
At least a slave could always hope to escape, but there's no escaping death.
If you weren't killed in the war and you tried to escape, you would be killed by the US Army.
And so those are some of the unsavory facts that I wanted to bring out about the first
big military adventure by the military industrial complex.
And shortly after that, there was another big military adventure that happened that
was commenced three months after the end of the so-called civil war.
I call it so-called because I prefer war to prevent southern independence.
It's not going to catch on except in a small group, but because of my belief that a civil
war is a war over two sides fighting over control of a government, and Jefferson Davis
did not want to run the government in Washington, D.C. any more than George Washington wanted
to run the government in London during our first war of secession.
And so I don't think it's accurate, even though it's been called that for a long, long time.
But the next adventure by the U.S. military was the war, the 25-year-long war on the Plains
Indians that was commenced just three months after Appomattox.
So on June 27th, 1865, so the war ended officially in May, May of 1865.
So just a couple months later, General Sherman is given command of the military district
of the Missouri.
The country was divided up into military districts by the US government.
And his job basically was to pave the way for the government-subsidized transcontinental
and the Transcontinental Railroads by killing as many of the Indians as he could.
The famous book, there's a book, Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow by Dee Brown.
Dee Brown was the famous historian of the American West, author of Bury My Heart at
Wounded Knee and it's a good history of the Transcontinental Railroad, Hear That Lonesome
Whistle Blow.
And here's one of the things he wrote about this enterprise that began during the war
and of course was continued after the war, the building of the transcontinental railroads, the government subsidized transcontinental railroads.
He says that Lincoln's Pacific Railway Act, which was passed in 1862, assured the fortunes of a dynasty of American families.
The Brewsters, Bushnells, Alcotts, Harkers, Harrisons, Trowbridges, Landworthies, Reeds, Ogdens, Bradfords, Noises, Brooks, Cornelles and dozens of others
and all, you know, wealth that lasts to this day. Their descendants all enjoy this great wealth
that was created by their connections to the Republican Party during this era.
For example, he writes that Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania received a block of Union Pacific
stock in exchange for his vote for the Pacific Railroad bill. So back in the good old days,
you could actually bribe members of Congress with stock out in the open here. Here's some shares of
Stock, Vote for My Bill, and they try to do it. They do it still today, of course, but
it's done more surreptitiously. He was a Pennsylvania iron manufacturer and he also
demanded a legal requirement that all the iron used in constructing the railroad be
made in the United States, purchased from him among other people. A congressman from
Massachusetts named Oakes Ames was a shovel manufacturer and he agreed to vote for the
Pacific Railway Bill if they used American-made shovels, and of course, it must have taken
a lot of shovels to dig railroad beds from Iowa to California.
And then so Sherman, you know, right after the war, in his memoirs, here's what he writes.
He says, as soon as the war is over, and he writes this, my thoughts and feelings at once
reverted to the construction of the Great Pacific Railway, I put myself in communication
with the parties engaged in the work, visiting them in person and assured them that I would
to afford them all possible assistance and encouragement.
And he also said, we are not going to let a few thieving, ragged Indians check and stop
the progress of the railroads.
And one of Lincoln's friends was a man named Grenville Dodge, who Lincoln made a general
during the war.
And his basic assignment during the war was to kill Indians, get them out of the way and
commence the building of the railroads.
And so he did that.
That's basically, he didn't really fight any real battles or was involved in any real battles
with Confederates, shooing the Indians out of the way, and he was made the chief engineer
of the Transcontinental Railroad at the end of the war, and he recommended making slaves
of the Indians.
That's what was his recommendation to Congress, but Congress and the administration decided
not to make slaves of the Indians and to use federal soldiers as sort of a new brand of
overseers.
They decided to try to murder as many of the Indians as possible instead, and they succeeded
pretty well.
and of course Sheridan joined in on this and one biographer writes this he says the great triumvirate of
of the Union Civil War Effort, Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan.
This is Michael Fellman, the Sherman biographer,
formulated and enacted military Indian policy
until reaching by the 1880s what Sherman sometimes
referred to as the final solution of the Indian problem.
You can't make this stuff up, can you, the final solution,
General Sherman, to the Indian problem?
Michael Fellman goes on.
He says, these men applied their shared ruthlessness born of their civil war experiences against
the people all three men despised.
Sherman's overall policy was never accommodation and compromise, but vigorous war against the
Indians, whom he regarded as a less than human and savage race.
And so, and the other generals, there were many others too, Filman goes on to say they
were like Sherman and Sheridan, civil war luminaries.
These included John Pope, O.O. Howard, Nelson Miles, Alfred Terry, Edward Canby, George
Armstrong Custer, Benjamin Garrison, Winfield Scott Hancock, all the same crowd, all the
same people, individuals.
And Feldman goes on to say Sherman viewed Indians as he viewed recalcitrant Southerners
during the war and newly freed people after the war as namely resistors to the legitimate
forces of an ordered society.
And so Sherman was going to bring order to Indian society by killing as many Indians
as possible.
That would make society more orderly, apparently.
And he goes on to say Sherman charged Sheridan, quote, to act with all the vigor he had shown
in the Shenandoah Valley.
So and I just described the kind of vigor that Sheridan showed in the Shenandoah Valley.
Another Sherman biographer writes that these Union Civil War veterans, they considered
for Indians to be subhuman and racially inferior to whites and therefore deserving of extermination.
And here's what he said.
This is Lee Kennett.
He was a Sherman biographer.
And these are all mainstream Sherman biographers.
You can pick up these books at any Barnes and Noble or I'm sure the Furman Library has
these books by Lee Kennett and John Marzelak and these other people I'm citing.
He said this, quote, the Indians, this is Sherman's view, the Indians give a fair illustration
of the fate of the Negroes if they are released from the control of the whites, Sherman once
said.
He said the blending of, this is Sherman's words, the blending of races in Mexico had
produced general equality, which led inevitably to Mexican anarchy.
And so Sherman himself considered this, what Michael Fellman, his biographer, called a
racial cleansing of the land.
And so when I mentioned Victor Davis Hansen as saying, well, Sherman was so mean to Southerners
because he was sort of a racial egalitarian and was offended by the racial inequality
in the South.
Well, I don't know if that's the dumbest thing or the funniest thing I've ever read by a
historian.
If you read Sherman's own views regarding the Indians and the blending of the black and white and Indian cultures in Mexico,
he called these people of this ancestry mongrels and called for a racial cleansing of the land and promised that this is not going to happen in America.
We're going to at least take care of the Indians and make sure it doesn't happen that way, is what Sherman was saying.
And of course, Sherman and Sheridan were famous for the old slogan that the only good Indian
is a dead Indian, and here's one of Sherman's actual orders was this, all the Indians will
have to be killed or be maintained as a species of paupers, and that's pretty much what they
did.
They gave Sheridan prior authorization to slaughter as many women and children as well
The Indian Warriors
They conducted more than a thousand attacks on Indian villages over this 25-year period
1865 to 1890. And they usually occurred in the wintertime when families would be together.
And they also waged a war of extermination on the buffalo. It wasn't just the tragedy of the
commons that made the buffalo almost extinct. There was a concerted effort by the US government
to wipe out the buffalo herd because the Indians used the buffalo for everything, food, clothing.
They even used buffalo bones for fish hooks and things like that. And so if they didn't kill them
The Civil War against the Indians took place during the Civil War, and then continued for many years after it, and one awful example of it, of something that happened during the war, this is November 29th, 1864, there was a famous massacre called the Sand Creek Massacre, and there were a group of Indians in New York City, and they tried to starve them out by waging war against the buffalo as well as the Indians. And so this war against the Indians actually took place during the Civil War, and then continued for many years after it.
in Colorado, southeastern Colorado, who had made peace with the US government.
The US government told them, if you fly our flag over your teepees, we know that you're friendly.
You just want to live in peace, trade with us, we'll leave you alone.
So they did that, but here's what happened.
There's an account of this in a book called Crimson Prairie, The Indian Wars, and it's written by S.L.A. Marshall.
S. L. A. Marshall was the chief historian of the European theater of World War II.
And he's the author of over 30 books on US military history.
So he's the government's official historian of the war in Europe during World War II.
This is a man with some credibility.
And he wrote about this in his book Crimson Perry.
There was an officer named Chivington, Captain Chivington.
He says his troops quote began, when they attacked this peaceful village, they began
a full day given over to bloodlust, orgiastic mutilation, rapine and destruction, with Chivington
looking on and approving.
Dee Brown wrote about the Sand Creek Massacre also in Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.
In his famous book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, he said this, when the troops came up
to the squaws, the squaws ran out and showed their persons to let the soldiers know they
And they were squads, and begged for mercy, but the soldiers shot them all.
There seemed to be indiscriminate slaughter of men, women, and children.
The squads offered no resistance.
Every one of them was scalped.
And then he also writes about how after this, Shervington and his troops marched triumphantly
through Denver with all these scalps and other body parts on display from the Indians.
And it gets much grosser than just the scalping, and I'm not going to get into any more detail
than that.
And so that's what happened.
Marshall called...
This is a man who wrote 30 books on American military history, SLA Marshall, and he calls
Sheridan's orders to Custer.
He calls them the most brutal orders ever published to American troops.
And that's saying something for a man who wrote 30 books on U.S. military history and
wrote the entire official history of the European theater of World War II.
And, for example, what went on with Custer, his troops decided to do this, to kill or
hang all the warriors, of course, that was the order.
But that meant separating them from, I'm quoting from D. Brown, that meant separating them
from old men, women and children.
This work was too slow and dangerous for the cavalrymen.
They found it much more efficient and safe to kill indiscriminately.
They killed 103 Cheyenne, but only 11 of them were warriors.
The rest were women and children.
And there are some books that try to take an accounting of how many of the Plains Indians
were murdered in this way.
And the biggest estimate is about 45,000, I think.
And you can imagine that there must have been many times that much maimed and injured and
given no medical care.
The official death count of the Civil War, by the way, for many, many years, was 620,000 on both sides, but recently, just in the past year or two, there's some new research that says it might be more like 800,000, because of the government records being, you know, government records, not kept very well.
And so, you know, this was at a time when the population of the United States was about 30 million, about one-tenth of what it is today.
So the death in the Civil War was the equivalent of eight million Americans dying in four years.
And so when you hear this number of 45,000, you know, like Stalin is supposed to have said that, you know, a death of thousands, nobody cares,
but a death of an individual that you can actually see people make a much bigger deal out of, 45,000 might not sound like a lot,
Considering the population of the American West at the time, that was a lot of death and a lot of slaughter, 45,000 people, even if it's over 25 years.
And so to sort of wrap up the message of what I'm trying to convey here, I'm going to quote Ludwig von Mises on war.
What distinguishes man from animals is the insight into the advantages that can be derived
from cooperation under the division of labor.
He's talking about the marketplace.
Man curbs his innate instinct of aggression in order to cooperate with other human beings.
That's the free market.
The more he wants to improve his material well-being, the more he must expand the system
of division of labor, specialization.
More commitmentally, he must more and more restrict the sphere in which he resorts to
military action.
So military action and peaceful exchange are just the exact opposites.
Human cooperation under the division of labor in the civil society bursts asunder, Mises
wrote, whenever citizens turn into warriors.
So what creates civilization is the international division of labor and cooperation in the marketplace.
That's why we don't all live like cavemen and cavewomen.
War bursts all this asunder and destroys all this.
And of course, Mises knows what he's talking about.
He was in the Austrian army during World War I.
The US government certainly dehumanized the Plains Indians just as they dehumanized Southerners.
And I would argue that there's a lot of dehumanization of Southerners that still goes on to this
by the government and its various apparatchiks in the so-called private sector for the same reason, basically.
It bolsters the power and prestige of the state to do that and the state's glorious victory in its wars.
And the same dehumanization took place also in the late 19th century against the Filipinos.
When the U.S. military went to the Philippines and slaughtered more than 200,000 Filipinos,
President Theodore Roosevelt justified the slaughter of 200,000 or more Filipinos who
objected to being made a part of the American Empire since they had just gotten rid of the
Spanish Empire.
Teddy Roosevelt, Bill Kristol's favorite president, he's a favorite of all the neocons, he justified
By the Slaughter, in his mind anyway, by calling the Filipinos, savages, half-breeds, a wild
and ignorant people.
Very similar to how Sherman described the Plains Indians and how Sherman and his wife
described Southerners during the war in those letters that I read to you earlier.
So that is always a part of the military policy, isn't it?
When we engage in aggressive wars, the first step has to be the dehumanization of people.
It sort of reminds me of how during the first Persian Gulf War, the rumor was spread that
Saddam Hussein's soldiers were going into Kuwaiti hospitals and pulling the plugs on
incubators and killing the preemies in a hospital.
And of course, that was a ridiculous lie that was told, but that was just one tiny part
of the necessary dehumanization of people who were picked out as enemies by the American
military establishment.
And there's a very long history of that.
And so that's my story and I'm sticking to it for now.