WEBVTT NOTE The Genesis of the American Warfare State: 1861-1890 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:08.600 The topic I gave was the genesis of the American Warfare State, which is kind of a big topic, 2 00:00:08.600 --> 00:00:12.680 and there's a lot you can say about that, but since I've written a good bit about the 3 00:00:12.680 --> 00:00:20.520 American Civil War era and some of the decades after that, I thought that would be appropriate 4 00:00:20.520 --> 00:00:25.000 for a first talk in this event. 5 00:00:25.000 --> 00:00:29.520 And if you've never read this essay, there's an essay that's online. 6 00:00:29.520 --> 00:00:34.960 is called War is the Health of the State by Randolph Bourne, B-O-U-R-N-E. 7 00:00:34.960 --> 00:00:39.080 And especially the students, if you're interested in this whole topic, you really must read 8 00:00:39.080 --> 00:00:40.080 this essay. 9 00:00:40.080 --> 00:00:45.000 It was published in the early 20th century, War is the Health of the State. 10 00:00:45.000 --> 00:00:49.280 And it's one of the most insightful articles about the topic of war I've ever read. 11 00:00:49.280 --> 00:00:50.280 And it's a real classic. 12 00:00:50.280 --> 00:00:54.840 So I want to start out by encouraging you to read that essay to get interested in this 13 00:00:54.840 --> 00:00:56.480 whole topic. 14 00:00:56.480 --> 00:00:59.480 War certainly is the health of the state. 15 00:00:59.480 --> 00:01:00.560 I'll give you some examples. 16 00:01:00.560 --> 00:01:02.880 I'm gonna start with the American Civil War, 17 00:01:02.880 --> 00:01:05.680 which I consider to be really the first, 18 00:01:05.680 --> 00:01:08.120 the first, the creation of the American 19 00:01:08.120 --> 00:01:11.280 military-industrial-congressional complex, 20 00:01:11.280 --> 00:01:12.960 as we call it today. 21 00:01:12.960 --> 00:01:15.600 More than 100 years before President Eisenhower 22 00:01:15.600 --> 00:01:18.920 coined that phrase, military-industrial complex. 23 00:01:18.920 --> 00:01:21.240 There were wars prior to that, of course, 24 00:01:21.240 --> 00:01:23.560 but before the Civil War, 25 00:01:23.560 --> 00:01:31.880 The US Army was relatively small. It was located in outposts, keeping an eye on Indians and 26 00:01:31.880 --> 00:01:38.840 things like that. Many of the West Point graduates who became generals in the Civil War had retired 27 00:01:38.840 --> 00:01:45.000 from the Army. General Sherman was a banker in Mississippi, for example, before he became 28 00:01:45.000 --> 00:01:52.000 General Sherman. And so the military wasn't much. Hold your applause, please. And the 29 00:01:52.000 --> 00:01:57.600 The average American citizen, by the way, paid federal taxes of about $45 a year, and the 30 00:01:57.600 --> 00:02:02.000 only contact he ever had with the federal government before the Civil War was through 31 00:02:02.000 --> 00:02:05.400 the post office, and that's about it. 32 00:02:05.400 --> 00:02:11.080 And so it was a very different world back then, but it changed dramatically in a number 33 00:02:11.080 --> 00:02:12.080 of ways. 34 00:02:12.080 --> 00:02:19.480 We had the first income tax during the war, the first federal military conscription law. 35 00:02:19.480 --> 00:02:24.240 There were pervasive excise taxes imposed on just about everything that financed the war. 36 00:02:24.240 --> 00:02:30.320 The Internal Revenue Bureaucracy was created by the Lincoln administration during the war. 37 00:02:30.320 --> 00:02:32.280 There were 10 tariff increases. 38 00:02:32.280 --> 00:02:37.480 At the time, federal revenue was mostly tariff revenue on imports. 39 00:02:37.480 --> 00:02:44.600 About 90% or so of all federal tax revenue was from tariffs on imports at the time. 40 00:02:44.600 --> 00:02:49.360 And the Lincoln administration, Lincoln himself signed 10 tariff tax increases so that by 41 00:02:49.360 --> 00:02:54.960 By the end of the Civil War, the average tax on imports was close to 50% and it remained 42 00:02:54.960 --> 00:03:01.120 in the 40% to 50% range until 1913 when we got the income tax. 43 00:03:01.120 --> 00:03:04.740 So that was a long-lasting tax increase there. 44 00:03:04.740 --> 00:03:10.080 The writ of habeas corpus was suspended for pretty much the duration of the Civil War. 45 00:03:10.080 --> 00:03:14.800 There were mass arrests of northern civilians by the tens of thousands. 46 00:03:14.800 --> 00:03:23.360 in New York Harbor, there was a man named Dean Sprague who wrote a book called Freedom 47 00:03:23.360 --> 00:03:28.420 Under Lincoln published by University Press who remarked that the only place in the northern 48 00:03:28.420 --> 00:03:33.880 states during the Civil War where there was genuine free speech was in these prisons because 49 00:03:33.880 --> 00:03:38.040 if you're already in prison for speaking freely in opposition to the government, what have 50 00:03:38.040 --> 00:03:39.040 you got to lose? 51 00:03:39.040 --> 00:03:40.040 What are they going to do? 52 00:03:40.040 --> 00:03:41.280 Put you in prison? 53 00:03:41.280 --> 00:03:47.400 And so, when I cited this in one of my books, I had emails from several people from Eastern 54 00:03:47.400 --> 00:03:51.960 Europe who said, well, this sounds just like it was under communism, where the only place 55 00:03:51.960 --> 00:03:56.300 you could speak freely was if you were in prison, if you were in the gulag for speaking 56 00:03:56.300 --> 00:03:58.380 freely against the communists. 57 00:03:58.380 --> 00:04:01.760 And so there are parallels there. 58 00:04:01.760 --> 00:04:04.920 Hundreds of newspapers were shut down in the northern, so I'm not talking about the south, 59 00:04:04.920 --> 00:04:10.240 I'm talking about the northern states, where I'm talking about the US Army here in my talk. 60 00:04:10.240 --> 00:04:16.380 At the same time, Lincoln also issued an arrest warrant for the Chief Justice of the United 61 00:04:16.380 --> 00:04:22.260 States, Roger B. Taney, after Taney issued an opinion that his suspension of habeas corpus 62 00:04:22.260 --> 00:04:23.260 was unconstitutional. 63 00:04:23.260 --> 00:04:27.760 Rather than challenging it in court, he issued an arrest warrant. 64 00:04:27.760 --> 00:04:33.000 And the source of this was originally a lawyer and friend of Lincoln's named Ward Layman, 65 00:04:33.000 --> 00:04:36.620 who wrote about it in his biography. 66 00:04:36.620 --> 00:04:37.960 But then there are other sources too. 67 00:04:37.960 --> 00:04:41.560 The mayor of Baltimore at the time was a personal friend of Judge Taney. 68 00:04:41.560 --> 00:04:44.080 He wrote about it in his memoirs. 69 00:04:44.080 --> 00:04:48.160 There's an official history of the US Marshals Service that mentions the arrest warrant for 70 00:04:48.160 --> 00:04:49.720 Judge Taney. 71 00:04:49.720 --> 00:04:56.280 And the justice of the Supreme Court who resigned after the Dred Scott decision wrote his memoirs. 72 00:04:56.280 --> 00:05:00.360 And he said that he knew, that Taney knew, that there was an arrest warrant issued by 73 00:05:00.360 --> 00:05:02.240 the Lincoln administration for him. 74 00:05:02.240 --> 00:05:07.560 And so there was an attack on the separation of powers, in other words, with the intimidation 75 00:05:07.560 --> 00:05:08.560 of Federal Judges. 76 00:05:08.560 --> 00:05:12.640 And Tony was not the only federal judge who was intimidated in this way. 77 00:05:12.640 --> 00:05:18.880 In my book, Lincoln Unmasked, I dug up out of the archives a letter from a federal judge 78 00:05:18.880 --> 00:05:24.240 who wrote his fellow judges a letter explaining why he could not come to court that day to 79 00:05:24.240 --> 00:05:29.000 issue a writ of habeas corpus to a young man who had been accused by the government of 80 00:05:29.000 --> 00:05:31.280 criticizing the Lincoln administration. 81 00:05:31.280 --> 00:05:36.040 He said when he got home, his home was surrounded by federal soldiers who literally held him 82 00:06:06.040 --> 00:06:14.640 and Politically Connected People in Illinois of the day, and one of the things that sticks 83 00:06:14.640 --> 00:06:19.840 out of my mind is that Abe Lincoln lived in the biggest house on old aristocracy row. 84 00:06:19.840 --> 00:06:22.920 In his next door neighbor though, there's a plaque next to the house of his next door 85 00:06:22.920 --> 00:06:27.960 neighbor was a tin cup manufacturer, and he sold tin cups. 86 00:06:27.960 --> 00:06:33.920 He miraculously by sheer luck probably, I suppose, got the contract with the US government 87 00:06:33.920 --> 00:06:36.920 to Supply Tin Cups to the U.S. Army. 88 00:06:36.920 --> 00:06:44.360 And so that was sort of the start of the corrupt military industrial complex system that Bob 89 00:06:44.360 --> 00:06:50.760 Higgs, our next speaker, has written about so much in many of his books and articles. 90 00:06:50.760 --> 00:06:54.240 And so war certainly is the health of the state. 91 00:06:54.240 --> 00:07:01.640 And these are just a few examples of what is meant by that. 92 00:07:01.640 --> 00:07:07.080 That is always true that the healthier the state, the more unhealthy is the civil society, 93 00:07:07.080 --> 00:07:12.280 the private enterprise system, and the degree of freedom in the country. 94 00:07:12.280 --> 00:07:16.760 We've long ago passed the idea where we have the night watchman state, where the state 95 00:07:16.760 --> 00:07:21.040 basically protects rights to life, liberty and property. 96 00:07:21.040 --> 00:07:26.600 The budget for the US government to cover that was adequate under George Washington. 97 00:07:26.600 --> 00:07:32.120 And ever since then, it's all been one big transfer society for the most part, as opposed 98 00:07:32.120 --> 00:07:34.800 to a property rights protection society. 99 00:07:34.800 --> 00:07:42.740 But what I'd like to get into now is talking about the way in which the waging of war was 100 00:07:42.740 --> 00:07:49.040 established in America's first really big war, the American Civil War and the US government's 101 00:07:49.040 --> 00:07:50.040 war. 102 00:07:50.040 --> 00:07:54.360 So I'm not going to talk about the Confederate side of the war. 103 00:07:54.360 --> 00:08:00.380 My subject here is the U.S. Army, and there's a book called The Hard Hand of War by Mark 104 00:08:00.380 --> 00:08:01.380 Grimsley. 105 00:08:01.380 --> 00:08:06.680 Mark Grimsley is a defense historian, he's a consultant to the Defense Department and 106 00:08:06.680 --> 00:08:12.840 the Army, and he wrote this book, The Hard Hand of War, and I remember going to the beach 107 00:08:12.840 --> 00:08:17.800 and reading this at the beach on vacation once, where everyone else is reading Us Magazine 108 00:08:17.800 --> 00:08:22.880 and things like that, and I'm reading The Hard Hand of War, and here's one of the things 109 00:08:22.880 --> 00:08:29.400 As he said, he said the Army of the Potomac, which was the US Army, possessed its full 110 00:08:29.400 --> 00:08:35.360 quotient of thieves, freelance foragers, and officers willing to look the other way. 111 00:08:35.360 --> 00:08:41.960 And it's a testament to Mark Grimsley that he can write this and still be a paid consultant 112 00:08:41.960 --> 00:08:44.840 to the Defense Department, I suppose. 113 00:08:44.840 --> 00:08:51.680 And so in other words, even the defenders and promoters of the US military establishment 114 00:08:51.680 --> 00:09:02.680 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. 115 00:09:02.680 --> 00:09:13.680 For example, to retaliate against Confederate army attacks, from the very beginning, one part of the routine was holding randomly chosen civilians as hostages, 116 00:09:13.680 --> 00:09:17.680 sometimes shooting them and sometimes burning their houses to the ground. 117 00:09:17.680 --> 00:09:25.680 For example, there was a colonel named John Beatty who warned the residents of Paint Rock, Alabama, this, these are his words, 118 00:09:25.680 --> 00:09:32.680 Every time the telegraph wire is cut, we will burn a house. Every time a train is fired upon, we will hang a man. 119 00:09:32.680 --> 00:09:39.680 And we will continue to do this until every house is burned and every man hanged between Decatur and Bridgeport, Alabama. 120 00:09:39.680 --> 00:09:45.680 And he ended up burning the entire town of Paint Rock to the ground while seizing three hostages. 121 00:09:45.680 --> 00:09:46.680 Hostages. 122 00:09:46.680 --> 00:09:51.960 And there was also rampant vandalism by the U.S. Army during the war. 123 00:09:51.960 --> 00:09:59.700 This is probably not news to a lot of South Carolinians, but if you ever saw the sequence 124 00:09:59.700 --> 00:10:04.080 of movies starting with Gettysburg and then I think it was the Killer Angels, I think 125 00:10:04.080 --> 00:10:10.920 was the first book that was made into a movie, and then the sequel to that, when I saw it, 126 00:10:10.920 --> 00:10:17.000 I was shocked to notice that there was actually a scene of a looting of Fredericksburg, Virginia, 127 00:10:17.000 --> 00:10:21.280 because that's really politically incorrect, to actually show U.S. Army soldiers looting 128 00:10:21.280 --> 00:10:23.700 private homes in their own country. 129 00:10:23.700 --> 00:10:28.240 But here's a firsthand account by a federal soldier of what happened, he said, this, boys 130 00:10:28.240 --> 00:10:34.480 came in loaded with silver pitchers, silver spoons, silver lamps and casters, et cetera. 131 00:10:34.480 --> 00:10:39.480 Great three-story houses furnished magnificently were broken into and their content scattered 132 00:10:39.480 --> 00:10:44.460 over the floors and trampled on by the muddy feet of the soldiers. Splendid alabaster vases 133 00:10:44.460 --> 00:10:49.560 and pieces of statuary were thrown at six and seven hundred dollar mirrors. Closets 134 00:10:49.560 --> 00:10:53.760 of the very finest china were broken into and their contents smashed onto the floor 135 00:10:53.760 --> 00:11:01.440 and stamped to pieces. Finest cut glass where cobblets were hurled at nine nice place-clad 136 00:11:01.440 --> 00:11:06.680 windows, beautifully embroidered window curtains torn down, rosewood pianos piled in the street 137 00:11:06.680 --> 00:11:12.680 and Burn, or soldiers would get on top of them and kick the keyboard and internal machinery all to pieces. 138 00:11:12.680 --> 00:11:17.680 And so this was just a riot upon the civilian population. 139 00:11:17.680 --> 00:11:23.680 And of course, the same sort of thing went on for four years, especially with Sherman's march through South Carolina. 140 00:11:23.680 --> 00:11:29.680 And one of the neoconservative war apologists, who's one of my favorites, Victor Davis Hanson, 141 00:11:29.680 --> 00:11:35.680 wrote about this once when he knows about all these stories of Sherman's bummers, as they were called, 142 00:11:35.680 --> 00:11:43.040 and the destruction of personal property and the murder of civilians and he claims that 143 00:11:43.040 --> 00:11:50.120 Sherman himself did this and tolerated this because he was such a racial egalitarian and 144 00:11:50.120 --> 00:11:55.480 he was so hurt by the fact that there was racial inequality in the southern states that 145 00:11:55.480 --> 00:12:02.640 that's what motivated him to burn the entire town of two-thirds of Columbia, for example. 146 00:12:02.640 --> 00:12:06.720 And this is probably the dumbest remark ever made by a neoconservative, and that's naturally 147 00:12:06.720 --> 00:12:07.720 saying something. 148 00:12:07.720 --> 00:12:11.840 Because if you know anything about Sherman, I have some quotes from General Sherman that 149 00:12:11.840 --> 00:12:16.920 I'm going to read to you later on that shows that he was as much a white supremacist as 150 00:12:16.920 --> 00:12:19.960 any man of his age or any other age. 151 00:12:19.960 --> 00:12:25.360 And so for someone like Victor Davis Hansen to say a statement like that is just patently 152 00:12:25.360 --> 00:12:26.360 absurd. 153 00:12:26.360 --> 00:12:32.000 But that's the type of thing you get when you read mainstream history books about this 154 00:12:32.000 --> 00:12:38.200 This Period of History, Sherman himself, early in the war, before he became famous for his 155 00:12:38.200 --> 00:12:46.360 famous march, in 1862, he was frustrated by his ability to subdue Confederate snipers 156 00:12:46.360 --> 00:12:53.040 and sharpshooters, and so he took vengeance upon the civilian population. 157 00:12:53.040 --> 00:12:57.400 He made speech after speech, claiming that it was the faulty logic, those were the words 158 00:12:57.400 --> 00:13:26.600 General Halleck, Hold the Neighborhood, Fully Responsible, Men, Women, Children, Enemy Soldiers, 159 00:13:26.600 --> 00:13:32.240 One of his subordinates, a Colonel Walcott, to burn the entire town down, but leave one 160 00:13:32.240 --> 00:13:39.200 house standing as an example to mark the place where a town once was. 161 00:13:39.200 --> 00:13:43.680 And Mark Grimsley, the historian I mentioned earlier, he defends this sort of thing by 162 00:13:43.680 --> 00:13:48.720 saying this, quote, Sherman pursued a policy quite in keeping with that of other Union 163 00:13:48.720 --> 00:13:51.240 commanders from Missouri to Virginia. 164 00:13:51.240 --> 00:13:52.520 So they're all doing it. 165 00:13:52.520 --> 00:13:57.780 So he says in one part of his book, The Hard Hand of War, you know, why is everybody so 166 00:13:57.780 --> 00:14:00.700 critical of Sherman when they were all doing this? 167 00:14:00.700 --> 00:14:04.520 They were all waging total war on civilians because that was the policy of the Lincoln 168 00:14:04.520 --> 00:14:05.520 administration. 169 00:14:05.520 --> 00:14:11.200 And so he damns him with faint praise and he damns all the other generals as well. 170 00:14:11.200 --> 00:14:16.840 Here's how Sherman described his ultimate purpose in the war in a letter to his wife. 171 00:14:16.840 --> 00:14:18.760 And this is his own words. 172 00:14:18.760 --> 00:14:24.560 His purpose was, quote, extermination, not of soldiers alone, that is the least part 173 00:14:24.560 --> 00:14:28.920 of the trouble, but the people, you know, the people, the extermination of the people 174 00:14:28.920 --> 00:14:30.400 of the South. 175 00:14:30.400 --> 00:14:37.280 His loving wife wrote back this, she said, she offered her sincerest wish that the war 176 00:14:37.280 --> 00:14:41.680 would be a war of extermination, and that all southerners would be driven like swine 177 00:14:41.680 --> 00:14:43.200 into the sea. 178 00:14:43.200 --> 00:14:48.480 May we carry fire and sword into their states till not one habitation is left standing. 179 00:14:48.480 --> 00:14:57.560 of the Sweetheart, Mrs. Sherman must have been, and you know, I was on Cape Cod a couple 180 00:14:57.560 --> 00:15:01.300 years ago, and driving around, there's one of the main highways that goes all the way 181 00:15:01.300 --> 00:15:06.680 across Cape Cod, Massachusetts, it's called Grand Army of the Republic, and it's sort 182 00:15:06.680 --> 00:15:11.840 of sickened me, it ruined my vacation, I'm riding on the Grand, the Republicans started 183 00:15:11.840 --> 00:15:17.380 calling themselves the Grand Old Party, because they're such a grand bunch, and of course 184 00:15:17.380 --> 00:15:23.660 I think a more proper name would be the Grand Army of the Empire, not the Grand Army of 185 00:15:23.660 --> 00:15:24.660 the Republic. 186 00:15:24.660 --> 00:15:30.900 Here's what Sherman described when he described in his own words the destruction of Meridian, 187 00:15:30.900 --> 00:15:31.900 Mississippi. 188 00:15:31.900 --> 00:15:36.660 He said, for five days, 10,000 of our men worked hard and with a will in that work of 189 00:15:36.660 --> 00:15:41.340 destruction with axes, sledges, crowbars, claw bars, and with fire. 190 00:15:41.340 --> 00:15:46.140 And I have no hesitation in pronouncing the work well done, Meridian no longer exists. 191 00:15:46.140 --> 00:15:49.560 And so they totally destroyed Meridian, Mississippi also. 192 00:15:49.560 --> 00:15:55.680 Mark Grimsley writes about Grant, he said, quote, Grant had approved the Meridian Expedition 193 00:15:55.680 --> 00:16:01.400 and it formed a good example of the sort of war he expected to conduct against the South. 194 00:16:01.400 --> 00:16:05.580 And so it definitely was a war of terrorism and total war waged on the civilian population 195 00:16:05.580 --> 00:16:08.100 from the very beginning. 196 00:16:08.100 --> 00:16:13.240 And when Sherman got to Atlanta, the Confederate Army was gone, but they bombed the city of 197 00:16:13.240 --> 00:16:16.600 of Atlanta for several days after the army had left. 198 00:16:16.600 --> 00:16:19.680 And according to the official records, 199 00:16:19.680 --> 00:16:22.160 there were about 4,000 private homes 200 00:16:22.160 --> 00:16:23.760 in the city at that point. 201 00:16:23.760 --> 00:16:25.560 And keep in mind, there's no Confederate army, 202 00:16:25.560 --> 00:16:27.120 they think they're gone. 203 00:16:27.120 --> 00:16:30.240 And they bombed for four straight days 204 00:16:30.240 --> 00:16:32.960 so that there were only 400 left standing. 205 00:16:32.960 --> 00:16:35.680 So they destroyed 90% of all the buildings in Atlanta, 206 00:16:35.680 --> 00:16:37.560 including many churches. 207 00:16:37.560 --> 00:16:39.880 And if you read, there's a book called, 208 00:16:39.880 --> 00:16:47.960 The book on Waging War on Southern Civilians, and it's based on the government's official 209 00:16:47.960 --> 00:16:58.800 records of the war, and it tells stories of how some of Sherman's artillerists were literally 210 00:16:58.800 --> 00:17:01.600 using private homes for target practice. 211 00:17:01.600 --> 00:17:06.200 They would wait until they saw a shadow or a figure, and it looked like someone was there, 212 00:17:06.200 --> 00:17:10.160 And they would pinpoint that home and sort of compete with each other to see who could 213 00:17:10.160 --> 00:17:14.040 put a shell through the window of that house. 214 00:17:14.040 --> 00:17:17.600 And Sherman sat there approvingly the whole time. 215 00:17:17.600 --> 00:17:21.920 And his defenders, by the way, when I write about these things in my books and articles, 216 00:17:21.920 --> 00:17:28.920 I get emails from historians every once in a while defending Sherman by quoting his orders. 217 00:17:28.920 --> 00:17:33.200 They'll quote some order of his and say, you know, we are not to disturb any houses, any 218 00:17:33.200 --> 00:17:37.240 Private Homes, and then he sits on his horse and watches his artillerist destroy private 219 00:17:37.240 --> 00:17:38.240 homes. 220 00:17:38.240 --> 00:17:42.920 And so the proof that he didn't do this is supposedly that he issued orders at some point 221 00:17:42.920 --> 00:17:45.720 to not do this, wink, wink. 222 00:17:45.720 --> 00:17:49.800 And Grimsley downplays the suffering of the citizens of Atlanta. 223 00:17:49.800 --> 00:17:55.360 After 90% of the buildings of Atlanta were destroyed, there were about 2,000 people left 224 00:17:55.360 --> 00:18:02.160 there, and they were kicked out of their homes and forced to just become homeless in November. 225 00:18:02.160 --> 00:18:08.120 And after two large armies had just eaten out the countryside by foraging, and Grimsley 226 00:18:08.120 --> 00:18:14.280 downplays this by, he said that there were only, his words, only a few thousand people. 227 00:18:14.280 --> 00:18:15.680 So you know, what's your complaint? 228 00:18:15.680 --> 00:18:20.400 There was only a few thousand people that this was done to. 229 00:18:20.400 --> 00:18:28.080 And by October of 1864, Sherman gave up all pretense of legality when he ordered the shooting 230 00:18:28.080 --> 00:18:34.960 of Randomly Chosen Civilians in Retaliation for Attacks by Confederate Soldiers, who would 231 00:18:34.960 --> 00:18:42.120 kill his soldiers, and if he couldn't apprehend the responsible parties, they would just randomly 232 00:18:42.120 --> 00:18:44.880 apprehend civilians and murder them. 233 00:18:44.880 --> 00:18:51.360 Here's one of Sherman's actual orders, these are his words, to a General Lewis Watkins, 234 00:18:51.360 --> 00:18:57.800 cannot you send over about Fairmount and Adairsville, burn 10 or 12 houses of known secessionists, 235 00:18:57.800 --> 00:19:01.700 Tell a few at random and let them know that it will be repeated every time a train is 236 00:19:01.700 --> 00:19:06.200 fired upon from Rissaca to Kingston. 237 00:19:06.200 --> 00:19:09.800 So that was part of the policy of the war also. 238 00:19:09.800 --> 00:19:17.320 A biographer of Sherman named Lee Kennet, he wrote also something similar to what Mark 239 00:19:17.320 --> 00:19:21.040 Grimsley wrote about some of the soldiers in Sherman's army. 240 00:19:21.040 --> 00:19:25.760 He said this, the New York regiments were filled with big city criminals and foreigners 241 00:19:25.760 --> 00:19:28.640 Fresh from the jails of the old world. 242 00:19:28.640 --> 00:19:34.040 So in other words, some of the European governments empty their jails because the Lincoln administration 243 00:19:34.040 --> 00:19:39.240 was hiring mercenaries by promising them land under the Homestead Act. 244 00:19:39.240 --> 00:19:42.560 If you ever saw the movie Gangs of New York, there's a scene in there where these Irish 245 00:19:42.560 --> 00:19:46.800 immigrants are getting off the boat from Ireland and they take about 10 steps and they sign 246 00:19:46.800 --> 00:19:52.400 up for the U.S. Army, and I'm not sure it was that immediate, but a lot of that did 247 00:19:52.400 --> 00:19:53.400 did happen. 248 00:19:53.400 --> 00:19:54.400 A lot of that did happen. 249 00:19:54.400 --> 00:19:59.920 And of course, you know, many hundreds or thousands of them were killed in Virginia. 250 00:19:59.920 --> 00:20:02.120 Shortly thereafter, that sort of happened. 251 00:20:02.120 --> 00:20:10.280 Clyde Wilson, the retired history professor from USC, he, one of his papers, he estimated 252 00:20:10.280 --> 00:20:16.400 that there were some 200,000 mercenary, European mercenaries in the US Army during this time. 253 00:20:16.400 --> 00:20:21.580 I don't know how accurate that is, but Clyde is a pretty renowned scholar. 254 00:20:21.580 --> 00:20:25.460 And so it carries a lot of weight as far as that goes. 255 00:20:25.460 --> 00:20:31.740 And of course, the slaves and free blacks were treated just as poorly as anyone else 256 00:20:31.740 --> 00:20:32.740 was. 257 00:20:32.740 --> 00:20:37.060 Grimsley says this, he says, with the utter disregard for blacks that was the norm among 258 00:20:37.060 --> 00:20:42.300 Union troops, the soldiers ransacked the slave cabins, taking whatever they liked. 259 00:20:42.300 --> 00:20:49.380 They often tortured or murdered slaves if they wouldn't tell them where the family valuables 260 00:20:49.380 --> 00:21:19.380 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 261 00:21:19.380 --> 00:21:25.700 If anyone wants to read about this, of course, there have been many accounts of this, but 262 00:21:25.700 --> 00:21:31.180 one kind of interesting account, there was a young woman named Emma Laconte, L-E-C-O-N-T-E, 263 00:21:31.180 --> 00:21:36.180 from Columbia, South Carolina, and I read across a book, Oxford University Press published 264 00:21:36.180 --> 00:21:43.260 a book of hers in 1957 about the burning of Columbia, which she witnessed as an 18-year-old 265 00:21:43.260 --> 00:21:48.740 woman, and so if you want to really read about that, I would recommend Emma Laconte's book 266 00:21:48.740 --> 00:22:01.860 The Fire on Main Street was now raging, and we anxiously watched its progress from the 267 00:22:01.860 --> 00:22:02.860 upper front windows. 268 00:22:02.860 --> 00:22:06.460 In a little while, however, the flames broke forth in every direction. 269 00:22:06.460 --> 00:22:11.340 The drunken devils roamed about, setting fire to every house the flames seemed likely to 270 00:22:11.340 --> 00:22:12.340 spare. 271 00:22:12.340 --> 00:22:14.740 They were fully equipped for the noble work they had in hand. 272 00:22:14.740 --> 00:22:18.780 Each soldier was furnished with combustibles compactly put up. 273 00:22:18.780 --> 00:22:23.020 They would enter houses and in the presence of helpless women and children, pour turpentine 274 00:22:23.020 --> 00:22:25.460 on the beds and set them on fire. 275 00:22:25.460 --> 00:22:27.180 Guards were rarely of any assistance. 276 00:22:27.180 --> 00:22:30.500 Most generally they assisted in the pillaging and firing. 277 00:22:30.500 --> 00:22:33.000 And so that's the sort of thing that went on. 278 00:22:33.000 --> 00:22:36.300 Another famous general was Sheridan. 279 00:22:36.300 --> 00:22:41.140 And again, like Sherman, after the Confederate army had vacated the Shenandoah Valley, he 280 00:22:41.140 --> 00:22:46.660 He went on a looting, burning and murdering binge of the civilian population and became 281 00:22:46.660 --> 00:22:48.860 quite famous for that. 282 00:22:48.860 --> 00:22:55.580 It is said that after the war was over, Sheridan was invited to speak to the Prussian army in 283 00:22:55.580 --> 00:23:02.620 Europe and even the Prussians were appalled at the stories that he told about the American 284 00:23:02.620 --> 00:23:05.900 way of waging war. 285 00:23:05.900 --> 00:23:06.900 Here's one example. 286 00:23:06.900 --> 00:23:15.100 Here's a letter that Sheridan wrote to Grant in 1864 in the middle of his burning of the 287 00:23:15.100 --> 00:23:16.100 Shenandoah Valley. 288 00:23:16.100 --> 00:23:21.460 He said, the wheat, quote, had destroyed over 2,200 barns filled with wheat, hay, and farming 289 00:23:21.460 --> 00:23:22.460 implements. 290 00:23:22.460 --> 00:23:27.060 Over 70 mills filled with flour and wheat have driven in front of the army over 4,000 291 00:23:27.060 --> 00:23:32.020 head of stock and have killed and issued to the troops not less than 3,000 sheep. 292 00:23:32.020 --> 00:23:34.700 Tomorrow I will continue the destruction. 293 00:23:34.700 --> 00:23:39.820 A federal officer said this describing the scene in the Shenandoah Valley, said, 294 00:23:39.820 --> 00:23:45.020 The atmosphere from horizon to horizon has been black with smoke of a hundred conflagrations, 295 00:23:45.020 --> 00:23:49.260 and at night a gleam brighter and more lurid than sunset has shot from every verge. 296 00:23:49.820 --> 00:23:54.620 The completeness of the devastation is awful. Hundreds of nearly starving people are going 297 00:23:54.620 --> 00:24:00.220 north. Our trains are crowded with them. They line the wayside. Hundreds more are coming, 298 00:24:00.220 --> 00:24:03.740 so stripped of food that I cannot imagine how they escape starvation. 299 00:24:03.740 --> 00:24:08.620 And one soldier wrote home, a federal soldier wrote home that he had personally burned more 300 00:24:08.620 --> 00:24:11.420 than 60 private homes to the ground. 301 00:24:11.420 --> 00:24:18.040 And he said this in his letter, it was a hard-looking sight to see the women and children turned 302 00:24:18.040 --> 00:24:21.020 out of doors at this season of the year, end quote. 303 00:24:21.020 --> 00:24:26.300 And again, it was October, November, winter was coming that this was happening. 304 00:24:26.300 --> 00:24:30.140 And so that's the famous General Sheridan in his work. 305 00:24:30.140 --> 00:24:35.320 And after Sheridan did that, of course, Lincoln famously extended to Sheridan his personal 306 00:24:35.320 --> 00:24:37.640 thanks and the thanks of the nation. 307 00:24:37.640 --> 00:24:39.980 Those are Lincoln's words for doing this. 308 00:24:39.980 --> 00:24:46.520 And of course, this is also around the time when Lincoln was making speeches about malice 309 00:24:46.520 --> 00:24:55.120 toward none, while congratulating his generals for doing this sort of malicious thing. 310 00:24:55.120 --> 00:25:01.800 And all of this is why a Sherman biographer named Lee Kennet, who wrote a very favorable 311 00:25:01.800 --> 00:25:03.980 biography of Sherman, as most all of them are. 312 00:25:03.980 --> 00:25:09.780 They all tend to be hagiographies and these sort of hero worship books. 313 00:25:09.780 --> 00:25:14.040 But he concluded, you know, after writing about all these facts based on the official 314 00:25:14.040 --> 00:25:20.380 records kept by the government, he said this, he said, had the Confederates somehow won, 315 00:25:20.380 --> 00:25:24.160 had their victory put them in position to bring their chief opponents before some sort 316 00:25:54.160 --> 00:25:55.160 Excuses. 317 00:25:55.160 --> 00:25:57.560 And I'll give you one example of what I'm talking about. 318 00:25:57.560 --> 00:26:02.600 The historian Mark Neely, who I think he's the head of one of the numerous Lincoln Museums 319 00:26:02.600 --> 00:26:03.600 in the country. 320 00:26:03.600 --> 00:26:07.360 I think there are maybe 10 or 20,000 of these things, and they're just everywhere. 321 00:26:07.360 --> 00:26:11.200 And he's the head, the director of one of them. 322 00:26:11.200 --> 00:26:17.540 About Sherman in one of his books, he says, he said, Sherman and his fellow generals waged 323 00:26:17.540 --> 00:26:22.280 war in the same way most Victorian gentlemen did, and other Victorian gentlemen in the 324 00:26:22.280 --> 00:26:23.900 world knew it. 325 00:26:23.900 --> 00:26:30.660 So he was a Victorian gentleman and he waged war and this statement by Neely is made in 326 00:26:30.660 --> 00:26:39.660 a book that has essays by 31 different authors and the editor of that book, 31 different 327 00:26:39.660 --> 00:26:44.780 authors, said that Neely must have been commenting on a different war than the other 30 authors 328 00:26:44.780 --> 00:26:47.660 were commenting on to make a statement like this. 329 00:26:47.660 --> 00:26:51.980 So that's the sort of thing you get into when you get into this literature that you can 330 00:26:51.980 --> 00:26:57.720 You can get these facts in highly regarded university press books, but sometimes the 331 00:26:57.720 --> 00:27:05.740 facts will be on one page and then there will be 30 pages of excuses in flim-flam like this. 332 00:27:05.740 --> 00:27:11.420 And so sometimes you lose the facts because the context is so skewed. 333 00:27:11.420 --> 00:27:18.780 There was also a major, another characteristic of the first major adventure of the U.S. military, 334 00:27:18.780 --> 00:27:26.140 in the Civil War was a massive desertion by, there was desertion on both sides to be sure. 335 00:27:26.140 --> 00:27:32.940 But there was a book on this, a very good scholarly book published by Ella Lahn, last 336 00:27:32.940 --> 00:27:36.580 name is L-O-N-N, called Desertion During the Civil War. 337 00:27:36.580 --> 00:27:41.980 And it's based mostly on the official government records and letters from the generals to Lincoln 338 00:27:41.980 --> 00:27:44.280 and to Jefferson Davis and so forth. 339 00:27:44.280 --> 00:27:48.580 So she, it's pretty well documented on desertion. 340 00:27:48.580 --> 00:27:55.020 And on the Federal Army side, she says that although General McClellan had 180,000 men 341 00:27:55.020 --> 00:28:01.260 on his roster, his official roster prior to the Battle of Antietam, who otherwise known 342 00:28:01.260 --> 00:28:06.700 as Battle of Sharpsburg, he had no more than 90,000 during the battle itself. 343 00:28:06.700 --> 00:28:12.660 So according to the official records, about half of the army just disappeared. 344 00:28:12.660 --> 00:28:16.100 And that was pretty typical on the eve of battle, that sort of thing happened. 345 00:28:16.100 --> 00:28:21.500 In June of 1862, General Buell reported from Tennessee that 14,000 officers and soldiers 346 00:28:21.500 --> 00:28:28.500 were absent when General Hooker took command of the Army of the Potomac in 1863, January. 347 00:28:28.500 --> 00:28:33.180 He wrote that, quote, desertions were occurring at the rate of several hundred a day, and 348 00:28:33.180 --> 00:28:40.260 about 25% of the Army was absent, according to his letters in the official records. 349 00:28:40.260 --> 00:28:45.220 And the response of the Lincoln administration was to execute deserters. 350 00:28:45.220 --> 00:28:47.360 And there's kind of an interesting story about this. 351 00:28:47.360 --> 00:28:52.580 There was a book published 10 or 12 years ago that was based mostly on a few letters 352 00:28:52.580 --> 00:29:02.660 that Lincoln supposedly wrote that overturned an order to shoot some deserters. 353 00:29:02.660 --> 00:29:07.540 And it was revealed just about a year ago that the letters were faked, that the person 354 00:29:07.540 --> 00:29:11.980 who found the letters in the archives actually changed the writing around in the letters 355 00:29:11.980 --> 00:29:41.980 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. 356 00:29:41.980 --> 00:29:47.980 Executions of deserters were taking place almost daily in the Army of the Potomac. 357 00:29:47.980 --> 00:29:52.980 General Halleck complained to Lincoln that hundreds of officers were almost continually absent from their commands, 358 00:29:52.980 --> 00:29:56.980 and that about 200 more were absent without leave every month. 359 00:29:56.980 --> 00:30:01.980 So there were, you know, there were 100,000 deserters from the Union Army in 1862. 360 00:30:01.980 --> 00:30:03.980 So what did they do? 361 00:30:03.980 --> 00:30:11.980 She writes that the Lincoln government, quote, had no compunction about shooting or hanging deserters who resisted arrest. 362 00:30:11.980 --> 00:30:18.980 And here's how it worked. Here's how she describes the scene in a typical army encampment. 363 00:30:18.980 --> 00:30:28.980 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, 364 00:30:28.980 --> 00:30:32.980 that some wretched deserter did not suffer the death penalty in the army of the Potomac. 365 00:30:32.980 --> 00:30:38.660 The death penalty was so unsparingly used that executions were almost daily occurrences 366 00:30:38.660 --> 00:30:40.140 in most of the armies. 367 00:30:40.140 --> 00:30:41.140 So this happened. 368 00:30:41.140 --> 00:30:46.220 She goes on to write that the condemned men marched out between two ranks of the regiment, 369 00:30:46.220 --> 00:30:49.700 preceded by the musicians, playing a funeral march. 370 00:30:49.700 --> 00:30:52.900 The provost's guard, as an escort, carried the coffin. 371 00:30:52.900 --> 00:30:57.220 The victim was conducted to the edge of the grave, which had already been dug. 372 00:30:57.220 --> 00:31:01.540 After the sentence was read, he was seated, blindfolded and placed upon a board at the 373 00:31:01.540 --> 00:31:14.820 The Method of Execution was generally shooting, but hanging sometimes seems to be unused occasionally. 374 00:31:14.820 --> 00:31:20.980 And so that was what really happened with regard to deserters, many of whom were conscripts. 375 00:31:20.980 --> 00:31:23.460 Of course, they were draftees. 376 00:31:23.460 --> 00:31:27.660 That's why for many of these men, being drafted was worse than being a slave. 377 00:31:27.660 --> 00:31:32.860 At least a slave could always hope to escape, but there's no escaping death. 378 00:31:32.860 --> 00:31:38.540 If you weren't killed in the war and you tried to escape, you would be killed by the US Army. 379 00:31:38.540 --> 00:31:44.140 And so those are some of the unsavory facts that I wanted to bring out about the first 380 00:31:44.140 --> 00:31:48.380 big military adventure by the military industrial complex. 381 00:31:48.380 --> 00:31:53.340 And shortly after that, there was another big military adventure that happened that 382 00:31:53.340 --> 00:31:59.060 was commenced three months after the end of the so-called civil war. 383 00:31:59.060 --> 00:32:04.980 I call it so-called because I prefer war to prevent southern independence. 384 00:32:04.980 --> 00:32:10.580 It's not going to catch on except in a small group, but because of my belief that a civil 385 00:32:10.580 --> 00:32:16.340 war is a war over two sides fighting over control of a government, and Jefferson Davis 386 00:32:16.340 --> 00:32:19.980 did not want to run the government in Washington, D.C. any more than George Washington wanted 387 00:32:19.980 --> 00:32:24.440 to run the government in London during our first war of secession. 388 00:32:24.440 --> 00:32:33.620 And so I don't think it's accurate, even though it's been called that for a long, long time. 389 00:32:33.620 --> 00:32:39.800 But the next adventure by the U.S. military was the war, the 25-year-long war on the Plains 390 00:32:39.800 --> 00:32:45.160 Indians that was commenced just three months after Appomattox. 391 00:32:45.160 --> 00:32:54.120 So on June 27th, 1865, so the war ended officially in May, May of 1865. 392 00:32:54.120 --> 00:32:58.600 So just a couple months later, General Sherman is given command of the military district 393 00:32:58.600 --> 00:32:59.600 of the Missouri. 394 00:32:59.600 --> 00:33:05.040 The country was divided up into military districts by the US government. 395 00:33:05.040 --> 00:33:10.560 And his job basically was to pave the way for the government-subsidized transcontinental 396 00:33:10.560 --> 00:33:16.720 and the Transcontinental Railroads by killing as many of the Indians as he could. 397 00:33:16.720 --> 00:33:20.560 The famous book, there's a book, Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow by Dee Brown. 398 00:33:20.560 --> 00:33:25.200 Dee Brown was the famous historian of the American West, author of Bury My Heart at 399 00:33:25.200 --> 00:33:30.880 Wounded Knee and it's a good history of the Transcontinental Railroad, Hear That Lonesome 400 00:33:30.880 --> 00:33:32.800 Whistle Blow. 401 00:33:32.800 --> 00:33:37.680 And here's one of the things he wrote about this enterprise that began during the war 402 00:33:37.680 --> 00:33:44.800 and of course was continued after the war, the building of the transcontinental railroads, the government subsidized transcontinental railroads. 403 00:33:44.800 --> 00:33:53.880 He says that Lincoln's Pacific Railway Act, which was passed in 1862, assured the fortunes of a dynasty of American families. 404 00:33:53.880 --> 00:34:04.320 The Brewsters, Bushnells, Alcotts, Harkers, Harrisons, Trowbridges, Landworthies, Reeds, Ogdens, Bradfords, Noises, Brooks, Cornelles and dozens of others 405 00:34:04.320 --> 00:34:09.200 and all, you know, wealth that lasts to this day. Their descendants all enjoy this great wealth 406 00:34:09.200 --> 00:34:12.640 that was created by their connections to the Republican Party during this era. 407 00:34:13.440 --> 00:34:18.720 For example, he writes that Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania received a block of Union Pacific 408 00:34:18.720 --> 00:34:24.560 stock in exchange for his vote for the Pacific Railroad bill. So back in the good old days, 409 00:34:24.560 --> 00:34:29.200 you could actually bribe members of Congress with stock out in the open here. Here's some shares of 410 00:34:29.200 --> 00:34:34.640 Stock, Vote for My Bill, and they try to do it. They do it still today, of course, but 411 00:34:34.640 --> 00:34:41.320 it's done more surreptitiously. He was a Pennsylvania iron manufacturer and he also 412 00:34:41.320 --> 00:34:45.440 demanded a legal requirement that all the iron used in constructing the railroad be 413 00:34:45.440 --> 00:34:50.280 made in the United States, purchased from him among other people. A congressman from 414 00:34:50.280 --> 00:34:55.800 Massachusetts named Oakes Ames was a shovel manufacturer and he agreed to vote for the 415 00:34:55.800 --> 00:35:00.760 Pacific Railway Bill if they used American-made shovels, and of course, it must have taken 416 00:35:00.760 --> 00:35:06.640 a lot of shovels to dig railroad beds from Iowa to California. 417 00:35:06.640 --> 00:35:10.640 And then so Sherman, you know, right after the war, in his memoirs, here's what he writes. 418 00:35:10.640 --> 00:35:15.600 He says, as soon as the war is over, and he writes this, my thoughts and feelings at once 419 00:35:15.600 --> 00:35:20.440 reverted to the construction of the Great Pacific Railway, I put myself in communication 420 00:35:20.440 --> 00:35:25.440 with the parties engaged in the work, visiting them in person and assured them that I would 421 00:35:25.440 --> 00:35:28.320 to afford them all possible assistance and encouragement. 422 00:35:28.320 --> 00:35:33.320 And he also said, we are not going to let a few thieving, ragged Indians check and stop 423 00:35:33.320 --> 00:35:36.000 the progress of the railroads. 424 00:35:36.000 --> 00:35:42.320 And one of Lincoln's friends was a man named Grenville Dodge, who Lincoln made a general 425 00:35:42.320 --> 00:35:43.320 during the war. 426 00:35:43.320 --> 00:35:47.000 And his basic assignment during the war was to kill Indians, get them out of the way and 427 00:35:47.000 --> 00:35:49.000 commence the building of the railroads. 428 00:35:49.000 --> 00:35:50.000 And so he did that. 429 00:35:50.000 --> 00:35:52.960 That's basically, he didn't really fight any real battles or was involved in any real battles 430 00:35:52.960 --> 00:35:57.600 with Confederates, shooing the Indians out of the way, and he was made the chief engineer 431 00:35:57.600 --> 00:36:01.520 of the Transcontinental Railroad at the end of the war, and he recommended making slaves 432 00:36:01.520 --> 00:36:02.520 of the Indians. 433 00:36:02.520 --> 00:36:08.140 That's what was his recommendation to Congress, but Congress and the administration decided 434 00:36:08.140 --> 00:36:13.520 not to make slaves of the Indians and to use federal soldiers as sort of a new brand of 435 00:36:13.520 --> 00:36:14.520 overseers. 436 00:36:14.520 --> 00:36:19.240 They decided to try to murder as many of the Indians as possible instead, and they succeeded 437 00:36:19.240 --> 00:36:20.240 pretty well. 438 00:36:20.240 --> 00:36:50.240 and of course Sheridan joined in on this and one biographer writes this he says the great triumvirate of 439 00:36:50.240 --> 00:36:54.920 of the Union Civil War Effort, Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan. 440 00:36:54.920 --> 00:36:57.360 This is Michael Fellman, the Sherman biographer, 441 00:36:57.360 --> 00:37:00.280 formulated and enacted military Indian policy 442 00:37:00.280 --> 00:37:03.780 until reaching by the 1880s what Sherman sometimes 443 00:37:03.780 --> 00:37:07.840 referred to as the final solution of the Indian problem. 444 00:37:07.840 --> 00:37:11.280 You can't make this stuff up, can you, the final solution, 445 00:37:11.280 --> 00:37:15.000 General Sherman, to the Indian problem? 446 00:37:15.000 --> 00:37:17.720 Michael Fellman goes on. 447 00:37:17.720 --> 00:37:23.480 He says, these men applied their shared ruthlessness born of their civil war experiences against 448 00:37:23.480 --> 00:37:26.400 the people all three men despised. 449 00:37:26.400 --> 00:37:31.000 Sherman's overall policy was never accommodation and compromise, but vigorous war against the 450 00:37:31.000 --> 00:37:36.000 Indians, whom he regarded as a less than human and savage race. 451 00:37:36.000 --> 00:37:41.520 And so, and the other generals, there were many others too, Filman goes on to say they 452 00:37:41.520 --> 00:37:45.760 were like Sherman and Sheridan, civil war luminaries. 453 00:37:45.760 --> 00:37:52.920 These included John Pope, O.O. Howard, Nelson Miles, Alfred Terry, Edward Canby, George 454 00:37:52.920 --> 00:37:58.400 Armstrong Custer, Benjamin Garrison, Winfield Scott Hancock, all the same crowd, all the 455 00:37:58.400 --> 00:38:01.160 same people, individuals. 456 00:38:01.160 --> 00:38:06.280 And Feldman goes on to say Sherman viewed Indians as he viewed recalcitrant Southerners 457 00:38:06.280 --> 00:38:12.040 during the war and newly freed people after the war as namely resistors to the legitimate 458 00:38:12.040 --> 00:38:14.640 forces of an ordered society. 459 00:38:14.640 --> 00:38:18.480 And so Sherman was going to bring order to Indian society by killing as many Indians 460 00:38:18.480 --> 00:38:19.480 as possible. 461 00:38:19.480 --> 00:38:23.280 That would make society more orderly, apparently. 462 00:38:23.280 --> 00:38:28.320 And he goes on to say Sherman charged Sheridan, quote, to act with all the vigor he had shown 463 00:38:28.320 --> 00:38:30.320 in the Shenandoah Valley. 464 00:38:30.320 --> 00:38:36.680 So and I just described the kind of vigor that Sheridan showed in the Shenandoah Valley. 465 00:38:36.680 --> 00:38:42.220 Another Sherman biographer writes that these Union Civil War veterans, they considered 466 00:38:42.220 --> 00:38:50.380 for Indians to be subhuman and racially inferior to whites and therefore deserving of extermination. 467 00:38:50.380 --> 00:38:53.340 And here's what he said. 468 00:38:53.340 --> 00:38:54.340 This is Lee Kennett. 469 00:38:54.340 --> 00:38:56.380 He was a Sherman biographer. 470 00:38:56.380 --> 00:38:59.180 And these are all mainstream Sherman biographers. 471 00:38:59.180 --> 00:39:03.620 You can pick up these books at any Barnes and Noble or I'm sure the Furman Library has 472 00:39:03.620 --> 00:39:09.700 these books by Lee Kennett and John Marzelak and these other people I'm citing. 473 00:39:09.700 --> 00:39:16.500 He said this, quote, the Indians, this is Sherman's view, the Indians give a fair illustration 474 00:39:16.500 --> 00:39:21.060 of the fate of the Negroes if they are released from the control of the whites, Sherman once 475 00:39:21.060 --> 00:39:22.060 said. 476 00:39:22.060 --> 00:39:27.460 He said the blending of, this is Sherman's words, the blending of races in Mexico had 477 00:39:27.460 --> 00:39:33.100 produced general equality, which led inevitably to Mexican anarchy. 478 00:39:33.100 --> 00:39:39.180 And so Sherman himself considered this, what Michael Fellman, his biographer, called a 479 00:39:39.180 --> 00:39:41.980 racial cleansing of the land. 480 00:39:41.980 --> 00:39:47.340 And so when I mentioned Victor Davis Hansen as saying, well, Sherman was so mean to Southerners 481 00:39:47.340 --> 00:39:52.740 because he was sort of a racial egalitarian and was offended by the racial inequality 482 00:39:52.740 --> 00:39:53.740 in the South. 483 00:39:53.740 --> 00:39:58.380 Well, I don't know if that's the dumbest thing or the funniest thing I've ever read by a 484 00:39:58.380 --> 00:39:59.380 historian. 485 00:39:59.380 --> 00:40:07.380 If you read Sherman's own views regarding the Indians and the blending of the black and white and Indian cultures in Mexico, 486 00:40:07.380 --> 00:40:17.380 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. 487 00:40:17.380 --> 00:40:23.380 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. 488 00:40:23.380 --> 00:40:29.580 And of course, Sherman and Sheridan were famous for the old slogan that the only good Indian 489 00:40:29.580 --> 00:40:38.260 is a dead Indian, and here's one of Sherman's actual orders was this, all the Indians will 490 00:40:38.260 --> 00:40:42.580 have to be killed or be maintained as a species of paupers, and that's pretty much what they 491 00:40:42.580 --> 00:40:43.580 did. 492 00:40:43.580 --> 00:40:48.260 They gave Sheridan prior authorization to slaughter as many women and children as well 493 00:40:48.260 --> 00:41:13.300 The Indian Warriors 494 00:41:13.300 --> 00:41:17.980 They conducted more than a thousand attacks on Indian villages over this 25-year period 495 00:41:17.980 --> 00:41:23.420 1865 to 1890. And they usually occurred in the wintertime when families would be together. 496 00:41:24.060 --> 00:41:29.020 And they also waged a war of extermination on the buffalo. It wasn't just the tragedy of the 497 00:41:29.020 --> 00:41:34.700 commons that made the buffalo almost extinct. There was a concerted effort by the US government 498 00:41:34.700 --> 00:41:41.260 to wipe out the buffalo herd because the Indians used the buffalo for everything, food, clothing. 499 00:41:41.260 --> 00:41:47.180 They even used buffalo bones for fish hooks and things like that. And so if they didn't kill them 500 00:41:47.180 --> 00:42:17.180 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. 501 00:42:17.180 --> 00:42:22.180 in Colorado, southeastern Colorado, who had made peace with the US government. 502 00:42:22.180 --> 00:42:28.180 The US government told them, if you fly our flag over your teepees, we know that you're friendly. 503 00:42:28.180 --> 00:42:32.180 You just want to live in peace, trade with us, we'll leave you alone. 504 00:42:32.180 --> 00:42:35.180 So they did that, but here's what happened. 505 00:42:35.180 --> 00:42:42.180 There's an account of this in a book called Crimson Prairie, The Indian Wars, and it's written by S.L.A. Marshall. 506 00:42:42.180 --> 00:42:48.100 S. L. A. Marshall was the chief historian of the European theater of World War II. 507 00:42:48.100 --> 00:42:52.060 And he's the author of over 30 books on US military history. 508 00:42:52.060 --> 00:42:57.220 So he's the government's official historian of the war in Europe during World War II. 509 00:42:57.220 --> 00:42:59.560 This is a man with some credibility. 510 00:42:59.560 --> 00:43:02.340 And he wrote about this in his book Crimson Perry. 511 00:43:02.340 --> 00:43:07.300 There was an officer named Chivington, Captain Chivington. 512 00:43:07.300 --> 00:43:12.620 He says his troops quote began, when they attacked this peaceful village, they began 513 00:43:12.620 --> 00:43:19.460 a full day given over to bloodlust, orgiastic mutilation, rapine and destruction, with Chivington 514 00:43:19.460 --> 00:43:21.740 looking on and approving. 515 00:43:21.740 --> 00:43:26.540 Dee Brown wrote about the Sand Creek Massacre also in Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. 516 00:43:26.540 --> 00:43:31.220 In his famous book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, he said this, when the troops came up 517 00:43:31.220 --> 00:43:36.860 to the squaws, the squaws ran out and showed their persons to let the soldiers know they 518 00:43:36.860 --> 00:43:41.700 And they were squads, and begged for mercy, but the soldiers shot them all. 519 00:43:41.700 --> 00:43:45.580 There seemed to be indiscriminate slaughter of men, women, and children. 520 00:43:45.580 --> 00:43:47.660 The squads offered no resistance. 521 00:43:47.660 --> 00:43:49.780 Every one of them was scalped. 522 00:43:49.780 --> 00:43:57.820 And then he also writes about how after this, Shervington and his troops marched triumphantly 523 00:43:57.820 --> 00:44:04.820 through Denver with all these scalps and other body parts on display from the Indians. 524 00:44:04.820 --> 00:44:10.620 And it gets much grosser than just the scalping, and I'm not going to get into any more detail 525 00:44:10.620 --> 00:44:12.060 than that. 526 00:44:12.060 --> 00:44:16.280 And so that's what happened. 527 00:44:16.280 --> 00:44:17.280 Marshall called... 528 00:44:17.280 --> 00:44:23.620 This is a man who wrote 30 books on American military history, SLA Marshall, and he calls 529 00:44:23.620 --> 00:44:25.940 Sheridan's orders to Custer. 530 00:44:25.940 --> 00:44:30.280 He calls them the most brutal orders ever published to American troops. 531 00:44:30.280 --> 00:44:35.240 And that's saying something for a man who wrote 30 books on U.S. military history and 532 00:44:35.240 --> 00:44:40.080 wrote the entire official history of the European theater of World War II. 533 00:44:40.080 --> 00:44:45.840 And, for example, what went on with Custer, his troops decided to do this, to kill or 534 00:44:45.840 --> 00:44:48.880 hang all the warriors, of course, that was the order. 535 00:44:48.880 --> 00:44:53.440 But that meant separating them from, I'm quoting from D. Brown, that meant separating them 536 00:44:53.440 --> 00:44:55.520 from old men, women and children. 537 00:44:55.520 --> 00:44:58.520 This work was too slow and dangerous for the cavalrymen. 538 00:44:58.520 --> 00:45:01.840 They found it much more efficient and safe to kill indiscriminately. 539 00:45:01.840 --> 00:45:05.840 They killed 103 Cheyenne, but only 11 of them were warriors. 540 00:45:05.840 --> 00:45:08.040 The rest were women and children. 541 00:45:08.040 --> 00:45:11.760 And there are some books that try to take an accounting of how many of the Plains Indians 542 00:45:11.760 --> 00:45:13.640 were murdered in this way. 543 00:45:13.640 --> 00:45:17.320 And the biggest estimate is about 45,000, I think. 544 00:45:17.320 --> 00:45:22.560 And you can imagine that there must have been many times that much maimed and injured and 545 00:45:22.560 --> 00:45:24.840 given no medical care. 546 00:45:24.840 --> 00:45:44.840 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. 547 00:45:44.840 --> 00:45:51.840 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. 548 00:45:51.840 --> 00:45:56.840 So the death in the Civil War was the equivalent of eight million Americans dying in four years. 549 00:45:56.840 --> 00:46:05.840 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, 550 00:46:05.840 --> 00:46:12.840 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, 551 00:46:12.840 --> 00:46:23.840 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. 552 00:46:23.840 --> 00:46:32.840 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. 553 00:46:32.840 --> 00:46:40.920 What distinguishes man from animals is the insight into the advantages that can be derived 554 00:46:40.920 --> 00:46:43.840 from cooperation under the division of labor. 555 00:46:43.840 --> 00:46:46.800 He's talking about the marketplace. 556 00:46:46.800 --> 00:46:52.280 Man curbs his innate instinct of aggression in order to cooperate with other human beings. 557 00:46:52.280 --> 00:46:53.940 That's the free market. 558 00:46:53.940 --> 00:46:58.160 The more he wants to improve his material well-being, the more he must expand the system 559 00:46:58.160 --> 00:47:01.600 of division of labor, specialization. 560 00:47:01.600 --> 00:47:05.380 More commitmentally, he must more and more restrict the sphere in which he resorts to 561 00:47:05.380 --> 00:47:07.120 military action. 562 00:47:07.120 --> 00:47:12.200 So military action and peaceful exchange are just the exact opposites. 563 00:47:12.200 --> 00:47:17.480 Human cooperation under the division of labor in the civil society bursts asunder, Mises 564 00:47:17.480 --> 00:47:21.280 wrote, whenever citizens turn into warriors. 565 00:47:21.280 --> 00:47:27.120 So what creates civilization is the international division of labor and cooperation in the marketplace. 566 00:47:27.120 --> 00:47:31.080 That's why we don't all live like cavemen and cavewomen. 567 00:47:31.080 --> 00:47:37.360 War bursts all this asunder and destroys all this. 568 00:47:37.360 --> 00:47:40.600 And of course, Mises knows what he's talking about. 569 00:47:40.600 --> 00:47:46.240 He was in the Austrian army during World War I. 570 00:47:46.240 --> 00:47:52.440 The US government certainly dehumanized the Plains Indians just as they dehumanized Southerners. 571 00:47:52.440 --> 00:47:56.040 And I would argue that there's a lot of dehumanization of Southerners that still goes on to this 572 00:47:56.040 --> 00:48:05.040 by the government and its various apparatchiks in the so-called private sector for the same reason, basically. 573 00:48:05.040 --> 00:48:12.040 It bolsters the power and prestige of the state to do that and the state's glorious victory in its wars. 574 00:48:12.040 --> 00:48:18.040 And the same dehumanization took place also in the late 19th century against the Filipinos. 575 00:48:18.040 --> 00:48:26.560 When the U.S. military went to the Philippines and slaughtered more than 200,000 Filipinos, 576 00:48:26.560 --> 00:48:32.400 President Theodore Roosevelt justified the slaughter of 200,000 or more Filipinos who 577 00:48:32.400 --> 00:48:36.480 objected to being made a part of the American Empire since they had just gotten rid of the 578 00:48:36.480 --> 00:48:38.920 Spanish Empire. 579 00:48:38.920 --> 00:48:45.760 Teddy Roosevelt, Bill Kristol's favorite president, he's a favorite of all the neocons, he justified 580 00:48:45.760 --> 00:48:52.380 By the Slaughter, in his mind anyway, by calling the Filipinos, savages, half-breeds, a wild 581 00:48:52.380 --> 00:48:54.220 and ignorant people. 582 00:48:54.220 --> 00:48:59.220 Very similar to how Sherman described the Plains Indians and how Sherman and his wife 583 00:48:59.220 --> 00:49:03.220 described Southerners during the war in those letters that I read to you earlier. 584 00:49:03.220 --> 00:49:08.060 So that is always a part of the military policy, isn't it? 585 00:49:08.060 --> 00:49:14.860 When we engage in aggressive wars, the first step has to be the dehumanization of people. 586 00:49:14.860 --> 00:49:19.460 It sort of reminds me of how during the first Persian Gulf War, the rumor was spread that 587 00:49:19.460 --> 00:49:23.780 Saddam Hussein's soldiers were going into Kuwaiti hospitals and pulling the plugs on 588 00:49:23.780 --> 00:49:27.300 incubators and killing the preemies in a hospital. 589 00:49:27.300 --> 00:49:33.120 And of course, that was a ridiculous lie that was told, but that was just one tiny part 590 00:49:33.120 --> 00:49:40.480 of the necessary dehumanization of people who were picked out as enemies by the American 591 00:49:40.480 --> 00:49:42.100 military establishment. 592 00:49:42.100 --> 00:49:44.000 And there's a very long history of that. 593 00:49:44.000 --> 00:49:48.320 And so that's my story and I'm sticking to it for now.