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82 4 GENERAL ORDERS 100, UNION GENERAL SHERMAN’S MARCH TO ATLANTA, AND THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE Protection was, and still is, with uncivilized peoples, the exception. —Francis Lieber, General Orders 100, 1863 In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln observed that“civilized belligerents...do all in their power to help themselves or hurt the enemy...except things regarded as barbarous or cruel...the massacre of vanquished foes, and of non-combatants male and female.”1 Regardless of the power of this sentiment and the significance of its orator, a year later Union General William Tecumseh Sherman’s March to the Sea began and Colonel John Chivington led federal troops in a massacre of over one hundred Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians in Colorado. A contemporary editorial published in the Rocky Mountain News reported“that in no single battle in North America, we believe, had so many Indians been slain.”2 Although the American Civil War and the U.S.-Indian were nominally two different wars, during the American Civil War the western frontier wars against Native Americans were considered a secondary but significant front and both the Confederacy and the Union recruited particular Indian tribes to their cause. Not only was Stand Watie, the last Confederate general to surrender, a Cherokee chief, but as early as 1861 the Confederates sent emissaries to the Creek, Seminoles, Osage, and Cherokees to gain their loyalty. The American Civil War is frequently invoked as the harbinger of modern warfare and as an exemplar of total war. But, when compared to the savagery of past European battles,as well as to the brutal tactics employed against the U.S.Indians , the American Civil war is more accurately, and now commonly, described using Mark Grimsley’s concept of hard war.3 In part, this is because the American Civil War degenerated infrequently into unalloyed violence, in which the distinction between combatant and civilian was disregarded.4 However destructive the GENERAL ORDERS 100, SHERMAN’S MARCH, SAND CREEK MASSACRE 83 war became, the Union and Confederacy did not utterly trespass a set of mutually agreed-on limits to the violence.5 In contrast, during the wars against the Indians , Unionists engaged in indiscriminate massacres. Although the principle of distinction held for the great majority of the American Civil War, the reverse was true for the U.S.-Indian wars. Still, between 1861 and 1865 both wars were fought in many similar ways. Both initially involved many of the same officers in the Union and Confederate military, used the same weaponry, and began without the benefit of a coherent organized strategy beyond that of an offensive yet erstwhile conciliatory war. James McPherson, Civil War historian, writes that “the United States has usually prepared for its wars after getting into them. Never was this more true than in the Civil War.”6 According to Robert Wooster, another historian, the U.S.-Indian wars were fought in a similarly haphazard manner.Although the Indians primarily fought a different style of war, preferring tactical raids, small party engagements , and surprise attacks, it was a style not unlike that favored by both the Confederate and Union guerrillas who played a decisive role during the Civil War. “Many of the men who organized guerrilla bands presented as credentials for such service their experience as Indian fighters.”7 Finally, both wars sparked open debates over the proper norms for waging war. How should the war be fought? The tension of assimilation and extermination remained constant in the wars against the Indians, whereas in the American Civil War conciliation gave way to retaliation. As the strategies of both wars evolved to include wholesale devastation of the economic base of the South and appropriation of its resources , a tactic already in use during U.S.-Indian wars, the questions of who was to be spared and who was not, who was a combatant and who was a civilian, remained an unsettled, contentious element. Initially, one answer to how the war should be fought and who should be spared was that women and children were outside of war and were not to be intentionally killed. The Indians chose their battlefields to separate their warriors from their families. The women and children remained, as far as possible, outside the sphere of combat unless attacked. Although many a story recounts Indian women fighting with equal brutality, the shared presumption of both the Civil War and the U.S.-Indian wars was that men were the primary combatants and women and children...

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