The Genesis of the American Warfare State: 1861-1890

0:00The 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.

0:45And 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

1:52The 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.

2:37About 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?

3:39What 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.

4:27And 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

5:24issue 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

6:06and 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.

6:54And 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.

7:50So 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.

8:35And 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.

9:32And 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.

10:23But 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.

11:12And 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.

12:02And 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.

12:53He 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.

13:39And 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.

14:30His 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.

15:24Here'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.

16:16And 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.

17:01They 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.

17:49After 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.

18:44Here'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.

19:39If 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.

20:25And 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

21:36a 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.

22:25Guards 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.

23:16He 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.

24:03And 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.

24:55And 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

25:54Excuses. 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.

26:47So 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.

27:36And 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.

28:28He 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.

29:41Executions 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.

30:32The 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.

31:20Of 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.

32:24And 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.

33:16The 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.

34:13For 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.

35:06And 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

35:57of 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.

36:54This 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.

37:45These 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.

38:36Another 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.

39:22He 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.

40:17We'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.

41:24And 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.

42:17in 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.

43:02There 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.

43:47Every 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.

44:40And, 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.

45:44And 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.

46:32What 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.

47:21So 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.

48:12And 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.

49:03So 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.