Today there are memorials to him, statues, and buildings named after him, - Gen. W, T. Sherman, Union Civil War 'Hero'.
He is also famous for something else... For the instrumentation and racial cleansing and genocide of the American Indian
On June 27, 1865, General William Tecumseh Sherman was given command of the Military District of the Missouri, which was one of the five military divisions into which the U.S. government had divided the country.
Sherman received this command for the purpose of commencing the 25-year war against the Plains Indians, primarily as a form of veiled subsidy to the government-subsidized railroad corporations and other politically connected corporations involved in building the transcontinental railroads.
These corporations were the financial backbone of the Republican Party. Indeed, in June 1861, Abraham Lincoln, former legal counsel of the Illinois Central Railroad, called a special emergency session of Congress not to deal with the two-month-old Civil War, but to commence work on the Pacific Railway Act. Subsidizing the transcontinental railroads was a primary (if not "the" primary) objective of the new Republican Party.
What Sherman called the “Final" solution of the 'Indian' problem involved “killing hostile Indians and segregating their pauperized survivors in remote places.” During the Civil War, Sherman had practiced a total war of destruction of property. Now the army, in its 'Indian' warfare, often wiped out entire villages. Sherman's sentiments were that 'Indians' to be subhuman and racially inferior to whites and therefore deserving of extermination if they could not be controlled” by the white population.
Sherman’s goal was also to eliminate the possibility racial amalgamation (the action, process, or result of combining or uniting )that might occur elsewhere in the United States, by undertaking to effect a “racial cleansing" of the land beginning with extermination of the Indians. Sherman's troops conducted more than one thousand attacks on Native American villages, mostly in the winter months, when families were together. The U.S. army’s actions matched its leaders’ rhetoric of extermination.
Sherman gave orders to kill everyone and everything, including dogs, and to burn everything that would burn so as to increase the likelihood that any survivors would starve or freeze to death. The soldiers also waged a war of extermination on the buffalo, which was the Plains Natives source of food, winter clothing, and other goods.
The escalation of violence against the Plains Indians actually began in earnest during the War Between the States. Sherman and Sheridan’s Indian policy was a continuation and escalation of a policy that General Grenville Dodge, among others, had already commenced. Dodge said after John Chivington - Sand Creek Massacre "These Indians must be punished, their women and children captured and held as hostages" They were running for there life's Notice there was no men mentioned in that sentence
It was not necessary to kill tens of thousands of Native Americans and imprison thousands more in P.O.W./concentration camps (today “reservations”) for generations in order to build a transcontinental railroad. Nor were the wars on the Plains Indians a matter of “The white population’s” waging a war of extermination.
Sherman, along with others utilized the state’s latest technologies of mass killing developed during the Civil War and its mercenary soldiers to wage their war because they were in a hurry to shovel subsidies to the railroad corporations.General William T. Sherman, a true war criminal.
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