It is commonly agreed that nineteenth-century America had two experiences with "total war": the first against the Southern Confederacy, the second against the western plains Indians.⁽¹⁾ A number of historians have discerned similarities in the military methods employed, particularly the emphasis on the destruction of supplies and attacks on noncombatants. The similarities seem all the more telling because the officers who presided over the destruction of Indian autonomy in the late 19th century were often the same men who had helped destroy the Confederacy in 1861-1865.⁽²⁾ Such commonalities imply that however potent racial views may have been in white America's overall stance toward Native America, the role of race in the final military contest with Native America was not central. This point is suggested even by Francis Jennings, a distinguished historian highly critical of white America's conduct toward Native Americans. Writing of General William T. Sherman, he remarks: "Any photograph of Sherman's Civil War devastation of Atlanta will reveal his style of war. Why should anyone expect him to be more merciful to alien Indians than to people of his own kind?"⁽³⁾

Today I want to argue that in fact Sherman--and his counterparts within the Union army--did behave with considerably more mercy toward Southern whites than white America showed in its final wars with Native America, and that the difference reflects the salience of race and culture in the latter struggles. Russell F. Weigley spoke some years ago of an "American way of war." It has long seemed to some historians that possibly America has had two ways of war--one for enemies who are similar to white Americans in culture and ethnicity, one for enemies who are not.⁽⁴⁾ Yet if this is correct (and some would say it is screamingly obvious), one still has to come to terms with the dominant view in the literature, which suggests that the last wars against the Plains Indians were principally an extension and amplification of the methods used against white Southern civilians.⁽⁵⁾

The contrasts between the wars against the Confederacy and Native America are compelling. They begin with the basic legal principles by which the two struggles were conducted. The laws and customs of European warfare contain two main strands of thought, one applicable to wars between nation-states and the other to internal rebellions. Although the Federal government explicitly denied the Confederacy's legal existence, it extended full belligerent rights to Southern armies and as a practical matter, waged the Civil War largely as a contest between two nations. By extension, Union armies generally treated Southern civilians as if they were citizens of a foreign nation--subject to military rule and the seizure of their crops, to be sure, yet not to imprisonment or summary execution provided they refrained from guerrilla activity. This is so obvious that it is easy to overlook. But as William T. Sherman enjoyed pointing out, the Federal government's decision amounted to a substantial act of forbearance, for by rights it could have applied the insurrectionary principle sweepingly, executed virulent secessionists, confiscated property wholesale, and even "banish[ed the inhabitants] and appropriate[d] their lands to a more loyal and useful population."⁽⁶⁾

Military policy toward Native Americans, on the other hand, routinely followed the insurrectionary principle, which in effect not only denied legitimacy to Native American combatants, but placed them in the same legal category as bandits or highwaymen. It did this despite the fact that Native Americans were not citizens of the United States but belonged instead to separate non-state societies that until 1871 were officially regarded as semi-sovereign nations.⁽⁷⁾ American units on the western frontier certainly did not automatically kill every Indian they encountered, but the widespread sense that Indians were illegitimate combatants--insurgents, simple bandits, or (in Gen. Philip Sheridan's expressive phrase) "fiends"--made killing much easier to contemplate, condone, or excuse.⁽⁸⁾

It is sometimes suggested that the more relevant parallel is with Union policy toward Confederate guerrillas, who did fall under the insurrectionary principle and were therefore entitled, as one Union general put it, to "the rights due to pirates and robbers": In other words, no rights at all.⁽⁹⁾ Undeniably, Union punishment of guerrilla activity was severe. The guerrillas themselves were often killed when caught, and reprisals against local civilians could take the form of arrests, hostage-taking, expulsions, or the destruction of homes. But historians who equate Union treatment of Confederate guerrillas and Indian warriors overlook a crucial distinction. By according the Confederacy belligerent rights, the Union gave white Southerners a legitimate avenue of resistance: They could join the Confederate army. Moreover, the Union bound itself to extend the customary protections of war even to partisan soldiers taken in arms, provided they displayed their weapons openly and wore distinctive identifying emblems. A guerrilla might choose to fight the Union while ignoring these injunctions, but a Native American had no choice: He was regarded as an insurgent no matter how he fought, even if he displayed arms openly and eschewed the moral camouflage of the peaceable civilian. Moreover, those who supported him were also regarded as insurgents, whether they carried arms or not.

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During their clashes with the western Indians, U.S. forces quickly discovered that it was almost impossible to destroy a Native American war party in open combat, since Indians normally avoided battle except under favorable conditions, and their small numbers and high mobility made them hard to locate amid the vastness of the Far West. Accordingly, one of the Army's favorite tactics was to swoop down upon a hostile party while it was ensconced in a village, ideally at dawn. This tactic practically guaranteed casualties among Native American women, children, and the elderly.⁽¹⁰⁾ Sheridan defended the tactic against criticism by Eastern humanitarians, averring that it was no different than what had been practiced during the Civil War: "During the war did any one hesitate to attack a village or town occupied by the enemy because women and children were within its limits? Did we cease to throw shells into Vicksburg or Atlanta because women and children were there?"⁽¹¹⁾

But this was disingenuous. The bombardments of Vicksburg and Atlanta were rather desultory and produced few civilian casualties; then too, the townspeople knew for days if not weeks of the enemy's approach and could have departed (as many did).⁽¹²⁾ By contrast, the success of the western village attacks depended upon the Native Americans' not knowing of their enemy's approach. And whereas the presence of noncombatants at Vicksburg and Atlanta were incidental to operations against the Confederate armies defending them, the presence of noncombatants in a Native American village was of central importance. As Richard Slotkin points out, "[T]he greatest opportunities for white victory would occur when the presence of women and children immobilized the warriors and forced them to defend their ground."⁽¹³⁾ Finally, while the Union army could readily discriminate between military and civilian targets at Vicksburg and Atlanta, during a village attack, combatants and noncombatants were hopelessly intermingled. The result, predictably, was a level of noncombatant casualties far higher than anything seen during Civil War military operations, including sieges.⁽¹⁴⁾ In short, Sheridan was not drawing an appropriate comparison. Rather he was cloaking a morally dubious act in the mantle of one more easily defensible.⁽¹⁵⁾

The telling contrast between conduct toward white Southerners and Native Americans was also evident with regard to the destruction of property. Even historians fully aware that the Union military operations resulted in few civilian deaths dwell heavily on the devastation of Southern croplands, the burning of Southern towns, the looting of Southern homesteads. If these acts stopped short of the actual killing of noncombatants, surely they opened a Pandora's box that soon led to such killings? "The battlefields of the Civil War," declares a recent assessment, "were classrooms in which American officers learned the tactics they would apply with devastating effect against Native Americans."⁽¹⁶⁾ I am not at all sure that they did. In fact, I think that despite a surface plausibility, such a formulation hinders more than it assists understanding.

I have spent a book describing the evolution of Union military policy toward Southern civilians and property, and I can do no more today than summarize a few key findings.⁽¹⁷⁾ The first is that the North's early conciliatory policy represented a deliberate attempt at restraint, and that the eventual "hard war" against the South's economic base was not a revolutionary new tactic. Union commanders were simply invoking the letter of the established laws and customs of war--rules largely developed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and, on the whole, quite well-adapted to the demands of a mid-nineteenth century American civil war.⁽¹⁸⁾ The second is that this hard war policy was characterized by a striking mixture of severity and restraint that directed destructive energies far more toward public property than private, far more toward secessionists (real or presumed) than toward white Southerners thought to be neutral, passive, or Unionist. Certainly the North's war upon Southern resources was hard, but it was also channeled. And by choosing to wage the war as a contest between two nations, the Union government threw its moral and legal authority squarely behind the preservation of distinctions between combatants and noncombatants. Field commanders reinforced the distinction through a stream of orders that forbade pillaging and wanton destruction. Critics who cite the orders as evidence of continued depredations miss the crucial point: In war, nothing undercuts the claims of personal conscience faster than the demands of public authority.⁽¹⁹⁾ By insisting on proper conduct toward Southern civilians, Union generals encouraged rather than undermined their soldiers' consciences.

Third, the policy held up in no small measure because it made moral and political sense to the citizen-soldier in the ranks: men who accepted the need for a destructive war but wished its effects to be visited as much as possible on those who deserved it, and then in rough accord with the extent of their sins. This wish often persisted even in the face of guerrilla activity, something that provoked Union soldiers more than anything else. A Federal brigade commander, for example, interceded with Sheridan to save a Virginia community from being burned in retaliation for the bushwhacking of a Union officer. His men wholeheartedly approved, and when informed that Sheridan had rescinded the order, "there was louder cheering than there ever was when we made a bayonet charge."⁽²⁰⁾ Told to burn houses near the sites of guerrilla activity in West Virginia, a Union colonel demurred nevertheless. "To men who have taken the oath [of allegiance], unless charges could be made and sustained, I do not feel authorized to apply [the] order. . . . I would rather spare two secesh than burn up one Union man's property."⁽²¹⁾

The destruction of Native American property followed a considerably different pattern. Although Southern barns and outbuildings might be destroyed, it was relatively uncommon for Union troops to burn private dwellings. But U.S. troops in the west routinely burned entire Native American villages. The emphasis in both official orders and actual practice was to leave white Southern civilians enough provisions to get by; in the west, the norm was to destroy provisions so thoroughly as to force the Native Americans to choose between reservation life and starvation. The pattern during the Civil War was to distinguish between Union, secessionist, and neutral or passive civilians; in the west, distinctions between the peace and war factions of a tribe were seldom made. Union foraging parties often gave white Southerners receipts for supplies taken, and after the war a Southern Claims Commission gave compensation to those who could demonstrate their loyalty. No such niceties applied in the contest against Native America.

Both struggles, of course, saw depredations by the rank-and-file. Southern tales of purloined silverware and rifled wardrobes have a strong factual basis. But the stories of widespread murder and rape by Union soldiers in the South do not. Few white Southern women suffered rape or sexual abuse.⁽²²⁾ In the west, however, the rape of Native American women was common and frequently remarked. The Sand Creek massacre is a particularly well-known case, but there were many others. A California newspaper reported in 1862 the gang rape of several Indian women by a military patrol.⁽²³⁾ At Bear River (Idaho Territory), where an estimated 250 Northwestern Shoshoni Indians were slaughtered in January 1863, women were raped even as they lay dying from wounds.⁽²⁴⁾ There were also reports of forced concubinage on the part of Custer's cavalry after the Battle of the Washita. "Under these circumstances," writes Sherry L. Smith, "officers apparently saw the Indian women as the spoils of war, as sexual conveniences."⁽²⁵⁾

One historian offers two explanations for the widespread rape of Native American women: "It is women, after all, who are the repository of racial purity, and the rape of women has been a traditional part of a conquering army's celebration."⁽²⁶⁾ Both points seem reasonable, but the second raises questions about the rarity of such conduct among Union soldiers. If rape is a traditional act of conquering soldiers, why does the reality of Union conduct toward Southern white women so little resemble the myth?

There is a pervasive belief that participation in war is inherently brutalizing. "Humans regress under prolonged stress or discomfort," notes one social psychologist; "they become more primitive. . . ."⁽²⁷⁾ A U.S. officer in Vietnam remarked that his troops were decent enough young men. But subjected to sufficient fear, exhaustion, stress, and "a little mob pressure," he continued, "those nice kids . . . would rape like champions. Kill, rape, and steal is the name of the game."⁽²⁸⁾ Although much may be said in support of such a view, it is too simple. It overlooks, for example, the role that conscious indoctrination and informal military culture play in encouraging the depersonalization of the individual.⁽²⁹⁾ The persistence of restraint among Union soldiers during the Civil War suggests that brutalization is not a foregone conclusion. In my book, I concluded that Union soldiers exercised restraint, in part, because they were citizen-soldiers who retained strong links to their communities--members of which fought alongside them--and thus a continued connection to the moral values of the society that bred them. Men raised to regard rape as wrong continued to regard it as wrong even after three years of combat, illness, and hardship. If rape was more widespread in the west, something was at work besides the inherent brutality of war.

In short, it is misleading to see the Indian wars merely as an extension and amplification of the tactics employed during the Civil War. The treatment of noncombatants during the two contests was qualitatively different. The legal principles by which they were conducted underscored the distinction between combatant and noncombatant during the Civil War but undercut it during the Indian wars. The tactics employed resulted in few civilian deaths during the Civil War but hundreds during the fighting in the west. The destruction of property was far more sweeping and complete in the latter struggles as well. Finally, incidents of rape were rare among the Union armies in the South, far more common in the west.

Where does this recognition get us? One hopes it does not simply return us to the old, unproductive squabble about whether the U.S. Army fought honorably or pursued a "deliberate, if bungled, program of genocide."⁽³⁰⁾ The historiography of the Civil War passed through stages in which the North's "hard war" policy was viewed through the lens of morality and subsequently through the lens of total war. The lens of morality tended to yield a lot of finger-pointing and the lens of total war tended to emphasize destructiveness and political "realism" while overlooking evidence of restraint. I found that exploring the significance of both severity and restraint gave me the most satisfying explanation of Union conduct toward Southern civilians. The same method might be useful with regard to the Indian wars. When one examines Anglo American conduct toward Native Americans, the differing patterns of severity and restraint yield intriguing clues concerning the underlying dynamics.

It is fairly apparent that much of the qualitative difference between the Civil War and Indian wars can be laid at the door of racial antagonism. White soldiers treated Southern whites with forbearance because in language, culture, and ethnicity they seemed basically similar. They treated Indians more harshly because the Indians seemed different, alien.⁽³¹⁾ But this commonplace idea lacks nuance. It cannot account for the bloody white-on-white irregular warfare that wracked much of the borderlands during the Civil War. The Lawrence Massacre in August 1863 was only the most spectacular example of this kind of warfare, which faithfully mirrored the white-on-red contests out west in all respects but one: We see comparatively few instances of rape and sexual assault.⁽³²⁾

Similarly, it cannot account for the differences in white attitudes toward Native Americans. The U.S. Army fought the Indians using tactics that often showed a reckless disregard for the lives of noncombatants, and regular troops both experienced and inflicted atrocities.⁽³³⁾ Yet by and large the Army reflected an Eastern assessment of Native Americans that saw them as inferior, savage, and fated for assimilation or extinction--but could also muster some pity for a dying culture and could acknowledge that the Indians had often been treated unjustly. Volunteer troops from states east of the Mississippi also occasionally fought in the west and exhibited a similar ambivalence. For example, a Utah observer noted (with some surprise) that the colonel of the 6th Ohio Cavalry was "decidedly against killing Indians indiscriminately, and will not take any general measures, save on the defensive, until he can ascertain satisfactorily by whom the depredations have been committed, and then not resort to killing until he is satisfied that peaceable measures have failed."⁽³⁴⁾

The prevalent attitude of western whites was far more virulent. Many embraced an ideology of outright extermination. "Indian hunting"--collective violence against Native Americans by groups of white civilians--was common in the west and epidemic in California, where Anglo Americans slew some 4,500 Indians between 1848 and 1880, a figure roughly equivalent to the total killed in battles against the U.S. Army.⁽³⁵⁾ A number of California Native Americans were captured and sold into slavery.⁽³⁶⁾

Some years ago, Barbara Fields suggested that race is "profoundly and in its very essence ideological," and that during the nineteenth century it became "the ideological medium through which Americans confronted questions of sovereignty and power."⁽³⁷⁾ The human predisposition to create "in-groups" and "out-groups" is manipulated and exploited in order to deny the possibility of community of one group and another, and in so doing, to deny the sense of mutual moral responsibility on which society normally rests.⁽³⁸⁾ Other scholars, building upon this fundamental insight, have forcefully argued that racial categories are not transhistorical but instead are very powerful social constructions. The key distinction thus turns out to be not so much racial difference per se as the willingness or unwillingness to acknowledge potential political community. This is hardly an automatic consequence of a common ethnicity or culture: During the American Revolution, for example, the antagonism between Whigs and Loyalists could be nearly as vicious as anything the Indian wars could produce. The same was true of the intranecine strife in the Southern upcountry during the Civil War, and it is possible that the lethal postwar labor strife can be seen in a similar light. White Southerners got off more easily the more they seemed likely to resume their status as U.S. citizens, and because the goal was to restore the South to the Union, some measure of forbearance was extended to virtually all white southerners.

The degree of forbearance accorded Native Americans was greatly less, in large measure because few whites were willing to contemplate the extension of community to Native Americans except on terms that whites absolutely controlled. But because "whiteness" was as much socially-constructed as other racial categories, it seems clear that white racial ideology, while retaining certain fundamental features, could vary according to place and circumstances.⁽³⁹⁾ This had implications for the terms on which whites could contemplate coexistence with Native Americans. For Eastern humanitarians, the terms amounted to assimilation within the dominant white culture. The defensiveness of Army officers when confronted by charges of atrocities, coupled with the humanitarian impulses of a few officers like George Crook and Oliver O. Howard, suggests that the Army was not deaf to the idea that Native Americans might eventually be included on some subordinate basis. But it was also responsive to white America's demand that the west must be made safe for its own voracious development, and that Indians who stood in the way--however courageous or shamefully wronged--must be made to submit.⁽⁴⁰⁾

Too much can be made of the U.S. Army's humanitarianism in the conduct of this difficult mission. The denial of community between whites and Indians, except on white terms, made it easy to define Indian resistance as illegitimate, and to employ tactics that would have seemed barbaric, extreme, and unthinkable if employed against Southern whites. But it is fortunate that the U.S. government chose to make the regular army its principal instrument in the post Civil War Indian conflicts rather than to continue the large-scale use of western volunteer troops, for among westerners the denial of community with Native Americans was all but complete. If the Union citizen-soldier's continued sense of connection to his home society was a key factor in preserving restraint during the Civil War, that same sense of connection helped make the western citizen-soldier into an implacable Indian destroyer. It is worth recalling that the Third Colorado Volunteers, who perpetrated the Sand Creek massacre, were enlisted for only a hundred days, had a social composition similar to other Civil War regiments, slaughtered the Black Kettle encampment in their first and only engagement, and returned to Denver festooned with scalps and women's genitalia, to receive a heroes' welcome.⁽⁴¹⁾

NOTES

1. "Total war" is employed here in its familiar usage, as a conflict in which the boundaries between combatants and noncombatants are blurred or broken down.

2. For examples of this interpretation, see Russell F. Weigley, The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy (New York: MacMillan, 1973), 153-163; Robert M. Utley, Frontier Regulars: The United States Army and the Indian, 1866-1890 (New York: MacMillan, 1973), 149-150 (as well as other works by Utley); Jerry M. Cooper, "The Army's Search for a Mission, 1865-1890," in Kenneth J. Hagan and William R. Roberts (eds.), Against All Enemies: Interpretations of American Military History from Colonial Times to the Present (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986), 178-182; and Lance Janda, "Shutting the Gates of Mercy: The American Origins of Total War, 1860-1880," Journal of Military History, vol. 59, no. 1 (January 1995), 7-26.

3. Francis Jennings, The Founders of America: How Indians Discovered the Land, Pioneered in It, and Created Great Classical Civilizations, How They Were Plunged into a New Dark Age by Invasion and Conquest, and How They Are Reviving (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1993), 376.

4. This point is suggested in Don Higginbotham, "The Early American Way of War: Reconnaissance and Appraisal," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, vol. 49 (1987), 234.

5. This of course is the view taken by the works cited in note 2, above. It is also suggested in a number of other works, including Charles Royster, The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 393-399; and Paul Andrew Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985). Richard Slotkin reverses the usual interpretation, saying that "Sherman's march had its roots in colonial- and Revolutionary-era Indian campaigns." (The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890 [paperback ed., New York: HarperPerennial, 1994], 304.) John F. Marszalek does much the same, suggesting that Sherman's experiences in the Second Seminole War influenced his later treatment of Southern civilians. See his Sherman: A Soldier's Passion for Order (New York: Free Press, 1993), 195-196.

The principal dissent from the dominant view is Robert A. Wooster, The Military and United States Indian Policy, 1865-1903 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988), 136-142, 214. Wooster's objection emphasizes that the Civil War and the wars against the plains Indians were very different contests and that the U.S. Army recognized them as such. He includes a paragraph on racism as a key difference, with emphasis on the fact that white Southern civilians were seldom killed by Union forces, whereas Native American women, children, and the elderly were not infrequently slain in western warfare.

6. Sherman to Roswell M. Sawyer, January 31, 1864, War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 128 vols. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1880-1901), Series I, vol. 32, part 2, p. 279. Cited hereafter as OR. All citations are to Series I.

7. An obscure rider to an Indian appropriations bill outlawed further treaty-making with Native American tribes, and U.S. policy shifted during the late 1860s and 1870s toward regarding Indians as "wards of the nation" rather than members of semi-sovereign tribes. But the precise legal status of Indians remained in flux for some time. The appropriations rider is reprinted in Francis Paul Prucha (ed.), Documents in United States Indian Policy, 2nd ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 136. The most thorough discussion of U.S. Indian policy during the last half of the nineteenth century is idem., American Indian Policy in Crisis: Christian Reformers and the Indian, 1865-1900 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976).

8. The so-called Quaker or Grant Peace Policy of 1869 strongly buttressed this way of regarding Indians, because it established reservations for most Native Americans and regarded as hostile any Native Americans who strayed from them. See Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians (abridged ed.; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 152-180 passim. The Sheridan quote is in Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army, 185.

9. See John M. Gates, "Indians and Insurrectos: The U.S. Army's Experience with Insurgency," Parameters 12 (March 1983): 59-68. General Order No. 92 [Army of the Mississippi], July 12, 1862, Official Records, vol. 17, pt. 2, p. 97. The formulation is that of Maj. Gen. William S. Rosecrans, but the principle represented official Union policy. See General Order No. 100 [U.S. War Department], April 24, 1863, section IV. More familiarly known as Lieber's Code, the order is conveniently reprinted in Richard Shelly Hartigan, Lieber's Code and the Law of War (Chicago: Precedent, 1983).

10. Two well-known examples of this tactic are the Battle of the Washita on November 29, 1868, and the Marias Massacre on January 23, 1870. At the Washita (in present-day Oklahoma), Lt. Col. George A. Custer's Seventh Cavalry killed an estimated 103 Cheyennes, an undetermined number of whom (perhaps as many as half) were women and children. At the Marias River (Montana), Maj. Edward M. Baker and two squadrons of the Second Cavalry killed 173 Piegan Indians, including 53 women and children, many of them ill with smallpox. See Stan Hoig, The Battle of the Washita: The Sheridan-Custer Indian Campaign of 1867-69 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976), esp. Appendix C, pp. 200-201; Robert M. Utley, Frontier Regulars: The United States Army and the Indian, 1866-1891 (New York: MacMillan, 1973), 198.

11. Sheridan to Sherman, March 18, 1870, Box 91, Philip H. Sheridan Papers, Library of Congress; quoted in Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army, 185.

12. While not precisely known, civilian deaths caused by the Union bombardment of Atlanta are estimated at about twenty over a three-week period. See Albert Castel, Decision in the West: The Atlanta Campaign of 1864 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992), 488. The figures for Vicksburg were even less: between five and ten people over the course of a 47-day siege. See Peter F. Walker, Vicksburg: A People at War, 1860-1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960), 203fn.

13. Slotkin, Fatal Environment, 400.

14. Field engagements produced even fewer civilian losses. During the three-day battle of Gettysburg, for example, only one civilian lost her life: Jennie Wade. The fact that she is a minor celebrity of the battle--her house in the town has been preserved--eloquently testifies to the rarity of such deaths. The same might be said of Judith Henry, killed by a shell at the First Battle of Manassas. Even during Sherman's destructive marches through Georgia and South Carolina, almost no civilian deaths are recorded.

15. The principle of "double effect" helps to underscore the difference between the bombardment of besieged Southern cities and direct attacks on Native American villages. It is well-explicated by Michael Walzer in Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument With Historical Illustrations, 2d ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 151-159. "Double effect," he writes, "is a way of reconciling the absolute prohibition against attacking noncombatants with the legitimate conduct of military activity," which may unavoidably expose noncombatants to harm. (Ibid., 153) Its key condition, he continues, is that "[t]he intention of the actor is good, that is, he aims narrowly at the acceptable effect [e.g., the death or incapacitation of combatants]; the evil effect [death or injury to noncombatants] is not one of his ends, nor is it a means to his ends, and, aware of the evil involved, he seeks to minimize it, accepting costs to himself." (Ibid., 155) One may complain that during the Atlanta bombardment, Sherman failed to minimize the risk of causing harm to civilians. But causing harm to them was neither his objective nor a means to his objective. By contrast, while causing harm to Native American women and children was plausibly not the objective of Custer at the Washita or Baker at the Marias, their presence was an important means to insure the vulnerability of the otherwise Native American warriors. According to the principle of double effect, this is morally unacceptable. "A soldier must take careful aim at his target and away from nonmilitary targets. He can shoot only if he has a reasonably clear shot; he can attack only if a direct attack is possible. He can risk incidental deaths, but he cannot kill civilians simply because he finds them between himself and his enemies." (Ibid., 174)

Ethically, then, the U.S. Army could have resorted to attacks on Native American villages only if it were prepared to take significant steps to avoid noncombatant casualties--for example, by using forces sufficient to surround the village, offer the Native Americans an opportunity to surrender, and permit noncombatants the opportunity to leave the battle area. Although I think this conclusion cannot be gainsaid, it is perhaps only fair to point out that the Army found itself chronically shorthanded during most of its campaigns and that even surprise attacks were fraught with considerable risk. At the Battle of the Big Hole (Montana) on August 9, 1877, a column under Col. John Gibbon surprised a Nez Percé encampment but failed to prevent the escape of most warriors, who found cover and shot down fully a third of Gibbon's men. But as usual, many of the Nez Percé killed in the opening attack were women and children. Estimates of Indian losses are notoriously hard to establish reliably, but the evidence suggests that as many as two-thirds of the eighty to ninety dead were noncombatants. See Merrill D. Beal, "I Will Fight No More Forever: Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce War (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1963), 112-143, esp. 128-129.

16. Janda, "Shutting the Gates of Mercy," 26.

17. Mark Grimsley, The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy Toward Southern Civilians, 1861-1865 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

18. Although it is common to locate the germ of the hard war policy within the fertile mind of William T. Sherman, in fact it was more the result of the logistical imperative by which Civil War armies sometimes found it necessary to take supplies from the countryside and, by extension, to deny them to the enemy. A number of Union commanders resorted to foraging and area denial well before Sherman did; such methods were obvious solutions to obvious military problems. It requires little imagination to realize that if the Civil War had never taken place, the military problems of a war against the plains Indians would have suggested their own solutions in much the same way. Faced with an opponent too mobile and too elusive to destroy in conventional battle, Army officers resorted to attacks on villages, which were comparatively easy to locate; to the destruction of supplies that fed the warriors; to the killing of the ponies on which their mobility rested. One does not need Sherman's Marches to explain the genesis of these measures; one does not even need the ample historical precedent of the colonial "feedfights," for which see Alden T. Vaughan, "`Expulsion of the Salvages': English Policy and the Virginia Massacre of 1622," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, vol. 35, no. 1 (January 1978), 57-84.

19. The literature on this point is large, but see especially Herbert C. Kelman and V. Lee Hamilton, Crimes of Obedience: Toward a Social Psychology of Authority and Responsibility (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989).

20. This incident is described in Grimsley, Hard Hand of War, 184-185.

21. Quoted in ibid., 224.

22. Joseph T. Glatthaar, The March to the Sea and Beyond: Sherman's Troops in the Savannah and Carolinas Campaigns (New York: New York University Press, 1985), 72-74; George C. Rable, Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 160-161; Lee Kennett, Marching Through Georgia: The Story of Soldiers and Civilians During Sherman's Campaign (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 306-307; Grimsley, Hard Hand of War, 81, 199, 220; Stephen V. Ash, When the Yankees Came: Conflict and Chaos in the Occupied South, 1861-1865 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 200-201; and Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 200. Significantly, African American women seem to have been sexually abused with much greater frequency. On this point, as well the question of rapes upon white women, see the excellent discussion in Reid Mitchell, The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 102-110.

23. Red Bluff (Calif.) Beacon, October 9, 1862, excerpted in Robert F. Heizer (ed.), The Destruction of California Indians (Bison Book Edition; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993 [1974]), 283.

24. Brigham D. Madsen, The Shoshoni Frontier and the Bear River Massacre (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1985), 193.

25. Sherry L. Smith, The View from Officer's Row: Army Perceptions of Western Indians (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990), 82. Documentary evidence on this point is suggestive but sketchy. See, e.g., Frederick W. Benteen to Theodore W. Goldin, February 17, 1896, in John M. Carroll (ed.), The Benteen-Goldin Letters on Custer and His Last Battle (reprint ed.; Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1991 [1974]), 271: "[Custer issued] an informal invitation . . . for officers desiring to avail themselves of the services of a captured squaw, to come to the squaw round-up corral and select one! . . . Custer took first choice, and lived with her during the winter and spring of 1868 and '69." See also Paul Andrew Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army, 74, 389.

26. Sarah Deutsch, "Landscape of Enclaves: Race Relations in the West, 1865-1990," in William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin (eds.), Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America's Western Past (paperback ed.; New York: Norton, 1993), 117.

27. Ervin Staub, The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 45. Here Staub is paraphrasing the opinion of another writer, M. Scott Peck, but the next sentence makes it clear that he accepts and endorses this view.

28. Quoted in Richard Holmes, Acts of War: The Behavior of Men in Battle (New York: Free Press, 1985), 392.

29. On this point, see Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995).

30. Diana Vári, "A Monstrous Wrong Without Guilt," Reviews in American History, vol. 3, no. 1 (March 1975), 81. In this essay, which reviewed Robert M. Utley's Frontier Regulars, Vári encapsulated the terms of the debate caustically but vividly: "On one side stands a loosely related group of historians who advocate the innocent motives if sometimes malign acts of the government, army, and even philanthropists. They describe the other side as smarmy dreamers who believe that the army was always sadistic and the plains Indians were sweet kids who were just plain misunderstood. Strange, but I never thought of Quanah Parker and the boys that way." (Ibid., pp. 81-82)

31. There is an extensive literature on white perceptions of Native Americans. See, e.g., Robert F. Birkhofer, The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978); Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19th-Century America (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), esp. chapters 5 and 8; Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), 189-207; and Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980).

32. For the Lawrence Massacre, see Thomas Goodrich, Bloody Dawn: The Story of the Lawrence Massacre (Kent, Ohio, and London: Kent State University Press, 1991). On the question of rape and sexual assault, see Michael Fellman, Inside War: The Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri During the American Civil War (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 199-214.

33. A brief but perceptive summary of atrocities during the plains warfare (both Indian and white) is in Thomas W. Dunlay, Wolves for the Blue Soldiers: Indian Scouts and Auxiliaries with the United States Army, 1860-1890 (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 201-205. See also Don Rickey, Forty Miles a Day on Beans and Hay: The Enlisted Soldier Fighting the Indian Wars (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963), 231-234.

34. Quoted in E. B. Long, The Saints and the Union: Utah Territory During the Civil War (Urbana and London: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 87.

35. Richard White, "It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own": A History of the American West (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 337-340. One might also point to the Camp Grant Massacre in April 1871, in which a mixed group of Papago Indians, Hispanics, and Anglo Americans from Tucson (Arizona Territory) fell upon an unoffending encampment of Pinal and Aravaipa Apaches, killed between 86 and 150 people, raped the surviving women, mutilated the corpses, and sold 29 children into slavery. See Don Schellie, Vast Domain of Blood: The Story of the Camp Grant Massacre (Los Angeles: Westernlore Press, 1968).

36. Albert L. Hurtado, Indian Survival on the California Frontier (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1988), 145, 211. California law permitted the indenture of loitering and minor Indians, and in a number of instances Indians were enslaved extralegally. As late as 1862 a Union officer reported that Indians were being enslaved in his district. Thomas E. Ketcham to John Hanna, Jr., April 3, 1862, OR 50, pt. 1, 982.

37. Barbara J. Fields, "Ideology and Race in American History," in J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson (eds.), Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 144, 168.

38. On the inherent human tendency to construct in-groups and out-groups, even on the basis of trivial differences, see Straub, The Roots of Evil, 58.

39. The literature on what Theodore W. Allen has termed "the invention of the white race" is substantial and growing rapidly. See Allen's The Invention of the White Race, vol. 1: Social Control and Oppression (London and New York: Verso, 1994); David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London and New York: Verso, 1991); idem., Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class History (London and New York: Verso, 1994); and Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York and London: Routledge, 1995). Three older works with implications for the construction of whiteness are Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages; Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1971); and Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1968). Most of these works implicitly deal with whiteness as it was constructed and understood east of the Mississippi. A good study that addresses white racial identity in the Far West is Tomás Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1994).

40. This tension in the views of many U.S. officers is sensitively explored in Thomas C. Leonard, Above the Battle: War-making from Appomattox to Versailles (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 43-58.

It is usually thought that Southern whites, too, were made to submit: This is a cherished bit of Civil War mythology. The North's hard war against Southern property is seen as a principal instrument toward this end. But the goal of Union policy was really to detach Southern whites from their allegiance to the Confederacy. This accomplished, the relative mildness of Reconstruction and the speed with which self-rule returned to the white South are, on the whole, remarkable.

41. Lonnie J. White, "From Bloodless to Bloody: The Third Colorado Cavalry and the Sand Creek Massacre," Journal of the West, vol. 6, no. 3 (October 1967), 535-581; Raymond G. Carey, "The `Bloodless Third' Regiment, Colorado Volunteer Cavalry," Colorado Magazine, vol. 38, no. 3 (October 1961), 275-300. See also Stan Hoig, The Sand Creek Massacre (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961); David Svaldi, Sand Creek and the Rhetoric of Extermination: A Case Study in Indian-White Relations (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1989).

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