William Tecumseh Sherman

Biography

William Tecumseh Sherman — named, with bitter irony, after the great Shawnee leader who united Native nations against American expansion — served as Commanding General of the U.S. Army from 1869 to 1883 and was the principal architect of the military strategy for subduing the Plains nations. His Civil War experience had taught him that total war — destroying the economic and material foundation of an enemy's society — was more decisive than conventional battle. He applied the same logic to the Plains: destroy the buffalo, destroy the villages, destroy the capacity to resist. Sherman explicitly supported the extermination of the buffalo herds as military policy, understanding that the great bison herds were the foundation of Plains life. 'Send them powder and lead, if you will, but for the sake of a lasting peace, let them kill, skin and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated,' he reportedly said of commercial hunters. His strategy worked, though the suffering it caused was immense. He despised reservation agents and the 'peace policy' advocates in Washington, viewing them as naive obstructionists. His views on Native peoples were openly exterminatory, placing him among the most ruthless architects of what historians now recognize as a campaign of cultural and physical destruction.