>>56069Sherman’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.”
“Sherman viewed Indians as he viewed Southerners". During the Civil War, Sherman practiced a total war of destruction of property used to feed women & children … Now the army, in its Indian warfare, wiped out entire villages.”
Sherman ordered his men when encountering Indians, “to act with all the vigor he had shown in the Shenandoah Valley during the final months of the Civil War.”, where they burned and plundered the Valley when only women, children, and elderly remained there.
Sherman insisted that the only answer to the Indian problem was all-out war — of the kind he had utilized against Southern civilians.
Sherman's compulsion was extermination. In a letter to his wife early in the war, he declared that his ultimate purpose was “extermination of the people of the South, till not one habitation is left standing."
Sherman considered Indians to be subhuman and racially inferior to whites and therefore deserving of extermination.
Sherman himself thought of the former slaves in exactly the same way. “The Indians give a fair illustration of the fate of the negroes if they are released from the control of the whites,” he once said.
Sherman’s goal was a “racial cleansing of the land,” beginning with extermination of the Indians.
Sherman conducted more than one thousand attacks on Indian villages, mostly in the winter months, when families were together.
Sherman gave the same orders he gave in Georgia, 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.
