{"id":23734,"date":"2014-06-25T09:34:55","date_gmt":"2014-06-25T17:34:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=23734"},"modified":"2014-06-25T14:55:49","modified_gmt":"2014-06-25T22:55:49","slug":"happy-custer-massacre-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2014\/06\/25\/happy-custer-massacre-day\/","title":{"rendered":"Happy Custer Massacre Day!"},"content":{"rendered":"

On this day in 1876, Gen.\"custer2\"<\/a> George S. Custer led his 7th Cavalry regiment to their demise in Montana.\u00a0 The Battle of Little Big Horn was one of the biggest defeats suffered by the U.S. Army in the war against the Indians.\u00a0\u00a0 It is only in recent years that proper attention has been paid to the role of atrocities by Custer<\/a> and other military leaders in stirring up the wrath of oppressed Indians.<\/p>\n

I visited the Little Big Horn Battlefield National Monument 45 years ago during a cross-country trip as a 12-year-old boy\u00a0to a Boy Scout Jamboree in Idaho. Like most Scouts, I subscribed to the Patriotic Version of American History. After visiting the battlefield,\u00a0I scribbled (or copied) a note that the Seventh Cavalry\u2019s \u201cheroic defense made the nation yearn for details that no white man lived to tell.\u201d\u00a0Many years later, I learned that Custer\u2019s men were wiped out <\/a>in part because the Army Quartermaster refused to permit them to carry repeating rifles – which supposedly wasted ammo. The Indians didn\u2019t have a quartermaster, so they had repeating rifles, and the rest is history.<\/p>\n

\"custer<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>Custer also played a leading role in the 1864 desolation of the Shenandoah Valley<\/a>, where I was raised a century later. After failing to decisively vanquish southern armies in the battlefield, Lincoln and his generals decided to win the war by brutalizing civilians. In August\u00a0 1864, Gen. U.S. Grant\u00a0 ordered\u00a0 the destruction of all the barns, crops, and livestock in the Shenandoah Valley.\u00a0\u00a0The etching <\/a>to the left shows his troops after torching much of the town of Mt. Jackson,\u00a0Virginia.\u00a0 The population of Warren County, my home county,\u00a0fell by 20% during the 1860s. Did anyone who refused to submit to Washington automatically forfeit his right to live? \u00a0The desolation from the war and the systemic looting in its aftermath (ironically labeled \u201cReconstruction\u201d) helped keep the South economically prostrate for generations.<\/p>\n

During the 1864 campaign, Custer was under the command of Gen. Phil Sheridan.\u00a0 Sheridan later became notorious for slaughtering Indians as a top commander out west.\u00a0 He is best known for telling an Indian chief in 1869: “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”\u00a0 He apparently felt the same way about Southerners – or at least “secessionists” and their wives and children.<\/p>\n

Sheridan’s campaign to starve Shenandoah Valley residents into submission evoked fierce opposition from the\u00a0 guerillas led by Col. John S. Mosby<\/a>, the \u201cGrey Ghost of the Confederacy.\u201d Late in the war, when Confederate armies were being trounced or pinned down everywhere, a few hundred Mosby partisans tied up ten thousand Yankees. Mosby suffered none of the Sir Walter Scott-style sentimentality that debilitated many Southern commanders. Instead of glimmering sabers, his men carried a pair of .44 caliber revolvers. There was so much fear of Mosby that the planks on the bridge across the Potomac were removed each night, for fear that he would raid the capital. Reading about him as a boy, \u00a0I was impressed how a few well-placed attacks could throw the entire government into a panic. (Herman Melville captured the dread that northern troops had of Mosby in his epic poem, A Scout to Aldie<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Mosby’s men were vastly outnumbered but they fought valiantly to try to stop Sheridan’s torching of the valley.\u00a0\u00a0 Sheridan responded by labeling Mosby’s men war criminals and announcing that they would be executed if captured.\u00a0 The North stretched the definition of illegal enemy combatant at the same time it redefined its own war crimes out of existence.\u00a0\u00a0Six of Mosby’s men were hung in Front Royal, Virginia <\/a>in September 1864.<\/p>\n

In the weeks after the hanging of his men,\u00a0Mosby’s men\u00a0captured 700 northern troops.\u00a0 In early November, his troops hanged several captured Yankees in retaliation.\u00a0 A sign was attached to one of the corpses: “These men have been hung in retaliation for an equal number of Colonel Mosby\u2019s men, hung by order of General Custer at Front Royal.\u00a0 Measure for measure.\u201d\u00a0 Recognizing the perils to his own troops, Sheridan ceased executing captured Mosby’s guerillas.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, most of the war crimes of the Civil War have been forgotten in the rush to sanctify a pointless vast loss of lives.\u00a0 Recasting the war as a triumph of good over evil was an easy way to make atrocities vanish. \u00a0And failing to recognize the true nature of that war lowered Americans’ resistance to politicians commencing new wars that promised to vanquish evil once and for all.<\/p>\n

For more discussion of my two cents on the Civil War, check the memoir essays in Public Policy Hooligan<\/a>.<\/p>\n

On Twitter @jimbovard<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On this day in 1876, Gen. George S. Custer led his 7th Cavalry regiment to their demise in Montana.\u00a0 The Battle of Little Big Horn was one of the biggest defeats suffered by the U.S. Army in the war against the Indians.\u00a0\u00a0 It is only in recent years that proper attention has been paid to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-23734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23734","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/45"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23734"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23734\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23738,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23734\/revisions\/23738"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23734"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=23734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}