Terrible Swift Sword (51 page)

The Society of Friends and former abolitionists had lobbied Grant to adopt the policy before his inauguration, amid the outrage over George Custer's attack on Black Kettle's Washita River camp. Grant asked the Quakers to recommend men
of their faith as Indian agents and superintendents, and they soon occupied nine positions in Nebraska, Kansas, and the Indian Territory. The army assigned officers to the Indian Bureau to fill the rest.

Westerners denounced the Peace Policy. “If more men are to be scalped and their hearts boiled, we hope to God that it may be some of our Quaker Indian Agents, and not our frontiersmen who want and are trying to do something for the improvement of the country,” asserted the
Leavenworth Bulletin
. The
Daily Colorado Herald
proposed transferring the Indian Bureau to the War Department. “Western people are the best judges in the matter,” the
Herald
concluded.
⁶

 

AT THE ACME OF this raging debate, Sheridan's troops attacked another Indian village in wintertime. Along Montana's Marias River in northern Montana, a band of Piegan Blackfeet Indians led by Mountain Chief had raided settlements and murdered settlers along the Canadian border. “Tell Baker to strike them hard,” Sheridan wrote from Chicago. On January 23, 1870, Major Eugene Baker, brevetted for gallantry at Winchester in 1864, surrounded a Piegan village with detachments from the 2nd Cavalry and the Thirteenth Infantry.

Tragically, it was the wrong village. Mountain Chief's band did not live there. This village was riddled with smallpox, with six people a day dying on average. When a scout tried to warn Baker about the mistake, Baker had him arrested. The village chief, Heavy Runner, ran toward the soldiers waving a safe conduct pass from the Indian Bureau—and was shot dead.

The soldiers commenced firing freely into the village. When they stopped an hour later, 173 Piegans, including 53 women and children, lay dead in the crimson-spattered snow. Just one soldier was killed. The troopers burned the village and marched away with 140 prisoners and three hundred horses.

Mountain Chief, whose guilty band's camp lay ten miles away, quietly escaped to Canada. General Philippe Regis de Trobriand, the Montana district commander, pronounced the operation “a complete success.”
⁷

Because Trobriand's initial report did not state that the troopers had wiped out the wrong village, Sheridan's account compounded the horrific mistake: “After having been reportedly warned, they have at last received a carefully prepared and well-merited blow. . . . . [I] cannot commend too highly” the troops who carried out the mission in bitter cold.
⁸

From Washington, Sherman warned Sheridan to brace himself for a storm. It burst upon him in the weeks that followed. Vincent Colyer, secretary to the Board of Indian Commissioners, claimed that just 15 of the 173 dead were warriors, while the rest were noncombatants, including fifty children under age twelve, many killed “in their parents' arms.”

Sheridan bitterly complained to Sherman that the Indian Ring, as represented by Colyer, was deliberately “deceiving the kind-hearted public . . . . to get possession of Indian affairs so that the treasury can be more successfully plundered.”
⁹

The army closed ranks around Baker and Sheridan. “You may assure Col. Baker that no amount of Clamor has shaken our Confidence in him and his officers,” Sherman wrote to Sheridan.
¹⁰

Yet the barrage of criticism continued. The
New York Semi-Weekly Tribune
called the attack “a national disgrace.” An editorial in the humanitarian journal
Bond of Peace
observed that “all the dispatches of Sheridan, Sherman and Baker on the late murderous and diabolical raid upon the Small Pox Camp of Pigeon [
sic
] Indians . . . . in no measure excuse the disgraceful and wicked act.” Wendell Phillips, the Boston abolitionist who advocated Indian citizenship, wrote, “I know only the names of three savages upon the plains—Colonel Baker, General Custer, and at the head of all, General Sheridan.”
¹¹

The wholesale condemnations stung Sheridan more than had the outcry after Washita because Baker had clearly destroyed the wrong village; the humanitarians, the clergy, and the Eastern press were right. Worse, many of the people who had idolized him during the Civil War had now turned against him.

Never one to gracefully accept blame, however, Sheridan also believed that the Indians bore a collective responsibility when their fellow tribesmen raided and killed white settlers. Moreover, as he, Sherman, and Grant had understood during the Civil War, there would always be collateral damage.

Sheridan raised both of these charged moral issues in his and Baker's defense in a letter to Sherman. Women and children had died, he wrote, through the fault of the Indian raiders “whose crimes necessitated the attack.” Furthermore, “during the war did any one hesitate to attack a village or town occupied by the enemy because women or children were within its limits? Did we cease to throw shells into Vicksburg or Atlanta because women and children were there?”

In the shared opinion of Sheridan, Sherman, and Grant, the deaths of Confederate noncombatants and the destruction of their crops and livestock were consequences of their support for the Rebel cause. War's Manichean imperatives legitimized barbarity.

While they were savaged in the East, Baker and Sheridan were lionized in the West for slaughtering the Piegan villagers. A petition signed by several hundred Wyoming Territory residents and sent to Sheridan expressed approval for his Indian policy and the “so-called ‘massacre' of the Piegans by Colonel Baker.” A resolution by Georgetown, Colorado, citizens asserted, “The war to the knife is the only way of avenging the many depredations that are daily being committed on the border.”
¹²

Caught between the diametrically opposed opinions of Easterners who advocated restraint and Westerners espousing unlimited aggression was the army, wrote Sheridan. “If we allow the defenseless people on the frontier to be scalped and ravished, we are burnt in effigy and execrated as soulless monsters, insensible to the sufferings of humanity. If the Indian is punished to give security to these people, we are the same soulless monsters from the other side.”
¹³

Fuel was added when an offhand remark made by Sheridan in January 1869 at Fort Cobb suddenly appeared in newspapers across the country. During a meeting with Southern Plains Indian chiefs, one of them introduced himself to Sheridan as “Me Toch-a-way. Me good Indian,” to which Sheridan reportedly retorted, “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.” Transmogrified into “The only good Indian is a dead Indian,” Sheridan's quip has resonated for more than a century.
¹⁴

Besides tainting Sheridan and ruining Baker's reputation, the “Baker Massacre” doomed a proposal before Congress to transfer the Indian Bureau from the Interior Department to the War Department. The consensus was that the army could not be trusted to manage the tribes humanely.

 

IN MAY I870, SHERIDAN was on his first inspection tour of the chain of Western forts for which he was now responsible when, upon reaching Helena, Montana, he learned that France and Prussia were at war. “I would like to go over as a spectator,” he telegraphed Sherman. “Will you help me, and lay the matter before the President?” Permission was quickly granted.
¹⁵

On his way to Europe, Sheridan visited Grant at his home in Long Branch, New Jersey. The president was pleased that Sheridan had elected to accompany the Prussians, not the French; he, like Sheridan, believed that the Germans would win, and Grant also regarded French emperor Napoleon III as a “usurper and a charlatan.” Nor had he or Sheridan forgiven Napoleon for installing Maximilian in Mexico and creating a sanctuary for former Confederates.

In his letter of introduction for Sheridan, the president authorized his lieutenant general to visit Europe and to “return at his own pleasure.” The letter described Sheridan as “one of the most skillful, brave and deserving soldiers developed by the great struggle through which the United States Government has just passed. Attention paid him will be duly appreciated by the country he has served so faithfully and efficiently.”
¹⁶

Sheridan and his inspector general and friend, Lieutenant Colonel James Forsyth, sailed from New York on July 27 on the steamship
Scotia
, reaching Liverpool on August 6. From there, they traveled to Berlin to meet the Prussian queen. Before their audience could be arranged, however, they received a telegram informing them
of an impending major battle. They hastily departed for the front, reaching the Prussian army headquarters at Pont-a-Mousson, France, on August 17.
¹⁷

 

FRANCE HAD DECLARED WAR on Prussia in July, ostensibly over Prussia's secret attempt to make Hohenzollern prince Leopold the king of Spain and King William I's refusal to apologize to France for the action. Of course, there was much more to it than that. Napoleon III was alarmed by the rise of Prussia's Northern German Federation. Irrationally confident about the prowess of his French army, Napoleon believed that he could defeat Prussia, shore up his tottering regime, and sharply curb Prussia's expansionist dreams.
¹⁸

William I had succeeded King Frederick William IV when he was declared mentally incompetent. Pragmatic and conservative, William began restoring the Prussian army, where he had spent his career, to its onetime greatness. He named Albrecht von Roon to be minister of war and Helmuth von Moltke as army chief of staff. Together, they transformed the army into Europe's most efficient war machine.

Prime Minister Otto von Bismarck was the architect of the Northern German Federation and a genius of statecraft. No more effective expedient existed to unify the northern and the southern German kingdoms, Bismarck believed, than a war with France, Germany's ancient enemy. Utilizing Germany's efficient railroad system, Von Moltke had swiftly mobilized 800,000 troops from across Germany to march into France.
¹⁹

 

ON SEPTEMBER 17, SHERIDAN and Forsyth rode in a hay wagon to German headquarters, where Count Bismarck greeted them. His personal physician, Dr. Moritz Busch, described Sheridan as “a small, corpulent gentleman of about forty-five, with dark moustache and chin tuft, [who] spoke the purest Yankee dialect.”

The next day, Sheridan and Forsyth accompanied Bismarck's party to the front. When they were introduced to King William at the forward headquarters at Gravelotte, the king was wearing his Prussian Guards uniform.

They were just in time to witness the main German attack. Sheridan was appalled when the German cavalry charged over an open field into “a dreadful fire without the least chance of returning it. . . . . The slaughter was terrible”—especially so at a deep cut in the road, clogged with dead and wounded men and horses.
²⁰

After German infantry pushed back the French on the right, army headquarters was moved to a spot on high, exposed ground. The German artillerists were confident that their Krupp guns had knocked out the French artillery and that the party would be safe there.

Sheridan was not so certain. Surveying the battleground through a spyglass, he saw French troops moving to the right. Turning to Bismarck, Sheridan warned him
that the French guns were going to fire on them at any minute. Bismarck urged the king to leave the hill; William refused.

Just then, two hundred French cannons roared to life and shells began falling around the king's party. The Germans hastily evacuated the high ground. Von Moltke then personally led a German infantry attack that drove the French from the field. Impressed by Sheridan's perception of danger from the French guns, Bismarck later wrote, “Sheridan had seen it from the beginning. I wish I had so quick an eye.”
²¹

That evening, the king's brother, Prince Frederick Charles—nicknamed the “Red Prince” because of his fondness for the hussar uniform of that color—shared a chunk of his stale black bread with Sheridan, who had not eaten all day. Sheridan then rode into a nearby town looking for water.

He was suddenly surrounded by a squad of hostile German troops who mistook his American army uniform for that of a Frenchman. “I thought my hour had come, for they could not understand English, and I could not speak German.” Just when it seemed that Sheridan might be shot, an officer from the king's headquarters happened to ride by. Recognizing Sheridan, he ordered the soldiers to release him. After enjoying a laugh at the story, King William gave Sheridan a pass so that he could go wherever he pleased, in safety.
²²

Sheridan and Bismarck shared the upstairs of a home in Rezonville. The general and the chancellor went foraging for breakfast the next morning. Bismarck scrounged two eggs and two bottles of brandy, and Sheridan contributed four large sausages that he had purchased from a sutler's wagon. They ate and drank heartily before touring the Gravelotte battlefield.
²³

The place where the German cavalrymen were slaughtered was “sickening to an extreme,” wrote Sheridan, and the ground was covered with thousands of German helmets that had been discarded during the fight. Sheridan was eager to inspect the abandoned French works for damage by the Germans' vaunted Krupp guns. “I was astonished . . . . how little harm had been done the defenses by the German artillery,” he wrote, despite the Germans' “serene faith” in its effectiveness.

During their battlefield tour, Sheridan and Bismarck found twenty wounded Germans whom the recovery parties had missed. They gave them water and brandy and stayed with them until army surgeons arrived.