Terrible Swift Sword (79 page)

Historian James McPherson observed that during the war's early years, Sheridan, Grant, and Major General William Sherman had all served in Missouri, a hotbed of retributive partisan warfare. Because of their exposure to this kind of no-holds-barred fighting, he suggested, they had fewer inhibitions against enacting harsh measures in Virginia and Georgia. See James M. McPherson, “From Limited War to Total War in America,” in
On the Road to Total War: The American Civil War and the German Wars of Unification, 1861–1871
, ed. Stig Förster and Jörg Nagler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 302.

In 1890, Early admitted in a letter to Richard Bache Irwin, author of
History of the Nineteenth Army Corps
, that he had written the message and sent it under an older code that the Rebels knew the Yankees had broken, certain that Union Signal Corps personnel were watching. His object was to discourage Sheridan from sending troops to Petersburg. See Richard Bache Irwin,
History of the Nineteenth Corps
(New York and London: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1892), 407.

Western historian Paul Hutton writes that between 1867 and 1884, under Sheridan's direct authority, army troops fought 619 battles against the Indians and lost 565 dead and 691 wounded—the unusually high killed-to-wounded ratio a result of the annihilation of Custer's command. See Paul A. Hutton,
Phil Sheridan and His Army
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), 345, 433n.

In
The Buffalo Hunters: The Story of the Hide Men
, American historian Mari Sandoz writes that a line of soldiers, Indians, and civilians turned the buffalos back whenever they began to cross the border, “and it was there, some said, shut in by this line of prairie fire and guns, that the greatest slaughter of the northern herd took place.” See Mari Sandoz,
The Buffalo Hunters: The Story of the Hide Men
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978), 340.