Antifa Up the Ante: Statues of Indian Fighters Targeted

In a sign that antifa anarcho-Marxists are ramping up the purge of historic monuments, they are now adding Indian fighters to their hit list. On Friday morning, the statue of Colonel William Crawford outside Crawford County Courthouse in Ohio was found decapitated.

Col. Crawford fought alongside General George Washington in various encounters against the British in the American Revolution. But, problematically in the eyes of leftists, he was also a veteran of British military campaigns with Native Americans in the French and Indian War, Pontiac’s Rebellion and Lord Dunmore’s War.

In 1782, Col. Crawford marched an army toward the Ohio River, where Gen. Washington charged him with attacking local Indians, who had sided with the British in the Revolutionary War.

The expedition ended in slow, harrowing death for Col. Crawford. On June 6, his supply chain disintegrated and Wyandot Indians surrounded Col. Crawford and his men. The Indians of the Ohio region were enraged by the recent slaughter of pacifist Christian Indians at the Moravian Mission in Gnadenhutten, Penn. Unfortunately for Col. Crawford, some of the perpetrators of the Gnadenhutten Massacre were among the men in his ranks.

Patriots had shot from behind women and children of the Gnadenhutten Mission as they knelt in prayer on March 8, 1782. The Wyandots, under Chief Konieschguanokee (Captain Pipe), took their revenge by torturing the members of Col. Crawford’s party. He and his son-in-law, William Harrison, were scalped and burned at the stake. Col. Crawford finally died after two hours of torment. At least 250 members of his party were killed in the disastrous encounter.

Col. Crawford’s horrendous death ensured that he would be remembered as a martyr. The site of his execution is included on the National Register of Historic Places and a monument has been erected there in his memory. Counties in Ohio and Pennsylvania also bear his name.

The Question of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman and Gen. Philip Sheridan

American history is filled with Indian fighters, land colonizers and settlers for which many counties in the Midwest and West are named. Monuments and statues are everywhere. One hardly knows where to begin, but General William Tecumseh Sherman — arguably a very nasty individual — ranks high, much more so than Crawford. He served as one of the Union’s most successful soldiers in the Civil War, during which he destroyed large swaths of southern property. At the burning of Atlanta, Union soldiers that did it unwillingly at the behest of Gen. Sherman described him as sullen and brutish.

Regarding southerners and Confederates, Gen. Sherman in a June 21, 1864, letter to President Lincoln’s Secretary of War Edwin Staton wrote, “There is a class of people, men, women and children, who must be killed or banished before you can hope for peace and order.”

Sec. Stanton replied, “Your letter of the 21st of June has just reached me and meets my approval.”

Dr. Thomas J. DiLorenzo, an economics professor at Loyola College in Baltimore and historian and writer, tells us that Gen. Sherman once wrote to his wife that his purpose was the “extermination not of soldiers alone … but of the people” of the South. Gen. Sherman often ordered his soldiers, many of whom were street criminals from northern as well as European cities, to shoot civilians at random. He ordered his men to burn entire towns in Tennessee and Mississippi and, of course, Georgia. And the thousands of letters and diaries that survived the war attest to the rape of both black and white women by Gen. Sherman’s men.

As Commanding General of the Army from 1869 until 1883, he was responsible for the U.S. Army’s engagement in the Indian Wars over the next 14 years. Gen. Sherman advocated total war against hostile Indians to force them onto their reservations. In the Winter Campaign of 1868–69, Gen. Sherman and General Philip Sheridan used hard-war tactics similar to those they had employed in the Civil War.

Gen. Sherman was successful in pressuring (aka negotiating) Indian treaties, such as the removal of Navajos from the Bosque Redondo.

In 1866, Gen. Sherman in a letter to General Ulysses S. Grant wrote, “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children … during an assault, the soldiers cannot pause to distinguish between male and female, or even discriminate as to age.”

In 1867, he wrote to Gen. Grant that “we are not going to let a few thieving, ragged Indians check and stop the progress of [the railroads].”

He said, “The more Indians we can kill … the less will have to be killed the next war, for the more I see of these Indians, the more convinced I am that they all have to be killed or be maintained as a species of paupers.”

Gen. Sherman’s war-criminal associate Gen. Sheridan once uttered, “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.”

In arguments about who is “bad” and “racist,” The New Nationalist finds singling out Robert E Lee, who by all accounts was honorable and humane as far as generals go, as particularly unjust. And taking down Confederate soldier war memorials put up by southern women for their kin is especially loathsome. This fully illustrated the fallacy of the winners writing history.

Generals Sherman and Sheridan are far more deserving for monument hostage taking and removal. We suggest antifa useful idiots do something useful for a change and head for Central Park in New York City. While they are at it, disrupt the nearby neighborhoods where the 0.001% reside.

Major monuments to Gen. Sherman include the gilded bronze Sherman Memorial (1902) by Augustus Saint-Gaudens at the main entrance to Central Park in New York City, and the Sherman Monument (1903) by Carl Rohl-Smith near President’s Park in Washington, D.C. The Sherman Monument (1900) in Muskegon, Mich., features a bronze statue by John Massey Rhind, and the Sherman Monument (1903) in Arlington National Cemetery features a smaller version of Saint-Gaudens’s equestrian statue. Copies of Saint-Gaudens’s “Bust of William Tecumseh Sherman” are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and elsewhere.

Gen. Sheridan’s main statue is at Sheridan Circle in Washington, D.C.