[William Tecumseh] Sherman's family was among the first generation of settlers who rushed to the Ohio Valley region after the total war that drove the people of the Shawnee Nation out of their homes, towns, and farms. Sherman's father gave his son the trophy name Tecumseh after the Shawnee leader who was killed by the US Army. The general had been a successful lawyer and banker in San Francisco and New York before he turned to a military career. During the Civil War, most famously in the siege of Atlanta, he made his mark as a proponent and practitioner of total war, scorched-earth campaigns against civilians, particularly targeting their food supplies. This had long been the colonial and US American way of war against the Indigenous peoples east of the Mississippi. Sherman sent an army commission to England to study English colonial campaigns worldwide, looking to employ successful English tactics for the US wars against Indigenous peoples. In Washington, Sherman had to contend with the upper echelons of the military that were under the sway of Carl von Clausewitz's book On War, which dealt with conflict between European nation-states with standing armies. This dichotomy of training the US military for standard European warfare but also training it in colonial counterinsurgency methods continues in the twenty-first century. Although a man of war, Sherman, like most in the US ruling class, was an entrepreneur at heart, and his mandate as head of the army and his passion were to protect the Anglo conquest of the West. Sherman regarded railroads a top priority. In a letter to Grant in 1867 he wrote, "We are not going to let a few thieving, ragged Indians stop the progress of [the railroads]."

— An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (ReVisioning American History) by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz (Page 144)