Mark Stoneman

Independent Historian / Freelance Editor and Translator

Home » Blog » Why Study Atrocities?

I study European history, so why did I post about Sand Creek earlier today? And why excerpt seemingly gratuitous violence? I have no expertise in U.S. history, but I am interested in the history of violence per se, which can reveal a lot about peoples and cultures at a given point in history. Further, the U.S. Civil War has some important structural similarities to the Franco-Prussian War, and perhaps to other European wars in the mid nineteenth century.1 Given the causal relationship between the U.S. Civil War and the expansion of violence against Native Americans out west, there might be a case, for example, to include France’s nineteenth-century colonial conflicts in such a comparison. However, my main interest relates to cultural taboos—or lack thereof—about specific kinds of violence against specific categories of people, assuming those people have not been perceived to violate any important taboos themselves.

In this particular case, the willingness to kill women and children indiscriminately underlines how little value these people’s lives had in the eyes of their butchers. Further, it suggests how utterly alien these Indians were in the eyes of their attackers, how far outside the attackers’ own ethnos or kin-culture community.2 Indeed, in Michael Fellman’s account of the guerrilla conflict in Missouri during the Civil War, white fighting men broke more cultural taboos in their fight against Indians than they did when committing violence against free and enslaved black people.3

At the same time, Congressional testimony points to other attitudes towards the slaughtered Native Americans. We hear of white men with native partners and sons, for instance, although the latter were called “half breed.” The paternalistic congressmen investigating the atrocity were also humane, in a certain sense, but a question about how long the witness-cum-translator had lived with the Indians suggests how different that congressman perceived him to be. At the same time, commentators who sided with the Colorado troops responsible for the massacre portrayed their opponents as brave. Of course, it was safer to make the women and children seem like incidental casualties of a battle, but the self-respect of fighting men also requires a worthy opponent. Without one, the act of killing brings no honor and—we are learning in recent conflicts—can leave deep scars in the soldier who pulls the trigger.4

Given the tiny source base behind this post, it only represents an approach to such violence, nothing more, especially since such an approach must also consider the specific historical context of this awful American story.


  1. See Stig Förster and Jörg Nagler, eds., On the Road to Total War: The American Civil War and the German Wars of Unification, 1861–1871 (Washington, DC: Cambridge Universtiy Press, 1997). â†©
  2. On kin-culture communities, see Azar Gat with Alexsander Yakobson, Nations: The Long and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). â†©
  3. Michael Fellman, Inside War: The Guerilla Conflict in Missouri during the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). â†©
  4. See Sharon E. French, “The Code of the Warrior,” The Harmon Memorial Lectures in Military History 47 (United States Airforce Academy: Colorado, 2004). French has published a book by the same title. â†©