Army Navy Journal 1863-1865
“The Army is the Indian's best friend.”- George Custer
The quote above from George Custer is controversial and reflective of the problems the United States Army and the cavalry faced in the American West. The United States Army has proven to be historically both a friend and enemy of the native tribes on the plains. Modern interpretations tend to focus on the negative relationship between these groups, however was Custer's statement reflective of the Army's popular opinion at the time? Did the Army view themselves as a friend to the Native Americans? How did they view their violent attacks on the Native Americans? Were they justified or were the Native Americans victims of Army violence? Furthermore how did the officers view the cavalry and their use on the plains? The remainder of this section intends to further examine these questions by analyzing primary sources from the period. Articles, memoirs, and books written by officers in the U.S. Army, veterans, or officers in the field provide a valuable insight into the opinions of the Army at this time. Below is the Voyant Document Summary tool for the sources being examined in this section on the U.S. Army. This lists the the documents used in the following examination of Army Navy Journal articles as well as Custer's My Life on the Plains and the Memoirs of Regis de Trobraind. This tool lists the documents, the number of words in each and other detailed information for comparison. Here you can see just how large the articles being examined are. Some of the Journal articles are as small as three hundred words and are just brief updates on what is going on like the 1876 article on General Crook's Indian Expedition. On the other hand many articles average around 1,200 words. On the larger side of the scale, Custer's book is almost 163,000 words and de Trobraind's is almost 57,000 words. These two sources are larger than all the articles put together and this will be relevant later on as their larger size will skew the comparative results of these sources.
Army Navy discussion of the Cavalry and Sheridan during the end of the Civil War
The purpose of this section is to conduct an analysis of primary sources written by the officers in the field. Other historians of Western history have conducted similar examinations from which this work draws from. Sherry Smith’s A View From Officer's Row is one of these works. Smith's primary argument is that the common stereotypes about the Indians are not true. She supports this claim through the evidence found in letters, dairies, and journals of officers and their wives who lived in the West and interacted with these Indians. Through her analysis of these primary sources, Smith proves that the popularized view of the Indians as savages was not reflective of what the officers and their wives actually thought. While most settlers came West with fear of the Indians, Smith shows how those fears were diminished upon actual interaction with the Indians. Seeing that the military was the largest organization in substantial contact with the Indians, they became crucial as observers of Indians and creating political interactions between them and the US government. By building on the works of Sherry Smith and other historians, this section examines written works from these officers to further understand the opinions of these men. This examination uses selected articles from the Army & Navy Journal (ANJ) written between 1863 and 1876 as well as a section from the memoirs of Colonel Régis de Trobraind and George Custer's My Life on the Plains . The first three parts of this analysis focus on the articles from the ANJ which have been grouped by year of publication. The ANJ is a journal that was established in 1863 and consisted of articles written by veterans and officers of the U.S. Army and Navy and service members and veterans were their primary audience. This was a lengthy journal that was published monthly and has been digitized by Ebscohost on the "Database: American Antiquarian Society (AAS) Historical Periodicals Collection Series 4 and 5 publications." Being a publication written by and for service members, this journal provides an interesting insight into the military discussion and opinions on the cavalry during this time period.
If any of the visuals below do not load, please click on the title of the visual to see an image or PDF file of the results, or go to the Sources page where all the visuals for this project are listed on the left hand side of your screen. Please take note that images of the Voyant tools are not interactive like the imbedded web tools.
Figure 12 above shows the raw data search results for articles in the ANJ that contain the words "Sheridan" and "Cavalry" between 1863 and 1876. In order to understand the articles selected and being examined in this portion of the project, it is important to see how many were available to choose from. As discussed in previous sections, Sheridan established himself as the most prominent cavalry officer by the end of the American Civil War and by the end of the Indian Wars was considered the United States most prominent Indian fighter. As such searching for his name in these articles is relevant because he is directly related to the discussion of the Cavalry and the Indians in the West. As the results in Figure 12 show, there were spikes in cavalry publications in the ANJ at the end of the Civil War and in 1871 as well. Comparatively Sheridan had noticably fewer publications containing his name in the ANJ at this time. Sheridan publications spiked in 1867 after the war and were not as frequent as the "Cavalry" publications. Of those available through these searchs, the articles that focus on the Cavalry or Sheridan in particular were selected for this analysis. In order to truly get a sense of officer's opinions on these topics it is important to examine documents that actually discuss these opinions rather than briefly mentioning Sheridan as an officer or the cavalry units. This first section that examines the ANJ focus on the publications in the journal during the American Civil War from August 1863 to December 1865. These articles have been separated in particular because of the fact that events of this time, the Civil War in particular, influenced officer's perspective and in turn what they wrote about. The officers will have different perspectives of what’s happening around them while they are at war then they would have in the years following the war which is why this period is being examined separately from the Indian Wars. The Civil War was a period of change for the cavalry and articles published during this period reflected this. Multiple articles were found discussing the changes that were being made to the Union Cavalry or changes that should be made to these forces. Other articles examined in this section discuss the actions of the cavalry or Sheridan during the war, how they were trained, supplied, and perceived by military officers. In total ten articles were selected from 1863 to 1865 to examine out of the fifty six articles that contained "Cavalry" or "Sheridan" in the twenty nine journals published during this period.
Voyant describes the TermsBerry tool as: "The highest frequency terms (or most distinct terms if you change the options) appear in the middle and in larger bubbles, with terms spiralling outwards. The darkness of the terms represents the proportion of the documents where the term appears (darker means that it appears in more documents; there will be no differentiation if there's only one document in the corpus). When you hover over a term it becomes the keyword and then each of the other bubbles will indicate the collocate frequency for that term (within the specified context, by default two words the left and two words to the right). The darker the colour, the higher the collocate frequency. The hovering term also has a tooltip that appears and that provides the term frequency as well as the number of documents in which that term appears" (Voyant Guide TermsBerry).
Figure 13 above is the TermsBerry tool created from Voyant using the ten articles from the ANJ published between 1863 to 1865. This TermsBerry shows twenty six terms from the documents, twenty five of which are the most frequently used words in addition to "Sheridan" which was added to this for sake of comparision. This tool shows how often each term was mentioned in these documents and in how many of the documents the term appeared in. Hovering your mouse over the term shows this information for each of them. The number of terms displayed can be changed by sliding the "Terms" bar at the bottom of the visual. This tool provides a distant examination of these articles to see what terms and possible themes were most used in these works. Sheridan was only mentioned eleven times in only three different documents examined in this selection. This shows how litte he was discussed at this time during the Civil War, which mirrors the results in Figure 12 above. In comparison, the term Cavalry appeared 214 times total and in all ten documents selected. Both "Horses" and "Service" were mentioned rather frequently as well. The term "Service" appears more frequently in many of these articles because the cavalry forces were often referred to as the "Cavalry Service" throughout these articles. Also numerous articles discuss horses and how to care or provided for them in detailed which is why the term "Horses" appears more frequently. It is important to note that there are other military terms in this TermsBerry like "Enemy(s)" and "Attack" however they appear less frequently. Upon further examination this is explained by the fact that the articles examined more frequently referenced proposed changes to the cavalry forces rather than discussions of their actions on the battlefield during the war. This tool provides a broad understanding of what terms were being used more often in these documents but does not fully contextualize these results.
"Collocates Graph represents keywords and terms that occur in close proximity as a force directed network graph. This represents a network graph where keywords in green are shown linked to collocates in maroon. You can hover over a term to see its frequency (for keywords it's the corpus frequency, for collocates it's the frequeny in the context of the linked keywords). You can drag and drop terms to move them. You can drag terms off the canvas to remove them" (Voyant Guide Collocates Graph).
The major terms (those that appear in blue) selected for this examination were "Cavalry", "Enemy", "General", "Sheridan", and "Horses". "Cavalry", "General", and "Enemy" are three of the more frequently used terms in this set of articles and this tool shows what terms they were most associated with. The other two terms, "Sheridan" and "Horses", were added to the visual for further comparison. When looking at this Collocates Graph it’s important to note that the cavalry and horses often link to terms not related to combat. Horses links heavily to "watered" and "groomed" which reflects how the articles at the time discussed the care and management for horses in the cavalry service and its importance to maintaining effective cavalry. In comparison, Sheridan and General most often link to other terms relating to ranks and officer names like "Buford" and "major". This implys that the officers are being referenced for what units they command not for their actions in the field. The term "Enemy" is in its own category comparatively and links to terms related to combat like "attack" and "driven". This tool is interesting to see because it shows how the more frequently used terms are often not related to each other in context, like enemy not linking to horses or cavalry.
"The Contexts (or Keywords in Context) tool shows each occurrence of a keyword with a bit of surrounding text (the context)." It can be useful for studying more closely how terms are used in different contexts (Voyant Guide Contexts). This tool lists how many times the term appears in each document as well as a set number of words to the left and right of the selected term. The term and the number of words to the left or right of the term can both be changed.
In Figure 15 the term selected is "cavalry" and five words to the left and right are displayed. As previously stated this term appears in every document for a total of two hundred and fourteen times. Scrolling through the tool allows you to see just what phrases were used pertaining to the cavalry. This tool is valuable because it shows how officers at this time discussed problems with the cavalry. Many of the contexts for cavalry show discussion of the problems with them and how to change things. There are documents that discuss their involvement in the field but they are the minority. There are also occasions where the Confederate cavalry are mentioned and their actions discussed, but again this is a minority in the overall analysis. This tool contextualizes the argument and proves that there was an ongoing discussion between 1863 and 1865 on the cavalry. Officers were discussing changes that should be made in the cavalry or the problems they currently were facing. It is clear that the discussion of the cavalry changed over time as one scrolls through this tool and examines the context year to year. By 1865 more articles began to focus on the actions of the cavalry in the field and their successes rather than their problems.
Officers take on the cavalry during the Civil War
Each of the texdt analysis tools above illustrate the discussion among officers in the ANJ about the cavalry during this time in increasing detail. At first it is clear that the cavalry are mentioned often throughout this document. Upon further examination of the context in which cavalry are discussed shows that these articles often discussed changes to be made in the cavalry. Officers were suggesting new ways to care for their horses, new ways to use the cavalry, and even requesting more cavalry forces be added to the army. The actions of Sheridan and the Cavalry in the field are discussed and credited in these articles but the majority of them call for improvements to be made. This is important because it further highlights the changes that were seen in the Army section were the Army strategy changed from minimal cavalry units prior to the Civil War to using them effectively during it. This evidence proves that these were not sudden changes that took place after the war but was a conversation that was taking place throughout the war from 1863 to 1865. As the Civil War came to a close the topics covered in the ANJ continued to shift as well.