Sheridan at the Reins

Officer Opinions during Reconstruction and the Indian Wars

During this period Sheridan was moved from his position in the South during Reconstruction to command the Department of the Missouri. More details on his career and actions can be seen on the Sheridan page and in the Timeline. Sheridan was brought into the West and almost immediately launched a campaign on the plains with his cavalry during the Winter of 1868-1869. Sheridan received a promotion in 1869 and was given command of virtually the entire American West. This was also the period of Grant's Peace Policy, Sherman's attempts to place Native Americans on reservations, and numerous campaigns against the Native Americans. As such the political and military climate of the United States was different than the years of the American Civil War. This section was intentionally separated from the previous section because as the nation emerges from Civil War, it was assumed that the officer's articles in the Army & Navy Journal would change. This assumption would be proven by the articles being examined. As can be seen in the search results graph, Figure 12: Army Navy Jouranl results for "Cavalry" and "Sheridan" 1863-1876, there were more articles written in this period about the Cavalry and Sheridan collectively than in the years before 1866 or after 1870. From the eighty three total articles from this period, fifteen are used for text analysis. During this time there was one hundred publications of the ANJ. A list of all of these articles can be seen on the Sources page with the rest of the articles examined in this section of the project.

If any of the Voyant Tools below do not load, please click on the tool title to see an image 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.

The Cirrus tool is a world cloud that "positions the words such that the terms that occur the most frequently are positioned centrally and are sized the largest. As the algorithm goes through the list and continues to attempt to draw words as close as possible to the center of the visualization it will also include small words within spaces left by larger words that do not fit together snugly. It's important to understand that the colour of words and their absolute position are not significant (if you resize the window or reload the page, words may appear in a different location)"(Voyant Guide Cirrus).

Above Figure 16 shows the Cirrus Word Frequency tool for the ANJ articles selected from 1866-1870. This tool is similar to the TermsBerry tool and displays the most frequently used words in the articles examined. Hovering your mouse over each term shows the term and how many times it is used in the fifteen documents examined in this selection of articles from the ANJ. Figure 16 shows the top twenty five terms that appear the most in these articles, but the number of terms displayed can be changed by sliding the "Terms" bar at the bottom of the tool. In these articles "Indians" and "Cavalry" were the most frequently used terms behind "general". "Indian" and "Cavalry" appear 110 and 101 times in these articles respectively. Unlike the 1863-1865 articles, these from 1866-1870 have the words "killed" and "wounded" appear more frequently. This is most likely due to the articles listing casualty numbers for both the Army and the Indians. Interestingly "sheridan" is one ofthe more frequently used terms in these articles, appearing 53 times. It is important to recognize that just from this broad examination it is clear that Sheridan is being mentioned far more often in this period than during the Civil War. This most likely because he had established a name for himself in the Civil War and was propelled into an influential Army position in the American West. It would be understandable that he would be discussed more often now that he had acquired authority and fame. From this surface level examination of these sources, they appear to have multiple similarities to those of the pervious years in what words are most frequently used, and some interesting differences.

This is the trends tool from Voyant. "Trends is a visualization that represents the frequencies of terms across documents in a corpus or across segments in a document, depending on the mode. Each series in the graph is coloured according to the word it represents, at the top of the graph a legend displays which words are associated with which colours. You can click on words in the legend to toggle their visibility. Hovering over any point in the graph causes a callout box to appear with information about the point, including the word, the frequency (raw or relative depending on mode), the document or document segment" (Voyant Guide Trends).

In Figure 17 the terms selected are listed at the top, their frequency on the x-axis and the document they appear in on the y-axis. The five terms selected are "General", "Indians", "Cavalry", "Sheridan", and "Horse". The terms "General", "Indians", and "Cavalry" are selected as they are most frequently used terms as show in Figure 16. "Sheridan" and "Horse" are included in this tool to visualize how the conversations on these topics were changing. In the articles examined from 1866-1870 the term Cavalry is seen used more often in the works discussing cavalry instructions, tactics, and the need for a cavalry school. There is also an relatively large use of the term in Sheridan's report of 1868. Compared to the other terms, "Indians" is used frequently throughout these documents but not largerly in any individual one (similar results can be see with the singular "Indian"). "General" is used frequently throughout, this term is most likely used so frequently because it was referring to the rank of various officers. One interesting thing displayed in this tool is that the term "cavalry" doesn’t appear in three of these documents. It is interesting but not surprising that the cavalry do not appear in an article on Sheridan's removal from the South during reconstruction and the article on Sherman's reservation policy. However it is surprising that Sheridan did not mention the cavalry in his report of 1869 following his promotion to Lt. General. Considering the fact that following his promotion Sheridan ordered numerous cavalry campaigns against the Indians in his department, one would expect him to mention them in some way in his report as he took command of these forces. Officers frequently reported the state of their command, the forces they had at their disposal, and what they planned for the future when taking a new command and Sheridan did not mention the "cavalry" at all in this report. Through this Trends tool the distribution of these popular terms can be seen but the full context of these words is still missing.

Figure 18 shows the Context tool for the ANJ articles from 1866 to 1870 using the terms "cavalry" and "indians". This tool was also used in the previous analysis of the ANJ from 1863-1865 and a explanation of the tool is on the Army page. This tool lists every instance that the term appears in each document as well as five 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 be changed. In this case the term selected is "cavalry" but this one example also includes the term "Indians" as well. The Context tools is a very effective visual for displaying the full context to which these terms were used and being discussed. The term "cavalry" is interesting in context because of the variety of results there are. Since there are articles whose topics range from the history of the 1st Cavalry, to cavalry tactics, to the Indians ability as fighters, there is a wide range of uses for the term "cavalry" in the context of these articles. With the exception of the article on their history, most of these articles reference the cavalry as they are being used in the field and the various officers commanding them. There are a minority of articles that discuss improvements to the cavalry that should be made to the cavalry, like a dedicated training school for officers on how to use the cavalry in the field or the article with instructions for new recruits. In this way, it can be seen that the discussion of the cavalry has begun to change from the Civil War period. The discussion has shifted to focus on how they are being used in the West in the various Wars with the Native Americans and defending the American Frontier rather than focusing on the changes that needed to be made to improve the cavalry. With this shift in focus to the cavalry in the West, it is also understandable that the Indians would inhabit prominent role in these articles as the responsibility of the cavalry in the West became more associated with combating hostile Native American threats. As such the term "Indians" is included in this visual and can be seen when scrolling through the tool. This is interesting because there are a mixture of results that support and refute the arguments of Sherry Smith in The View From Officers Row. There are times when these officers discuss the Native Americans in a negative tone; referencing how they needed to punish them for crimes they had committed, or how they can’t be trusted, or how they need to be suppressed in the West. There are also instances where they are defended or sympathies are expressed toward them like Sherry Smith describes in her analysis. One article in particular defends the Native Americans and the author expresses that they feel poorly for the Native Americans for the way they have been treated and the harsh and aggressive action of Sheridan. There are also instances where the discussion of Native Americnas is neutral and the term is simply used in reference to finding them or locating them on the plains. By putting both of these terms into context, this tool shows how the discussion of the cavalry has shifted in this period and that the Indians are becoming more prominent in not only articles in general but the discussion of the cavalry as well.

What the officers thought about the cavalry, Sheridan, and the Indians during this period

While these samples do not encompass all of the opinions at this time or all of the articles in the ANJ, from this distant reading of them conclusions can be drawn and new questions asked on officer's opinions of Sheridan, the cavalry, and the Indians at this time. It is clear that Sheridan has become more relevant in the conversation and has begun to appear more frequently in this period. Similarly the cavalry continue to be discussed in these articles frequently however the conversation has shifted from changes to be made to these units to examinations of how they are being used in the field and who is leading them. Since the cavalry are becoming more prominent in the discussion among officers of the American West it is also logical to conclude that they are taking a larger part in military operations in the West. This further shows the changes in the military taking place following the Civil War in comparison to military views prior to the Civil War. A change in the officer's discussion of the Native Americans can also be seen during this time. They have become more prominent in articles published during this time than they had in the past and there is a variety of views being shown about them. Some officers defend them while others support aggressive action against them. In the next section that examines 1871-1876 there were more armed conflicts and campaigns against the Native Americans than there were between 1866 and 1870 and it will be interesting to see if this opinion on the Native Americans changes in correspondence with these events.