from Massachusetts who had previously directed the recruitment of black soldiers, to implement that plan. Those orders, which became the basis of the claim that the Union government had promised freed slaves "forty acres and a mule", were revoked later that year by President Johnson. Towards the end of the Civil War, some elements within the Republican Party regarded Sherman as being strongly prejudiced against black people. Sherman's views on race evolved significantly over time. He dealt in a friendly and unaffected way with the black people that he met during his career. In 1888, near the end of his life, Sherman published an essay in the North American Review defending the full civil rights of black citizens in the former Confederacy. In that essay, Sherman called upon the South to "let the negro vote, and count his vote honestly", adding that "otherwise, so sure as there is a God in Heaven, you will have another war, more cruel than the last, when the torch and dagger will take the place of the muskets of well-ordered battalions". Strategies Sherman's military legacy rests primarily on his command of logistics and on his brilliance as a strategist. The influential 20th-century British military historian and theorist B. H. Liddell Hart ranked Sherman as "the first modern general" and one of the most important strategists in the annals of war, along with Scipio Africanus, Belisarius, Napoleon Bonaparte, T. E. Lawrence, and Erwin Rommel. Liddell Hart's views on the historical significance of Sherman have since been discussed and, to varying extents, defended by subsequent military scholars such as Jay Luvaas, Victor Davis Hanson, and Brian Holden-Reid. Maneuver warfare Liddell Hart credited Sherman with mastery of maneuver warfare, also known as the "indirect approach". In maneuver warfare, a commander seeks to defeat the enemy on the battleground through shock, disruption, and surprise, while minimizing frontal attacks on well-defended positions. According to Liddell Hart, this strategy was most clearly illustrated by Sherman's series of turning movements against Johnston during the Atlanta campaign. Liddell Hart also declared that the study of Sherman's campaigns had contributed significantly to his own "theory of strategy and tactics in mechanized warfare", and claimed that this had in turn influenced Heinz Guderian's doctrine of and Rommel's use of tanks during the Second World War. Another World War II-era student of Liddell Hart's writings on Sherman was General George S. Patton, who "spent a