War & Peace Quote by Nelson A. Miles

A career soldier’s calmest sentences can carry the loudest alarms. Nelson A. Miles frames early US settlement as a brief idyll of “peace and goodwill,” then pivots to “violent and relentless warfare” with the cold inevitability of a weather report. The intent isn’t to romanticize the first chapter so much as to establish a moral contrast: if peace was possible, then the later bloodshed wasn’t fated by “ancient hatreds” or frontier mythology. It was chosen, engineered, and sustained.

The phrasing is doing political work. “For a time” shrinks coexistence into a provisional experiment, while “only to be followed” performs a sleight of hand, smoothing human decisions into passive sequence. No agents appear. Who violated treaties, pursued land grabs, or imposed removal policies? The line’s grammar quietly dodges culpability even as its adjectives - “violent and relentless” - admit the scale and persistence of the conflict. It’s the language of someone who understands how institutions talk when they want history to sound inevitable.

Context matters: Miles rose to prominence in the post-Civil War Army and became a central figure in the Indian Wars and later a public commentator on them. That background lends the quote its tension. It reads like a controlled acknowledgment from inside the machinery: a recognition that the national story often begins with mutual accommodation and ends with organized force. Coming from Miles, it also functions as a warning about what states do once expansion becomes policy: they don’t just fight; they grind.