RICE UNIVERSITY
By
Edward Valentin Jr.
A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE
Doctor of Philosophy
APPROVED, THESIS COMMITTEE
William McDaniel (Apr 16, 2020) William C. McDaniel (Chair)
Associate Professor of History, Chair
Fay Yarbrough (Apr 16, 2020) Fay A. Yarbrough
Associate Professor of History
Nicole Waligora-Davis (Apr 17, 2020) Nicole A. Waligora-Davis Associate Professor of English
HOUSTON, TEXAS March 2020
Table of Contents
Abstract ...... iii
Acknowledgments ...... iv
Introduction “I Went Away Because I was not Treated Right”: Black Enlisted Men and Social Order in the Southwest Borderlands ...... 1
Chapter 1 Black Enlisted Men and the Rhetoric of Reputation in Trials by Courts-martial ...... 18
Chapter 2 “Without Just Cause”: Black Enlisted Men and the Rhetoric of Rights ...... 62
Chapter 3 “On the Other Side”: Black Soldiers and Border People 1866 to 1890...... 107
Chapter 4 Black Veterans in the Southwest Borderlands: Intermarriages, Community Integration, and Claims-making ...... 156 Chapter 5 “When Is an Indian War Veteran an Indian War Veteran”: Veterans of the Indian Wars and Public Memory in the Twentieth Century ...... 203
Epilogue “Are Any Survivors of that Fight Still Left” ...... 240
Appendix 1 ...... 244
Abstract
This dissertation relies on underused sources—including court-martial records and black veterans’ pension files—to examine the experiences of black soldiers in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands during the post-Civil War era. It focuses on soldiers’ cross-cultural encounters with the racially and ethnically diverse communities that surrounded the posts they garrisoned, revealing how black enlisted men viewed and attempted to define their positions within the complex and fluid social order of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. An analysis of black soldiers’ experiences enriches our understandings of race, ethnicity, gender, and settler colonialism by illuminating how these men both supported and undermined U.S. imperial projects. As agents of U.S. expansion, black troops actively transformed the West and secured the region for white settlements, but simultaneously undermined U.S. expansion by challenging the military justice system and building relationships that transcended the very boundaries they were charged with policing. This project thus not only sheds light on the experiences of black soldiers in the American West, but also enriches our understandings of the complicated processes associated with settler colonialism and claims to rights and citizenship in the post-Civil War era.
iii
Acknowledgements
One of the most important lessons I have learned in graduate school is that no one writes a dissertation alone, and throughout my five years at Rice University, an outstanding group of professors, colleagues, family, and friends have supported me. I am extremely grateful to have had W. Caleb McDaniel as my advisor. His steadfast commitment to mentoring and supporting me throughout my graduate career has been essential for my development as a historian and the advancement of this project. I also greatly benefited from having Fay Yarbrough and Nicole
Waligora-Davis as members of my dissertation committee, both of whom offered extremely valuable feedback as I worked to develop my project. While at Rice, I also had the privilege to work with and learn from Alexander Byrd, Sayuri Guthri-Shimizu, Randal Hall, Alida Metcalf,
Jared Staller, and James Sidbury; they have all been crucial in helping me hone my teaching, analytical, and writing skills.
I also wish to express gratitude to Desmond Bertrand-Pitts and Paul J. Matthews for giving me the opportunity to work at the Buffalo Soldiers National Museum. Serving as an assistant curator allowed me to gain valuable museum experience and deepened my appreciation for using my skills to engage with and help educate the general public. My museum work structured some of the fundamental questions I explore in this project and provided a welcome relief and change of pace from my doctoral work. During my time at the museum, I truly enjoyed getting to know and working alongside Mary Greene, Jacquilyn Jack-Anderson, Edward
Udell, Keith Love, Marquise Gibson, Barbara Matthews, and Steven Tatum.
The support of several grants and fellowships ensured that I was able to conduct the necessary research to complete this project. I am grateful for the support I received from the
New Mexico History Scholars Program Research Fellowship and the Texas State Library and iv
Archives Commission Research Fellowship. The Rice University History Department has also generously funded my travel to conduct research and present at several conferences. There are lots of moving pieces involved with requesting funds and completing administrative requirements for the graduate program, and I would be remiss if I failed to thank Lydia
Westbrook and Bev Konzem for patiently shepherding me through these processes throughout my time in the program.
I could not have completed this project without the consultation and assistance of numerous librarians and archivists during my research trip. In the initial stages of my project,
Jeffrey Wilhite and Molly Murphy from the Bizzell Memorial Library at the University of
Oklahoma Library assisted me in gaining access to important government documents on microfilm and microfiche that greatly aided me in narrowing my research objectives. I am deeply indebted to Danielle Ireland, Robin Penick, Lauren Souther, and Paul Harrison for answering my questions and lending me their expertise during my research trips to the National Archives branch in Washington D.C. I also appreciate Marcus Flores, Lynn Newton, and Elena Perez-
Lozano for assisting me during my visit to the New Mexico State Records Center and Archives in Santa Fe. Tonia Wood and Richard Gilbreath were extremely helpful at the Texas State
Library and Archives in Austin, Texas. Although I was unable to visit Silver City, New Mexico,
Ken Dayer and Lillian Galloway, from the Silver City Public Library, graciously sent several rolls of microfilm that allowed me to consult local newspapers for this project. They also connected me with a team of local historians who provided valuable information about black soldiers in New Mexico during the nineteenth century. I would also like to acknowledge the staff at Fondren Library for being invaluable resources during my time as a student. I had the opportunity to work closely with Rebecca Russell and Amanda Focke at the Woodson Research v
Center and learned a great deal from them about some of the archival resources available at Rice.
I would also like to thank Anna Shparberg for working with Fondren’s acquisition team to purchase copies of the Winners of the West microfilm series. Materials from this series are the main source base for the fifth chapter in this dissertation.
For the last five years, I have had the opportunity to work with, learn from, and develop relationships with gifted colleagues and friends that will last a lifetime. They have always offered useful advice and assistance, motivated me, and challenged me. Doctoral work is often isolating, exhausting, and frustrating, but I have benefited from a strong network of people who have always had my back. Thank you to Lauren Brand, Miller Wright, Maria Montalvo, D.
Andrew Johnson, Keith McCall, David Ponton III, Thomas Blake Earle, Samuel Abramson,
Christina Regelski, William Jones, Cami Jones, Sean Smith, Hannah Francis, Kelyne
Rhodehamel, Maki Kodama, Arang Ha, CarrieAnne DeLoach, Kimberly Jones, Cynthia
Martinez, Ben Gomez, Ana Goñi-Lessan, Tara Johnson, and Kathryn Kundrod for being amazing friends and colleagues. While I am excited to move on to the next stage in my life, I will certainly miss all of you.
Lastly, I would not be the person I am today without support and inspiration from a wonderful family. My parents, Edward and Odessa Valentin, have always worked hard to provide Alisa, my younger sister, and I with the means to achieve success. My parents were instrumental in developing my interests in reading, writing, and history at an early age; they purchased countless books and took us on numerous family trips to museums, parks, and other places with the goal of encouraging Alisa and I to learn more about the world around us. I would also like to thank Alisa for putting up with me enough to allow me to stay with her in the vi
Washington D.C. Metropolitan area during my research trips. Everything I do is for the honor of my family and the place I come from.
1
Introduction
“I Went Away Because I was not Treated Right”: Black Enlisted Men and Social Order in the Southwest Borderlands
In March 1873, Henry C. Turner, an African American soldier in the 9th Cavalry
Regiment, was serving a stint in confinement at Fort Duncan, Texas, a United States Army post near the U.S.-Mexico boundary for falling asleep on guard duty. The U.S. Army’s Register of
Enlistments indicates that Turner hailed from Iowa and had previously worked as a clerk in civilian life before enlisting in one of the four black regiments in the regular army.1 Then, on
March 14, 1873, Turner escaped from confinement and crossed the Rio Grande into Mexico.
Turner’s precise whereabouts remained unknown until he returned to Fort Duncan a month later and surrendered himself to the commanding officer. When officers convened a general court- martial to try Turner for desertion, the accused soldier made the prosecution’s task easy by pleading guilty to the charge. However, when officers afforded opportunity to make a statement in his defense at the end of the trial, Turner, according to the clerk, simply stated, “I went away because I was not treated right.” As punishment, the court ordered Turner to return to confinement in the post guardhouse for a year at hard labor, confiscated all his pay for that year, and required him to wear a ball and chain to prevent him from escaping again.2
Though many soldiers faced dismissal from the Army after convictions for desertion and other disciplinary infractions, officers retained Turner in the service and he completed his
1 Register of Enlistments in the United States Army, 1798-1914, 1872, 11, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington D.C. Microfilm Publication M233, Roll 40, this microfilm is digitized is available through fold3.com at https://www.fold3.com/image/310884288 (accessed December 18, 2019); Register of Enlistments in the United States Army, 1798-1914, 1877, 44, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington D.C. Microfilm Publication M233, Roll 40, https://www.fold3.com/image/310884369?rec=300428074 (accessed December 18, 2019). Cited hereafter as U.S. Army Register of Enlistments with year, roll number, page number, and hyperlink. 2 Private Henry C. Turner, Transcript of General Court-Martial Proceedings, PP3367, RG 153, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington D.C; courts-martial case files cited hereafter will list the accused soldiers’ names, and the case file number. 2 enlistment in March 1877 with a character rating of “excellent.”3 Turner reenlisted in the 9th
Cavalry almost immediately after the expiration of his first enlistment but strangely, chose to desert with another soldier from his company two months later. The monthly returns for the 9th
Cavalry indicate that Turner and his comrade deserted while their unit was on a scouting expedition in southern New Mexico, taking their horses and equipment with them.4 The exact destination or location of the fugitives remained unknown, but military records from the District of New Mexico suggest that Turner may have fled to Mexico again. Military correspondence written around the time outlines U.S. Army officers’ frequent attempts to coordinate with officials from Mexico and employ Native scouts to capture deserters they believed had crossed into Mexico.5 Such a move would have made sense for Turner since his company was already close to the U.S.-Mexico border at the time he deserted; fleeing north, deeper into the U.S. interior, would have involved a higher risk of capture. Unlike his previous effort at desertion in
Texas during his first enlistment, Turner was successful in making this escape permanent; records do not indicate that the army ever apprehended or court-martialed him.
In both instances, Turner’s actions and rhetoric raise important questions about how he understood his position as a soldier in the U.S. Army, as well as how he perceived the southwest borderlands. As outlined in the charges specified against Henry C. Turner from his experience at
Fort Duncan, Texas, desertion was a military infraction deemed “prejudicial to good order and
3 U.S. Army Register of Enlistments, 1872, 11, NARA M233, Roll 40, https://www.fold3.com/image/310884288 (accessed December 18, 2019) 4 May 1877 Monthly Return for the 9th Cavalry, Returns from Regular Army Cavalry Regiments, 1833- 1916, NARA Microfilm Publication M744, Reel 88, Records of U.S. Regular Army Mobile Units, 1821-1942, Record Group 391, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington D.C. cited hereafter with month and year of return, unit, Microfilm publication number and reel number. 5 Henry H. Wright to Post Adjutant at Fort Bayard, New Mexico, August 9, 1877, Letters Received, District of New Mexico, Records of United States Army Continental Commands, 1821-1920, Record Group 393, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington D.C., Microfilm Publication M1088, Roll 29. Cited hereafter with LR, District of New Mexico with date of later, with microfilm publication number and reel number. 3 discipline.” By absenting himself without permission, Turner was violating the terms of his enlistment contract, which required five years of military service, and denying the U.S. Army crucial manpower in their operations in the U.S. West. While the army’s justice system disciplined soldiers with the goal of enforcing the strict social order within the army, Turner’s actions and the one sentence he uttered during his subsequent trial by general court-martial demonstrate that he had his own ideas about that social order and how it should operate.
Although Turner did not elaborate on specifics, claiming that he “went away because [he] wasn’t treated right,” expressed a belief in a social order that involved the U.S. Army fulfilling certain obligations in treating soldiers “right.” More importantly, the statement conveys Turner’s assertion that the unfair treatment he experienced justified desertion.
This dissertation is a history of black soldiers that focuses on their ideas and how they understood themselves and the world around them not only as soldiers, but also as black men and citizens. From the American Revolution to the Vietnam War, military service often served as a catalyst for African Americans to secure freedom, rights, and citizenship. Yet, in many ways the scholarship associated with black military experiences in other contexts, specifically the processes associated with claiming rights and citizenship, remains richer and more sophisticated than the literature associated with black military experiences in the southwest borderlands.6
6 Sylvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); Douglas R. Egerton, Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Alan Gilbert, Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipation in the War for Independence (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2012); W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1997); Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, Citizen Sailors: Becoming American in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015); Michael A. Schoeppner, Moral Contagion: Black Atlantic Sailors, Citizenship, and Diplomacy in Antebellum America (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Lorien Foote, The Gentlemen and the Roughs: Violence, Honor, and Manhood in the Union Army (New York: New York University Press, 2010); Carole Emberton, “‘Only Murder Makes Men’: Reconsidering the Black Military Experience,” Journal of the Civil War Era 2, no. 3 (September 2012): 369–93; Andrew Lang, In the Wake of War: Military Occupation, Emancipation, and Civil War America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017); Chad L. Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era (Chapel Hill: University 4
Black troops’ military experiences in the southwest borderlands reflects continuity in this longer historical trajectory of claims-making and rights-making.
In recent years, scholars have written social and cultural histories of the post-Civil War
U.S. Army in the West that shed light on how regular army personnel made sense of the world around them, but the ideas and views of black troops are often absent from their analysis.7 In keeping with recent historical trends focusing on the postbellum U.S. Army in the West, this work devotes less attention to the campaigns, skirmishes, and other military expeditions that black soldiers embarked upon and instead focuses more on the daily duties involved in garrisoning posts that were more common aspects of enlisted soldiers’ lives in the army.8
of North Carolina Press, 2010); James E. Westheider, Fighting on Two Fronts: African Americans and the Vietnam War (New York: New York University Press, 1997). 7 In his study of troops in Arizona, Lahti focuses almost exclusively on white troops despite the fact that black troops from the 10th Cavalry and 24th Infantry regularly garrisoned posts in Arizona between 1885 and 1896. Kevin Adams does devote some attention to racial discrimination against black troops, but he incorporates little material on ideas among black soldiers themselves. Janne Lahti, Cultural Construction of Empire: The U.S. Army in Arizona and New Mexico (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2012); Kevin Adams, Class and Race in the Frontier Army: Military Life in the West, 1870–1890 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012); Janne Lahti ed., Soldiers in the Southwest Borderlands, 1848–1886 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017). Scholars have also produced excellent work that seriously considers how both black and white enlisted men’s experiences informed their ideas about the world around them in other wars; for example, see Paul Foos, A Short, Offhand, Killing Affair: Soldiers and Social Conflict during the Mexican-American War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Keith P. Wilson, Campfires of Freedom: The Camp Life of Black Soldiers during the Civil War (Kent and London: Kent University Press, 2002); Foote, The Gentlemen and the Roughs; Lang, In the Wake of War; Peter S. Carmichael, The War for the Common Soldier: How Men Thought, Fought, and Survived in Civil War Armies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018); Zachery A. Fry, A Republic in the Ranks: Loyalty and Dissent in the Army of the Potomac (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020). 8 For literature that devotes more attention to campaigns, skirmishes, and scouting expeditions see Leckie, Billington, and Schubert. Douglas McChristian, Robert Utley, and Don Rickey Jr. offer good introductions in general to campaigns, skirmishes, along with the life in garrison from the perspective of enlisted soldiers. William H. Leckie, The Buffalo Soldiers: A Narrative of the Negro Cavalry in the West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967); Arlen L. Fowler, The Black Infantry in the West, 1869-1891 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971); Monroe L. Billington, New Mexico’s Buffalo Soldiers, 1866-1900 (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 1994); Frank N. Schubert, Black Valor: Buffalo Soldiers and the Medal of Honor, 1870 - 1898 (Wilmington, Del: Scholarly Resource Books, 1997); Robert M. Utley, Frontier Regulars: The United States Army and the Indian, 1866-1891 (New York, N.Y.: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1973); Don Rickey Jr., Forty Miles a Day on Beans and Hay: The Enlisted Soldier Fighting the Indian Wars (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963); Douglas C. McChristian, Regular Army O!: Soldiering on the Western Frontier, 1865–1891 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017). 5
The rigid hierarchy and discipline that structured garrisoning and military life in general was the first new social order that black troops immediately encountered in the U.S. West. As other historians have noted, enlisted men often received cruel introductions to military discipline upon initially arriving at recruiting depots and other duty stations.9 As a result, turnover among enlisted personnel remained high due to desertion and soldiers’ opting to leave the army after completing their first enlistments.10 Despite higher reenlistment levels and lower desertion rates, black soldiers did not simply accept this social order, but often worked to improve their lives and material conditions within it. These efforts often involved elements of both cooperation and conflict with commissioned officers, non-commissioned officers, and other enlisted men. Yet social order not only encompassed soldiers’ experiences in living under, questioning, and sometimes rejecting military life, but also included enlisted men’s interactions with the people living in the southwest borderlands.
While the relationships between black enlisted men and the mostly white officers with whom they interacted are important relationships to study, Henry C. Turner’s experience illustrates that black troops’ physical geography was rarely confined strictly to military camps and forts.11 Black enlisted men lived and worked in the porous and diverse U.S.-Mexico borderlands, interacting regularly with people who lived in the racially and ethnically diverse
9 Rickey Jr., Forty Miles a Day on Beans and Hay; McChristian, Regular Army O!; William A. Dobak and Thomas D. Phillips, The Black Regulars, 1866-1898 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001), 179–202. 10 Edward M. Coffman, The Old Army: A Portrait of the American Army in Peacetime, 1784-1898 (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1986); Adams, Class and Race in the Frontier Army; Lahti, Cultural Construction of Empire; McChristian, Regular Army O! 11 Charles Kenner, William A. Dobak, and Thomas D. Philips primarily focus on the complex relationships between black soldiers and their white officers. Yet, when the scholars have discussed relationships between black troops and civilians, they devote more attention to determining what white people think about black soldiers rather than black enlisted men’s attitudes toward civilians. Frank N. Schubert, Outpost of the Sioux Wars: A History of Fort Robinson (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1993); Charles L. Kenner, Buffalo Soldiers and Officers of the Ninth Cavalry, 1867–1898: Black and White Together (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999); Dobak and Phillips, The Black Regulars, 1866-1898, 224–44. 6 communities that surrounded the posts they garrisoned. The official duties of soldiers in the U.S.
Army involved establishing a social and political order in the southwest borderlands that U.S. government officials viewed as volatile. Yet soldiers like Henry C. Turner were able to turn that volatility and porousness of the region to their advantage by exploiting geographic and national boundaries to escape the U.S. Army by fleeing to Mexico.12
Turner’s duties as a soldier in the regular army differed from African Americans who had performed military service in previous U.S. conflicts. Dating back to the American Revolution, the U.S. government employed black troops during times of war, but the Army Reorganization
Act of 1866 established permanent black regiments in the U.S. Army, marking an important transition in this practice. From the early national period through the American Civil War, the
“peacetime” U.S. Army primarily served as constabularies who established and maintained federal authority as the United States expanded its geographic boundaries.13 Although some elements of the regular army remained in the U.S. West during the Civil War, the regular army began fully resuming its “peacetime” duties after Appomattox. Approximately 180,000 black men had served as soldiers in the United States Colored Troops regiments during the Civil War,
12 Fleeing south to Mexico continued a long historical trend among African Americans freedom seekers dating back to the antebellum era. Ronnie C. Tyler, “Fugitive Slaves in Mexico,” The Journal of Negro History 57, no. 1 (January 1972): 1–12; Sarah E. Cornell, “Citizens of Nowhere: Fugitive Slaves and Free African Americans in Mexico, 1833-1857,” The Journal of American History 100, no. 2 (September 2013): 351–74; James David Nichols, “The Line of Liberty: Runaway Slaves and Fugitive Peons in the Texas-Mexico Borderlands,” Western Historical Quarterly 44, no. 4 (November 2013): 413–33; James David Nichols, The Limits of Liberty: Mobility and the Making of the Eastern U.S.-Mexico Border (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2018); Alice L. Baumgartner, “The Line of Positive Safety: Borders and Boundaries in the Rio Grande Valley, 1848–1880,” Journal of American History 101, no. 4 (March 1, 2015): 1106–22; Karl Jacoby, The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016). 13 Robert M. Utley, Frontiersmen in Blue: The United States Army and the Indian, 1848-1865 (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1967); Francis Paul Prucha, The Sword of the Republic: The United States Army on the Frontier, 1783-1846 (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1986); Durwood Ball, Army Regulars on the Western Frontier, 1848-1861 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001); Michael L. Tate, The Frontier Army in the Settlement of the West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001); Allan R. Millett and Peter Maslowski, For the Common Defense (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012), 236–51; Samuel J. Watson, Peacekeepers and Conquerors: The Army Officer Corps on the American Frontier, 1821-1846 (Lawrence, Ks.: University Press of Kansas, 2013). 7 providing a large pool of potential recruits for the new black regiments in the regular army.
William A. Dobak and Thomas D. Phillips estimate that nearly half of the black men who enlisted in the regular army during the 1860s were Civil War veterans; 566 men transferred directly from USCT units to regular army units in 1866, with another 2,500 USCT veterans joining the regulars later. Because of their military experience and education, USCT veterans often assumed leadership positions in the regulars.14 From 1867 through the early 1880s, the
U.S. Army primarily stationed black regiments in Texas, but between 1875 and the 1890s, the 9th and 10th Calvary along with the 24th Infantry served intermittently in New Mexico and Arizona.15
For much of the late nineteenth century, black troops constituted more than ten percent of the army’s 25,000 troops, and in certain periods and places they represented more than half of the available military force in the U.S. West.16
Forming permanent black regiments and stationing them in various locales in the U.S.
West meant thrusting black men like Henry C. Turner into constabulary roles in which they wielded federal authority and policed mostly non-black populations, ultimately supporting the interests of U.S. expansion and settler colonialism. Throughout the late nineteenth century, black troops in the regular army policed the U.S.-Mexico Border, assisted local and state
14 Although some former USCT soldiers served until they were eligible for retirement (thirty years of service), many USCT veterans left the army in the 1870s. For more on the early recruitment efforts for black regiments see Dobak and Phillips, The Black Regulars, 1866-1898, 3–24. 15 Although it is not the focus of this dissertation, black troops served extensively in Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Utah, Montana, and the Dakotas, especially in the 1880s and 1890s. The regimental returns for the peacetime black regiments (9th and 10th Cavalry along with the 24th and 25th Infantry) lists the location of units for any given month and year. Returns from Regular Army Cavalry Regiments, 1833–1916, NARA Publication M744, Rolls 87–94 for the Ninth Regiment and Rolls 95–102 for the Tenth. For details on black infantry regiments during the years 1869 to 1916 see Returns of Regular Army Infantry Regiments, June 1821-December 1916, NARA Publication M665, Rolls 245-253 for the Twenty-fourth Regiment and Rolls 254-261 for the Twenty-fifth Regiment. For monthly returns related to black infantry regiments from the years 1866–1869: see Roll 293 for the Thirty-eighth Infantry; Roll 294 for the Thirty-ninth Infantry; Roll 295 for the Fortieth Infantry; and Roll 296 for the Forty-first Infantry. 16 Dobak and Phillips, The Black Regulars, 1866-1898, 91. 8 authorities in quelling civil disturbances, escorted stage/postal coaches, and participated in military campaigns to secure Native peoples’ lands and resources.17
As the federal government attempted to establish a more racially inclusive definition of citizenship in the U.S. South, federal officials simultaneously adopted more exclusionary policies toward other groups in the U.S. West and employed black troops to enforce these policies. The experiences of black soldiers provide a lens for examining historical developments associated with both the processes of freedom and unfreedom that unfolded in the postbellum U.S. West.18
Black soldiers in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands lived under and were responsible for implementing a social order, but they had their own ideas about their place within that order in both the army and the broader communities they policed.
Unlike with officers, most of whom were white men from more elite socioeconomic backgrounds, black soldiers’ ideology and views about their world are often absent from the historical record, but underused general courts-martial records and pension files help fill important voids in this regard. As Kimberly M. Welch writes in another context, African
17 The earliest work on African-American soldiers in the U.S West pioneered by William H. Leckie, Arlen L. Fowler, and others primarily emphasized the fact that black soldiers in the U.S. Army actually existed and offer broad overviews of their duties and the campaigns they participated in. Recently, scholars like Elizabeth Leonard and James Leiker have begun to more seriously interrogate the contributions of black soldiers to settler colonialism. Leckie, The Buffalo Soldiers; Fowler, The Black Infantry in the West, 1869-1891; Jack D. Foner, Blacks and the Military in American History: A New Perspective (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 1974); Billington, New Mexico’s Buffalo Soldiers, 1866-1900; Charles L. Kenner, Buffalo Soldiers and Officers of the Ninth Cavalry, 1867–1898: Black and White Together (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999); Schubert, Outpost of the Sioux Wars; Schubert, Black Valor; Dobak and Phillips, The Black Regulars, 1866-1898; Bruce A. Glasrud and Michael N. Searles, Buffalo Soldiers in the West: A Black Soldiers Anthology (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2007); James N. Leiker, Racial Borders: Black Soldiers along the Rio Grande (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2002); Elizabeth D. Leonard, Men of Color to Arms!: Black Soldiers, Indian Wars, and the Quest for Equality (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010); Quintard Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528-1990 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), 164–92. 18 Stacey L. Smith, Freedom’s Frontier: California and the Struggle Over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Barbara Krauthamer, Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Gregory Downs and Kate Masur, The World the Civil War Made (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015); Andrew E. Masich, Civil War in the Southwest Borderlands, 1861–1867 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017). 9
Americans’ experiences in court provided them the “opportunity to recount their versions of events, based on their understandings of the world around them and their place in it.”19 In a similar fashion, Charles Kenner, Thomas D. Phillips and William A. Dobak note, court-martial records, although mediated by clerks and officers who produced the transcripts, allow historians to examine the experiences and interactions of black enlisted soldiers who were often unable or unwilling to describe them in letters, diaries, and other written sources.20 Black veterans’ pension files also incorporate the voices of black veterans and their family members. Files often contained written correspondence and interviews from soldiers who attempted to earn some means of financial compensation for various ailments they incurred in military service. In so doing, these records often provided black veterans with space to reflect upon their military experiences, but they also present a means for gaining insight into veterans’ experiences after ending their military careers. However, it is important to acknowledge the absence of the perspectives of soldiers who never faced trial by general court-martial or chose not to apply for service and disability pensions after ending their military careers. Despite testimony and statements from black troops in both court-martial records and pension files often being self-
19 Recent works in legal history have demonstrated that court records not only sheds light on the experiences of African Americans who entered the courtroom, but also provide a lens into their daily lived experiences. Kimberly M. Welch, Black Litigants in the Antebellum American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 27; Kelly M. Kennington, In the Shadow of Dred Scott: St. Louis Freedom Suits and the Legal Culture of Slavery in Antebellum America (Athens, Ga: University of Georgia Press, 2017); Melissa Milewski, Litigating Across the Color Line: Civil Cases Between Black and White Southerners from the End of Slavery to Civil Rights (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2018); Maria Renee Montalvo, “The Slavers’ Archive: Enslaved People, Power, and the Production of the Past in the Antebellum Courtroom” (PhD diss., Rice University, 2018); Loren Schweninger, Appealing for Liberty: Freedom Suits in the South (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); Anne Twitty, Before Dred Scott (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 20 Lorien Foote reaches a similar conclusion about the utility of courts-martial in exploring the experiences of white and black soldiers who served as soldiers in the U.S. Army during the Civil War. Although Kenner, Dobak, and Philips are more concerned with relationships between white officers and black enlisted men, they make important contributions to the scholarship of black enlisted men in the postbellum U.S. Army by using court-martial records to more closely examine the black military experience from the perspective of black enlisted men. Kenner, Buffalo Soldiers and Officers of the Ninth Cavalry, 1867–1898, 1999, 5–6; Dobak and Phillips, The Black Regulars, 1866-1898, xii; Foote, The Gentlemen and the Roughs, 5–6. 10 serving, these sources still provide an excellent means for examining black military experiences from the perspective of black enlisted men.
Court-martial records and pension files involving black men are easy to identify because of racial segregation in the military. When supplying personal information in pension applications, enlisted soldiers often referred to both their company and regiment. Apart from a handful of chaplains and line officers, the officer corps in the U.S. Army was exclusively white throughout the late nineteenth-century leading up to the Spanish-American War. With the Army
Reorganization Act of 1866, Congress initially formed four African-American infantry regiments
38th, 39th, 40th, and 41st Infantry Regiments along with two black cavalry regiments and 9th and
10th Cavalry Regiment. In 1869, however, as part of another reorganization effort in the U.S.
Army, the 38th and 41st Infantry Regiments consolidated to form the 24th Infantry with the 39th and 40th regiments combining and forming the 25th Infantry.21
Some scholars and members of the general public refer to the men who served in these regiments as the “buffalo soldiers.”22 While the explanations for the origins of the nickname vary, a common element in each account is that an outside party coined the term. As other historians have pointed out, the very soldiers to whom the nickname applies rarely referred to themselves as “buffalo soldiers.”23 For that reason, this work will not use that term to describe black troops.
21 Unless otherwise specified, allusions to the experience of soldiers from other army regiments refer to white troops. 22 Leckie, The Buffalo Soldiers; Billington, New Mexico’s Buffalo Soldiers, 1866-1900; Kenner, Buffalo Soldiers and Officers of the Ninth Cavalry, 1867–1898, 1999; Frank N. Schubert, On the Trail of the Buffalo Soldier: Biographies of African Americans in the U.S. Army, 1866-1917 (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1995); Schubert, Black Valor; Glasrud and Searles, Buffalo Soldiers in the West. 23 Fowler, The Black Infantry in the West, 1869-1891; Dobak and Phillips, The Black Regulars, 1866-1898; Adams, Class and Race in the Frontier Army; McChristian, Regular Army O! 11
Because of the racial/ethnic diversity in the southwest borderlands that is reflected in the military records analyzed in this project and the complexity of racial categories, it is important to clarify terminology. I often refer to black troops, laundresses, and other civilians of African descent as “black” or “African American.” I often use the term “Mexican” to describe people of
Mexican descent. Many people of Mexican descent I describe either lived or were born in
Mexico or had some cultural or social connections to the country. For many actors in the sources, “Mexican” functions as both a national and racial/ethnic category in reference to people rather than an indicator of whether a person is actually from Mexico. People of Mexican descent were legally tallied as “white” during this period, but many people viewed them as distinct in whiteness from European-Americans. I will use the term Anglo or Anglo-American primarily to describe U.S. citizens of European descent and European immigrants who resided in the borderlands. As Julian Lim writes, Anglo denotes “a narrower definition of whiteness, connoting not only an American national identity, but a white identity against which Mexicans were juxtaposed.” While people of Mexican descent were legally white in the United States, they frequently experienced social non-whiteness.24 Native people are not as prominent in this study as other groups, but I refer to them as Native people or by the specific group individuals were affiliated with if the information is available.
24 Julian Lim, Porous Borders: Multiracial Migrations and the Law in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 15; Arnoldo De León, They Called Them Greasers: Anglo Attitudes Toward Mexicans in Texas, 1821–1900 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983); David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987); Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkley: University of California Press, 1997); Eric V. Meeks, Border Citizens: The Making of Indians, Mexicans, and Anglos in Arizona (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 2007); William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb, Forgotten Dead: Mob Violence against Mexicans in the United States, 1848-1928 (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Monica Muñoz Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2018). 12
Finally, the phrase, “border people,” functions partially as a rhetorical device to refer to the large swath of people of various racial and ethnic backgrounds who inhabited the region and to distinguish these groups from other entities charged with policing the borderlands. In this context, border people lived in a contested geographic zone at the periphery of the United States,
Mexico, and powerful Native polities. The constant shifts in the meanings ascribed to physical and political geography surrounding their homes required border people to continuously adapt and adopt transcultural and transnational approaches to navigating the world around them to survive.25
This study is divided into three sections and five thematic chapters, each of which focuses on the experiences and ideas of black soldiers and veterans. The first section— comprising the first two chapters in my dissertation—explores the experiences of black soldiers in the military justice system through black soldiers’ testimony and verbal/written statements from general courts-martial. The second part of this project—composed of the third and fourth chapters— relies on both court-martial records and pension files and focuses more on black soldiers’ relationships with border communities in the southwest borderlands. The final chapter of my dissertation interrogates the process of collective memory among black veterans in the early twentieth century as they recounted their military experiences. Court-martial records offer depictions of black soldiers’ experiences between 1866 and the mid-1890s. Although pension files often involve black veterans and family members reflecting on events that occurred earlier
25 I largely draw this definition of border people from Oscar J. Martinez’s work. Oscar J. Martínez, Border People: Life and Society in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994), xviii; Maria E. Montoya, Translating Property: The Maxwell Land Grant and the Conflict Over Land in the American West, 1840-1900 (Berkley: University of California Press, 2002); Andrés Reséndez, Changing National Identities at the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800-1850 (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Samuel Truett, Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); Brian DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U. S. -Mexican War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). 13 in their lives during their military service, they also offer insight into the experiences of black veterans and their family members in the twentieth century.26
The first chapter serves as in introduction to the army’s justice system and demonstrates how black enlisted men employed the language of reputability, hoping to achieve favorable results and to exert influence over how officers discipline them. Yet, in many cases there were severe limits imposed on the level of influence black enlisted men had in determining their destiny in the army’s justice system. Enlisted men confronted a justice system that often appeared arbitrary with officers either not understanding the rules and procedures for enforcing discipline or conveniently ignoring or modifying the rules to achieve the results they wanted. By making appeals based on their reputations within their units, enlisted men were often operating within the confines of a script that officers outlined for them and using one of the few tools at their disposal to navigate the military justice system. However, other soldiers refused to follow that script and attempted to write their own.
The second chapter reveals how black enlisted men interpreted, questioned, and challenged the army’s justice system by centering on their appeals to rights. While historians have often explained why soldiers deserted, mutinied, and committed other disciplinary infractions, few have discussed how enlisted men discussed these violations when facing general courts-martial.27 Both black and white enlisted men often portrayed these infractions as last- ditch efforts to protect their rights and improve their material conditions as soldiers. By the mid-
26 For examples of scholars using pension files to examine the lives of black veterans after leaving military service see Donald R Shaffer, After the Glory: The Struggles of Black Civil War Veterans (Lawrence, Ks.: University Press of Kansas, 2004); Brandi C. Brimmer, “Black Women’s Politics, Narratives of Sexual Immorality, and Pension Bureaucracy in Mary Lee’s North Carolina Neighborhood,” Journal of Southern History 80, no. 4 (November 2014): 827–58; Tera W. Hunter, Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2017); Dale Kretz, “Pensions and Protest: Former Slaves and the Reconstructed American State,” Journal of the Civil War Era 7, no. 3 (2017): 425–45. 27 Utley, Frontier Regulars; Rickey Jr., Forty Miles a Day on Beans and Hay; Adams, Class and Race in the Frontier Army; McChristian, Regular Army O! 14
1880s and 1890s, the army began to respond to soldiers’ complaints by making wholesale changes to the military justice system and improvements to soldiers’ welfare, showing that enlisted men’s actions had influenced some of the army’s institutional reforms.28
Court-martial records continue to serve as the main source base for the third chapter, which shifts focus to the activities of off-duty black enlisted men, specifically the economic and social engagements that black soldiers and border people developed and sustained both on and beyond military posts. In so doing, black soldiers assumed dual identities as both “border enforcers” and “border people.” Borderlands scholars have emphasized states’ use of force to delineate national and racial differences along geographic boundaries along with the efforts of every-day people who lived in the borderlands frequently undermining or challenging the assertion of those boundaries.29 Although black soldiers’ official military duties involved them assuming the identity of border enforcers and enforcing geographic, national, and racial/ethnic boundaries, they formed economic and social relationships with border people that frequently transcended the very boundaries they were charged with policing when off duty. While cooperation figured more prominently in these relationships among black soldiers and civilians in the southwest borderlands than other historians have acknowledged, notions of racial
28 These works all provide insight into the various reforms that the army made in instituting reforms that made life more comfortable for soldiers, but the explanation for these reforms is often rooted in the growing effort of the U.S. Army to professionalize. Coffman, The Old Army; Millett and Maslowski, For the Common Defense; Dobak and Phillips, The Black Regulars, 1866-1898; Jack D. Foner, The United States Soldier between Two Wars: Army Life and Reforms, 1865-1898 (New York, N.Y.: Humanities Press, 1970). 29 Samuel Truett and Elliott Young, Continental Crossroads: Remapping U.S.-Mexico Borderlands History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); Reséndez, Changing National Identities at the Frontier, 2005; Truett, Fugitive Landscapes; Karl Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn: An Apache Massacre and the Violence of History (New York: Penguin Books, 2008); Patrick W. Ettinger, Imaginary Lines: Border Enforcement and the Origins of Undocumented Immigration, 1882-1930 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009); Rachel C. St. John, Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U.S.-Mexico Border (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); Baumgartner, “The Line of Positive Safety”; Lim, Porous Borders. 15 difference often limited the extent to which black soldiers could fully integrate themselves into border communities.30
My fourth chapter builds on an analysis of pension files involving black veterans and the
Mexican women they married to uncover significant details about interracial relationships and families in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
After completing their enlistments in the army, some black servicemen elected to remain in the southwest borderlands and some even took up permanent residence in Mexico. This chapter explores the patterns of intermarriages between black men and women of Mexican descent across the southwest, along with the strategies black veterans employed to integrate themselves into border communities. More importantly, claims for invalid and service pensions demonstrate that interracial couples challenged the solidification of national and racial/ethnic boundaries in the twentieth century by calling on federal officials to recognize their unions in the form of financial compensation.31 These efforts offer an alternative lens for analyzing larger questions
30 In general, when scholars address black soldiers’ relationships with civilians, they often conduct their analysis from a black-white binary and only mention non-Anglo groups in passing. Leiker makes an important contribution to borderlands scholarship by encouraging scholars to think beyond binary race relations and explicitly acknowledging that African Americans were “voluntary participants in the subjugation of Indian and Mexican peoples throughout the West” and played a profound role in reinforcing the geographic, racial, national, and ethnic boundaries in the southwest borderlands. I agree with many of Leiker’s conclusions, but my work focuses more on cooperation between black soldiers and border people rather than conflict Leiker, Racial Borders; Dobak and Phillips, The Black Regulars, 1866-1898; Kenner, Buffalo Soldiers and Officers of the Ninth Cavalry, 1867–1898, 1999; McChristian, Regular Army O!; Garna L. Christian, Black Soldiers in Jim Crow Texas, 1899-1917 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1995). 31 Both Sal Acosta and Julian Lim devote some attention to patterns of intermarriage among African Americans and other non-Anglo groups in the southwest borderlands, but pension files offer the opportunity to examine interracial/interethnic unions from the perspective of people involved in them rather than examining how state authorities attempted to regulate them. The first two parts of Peggy Pascoe’s work provides excellent insight into the development of anti-miscegenation laws across various spaces in the United States. Sal Acosta, Sanctioning Matrimony: Western Expansion and Interethnic Marriage in the Arizona Borderlands (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2016); Lim, Porous Borders; Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2009); Martha Hodes, Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History (New York, N.Y.: New York University Press, 1999). 16 focusing on how African Americans claimed access to the U.S. government’s officials and resources to secure rights and citizenship in the post-emancipation era.32
The final chapter interrogates how black veterans viewed themselves in relation to the larger communities of veterans who had fought in the late-nineteenth century series of conflicts known as the Indian Wars. This chapter primarily relies on pension files and excerpts of letters from African-American veterans and widows published in a veterans newspaper, Winners of the
West, during the 1920s and 1930s. This analysis illustrates how black veterans understood their role in seizing territory inhabited by Native people to secure settlements in what would become the U.S. West, a process we would describe today as settler colonialism. In this project, I define settler colonialism as a process in which a group of outsiders arrives, seizes territory, and displaces and/or destroys the territory’s original inhabitants.33
Both black and white veterans of the Indian Wars employed the rhetoric of reputation and equal rights to advocate for more favorable pension rates, believing that they suffered from unfair discrimination compared to veterans of other conflicts. Ironically, veterans of the Indian
Wars based their appeals for equality and increased socioeconomic mobility by calling for public recognition of the important role they had exerted in denying freedom and equality to Native people who inhabited what would become the U.S. West. Yet, black veterans of the Indian
32 For more general overviews of African Americans claiming access to the resources of the federal government in the post-emancipation era see Gregory Downs and Susanna Michele Lee Gregory P. Downs, Declarations of Dependence: The Long Reconstruction of Popular Politics in the South, 1861-1908 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Susanna Michele Lee, Claiming the Union: Citizenship in the Post-Civil War South (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Steven Hahn, A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910 (New York, N.Y.: Penguin, 2016), 302–14. 33Although enlisted soldiers functioned as some of the primary agents of Native dispossession, other parties, who often had greater financial assets, were more likely to reap the direct benefits of land ownership in the U.S. West. Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (December 1, 2006): 387–409; Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Lorenzo Veracini, “‘Settler Colonialism’: Career of a Concept,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 41, no. 2 (June 1, 2013): 313–33. 17
Wars, much like black veterans from other U.S. conflicts, faced the additional burden of racial discrimination that often prevented them from enjoying the benefits they believed they had earned. While the literature on Civil War veterans and memory is very rich, there are almost no studies of the experiences of Indian War veterans, black or white, or the processes surrounding collective memory among them.34
There is no indication that Henry C. Turner ever applied for a pension or participated in the discourse surrounding the treatment of Indian War Veterans. Turner likely understood that desertion disqualified him from receiving approval for a pension claim. Yet, black veterans in their quests to claim pensions for military service often mirrored Turner’s rhetoric and expectation to be “treated right,” demonstrating that black veterans continued to cherish ideas about the federal government’s obligations to them upon transitioning to their post-army lives in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Black enlisted men in the southwest borderlands lived under and were charged with implementing a variety of social and political orders. Yet, a common element in each context was African American troops seizing small pockets of mobility and autonomy, even in a period often described as the Nadir after
Reconstruction, in which African Americans faced persistent attacks on their freedom. Much
34 Jerome Greene and Douglas McChristian offer brief overviews of the development of the Indian Wars Veterans organization. Greene’s book republishes some veterans’ campaign accounts from Winners of the West, providing an alternative source for readers who may be unable to access the original publications of the newspaper on microfilm. Jerome Greene, Indian War Veterans: Memories of Army Life and Campaigns in the West, 1864-1898 (El Dorado Hills, Ca: Savas Beatie, 2007); McChristian, Regular Army O!, 592–97; David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001); Shaffer, After the Glory; James Marten, Sing Not War: The Lives of Union & Confederate Veterans in Gilded Age America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Barbara A. Gannon, The Won Cause: Black and White Comradeship in the Grand Army of the Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Caroline E. Janney, Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Brian Matthew Jordan, Marching Home: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War (New York; London: Liveright, 2015); Sarah Handley-Cousins, Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North (Athens, Ga: University of Georgia Press, 2019); Brian Matthew Jordan and Evan C. Rothera, The War Went On: Reconsidering the Lives of Civil War Veterans (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020); Barbara A. Gannon, “‘They Call Themselves Veterans’: Civil War and Spanish War Veterans and the Complexities of Veteranhood,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 5, no. 4 (November 21, 2015): 528–50. 18 like their predecessors in earlier U.S. conflicts and their successors in the Spanish-American
War, World War I, and World War II, black soldiers in the southwest borderlands stood at the vanguard of advancing claims to rights and citizenship.
19
Chapter 1
Black Enlisted Men and the Rhetoric of Reputation in Trials by Courts-martial
In October 1874, Sergeant Robert Merritt, an African-American soldier in the 24th
Infantry Regiment, faced trial by general court-martial for abandoning his commanding officer in the middle of a storm while he was performing escort duty in South Texas. In a written statement submitted at the end of the court-martial proceedings, Merritt maintained that he had left his commander to return to Fort Brown for assistance and fresh horses. At the same time, the accused soldier emphasized his history of reputable military service. Merritt was serving his third enlistment at the time and had been a non-commissioned officer since March 1870. “I always done my duty as far as I was able. I never have given any impudence to any officer since
I have been in the service,” Merritt wrote deferentially. In short, Merritt hoped that his reputation as a soldier would influence the court into lending a sympathetic ear in deciding his fate. The accused soldier was following a script that was one of the few tools available for enlisted soldiers to influence officers’ judgments in the U.S. Army’s justice system.1
This chapter serves as an introduction to the U.S. Army justice system in the post-Civil
War era and relies on black soldiers’ testimony from courts-martial to understand how black enlisted men interpreted and navigated the system. Historians have often emphasized black regiments’ exemplary combat records and highlighted the fact that black soldiers had lower desertion rates, higher rates of enlistment, and fewer breaches of military discipline than white enlisted men.2 While historians have focused on offering explanations for these discrepancies,
1 Robert Merritt, GCM Case File, PP4232. 2 Leckie, The Buffalo Soldiers; Fowler, The Black Infantry in the West, 1869-1891; Billington, New Mexico’s Buffalo Soldiers, 1866-1900; Schubert, Outpost of the Sioux Wars; Kenner, Buffalo Soldiers and Officers of the Ninth Cavalry, 1867–1898, 1999; Dobak and Phillips, The Black Regulars, 1866-1898; Leiker, Racial Borders; Leonard, Men of Color to Arms! 20 court-martial records outlining the infractions that did occur provide the opportunity to more closely examine black troops’ rhetoric and ideas about the military justice system.3
Soldiers’ perceptions of the military justice system were often most noticeable at the end of courts-martial proceedings. After the prosecution and defense presented evidence, members of the courts offered soldiers the opportunity to submit verbal or written statements for the court to consider in deliberating the evidence, issuing a finding, deciding on the sentence of the accused standing trial. Like any source, it is important to exercise caution in using such statements because soldiers often structured these statements, along with their answers to questions from the prosecution and defense, in hopes of influencing the outcome of the case and avoiding punishment. Officers serving as members on courts-martial boards ultimately decided on the guilt of the soldiers accused of crimes and determined the punishment for accused soldiers. Punishment for guilty findings ranged from death or lengthy confinement sentences to forfeiture of pay or loss of rank. However, a close examination of soldiers’ personal statements reveals how they attempted to navigate the military courtroom and provides insight into soldiers’ opinions about life in the army, perceptions of other soldiers and/or officers. Most importantly, black soldiers’ actions and statements show a deep awareness that a soldier’s reputation was ultimately one of the only tools they had for navigating an arbitrary and unpredictable military that afforded them few rights.
3 A brief note on terminology. Enlisted men in the 9th and 10th Cavalry and the 38th, 39th 40th, and 41st Infantry Regiments were African American. In 1869, Congress reduced the size of the army and the 4 black infantry regiments consolidated to form the 24th and 25th Infantry Regiments. Clerks’ references to soldiers’ companies and regiments in the records allow me to determine the accused soldier’s race. Any other enlisted men mentioned from any of the other cavalry and infantry regiments are white, unless otherwise specified. Between January 1867 and 1893, there were nearly 5,000 general court-martial cases involving black troops. Because it was not uncommon for soldiers to face multiple courts-martial during their enlistments, this database does not contain 5,000 unique soldiers. I compiled this database using the Register of the Records of the Proceedings of the U.S. Army General Court- Martial, 1809-1890, NARA Microfilm Publication M1105, Rolls 6, 7, and 8. 21
In the end, soldiers achieved mixed results in employing this legal strategy, but they continuously employed this courtroom tactic from the immediate post-Civil War era in 1866 through the 1890s because it was one of the few strategies available for enlisted men under the
U.S. Army Regulations and the Articles of War. This approach to navigating the army’s justice system also transcended racial and regional boundaries; black and white enlisted soldiers relied on the rhetoric of reputation regardless of the location in which they served in the Southwest.
Despite some of the distinct cultures and traditions that developed in various regiments and companies, this legal strategy was not unique to any specific army unit. Yet, some of the racist assumptions undergirding the judgements of white officers posed an additional burden for black soldiers compared to white soldiers.
Because this chapter relies primarily on transcripts from general court-martial records, it is instructive to understand the processes involved in the production of these sources. In many cases, enlisted soldiers effectively found themselves punished before they could prove their innocence and often before officers could prove wrongdoing. In Robert Merritt’s case, for example, his company commander reduced him in rank before the soldier’s trial by general court-martial convened.4 Upon concluding that enlisted men had committed offenses, officers often ordered the arrest of the accused soldier and filed charges against him, with the accused remaining in confinement in the post guardhouse until officers decided how to discipline the soldier; there was no formal requirement for officers to launch preliminary investigations before charging soldiers.5
Courts-martial were one of the tools available for officers to impose discipline upon enlisted men. Officers had the discretion of disciplining soldiers via garrison or regimental
4 Robert Merritt, GCM Case File, PP4232. 5 Foner, The United States Soldier between Two Wars, 32–33. 22 courts-martial for more trivial or minor offenses, and the sentences stemming from lower courts- martial were often lighter than those imposed at higher courts. For more serious offenses, however, officers sent the charges to their department headquarters to request permission to convene a general court-martial (authority to convene these courts ultimately rested with department commanders). Department headquarters then issued special orders detailing the personnel who would serve on the court.6 The process of assigning officers to serve on details for general courts-martial often required a great deal of coordination and time. The amount of time was certainly not lost on accused soldiers, who often remained in confinement until officers could convene their trial. When John Spillman, a black enlisted man in the 9th Cavalry, finally stood trial for desertion, he complained that he already “suffered sufficient confinement at hard labor for one year and four months Eleven months of witch [sic] [he] remained in Heavy irons without trial.”7
Aside from the accused, the key figures in general courts-martial were the Judge
Advocate General and the members of the court. The Judge Advocate General was an officer appointed to represent the interests of the U.S. government, with his primary responsibilities presenting evidence for the prosecution. However, in the event that enlisted men had no legal counsel available, the JAG was “at once prosecutor and so far prisoner’s counsel as to take care that the prisoner has every facility afforded him, that his rights are not infringed, and that he is not permitted to do anything, ignorantly, to his own detriment.”8
6 For more secondary literature that offer good summaries of how the military justice system functioned in the regular army in the post-Civil War era see Rickey Jr., Forty Miles a Day on Beans and Hay; Foner, The United States Soldier between Two Wars; Dobak and Phillips, The Black Regulars, 1866-1898, 180–86; McChristian, Regular Army O!, 381–89. 7 Private John Spillman, GCM Case File, PP5207 8 Henry Coppee, Field Manual of Courts-Martial, (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1864), 23. 23
The last and most important group within trials by general court-martial were the members: commissioned officers who essentially served as the jury and ultimately decided the accused’s fate. While U.S. Army regulations stipulated that a general court-martial was supposed to consist of thirteen members, courts had the latitude to appoint fewer than thirteen if
“no greater number could be convened without manifest injury to the service.” However, regulations mandated that at least five officers serve as members.9 The most senior member in rank often assumed responsibility for presiding over the proceedings. However, members were rarely passive, objective observers. Much to the chagrin of enlisted soldiers, officers sometimes simultaneously served as members and witnesses for the prosecution in the same trial. In these instances, members had often arrived at a decision about soldiers’ guilt before the trial by court- martial even began. Members also exercised the right to question witnesses on the condition that the majority of the body agreed to allow the question.10 At the end of the trial, the members deliberated and voted on the findings (verdicts) and imposition of sentences based on the evidence presented during the trial.11
At the beginning of each trial, the JAG afforded accused soldiers the opportunity to object to and advocate the removal of any officer they believed held bias against them, but the authority to remove members ultimately rested with members. Sergeant Thomas Goodlow, a black non-commissioned officer undergoing a trial by court-martial, stated, “I object to being tried by Captain J.M. Thompson, 24th Infantry, because he is the officer who preferred the
9 Coppee, Field Manual of Courts-Martial, 13-14. 10 The JAG or appointed clerks recording the testimony delineated which parties were asking questions in the transcripts for general courts-martial. For example, questions from the members are marked by the phrase “question by the court.” The indicator “questions by judge advocate” generally refer to questions for the prosecution with questions by defense or accused showing that accused soldiers or their defenders were asking questions. 11 Coppee, Field Manual of Courts-Martial, 13-36, 57-61. These decisions related to findings and sentencing required a simple majority, but in cases involving capital punishment, a two-thirds majority was required. The conversations concerning how officers arrived at their decisions because the transcripts from these cases do not include the votes of individual members or any of the conversations from their deliberations. 24 charges against me and has refused to sign my application for a transfer to another company.”12
The court upheld Goodlow’s objection and replaced his company commander with another officer, allowing the soldier to attempt to shape the members of the court-martial to his advantage. John Carter, another black enlisted man, successfully secured the removal of two officers who he felt “were prejudiced against him.”13 Private Charles Sheales, a member of the
25th Infantry, was less successful in shaping the members for his trial by general court-martial.
Like Thomas Goodlow, Sheales objected to his commanding officer serving as a member on his general court-martial board because his commander was the individual who levied charges against him. Members refused to remove Sheales’s commander as a member because there were not enough officers available to replace him.14
After addressing enlisted men’s challenges to the members, the JAG outlined the charges and specifications against the accused soldiers. The charge identified the Article of War that soldiers had violated along with specifications that described the soldiers’ alleged infraction in detail. Much like civilian courts, soldiers most often entered pleas of guilty or not guilty to both the charge and specification.15 The court then proceeded to the questioning of witnesses. The prosecution presented evidence and witnesses first, and the defense exercised the right to cross- examine and call their own witnesses. Although accused enlisted men were afforded opportunities to procure a commissioned officer to defend them in court, they often assumed responsibility for their own defense during the trials if they were unable to find an officer who
12 Sergeant Thomas Goodlow, GCM Case File, QQ3529. 13 Private John Carter, GCM Case File, PP4027. 14 When the Department of Texas reviewed the case, the staff officers argued that an absence of officers was not a sufficient reason to dismiss Sheales’s challenge to a member and ordered Sheales’s release from confinement and his restoration to normal duty. Headquarters Department of Texas, GCMO Orders No. 10, February 22, 1873, 6, NARA Microfiche Publication. 15 A soldier could admit to the act by pleading guilty to the specification but had the option to plead not guilty to the charge if they felt that their action did not violate a tenant of the Articles of War. 25 was able and willing to do it. At times enlisted men hired civilian lawyers from nearby towns.
Throughout the process, neither accused soldiers, the individuals who defended them, nor the members were permitted to directly question witnesses. Instead, both parties provided the questions they wanted to ask to the Judge Advocate General who directed the question to the witnesses for them.16
At the conclusion of the presentation of evidence by both the prosecution and the defense, the court afforded soldiers the opportunity to make a final verbal or written statement in their defense for the court’s consideration. Some soldiers declined to make a statement, but many others took full advantage of their only chance to directly address the court without mediation from the JAG. Recognizing the importance of carefully crafting a statement to potentially sway the opinions of the members and attain the best possible outcome, soldiers often exercised their right to delay the members’ deliberation of evidence in order to take extra time to carefully prepare a written or verbal statement for the court.17 It was not uncommon for senior officers to specifically refer to accused soldiers’ personal statements to outline inconsistencies in testimony, convictions stemming from insufficient evidence, and other missteps in courts-martial proceedings. In fact, senior officers encouraged their subordinates to take soldiers’ statements seriously, highlighting the importance of soldiers’ testimony in determining the outcomes of their cases. “The statement rather than the plea should have been considered as the intelligent act of the accused.” Furthermore, the reviewing officers mentioned that “the prosecution
[introduced] no evidence to disprove the statement of the accused, which, if true would appear
16 Coppee, Field Manual for Court-Martial, 13-36. When producing the transcripts from general court- martial cases, clerks or the JAG often indicated when different parties were asking questions. For example, question by J.A. indicates a question asked by the JAG for the prosecution. “Question by the court” shows that members were asking questions and “questions by accused” or “questions by defense” identify questions that accused soldiers and/or their defenders were examining witnesses. 17 Coppee, Field Manual for Court-Martial, 26. 26 should relieve him from any charge of criminality in the premises.”18 These statements, along with the eventual findings and sentences of the members, marked one stage in a long and complicated process.19
The inexperience and lack of knowledge among officers who administered the military justice system added more complexity to an already complicated process. Serving as a JAG, legal counsel for accused soldiers, or a member of the court were temporary duties for commissioned officers that diverted their attention away from their regular duties as infantry or cavalry officers. John Bigelow, a white officer serving in the 10th Cavalry, wrote in December
1884, “I feel quite at leisure having no court-martial case to write up. I have been sitting up until
12 and 1 & 2 oclock in the morning writing them.” Despite the long hours at work, Bigelow admitted that serving as the judge advocate general had greatly increased his knowledge of the army’s justice system.20 JAG appointees like Bigelow often lacked formal legal training and often learned on the job. Officers’ inexperience, the process of learning by trial and error, or simply a quest to end trials as quickly as possible to return to regular duties had tangible consequences for accused soldiers.
The arbitrary and unpredictable nature of courts-martial was often apparent in the wide disparities in punishments that officers issued to troops found guilty of infractions. Zenas R.
Bliss, a white officer who served with black regiments in South Carolina and in Texas after the
Civil War, noticed this trend and commented on it in his personal reminiscences. Bliss wrote,
“The sentences under which men served showed a very crude condition of affairs, at the various
18 Headquarters Department of Texas, GCMO No. 33, June 3, 1873, 5, GCMO Department of Texas 1873, NARA Microfiche Publication. 19 Members voted on both the finding and sentence after deliberating the evidence. Even if a member voted not guilty, they still had to participate in the deliberations of determining soldiers’ sentences. 20 John Bigelow, Garrison Tangles in the Friendless Tenth, 20, Western History Collection, University of Oklahoma. 27 posts at which they had been sentenced. Some would have twenty years for desertion, while another would be sentenced to only two years for the same offence.”21 Bliss recalled one specific case that showed “the inequality of the punishments meted out by the different courts.”22
A group of African-American soldiers broke into a post trader’s store and destroyed several hundred dollars-worth of goods and were only sentenced to six months at hard labor, whereas another black soldier accused of stealing an old pair of shoes from another soldier was tried and dishonorably discharged with loss of all pay and confined in prison for two years.23 Bliss, attributing the disparities in sentences to the inexperience of the officers and their unfamiliarity with life in the regular army, wrote, “Nearly all the Officers had just come from the Volunteers, and though they had great experience in the field during the War, they knew very little about garrison duties, and the whole army was in a bad condition.”24 Although garrisoning and military occupation posed some ideological challenges to volunteer officers and enlisted men alike, Bliss stressed the importance of proficiency in routine duties that often accompanied garrisoning and were essential for regulating discipline within the ranks.25
The inquiries that junior officers submitted to the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General headquarters in Washington D.C. about the proper procedures for conducting general courts- martial convey officers’ discomfort and inexperience with performing these duties. In May
1867, Captain Henry Carroll, an officer in the 9th Cavalry, wrote JAG headquarters in
Washington D.C. requesting information on the subject of enlisted men objecting to specific officers who served as members during courts-martial proceedings. Carroll wrote, “the accused
21 Zenas R. Bliss Reminiscences 1854-1876, Volume V, 58-59, Zenas Randall Bliss Papers, Box 2Q441, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin. 22 Bliss Reminiscences, 58. 23 Bliss Reminiscences, 59. 24 Bliss Reminiscences, 58. 25 For more on the ideological challenges surrounding garrisoning during the U.S.-Mexico War and the U.S. Civil War see Lang, In the Wake of War. 28 objected to a member of a General Court-martial and was sustained by the court could he (the accused) legally object to any more of the members on the small court, if he could, what would the limits to his objections if any (or could he continue objecting to members until all were off, providing he was sustained.”26 Another junior officer from a regiment comprised of white enlisted men wrote to JAG headquarters asking how much “latitude in time or no. of days” officers could apply in the phrase “on or about” when specifying charges against soldiers who had allegedly committed infractions.27
Agreeing to provide this kind of latitude to officers in the military courtroom would certainly have limited the options of enlisted men like Hiram Pitman. Sometime in the late summer of 1867, Pitman, a black recruit who had recently enlisted in the 10th Cavalry, deserted and was eventually arrested by an army officer in Cleveland, Ohio, the next month. During his trial by court-martial, Pitman entered a plea “in bar” stating that the trial could not continue for special reasons. According to the transcript, Pitman argued that because the prosecuting officer was unable to establish the exact date and place that he deserted, “it is impossible to disprove it or defend himself against it, and he therefore hopes the court will not entertain it.” After deliberation the court sustained Pitman’s plea, released him from confinement and allowed him to return to duty.28 Although officers were the arbiters of the military justice system, enlisted soldiers frequently tested the boundaries of permissible actions in the military courtroom.
26 Letter from Captain John Carroll to Judge Advocate General, May 7, 1869, Letters Received, Box 10, Entry 6, RG 153, NARA. 27 Letter from First Lieutenant William A. Olmsted to Judge Advocate General, January 31, 1868, Letters Received, Box 10, Entry 6, Records of Judge Advocate General, RG 153, NARA. 28 Private Hiram Pitman, GCM Case File, OO2828. Hiram Pitman deserted again a year later, but this time his departure from the army was permanent. Army records do not indicate that military authorities ever apprehended him. U.S. Army Register of Enlistments, 1867, Roll 34, P-Z, 21 https://www.fold3.com/image/310854261?rec=300203984 29
Senior officers, department commanders, and Department Judge Advocate General
(J.A.G.) Officers exercised oversight over proceedings, findings, sentences, and other matters related to the army’s justice system. At the conclusion of each series of cases, officers submitted the transcripts of general courts-martial to their department headquarters for final approval.
General courts-martial orders from the Department of Texas show that more senior and experienced military officers frequently intervened to address errors in court-martial cases submitted to the department’s headquarters in San Antonio for review. In cases involving both black and white soldiers, the department commander overturned rulings and mitigated sentences issued by courts convened across various posts in Texas, because of insufficient evidence, improper proceedings, excessive sentences, failure to properly educate accused soldiers about the consequences of guilty versus not-guilty pleas, and a range of other issues.29 In his review of a case involving a black soldier named George Cromwell, Winfield Scott Hancock expressed his dismay in writing, “The court appears to have borrowed its rules of evidence from the Spanish
Inquisition.” The charges were “founded upon a confession induced not only by threats, but by threats actually executed—in other words, torture.”30
At the same time, department commanders and staff officers were not necessarily crusaders seeking to protect enlisted soldiers from the abuses of lower-ranking line officers. There were instances in which higher-ranking officers intervened in situations where they believed members assigned to general courts-martial failed to sufficiently discipline accused soldiers. For example, officers at the headquarters of the Department of Texas argued that failing to couple confinement and forfeiture of pay to dishonorable discharges would only encourage enlisted men to purposely
29 Headquarters Department of Texas, GCMO, January through June 1873, NARA Microfiche Publications 30 Cromwell was accused of illegally selling clothing to Mexican people across the Rio Grande and one of Cromwell’s officers ordered him tied up until the soldier confessed to the crime. Private George Cromwell, GCM Case File, OO2766. 30 commit trivial offenses “in order to free himself from the voluntarily assumed obligations of his enlistment.”31
Nevertheless, some line officers serving in the field routinely rejected oversight from the department staff officers and commanders. John Bigelow complained about the additional burden that the Department of Texas placed on officers regarding courts-martial procedures in the 1880s. At the end of each case, the department commander required officers assigned to courts-martial duties to hold separate meetings to verify the proceedings at the end of each court session. Bigelow wrote that this requirement was the result of mistakes made by other officers serving on other courts-martial boards, suggesting that officers’ failures to properly administer the justice system remained a persistent problem well after the immediate post-Civil War era.
Bigelow opined that “The proper thing for the reviewing authority to do was to make the responsible persons an example to others and limit its punishment to them. As it is every Genl.
C[ourt] M[atrial] has to suffer for the misdoings of a couple of skylarkers.” Bigelow indignantly argued that this extra work was unfair to officers, writing that “This disciplinary measure, persecution on suspicion from a single case, is a common defect in military government.”32
Enlisted soldiers certainly agreed about the “common [defects] in military government,” as they often suffered the consequences of officers failing to properly execute their duties. The complaints emanating from some black soldiers reveal that some of the disparities and injustices in the army’s justice system not only originated in officers’ incompetence or inexperience, but also resulted from officers deliberately placing their thumbs on the scale to achieve the results they wanted in trials by general court-martial. In a letter to the commanding general of the
31 Headquarters Department of Texas, GCMO No. 42, August 10, 1874, 4, GCMO Department of Texas 1874, NARA Microfiche Productions. 32 Bigelow, Garrison Tangles in the Friendless Tenth, 12-13. 31
Department of Texas in 1874, Horace W. Ramsey, a black enlisted man who had been court- martialed twice for separate offenses, reported that the court had refused to remove a member who Ramsey believed had “prejudice against [him]” and “would not give [him] justice.”
Ramsey also claimed that he was “deprived of all privileges” during his trial with the court refusing to allow him to question witnesses or to address the court in a personal statement at the end of the trial. “The object of this is to give you some information of the proceedings of the
Cort by which I was tried which I believe was not recorded by the Cort as it appeared that the whole or nearly the whole Cort was prejudiced against me [sic],” Ramsey explained. From memory, Ramsey produced his own written record of his trial’s proceedings from start to finish, outlining all the questions and statements he wanted to make to prove his innocence. Aside from confirming some of the blind spots in the archives stemming from some of the biases and power dynamics involved in producing court-martial records, Ramsey also demonstrated that his poor reputation or standing among the members of the court, led to both a misrepresentation of the record sent to department headquarters and an unjust guilty finding against him.33 Despite this miscarriage of justice from Ramsey’s perspective, he continued his career in the military and served seven enlistments before eventually retiring in 1901.34
Relying on reputation as a legal defense often worked best for those who served as non- commissioned officers and enlisted men whose duties often allowed them to establish closer relationships with officers. Historians have shown that distinctions between officers and enlisted men often reflected the class tensions in the East, with the officer corps mostly comprised of men from the upper echelons of society and enlisted men originating from disadvantaged
33 Horace W. Ramsey to General Christopher C. Augur, date illegible, Letters Received by Judge Advocate General for the Department of Texas, Box 9, Entry 4961, RG 393 Part I, NARA. 34 U.S. Army Register of Enlistments, 1900, L-Z, 21, M233, Roll 54, https://www.fold3.com/image/310872905?rec=300218372 . 32 socioeconomic backgrounds.35 In many ways, the presence of non-commissioned officers complicates the binary of enlisted men and officers. If officers occupied the top of the military hierarchy with privates forming the bottom, non-commissioned officers, clerks, and others constituted a sort of middle class wedged between these two groups. Furthermore, in an institution with frequent promotions and/or demotions, enlisted soldiers often shifted from one category to another.
Scholars have examined the relationships between black soldiers and white officers to draw conclusions about unit cohesion and gauge the racial attitudes of white officers toward black enlisted men, but they have not fully examined how enlisted men used their connections to officers and other influential individuals to attain positive outcomes for themselves when navigating the military justice system.36 There were certainly distinctions in class between officers and enlisted men along with racial differences between white officers and black enlisted men, but enlisted soldiers sought to turn those class distinctions to their advantage in the military courtroom. With officers serving as members, it was advantageous for accused soldiers to secure the support of an individual who was part of the officer community to vouch for the accused’s good character and reputation, especially if the officers serving as members were not acquainted with the soldier on trial. Non-commissioned officers, especially those who had served multiple enlistments, were often in the best positions to rely on their reputations to obtain favorable
35 Adams, Class and Race in the Frontier Army; Coffman, The Old Army; Lahti, Cultural Construction of Empire; Foote, The Gentlemen and the Roughs. Adams and Lahti in particular show that officers were often members of the upper class who desired personal prestige, embraced a leisure culture associated with social elites, and hoped to distance themselves from those deemed socially inferior and of lower standing, specifically enlisted men and the civilians who resided in the areas surrounding the posts the army garrisoned in the West. 36 Dobak and Phillips, The Black Regulars, 1866-1898; Kenner, Buffalo Soldiers and Officers of the Ninth Cavalry, 1867–1898, 1999; Schubert, Outpost of the Sioux Wars; Adams, Class and Race in the Frontier Army. Dobak and Philips, Kenner, and Schubert all argue that racial attitudes toward black soldiers among white officers varied, but for the most part the necessity of accomplishing military tasks and missions forced them to set aside differences and work together. 33 outcomes in courts-martial because they had longer periods to establish reputations and cultivate connections with officers.
Relying on reputation as a legal defense ultimately involved accused soldiers’ attempt to convince the members of the court that the infraction leading to trial by court-martial was an aberration in his otherwise unblemished service history. As the sergeant major, King was the highest-ranking enlisted man in the 25th Infantry Regiment. In 1873, he pled guilty to physically assaulting Sallie Plant, an African-American laundress employed by the army. King’s defender in the court structured the entire legal strategy around reputation by summoning three different commissioned officers as character witnesses. The defense did not address the violent confrontation between King and Plant that ultimately led to King’s arrest. Instead, the defense questioned witnesses about King’s character and reputation along with their experiences working with him over the years. In a verbal statement before the members of the court-martial near the end of the proceedings, King ultimately attributed his violent attack on Plant to intoxication.
Initially, members of the court-martial sentenced him to a forfeiture of pay and reduction in rank, but commanders at the Department of Texas intervened and mitigated King’s sentence, allowing him to retain the rank of sergeant major, taking into consideration King’s “previous good character and the unanimous recommendation of the members of the court to clemency.”37
Because King pled guilty to the accusations against him, the prosecution chose not to collect testimony from Sallie Plant. Yet, had King opted to contest the charges, he could have pursued a common legal strategy among soldiers of questioning the character and public reputation of women during trials by general court-martial. These attacks often involved thinly veiled allusions to women’s supposed sexual immorality to attack their credibility as witnesses
37 Sergeant Major William F. King, GCM Case File, PP3695. 34 and/or accusers.38 For example, Adam Houston, a black cavalryman, described a black woman named Lulu Sampson as “a very bad character” and “a lewd woman,” in justifying his decision to forcibly dismiss her from the garrison at Fort Bayard, New Mexico.39 George Lyman, a black soldier, faced the charge of writing a note to “an honest upright well-behaved hard working white girl” named Cecilia Braund in which he propositioned her for sex. Lyman admitted to writing the note, but instead called several witnesses who recounted instances of Brown supposedly flirting with them or seeing Brown interact with other men in a manner they deemed
“indecent.” In short, Cecilia Braund’s status as a reputable, higher-class white woman became the primary subject of examination for the remainder of the courts-martial proceedings.40 Lorien
Foote demonstrates that gender, or more specifically various notions of manhood, undergirded ideas about public reputation and honor in both the military and other contexts.41 Whether they were officers’ wives, laundresses, or servants, women often faced intense gendered scrutiny when they testified in trials by court-martial in army garrisons in the U.S. West during the post-
Civil War era.
Private John H. Washington, a member of the 9th Cavalry, lacked the advantages of high- ranking non-commissioned officers like King in terms of cultivating relationships and networks with officers, but Washington still relied on his lengthy history of reputable service to achieve more favorable results in his trial. Officers at Fort Craig, New Mexico court-martialed
Washington for leaving his unit and returning to the Fort Craig while they were conducting scouting operations in the field. Although Washington pled guilty to the charge, he made a
38 Women who resided on or near military posts often accused soldiers of crimes and/or serve as witnesses for the prosecution during trials by general court-martial. 39 Trumpeter John Thomas, GCM Case File, SS476. 40 Sergeant George Lyman, GCM Case File, QQ4415. 41 Foote, The Gentlemen and the Roughs. 35 verbal statement at the end of the trial in which he recounted some of the harsh treatment he had endured in his company after quarreling with one of his fellow enlisted men. Washington reported the verbal altercation to his commanding officer, but “received no satisfaction” because the officer threatened to physically restrain and gag Washington if he continued to complain.
Ultimately, Washington’s lieutenant ordered other soldiers to tie Washington to a wooden post in an uncomfortable position where he remained until after dark. Washington stated that after his release, “I took my carbine and [ammunition] belt expecting to be treated worse if I remained with the company. I either had to take the law into my own hands to protect myself.” The accused soldier also professed that “it would be better for [him] to report to the [commanding] officer Fort Craig then it would maybe to be provoked to do serious injury to myself or other parties.”42
Washington clearly recognized the hierarchical relationship that existed between officers, non-commissioned officers and rank-and-file enlisted men, but his use of the phrases “received no satisfaction” and “took the law into my own hands to protect myself” suggest that
Washington still believed that enlisted men were entitled to certain rights and protections from harsh treatment. Washington also took the rhetoric of soldiers’ rights and protections a step further, arguing that if officers failed in what he perceived to be their duties to protect him from injury, then desertion and self-defense were justified.43 Despite his guilty plea and appeals to rights, Washington submitted his honorable discharge papers to the court from his service as a soldier in the United States Colored Troops during the Civil War, along with discharge paperwork from two other enlistments with the 10th U.S. Cavalry in the regular army after the war. Washington’s discharge papers from previous enlistments essentially served as a substitute
42 Private John H. Washington, GCM Case File, QQ2407. 43 I will cover more material related to soldiers’ ideas about rights in the next chapter. 36 for officers from his current unit who were unavailable or perhaps unwilling to testify as character witnesses for him. Without a network of officers to support him, discharge papers signed by officers affirming his character as “excellent” and “good,” allowed Washington to create a history of himself as a reputable soldier. In the end, the court sentenced Washington to confinement at hard labor for five months and required him to forfeit $10 of his monthly pay each month.44 Given that a private in the U.S. Army only earned $16 per month at the time, this was certainly not a light sentence, but Washington might have achieved the result he wanted in being permitted to continue his military career. Army records indicate that John H. Washington completed his sentence and the remainder of his enlistment (with a character rating of “fair”) and served another enlistment in the 24th Infantry Regiment until his discharge in 1888 (with a character rating of “generally good”).45
Eight years earlier than John Washington, Private John Taylor, a white enlisted man in the 4th Cavalry, employed a similar legal strategy in 1873 when he was court-martialed at Fort
McKavett, Texas, for stealing clothing and money from the tent of Mary Ann Sharpe, an
African-American woman who lived and worked on the post. In a personal statement at the end of the proceedings, Taylor stated that this incident was the first time he had ever been court- martialed and referenced his four years of service as a volunteer during the Civil War along with seven years of service in the regular army after the war. The Civil War veteran also attempted to convince the court that his strong reputation as a soldier at the post extended to the most senior
44 Private John H. Washington, GCM Case File, QQ2407. 45 U.S. Army Register of Enlistments, 1878-1884, P-Z, 109, 184, M233, Roll 43, https://www.fold3.com/image/310830233?rec=299726440; Returns from Regular Army Infantry Regiments, June 1821–December 1916, Regimental Returns for 24th Infantry Regiment, January 1888, NARA M665, Reel 247. Unfortunately, after this last discharge, I lose track of John H. Washington. I was unable to find him in the 1900 census and I could not find a pension application file for him under the regular army regiments he served in, but it is possible that he applied for a pension under his USCT regiment. Out of respect for the soldiers, I am trying to be very careful in defining light sentences versus heavy sentences because the soldiers probably had different interpretations about that. 37 ranking officers at the post, stating that his former company commander had informed the post commander and adjutant that Taylor had a “good honorable discharge from the 7th Cavalry and had borne a good character since serving in his company.”46
Although both black and white soldiers based their appeals on reputation in hopes of minimizing the repercussions for violating codes of military discipline, race posed an additional barrier for black enlisted men. Officers’ assessment of black soldiers was not simply based on soldiers’ individual reputability, but also on the racial attitudes that officers held toward those soldiers. In a diary entry from January 1884, John Bigelow recounted a conversation he had with another white officer from the 10th Cavalry about the degenerative impact that serving in black regiments had on the morality of white officers. According to Bigelow, his fellow officer remarked stated, “When he was n a white regiment, he knew that there were men in his company as good as he was; he was desirous of their esteem,” but “negroes have no moral sense. A man wedged between them and a brutal captain, where can he look for moral support and stimulation?”47 In one trial by court-martial, a white officer serving as the witness for the prosecution testified that he “had heard that the negro race had no gratitude repeatedly.”48
Officers at higher echelons of command in the army held similar views on race. For example, an 1874 tabular report from the JAG records for the Department of Texas shows that officers attempted to track the number of courts-martial cases involving burglary, theft, and violence between 1868 and 1873 solely by the race of the alleged offender. The motivations and purposes for commissioning such a report remain unclear. Burglary, theft, and violence were just a few among the many offenses that soldier could potentially commit. Additionally, the
46 Private John Taylor, GCM Case File, PP3414. 47 Bigelow, Garrison Tangles in the Friendless Tenth, 26. 48 Lewis Haskins, GCM Case File, PP4311. 38 number of incidents involving burglary, theft, and violence among enlisted men often paled in comparison to desertion which plagued the army’s manpower throughout the post-Civil War era.
The very existence of the report raises questions about the extent to which the tendency of associating criminality with blackness permeated the officer ranks and how those attitudes informed the judgments of officers in cases involving accused black soldiers.49 In another example, when the Judge Advocate General of the U.S. Army reviewed a case involving desertion by a black cavalryman and was unable to understand the trooper’s motive for deserting, he explained the infraction by associating blackness with ignorance. “The prisoner’s crimes were perpetrated it may be, under the influence of that ignorance which so often and so sadly depraves the race to which he belongs—an ignorance for which neither he nor that race should be held responsible,” he wrote. In this instance, racist tropes informed a white officer’s decision to recommend clemency and the soldier’s release from confinement, but these tropes could also have the opposite effect and work to black soldiers’ detriment.50
Walter Lowrie Finley, an officer serving in the 9th Cavalry at Fort Bayard, New Mexico, wrote to his mother, “It is very comical to see some of the darkey recruits here, they get so scared they can hardly tell their own names.” While Finley was inspecting the guards, he chastised one new enlisted man for failing to clean his weapon. Finley found amusement in the soldier’s fearful reaction to him and mimicked what he believed to be African-American dialect in his letter. “I could hardly keep from laughing and hadn’t the heart to punish him for it,” Finley wrote.51 In general, newly enlisted soldiers, unacquainted with the harsh realities of military life,
49 Letters Received by Judge Advocate General for the Department of Texas, Box 9, Entry 4961, RG 393 Part I, NARA. 50 J. Holt to Secretary of War, July 26, 1870, Letters Sent from Judge Advocate General, Volume 30, RG 153, NARA. 51 Transcripts of Walter Lowrie Finley Letters, 1879-1881, November 11, 1879, Box 10845, Folder 19, New Mexico State Library and Archives, Santa Fe, New Mexico. 39 also had a reputation for incompetence. When it came to black troops however, officers often attributed any perceived deficiencies to racial inferiority. From the outset of the establishment of permanent black regiments in the regular army, high-ranking officials in the federal government, including some army officers, questioned the proficiency of black troops and floated the idea of permanently disbanding black regiments altogether in the 1870s. Many believed that African
Americans were intellectually inferior and therefore, less efficient and more difficult to train than white troops.52 Officers and the general public often adopted derisive attitudes toward white enlisted soldiers as well, but they largely stemmed from ideas about the supposed moral defects of the impoverished class from which many white recruits came. Some officers attributed the incompetence and inefficiency of white soldiers to the recruitment of “bummers, drunkards, boys, and ignorant foreigners.”53 Black soldiers, understanding the importance of humility and pledging loyalty to officers, often assumed deferential tones when requesting clemency. Charles
Countee, an African American soldier found guilty of desertion, assumed such a tone when he wrote a letter to officers requesting an early release from confinement. “I have a desire to be returned to duty with my company as I sincerely promise to do my duty faithfully and I would like to soldier once more. I am very sorry for my having deserted and if I am permitted to soldier once more I will be obedient and try to do my duty faithfully,” Countee promised.54
Attitudes toward newly enlisted soldiers were generally negative among both the officer corps and more veteran enlisted soldiers, but some newly enlisted men attempted to turn these negative portrayals to their advantage in general courts-martial. In early 1871, officers accused
52 “The Army Appropriation Bill” Army and Navy Journal and Gazette, June 24, 1876, 742, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo.31924069759953&view=1up&seq=626 (accessed December 1, 2019). 53 “Army Abuses—Our Recruiting System Part II,” Army and Navy Journal and Gazette, May 6, 1876, 630-631, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo.31924069759953&view=1up&seq=626 (accessed December 1, 2019). 54 Private Charles Countee to Adjutant General of the Department of Texas, November 17, 1873, General Letters Received Department of Texas, Box 21, Entry 4873, RG 393 Part I, NARA. 40
Private John Yousting, a member of 25th Infantry Regiment, of allowing prisoners that Yousting was guarding to cease labor and play cards while he conversed with a Mexican laundress. At the end of his personal statement explaining his actions, Yousting proclaimed “I have only been in the army six months.”55 Yousting was hoping for a more merciful sentence because he was still new to military service and not fully acquainted with army regulations or his duties as an enlisted soldier. Private John Elvine, a white enlisted man who stood trial for selling boots to a Hispanic civilian living near his post in Texas, was more explicit about his identity as a new soldier and request for clemency. Elvine stated, “I would beg the Court to be as lenient as possible in this my first offence. I never having been a Soldier before and ignorant.”56 In the absence of a personal reputation, Elvine and Yousting adopted the identity and all of the stigma attached to the reputation of new soldiers to defend themselves in the courtroom. Perhaps both soldiers hoped that temporarily accepting the identity of new soldiers would allow them to remain in the army, avoid harsh punishment, and one day eventually establish a more positive reputation by gaining experience and performing their duties well within their respective units.
While reputation was one of the few tools available for enlisted men in the military courtroom, reputation certainly had limitations in protecting soldiers from punishment. For more severe infractions, officers sentenced accused soldiers to lengthy periods of confinement and often transferred these soldiers to serve sentences in state prisons. The movement from more familiar surroundings and social connections in military posts to prisons forced soldiers to establish new personal connections to improve their lives in prison or attain an early release.
Therefore, establishing and maintaining a good reputation remained crucial for soldiers as they served prison sentences.
55 Private John Yousting, GCM Case File, PP1457 56 Private John Elvine, GCM Case File, PP1387. 41
In March 1873, officers at Fort Richardson, Texas, court-martialed First Sergeant
Franklin Gibbs and found him guilty of both desertion and theft of military property, sentencing him to a four-year prison term. At the time, the U.S. government t had not yet established the military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, or Alcatraz Island in California and often transferred convicted soldiers to state prisons to serve their sentences. Initially, Gibbs served his sentence at the Texas State Prison in Huntsville, but the War Department transferred Gibbs to the
Missouri State Prison in Jefferson City in August 1874.57 While serving his sentence in
Missouri, Gibbs sent a letter to the Secretary of War requesting that his sentence be commuted.
To justify his request, Gibbs cited both his military service in the Civil War and the regular army after the war. Gibbs wrote, “Having served during the greater part of the late war as a non- commissioned officer in the one hundredth and tenth (110th) U.S. colored troops, and served in
Co. E 10th U.S. Cavalry as First Sergeant six years, I do must humbly trust the Honourable
Secretary will take these points into Consideration, and kindly comute my sentence.”58 Yet,
Gibbs went a step beyond relying on his reputation in the military service to gain an early release from prison, by also emphasizing the positive reputation he had built in prison. He specifically mentioned the names of prison wardens and other prison employees who could offer reassurances about his good character during his imprisonment at both the Texas and Missouri
State Prisons. According to Gibbs, these men could testify that he had “conducted [himself] in a manner to the entire satisfaction of [his] superiors.”59 His appeals based on his reputation in prison were successful, and approximately a year after Gibbs’s initial appeal, the army released
57 Franklin Gibbs, Convict Number 2827, Texas, Convict and Conduct Registers, Convict Record Ledgers, Huntsville, A00001-03000 1875-1945, Texas State Library and Archives (TSLAC). 58 Letter from Franklin Gibbs to W.W. Belknapp Secretary of War, February 1, 1875, part of GCM Case File, PP3100. 59 Gibbs to Belknapp, February 1, 1875. 42 him from prison citing his “continuous good conduct while serving in the Missouri
Penitentiary.”60 Gibbs’s early release from prison occurred approximately one year prior to his the expiration of his original sentence.
The case of Private Jerry Brown highlights the high stakes in the military courtroom and the importance of obtaining early releases from prison. Unlike Franklin Gibbs, who served with the 10th Cavalry at Fort Richardson in North Texas, Brown was a member of the 9th Cavalry stationed at Fort Clark near the U.S.-Mexico border and faced trial in the Kinney County District
Court for assault with an intent to kill. The trial resulted in Brown’s conviction, a dishonorable discharge from the army, and a six-year sentence in the Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville.61
Brown arrived at Huntsville to serve his sentence less than two months after Franklin Gibbs. As a prisoner who fell under state jurisdiction rather than federal authority, Brown remained incarcerated at Huntsville after the military transferred Gibbs and other military prisoners to
Missouri and Kansas. According to prison records, Brown died on January 23, 1878, with slightly more than eighteen months remaining on his sentence while working for a company that leased convicts from the Texas State prison for labor.62
60 Special Orders No. 163, Headquarters Department of the Missouri Assistant-Adjutant General’s Office, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, August 7, 1876, part of GCM Case File, PP3100. 61 Monthly return for the 9th Cavalry Regiment, March 1873, M744, Reel 88, NARA; Kinney County District Court Minutes, 1873-1916, Microfilm Reel 1016773 Vol 1. 1873-1879; U.S. Army Register of Enlistments, 1871-1877, A-G, 75, M233, Roll 38, https://www.fold3.com/image/310873879?rec=300239528; Texas, Convict and Conduct Registers 1875-1945, Convict Record Ledgers, TSLAC. 62 , Jerry Brown, Convict Number 2885, Texas, Convict and Conduct Registers 1875-1945, Convict Record Ledger, 145, TSLAC. This is indicative of the harsh lives that prisoners lived in the convict lease system. For more on the lives of prisoners in both Texas and other southern states see Donald R. Walker, Penology for Profit: A History of the Texas Prison System, 1867-1912 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1988); Robert Perkinson, Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire (New York, N.Y.: Henry Holt and Company, 2010); Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 2009); Talitha L. LeFlouria, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015); Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016). 43
Under the convict-lease system, the state of Texas contracted prisoners to perform labor for railroads, mining companies, plantations, and other private entities; approximately 60 percent of these prisoners between the years 1870-1912 were African Americans.63 Black soldiers served on the frontlines of the Texas frontier prosecuting wars that seized Native American lands and resources, but ex-soldiers sentenced to Texas state prisons built the infrastructure that transformed lands seized by force into a zone deemed more suitable for white settlement.
Although clear distinctions exist between voluntary military service and coerced prison labor, both projects served the interests of settler colonialism and white supremacy.64 Private George
S. Lawson died from a sunstroke while contracted out to E.H. Cunningham eight months into five-year sentence for robbery. Prison records indicate that guards punished Lawson twice for
“indolence” and “impudence” (fifteen lashes for “indolence”).65 At one point during his incarceration, Horace Weaver, a former black cavalryman serving a two-year sentence for robbery, received 25 lashes for “laziness.” Such harsh treatment explains why some former soldiers opted for escape rather than relying on reputation to improve their lives in prison.
Weaver attempted to break out of prison twice, including one effort that involved cutting a hole through the top of building.66 Although he was unsuccessful in escaping, Weaver managed to survive his prison sentence and was discharged in February 1887. Littleton Thomas, who was
63 Paul M. Lucko, “Prison System” Handbook of Texas Online, http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/jjp03 (accessed August 23, 2018). So far, I have been able to identify 18 black enlisted men who served sentences at the Texas State Prison at either Huntsville or Rusk after been convicted of crimes in civilian courts. 64 Kelly Lytle Hernández, City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). 65 George S. Lawson, Convict Number 2495, Texas, Convict and Conduct Registers 1875-1945, Convict Record Ledger, 250, TSLAC. 66 Horace Weaver, Convict Number 2972, Texas, Convict and Conduct Registers 1875-1945, Convict Record Ledger, 24, TSLAC. 44 also serving a five-year sentence in Huntsville, escaped from prison on July 9, 1875.67 John
Foster, a former member of the 25th Infantry, managed to escape from Huntsville barely a week after beginning his sentence.68
The testimony of both white and black enlisted soldiers who served sentences at
Huntsville, Texas, provides some insight into the harsh experiences that prisoners endured at the
Texas State Penitentiary. The War Department transferred Gibbs and other military prisoners from Texas to state prisons in Kansas and Missouri after an investigation revealed the deplorable conditions under which prisoners lived. When 67 military prisoners arrived at the Kansas State
Penitentiary, officials from Kansas collected testimony from the ex-soldiers and wrote that the emaciated and diseased conditions in which they arrived reminded the prison authorities more of
“returned Andersonville war prisoners than of military prisoners.”69 William Price, a former member of the 9th Cavalry, testified as follows:
I was in prison at Huntsville about eight months; worked on the railroad; some weeks we had enough to eat, and some weeks not; got no coffee; had coarse corn bread and beef; sometimes the beef was not fit to eat. . .one prisoner who had been there six or seven years, and had his leg broken, lay in his cell because there was not room for him in the hospital; gangrene set in; they gave him a dose of medicine, and he was dead in half an hour.70
The report from Kansas prison officials largely based on the experiences and testimony of white and black enlisted men was one of the earliest criticisms of the Texas prison system. In response to the negative publicity surrounding the prison at Huntsville, Governor Richard Coke,
67 Littleton Thomas, Convict Number 4301, Texas, Convict and Conduct Registers 1875-1945, Convict Record Ledger, 70, TSLAC. 68 John Foster, Convict Number 2756, Texas, Convict and Conduct Registers 1875-1945, Convict Record Ledger, TSLAC. 69 Report of the Commission Appointed by the Governor of Texas April 10, 1875, to Investigate the Alleged Mismanagement and Cruel Treatment of the Convicts, Houston: A.C. Gray, State Printer, 1875, p. 68, University of Houston M.D. Anderson Library, Special Collections cited hereafter as Report of the Commission, UH Special Collections 70 Report of the Commission, UH Special Collections, 73. 45 formed a small committee to investigate all matters related to the Texas State Prison at
Huntsville.71
In a paper presented before the National Prison Congress at St. Louis [in year], Ward,
Dewey and Co, the company who leased most of the convicts held at Huntsville to perform labor, outlined how a prisoner might improve their lives within the prison system by establishing a relationship with the wardens. The company’s representatives wrote,
“The more we trust a prisoner, the greater are the privileges we offer him. Many of them we make sub-bosses, clerks in the office, store-keepers, allowing them a near approach to the life of freemen, such as relieving them of the convict garb, allowing attendance at church, and in every case condemning every approximation to studied degradation as a means of punishment.”72
Franklin Gibbs, with his literacy and leadership experience as a senior non-commissioned officer in the army, might have been an ideal person to fill one of the roles described by the representatives of Ward, Dewey, and Co. One prison guard at Huntsville stated that “We have men here, whom, when you recognize the better part of their character and trust them, become the best of convicts. . .Some are mechanics, some white and some black.”73 Additionally, the officials managing the prison intended to maintain racial segregation among the convict labor force.74
A closer examination of the experience of another black cavalryman named William
Swanson illustrates how soldiers serving prison sentences established reputations and built rapport with officials who held political power or influence in civilian spaces. Swanson was a member of the 9th Cavalry assigned to Fort Bayard, New Mexico just north of the U.S.-Mexico
71 Walker, Penology for Profit, 37. 72 Report of the Commission, UH Special Collections, 75. 73 “Testimony re: condition of penitentiary, before Assistant Attorney General,” April 1875, Investigations, Records relating to the Penitentiary, 165, Box 022-11, Folder 8b, TSLAC. This is from a separate report commissioned by the Governor of Texas to investigate conditions of the Texas State Penitentiary. 74 “Testimony re: condition of penitentiary, before Assistant Attorney General,” 138, Box 022-11, folder 8a, TSLAC. 46 border in the summer of 1879. Unlike Gibbs, Swanson faced the more serious charge of murder in the 4th degree and was tried and convicted in Grant County by a justice of the peace and sentenced to serve two years in the Grant County jail.75
With William Swanson, there are fewer details about his criminal offense and the trial, but a clearer portrait of Swanson’s experience in confinement exist. In an absence of court documents, a combination of military records and local newspapers assist in understanding the circumstances surrounding the accusations against Swanson. The 9th Cavalry’s monthly returns indicate that officers transferred William Swanson from military custody at Fort Bayard to civilian authorities in Silver City on July 12, 1879.76 Two days later, the Mesilla Valley
Independent, a local newspaper, announced that they had received a telegram from Fort Bayard stating that two soldiers had been shot, resulting in at least one death.77 It is likely that Swanson was the perpetrator in this incident.
A pardon application submitted to Lionel Sheldon, the governor of New Mexico, on behalf of William Swanson offers some descriptions of Swanson’s life as a prisoner. More importantly, these depictions show how the former soldier (discharged in December 1879 at the expiration of his enlistment term) was able to establish his reputation with the local community in Silver City. In an initial letter to the governor, Albert J. Fountain, a Republican politician and attorney, forwarded a request for the pardon of William Swanson to the governor signed by approximately twenty people which provides some insight into the extensive network and
75 Register of Prisoners Confined in the County Jail of Grant County, New Mexico, 1877-1895, Grant County, New Mexico Records, Collection 1974-019, New Mexico State Library and Archives. 76 Returns from Regular Army Cavalry Regiments, 1833–1916, Monthly Returns for 9th Cavalry Regiment, July 1879, M744, Reel 88, NARA. 77 Special thanks to the research team at the Silver City Public Library and Museum for helping me track down some of the details related to this story. “Soldier Killed at Fort Bayard,” Mesilla Valley Independent, 3, University of New Mexico Digital Repository of Historical Newspapers, https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1085&context=mvi_news (accessed February 5, 2020) 47 connections that Swanson established. Among the signers of the pardon application were the district attorney, district judge, members of the grand jury, and the sheriff of Grant County.
Fountain also wrote that “a number of the most prominent businessmen in Silver City” planned to “furnish [Swanson] with the means to embark in business, as a reward for his exemplary conduct.”78 The petitioners briefly referenced the crime for which Swanson was serving his jail sentence, but explained, “there were many mitigating circumstances connected with the commission of the homicide for which Swanson was tried, convicted and sentenced,” suggesting that the petitioners’ perceptions of the Swanson’s crime had changed based on their observations and interactions with Swanson after the trial.79
However, the petitioners devoted more attention to Swanson’s actions as a prisoner, writing that his “exemplary conduct has won him the esteem of all who are familiar with the circumstances; for the last year.” Over the course of his imprisonment, Swanson served as an assistant jailor, and “by his vigilance,” prevented an escape of prisoners confined in the Grant
County Jail on at least one occasion. Around the time that Swanson began his sentence in the county jail after his conviction, the Grant County Herald complained that prisoners serving sentences in the county jail were “often seen on the streets without guards” and the excessive
“liberty that has been granted them” allowed several prisoners to escape from jail.80 With guard duty being an intricate part of military life, Swanson’s military training and experience made him uniquely qualified to serve as an efficient jailor. Yet, the Grant County register of prisoners also indicates that most of the prisoners confined in the county jail were of Mexican or Anglo-
78 Letter from Albert J. Fountain to Lionel A. Sheldon, February 27, 1882, Territorial Archives of New Mexico Roll 100, Penal Papers of Governor Lionel A. Sheldon 1881-1885. 79 Letter from various residents of Silver City, NM to Lionel A. Sheldon, February 13, 1882, Territorial Archives of New Mexico Roll 100, Penal Papers of Governor Lionel A. Sheldon 1881-1885 80 Grant County Herald, July 31, 1880, 1, Microfilm Box 344, Silver City Public Library, Silver City, New Mexico. 48
American descent, meaning that the sheriff entrusted an African-American man with supervising and guarding non-black prisoners.81 The petitioners also described Swanson as “a hard and industrious worker” who had completed most of the carpentry work on new county buildings and was often left unguarded while he performed this labor and never attempted to escape. The petitioners summarized Swanson’s conduct and reputation by stating, “He has by his good conduct and faithful service won the confidence and respect of the good citizens of Silver City who would rejoice at the exercise of executive clemency in his case.”82
Yet, Grant County officials did not simply argue that Swanson’s conduct as a prisoner merited an early release from confinement. Instead these officials made an explicit connection between Swanson’s reputation, his public service to Silver City, and his rights to citizenship.
The petitioners argued that Swanson’s “confinement will accomplish no public good, and his pardon can do no harm, but would restore a worth industrious well meaning but unfortunate man to liberty and the rights of citizenship. We feel confident that if he be pardoned by your
Excellency he will become a good citizen and that a public benefit will result.”83 In the end,
Swanson’s reputation with influential men residing in Grant County resulted in an early release from confinement. The governor of New Mexico pardoned William Swanson, who secured his discharge from the county jail on July 21, 1882.84
In November 1875, the Starr County District Court in Rio Grande City, Texas, indicted, tried, and convicted, John Williamson, a black soldier in the 9th Cavalry, for murder in the first
81 Register of Prisoners Confined in the County Jail of Grant County, New Mexico, 1877-1895, Grant County, New Mexico Records, Collection 1974-019, New Mexico State Library and Archives. 82 Letter from various residents of Silver City, NM to Lionel A. Sheldon, February 13, 1882, Territorial Archives of New Mexico Roll 100, Penal Papers of Governor Lionel A. Sheldon 1881-1885. 83 Letter from various residents of Silver City, NM to Lionel A. Sheldon, February 13, 1882, Territorial Archives of New Mexico Roll 100, Penal Papers of Governor Lionel A. Sheldon 1881-1885. 84 After this pardon and release from the county jail, William Swanson seems to vanish from the historical record. Register of Prisoners Confined in the County Jail of Grant County New Mexico, Grant County, New Mexico Records, Collection 1974-019, New Mexico State Library and Archives. 49 degree, ultimately sentencing him to life in prison.85 After spending nearly twenty years in prison at the Texas State Penitentiary, Williamson received a pardon from the Texas governor,
James S. Hogg, in February 1894. The governor cited Williamson’s “long and faithful service to the state” and the recommendations of prison officials, restoring him “to full citizenship and the right of suffrage.”86 Yet, it is important to interrogate the extent to which black men like
Williamson would have been able to exercise their rights associated with citizenship and suffrage in the middle of the Jim Crow Era. During this period, white southerners in states like Texas were reversing many of the gains in civic rights that black Americans had made during the
Reconstruction era.87
The cases of Franklin Gibbs, John Williamson, and William Swanson demonstrate the continuity in black soldiers’ reliance on reputation to navigate legal systems in a variety of spaces. Reputation and social connections offered some advantages regardless of unit and location. All three soldiers served in different units and at different posts. At the same time, both Swanson’s and Fisher’s respective cases suggest that reputation was useful in both military and civilian legal systems. Obviously, residing in small garrisons in the U.S. West meant that soldiers had regular interaction with other soldiers, but army posts were often located near small towns or settlements populated with civilians who had regular interactions with soldiers.
85 The minutes from the district court of Starr County allows us to track the progress of the case as it worked its way through the county court system. However, the minutes do not include the testimony from the case nor a specific description of the murder Williamson allegedly committed. However, the minutes do offer insight into the composition of the jury; both Anglos and people of Hispanic descent (based on some of the surnames) served as members of the jury. “The State of Texas vs. John Williamson,” Case No. 338, Starr County District Court Minutes, 1848-1923, Vol. A3, 1860-1879, 362, Microfilm Reel 1017266. 86 John Williamson, Applications for Pardons, 1840, 1845-1938, Texas Secretary of State Records, Box 2- 9/447, TSLAC. 87 Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Kenneth Wayne Howell, Still the Arena of Civil War: Violence and Turmoil in Reconstruction Texas, 1865-1874 (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2012); Michael Perman, The Road to Redemption: Southern Politics, 1869-1879 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984); Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888-1908 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). 50
Interactions between civilians and soldiers allowed soldiers to forge social connections with civilians who could testify to their good character in the military courtroom. Buck Childs was a soldier in the 9th Cavalry serving at Fort Bayard, New Mexico just north of the U.S.-
Mexico border. In April 1878, a military court charged Childs for mortally wounding (via gunshot) Squire Bartlett, another African-American soldier, after a personal dispute at a ball in the town of Central City, New Mexico. While receiving treatment for his gunshot wound at the post hospital at Fort Bayard, Bartlett identified Childs as the shooter in a deathbed statement to the doctor attending him, and Bartlett’s statement was the primary evidence that the Judge
Advocate General relied upon to prosecute Childs.88 Childs, with the assistance of a civilian attorney he hired to defend him, assembled a group of witnesses composed of several soldiers, a saloon keeper, two other civilian men, a laundress, and a Mexican couple to testify in his defense.
After a general court-martial that lasted two weeks, the members found Childs guilty of murder and sentenced him to 15 years imprisonment in the Kansas State Penitentiary. Childs sent a written appeal to the Secretary of War requesting a review of his case. In the request,
Childs emphasized both his personal reputation and the reputation of the witnesses who testified on his behalf stating, “I have been for about four years a member of the 9th Cavalry and have always been a faithful and obedient soldier.” Of the witnesses who testified in support of him,
Childs wrote, “the six or seven witnesses for the defense were all creditable Gentlemen and business men of the county.”89
88 Private Buck Gilds, GCM Case File, QQ673. 89 Letter from Private Buck Childs to the Secretary of War, December 1, 1878, Buck Childs, GCM Case File, QQ673. 51
W.M. Dunn, the Judge Advocate General in Washington D.C., did eventually review
Childs’s case and concluded that “the case was imperfectly and unskillfully tried, its difficulties being beyond the experience of the Judge Advocate of the court.” However, Dunn also stated that the testimony of witnesses from the defense was too contradictory and recommended that the results of the trial should stand. Dunn’s analysis is a stark contrast to the officer who actually prosecuted the case. In his closing argument before the members, the prosecuting officer argued
“when we find a remarkable agreement in a number of witnesses, even in trifling details, it is of itself a reason to suspect collusion and arrangement, especially when those witnesses are summoned in the interest of one party.”90 Dunn also made an explicit connection between reputation and race in stating, “the testimony of witnesses like those in those case, ignorant negroes trained under the poisonous influences of slavery, is never to be relied on without caution.”91 If this was the type of guidance that senior military officials provided to junior officers, racism was an extra burden for black men who entered the military courtroom. While personal reputation existed as one of black troops’ only weapons for achieving favorable outcomes in courts-martial, the racist attitudes that white officers sometimes held toward black troops placed an additional burden on black enlisted men. Not only did black soldiers have to prove that they were reputable soldiers, but they also had to work to challenge or counter the racist attitudes of white officers toward black enlisted men.
Ultimately, Buck Childs served less than one year of his 15-year sentence because he received a pardon from President Rutherford B. Hayes through the efforts of an attorney Childs
90 Private Buck Childs, GCM Case File, QQ673. During the courts-martial proceedings, some of the questions and objections voiced by members of the court suggest that they had already decided on a verdict before the trial’s end. 91 Private Buck Childs, GCM Case File, QQ673. 52 hired.92 Yet, in 1891, approximately twelve years after his release from prison, Childs penned another letter to the Secretary of War, revealing some of the economic consequences and obstacles that black veterans faced even after attaining early releases from prison sentences.
Childs mentioned some of the financial difficulties he faced in being unable to pay his legal fees.
Although Childs did not reference pensions in his letter, his dishonorable discharge from the army would have also prevented him from attaining approval for a monthly pension for his military service; thus, denying him another source of income. He argued that despite his early release from prison, the entire murder trial had permanently damaged his reputation. Childs wrote, “I have from time to time been seriously injured on account of this charge against me, as I am a cook, and of course persons hearing these stories would not want to employ me.”93
Perhaps most importantly, Childs’s case offers an example of how black soldiers relied on social connections beyond the immediate vicinity of army posts to navigate the military justice system. In fact, the experience of Buck Childs is a reminder that the broader military community included some of the small settlements located near the posts.
Yet, enlisted soldiers’ social connections extended even farther than these communities.
Historians have often raised questions about how enlisted soldiers serving in the U.S. West maintained their connections with the eastern United States where many of them lived prior to joining the army.94 But Henry James’s experience in the military justice system reveals not only how soldiers maintained social connections with people residing in the east, but also how
92 Letter from Buck Childs to the Secretary of War, October 2, 1891, Buck Childs GCM Case File, QQ673. At one point in the letter to the Secretary of War, Childs writes that he learned that the court that tried him did not have lawful jurisdiction. This may have been why he was able to secure the pardon. If this is true, jurisdiction probably should’ve fallen under the civilian court in Grant County since the shooting occurred within the village limits of Central City even though the event involved two soldiers. 93 Childs to the Secretary of War, October 2, 1891. 94 Utley, Frontier Regulars; Coffman, The Old Army; Dobak and Phillips, The Black Regulars, 1866-1898; Adams, Class and Race in the Frontier Army. 53 soldiers relied on those connections to navigate the military justice system. James was a member of the 24th Infantry Regiment and was very close to completing his first enlistment in 1890 when he and Private Alfred Jackson, another soldier from the 24th Infantry, ran into trouble with the law. James faced a trial by general court-martial for stealing $300 worth of gold pieces from a nearby post trader and resisting arrest.95
Henry James first relied on his connections through the military. Like other soldiers previously mentioned, James and the lawyer focused their defense strategy on James’s reputation in the unit. During the trial, James called on an officer as a witness who testified to James’s excellent character. James also contacted his former commanding officer, First Lieutenant James
E. Bush, requesting a letter of recommendation for the court. Bush agreed to write a letter and wrote that James had served as his clerk for nearly a year and half. During James’s time as a clerk Bush “found [James] to be intelligent, obedient, an efficient clerk reliable and of excellent character and habits and no one was more surprised and shocked at [his] offence than I was.”96
Even Adolph Lea, the post trader from whom Jackson and James stole the money, testified that he was acquainted with James for over a year and “considered his reputation as good.”97 Lea also commended James for arranging to have the stolen money returned to him. Despite James’s emphasis on his excellent reputation, the members of the court found him guilty of both charges and sent James to the Kansas State Penitentiary to serve a five-year sentence.
In a letter to the U.S. Army Adjutant General appealing for James’s release, James’ attorneys castigated Alfred Jackson, James’s partner in crime, for turning on James and testifying against him for the prosecution in exchange for a lighter sentence. James’s attorneys argued that
95 Private Henry James, GCM Case File, RR4335. 96 Letter from Company Commander, November 5, 1890, Private Henry James GCM Case File, RR4335. 97 Private Henry James, GCM Case File, RR4335. 54
Jackson’s willingness to betray his comrade in court damaged Jackson’s credibility as a witness.
The lawyers stated that “great weight should be given to evidence of good character and reputation, as it often happens that this is the only protection that an innocent person has against false accusers.”98 In addition to providing assurances about their own character or reputations, another option for accused soldiers was to question or demean the reputation of witnesses who testified against them, as James’s attorneys did.99
When his social connections within the military community failed him, James turned to older connections in Washington D.C. In January 1891, Ella Washington, a woman residing in
Washington D.C. wrote a letter to the J.A.G. office in Washington D.C. requesting that the War
Department reduce James’s five-year sentence to two years. In her letter, Washington cited her acquaintance with James prior to his enlistment in the army. Washington wrote that she “never knew [James] to be other than a polite, sober, and industrious young man.” Washington also emphasized that James had worked for “several influential families” in the city who could support her claim about his reputation. However, Washington confessed that she did not want to ask these families for their assistance in securing James release because doing so would have been “detrimental to his interest since [James] intends coming home as soon as released.”100
Washington’s assertions suggests that his reputation in D.C. was in danger. While the influential families could probably have assisted in testifying to James’s “excellent character” prior to enlistment in the army, their discovery of James’s conduct in the army could have diminished his
98 Argument of Fielder Brothers and Heflin (attorneys for Henry James) part of Private Henry James GCM Case File, RR4335. 99 In another example, a black enlisted man serving as a witness for the defense attacked the prosecution’s primary witness for reputation for “truth and veracity” by mentioning instances in which the witness tried to convince him to testify “differently” in a case. Thornton Reeves, GCM Case File, OO3460. 100 Letter from Ella Washington to Judge Advocate General, January 3, 1891, Private Henry James GCM Case File, RR4335. In another letter written the same month, Washington revealed that she and James intended to be married upon his return to Washington D.C. from his enlistment. When I checked the 1880 census for Washington D.C. there are several women named Ella Washington residing there. 55 reputation and discouraged the families from offering James employment upon his return. Ella
Washington understood that the War Department would be interested in scrutinizing her reputation for veracity and upstanding as a woman. To head off any skepticism in the War
Department about her reputation, Washington identified Horace A. Taylor, an official working in the Office of the Commissioner of Railroads for the Department of Interior, as an individual who could provide more information about her.101
In September 1892 the War Department reduced James’s sentence from five years to four years based on Ella Washington’s appeal for clemency and his “perfect” record as a prisoner in the Kansas State Penitentiary. In the early part of 1893, Henry James renewed his campaign for a full pardon and release from prison by submitting letters to both the JAG office in Washington
D.C. and President Grover Cleveland. Like Franklin Gibbs, William Swanson, and other former enlisted men held prisoner, James managed to establish relationships with other influential people while serving his prison sentence to aid him in his request for release. F.A. Briggs, the chaplain at the Kansas State Penitentiary, submitted a letter in support of James’s application for pardon stating that James “is a most excellent prisoner, never having given any trouble to officers since his incarceration. He is quiet, orderly and attends to his business as well as well as any person I ever knew.”102
James also emphasized another connection he had established with a potential employer in Oklahoma. Even though James had less than one year remaining on his sentence, he
101 Washington to Judge Advocate General, January 3, 1891; Letter from Ella Washington to the Secretary of War, January 18, 1891, Private Henry James GCM Casefile RR4335. In this second letter, Washington reveals that James worked as a clerk in the Department of the Interior, but she shifts away from the rhetoric of reputation and tries to appeal more based on her identity as a soldier’s wife (or soldier’s fiancé in this case) emphasizing how she does not like the separation from him because of his prison sentence. This rhetoric is common, but I also think it’s important when talking about soldiers and their families, but I plan on engaging with it more in a chapter on soldiers’ rhetoric of rights. 102 Letter from F.A. Briggs to President Grover Cleveland, October 6, 1893, Private Henry James GCM Case File, RR4335. 56 advocated for a pardon, because he was “offered good employment in Oklahoma by persons acquainted with my present surroundings and I am anxious to go and live with these people who have such confidence in my [illegible] good behavior.” James, anticipating the skepticism of officers in the JAG department, also provided the names of his potential employers. James wrote, “If this statement is doubted you are requested to correspond with Mr. and Mrs. Frank
Mitchell, wholesale and retail grain dealers, El Reno, Oklahoma Territory.” The former soldier also attempted to boost his reputation by demonstrating the exceptionality of his case in stating
“that a convict seldom receives such offers of assistance. In the sight of this information it is expected that you fill find sufficient inducement to warrant you in re-considering your recent decision in my case.”103
By December 1893/January 1894, the Department of Justice turned the case over to the
J.A.G. office in Washington D.C. It is likely that James, dissatisfied with the J.A.G.
Department’s first denial of clemency and refusal of the immediate release from prison, appealed directly to the President of the United States hoping for a different result. William C. Endicott, the Attorney in charge of Pardons, wrote that he preferred to defer to the War Department’s recommendation prior to sending the application to the president for his consideration. Overall,
James learned the value in establishing personal connections and social networks with influential people during his time in Washington D.C. James maintained his social connections to the East but sought to expand his connections to influential individuals throughout his time in the army and prison in the West.104
103 Letter from Henry James to Judge Advocate General, May 3, 1893, Private Henry James GCM Case File, RR4335. 104 Here is where the trail runs cold with this court-martial file. I have no way of proving of it without digging a bit deeper, but when the DOJ turned the case back over to the War Department and J.A.G., in January 1894 officers probably ignored the request and decided not to take any action because Henry James’s sentence was scheduled to end on April 26, 1894. Rather than go through War Department bureaucracy and sifting through more 57
Compared to his African-American counterparts in the army, Henry James was more of an exceptional case than the norm. Most enlisted soldiers, both black and white, came from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds and did not have the kind of social or political connections as Henry James.105 However, when these connections were available, soldiers like
James did not hesitate to use them. Prior to his enlistment in the 2nd Cavalry, Private John
French, had an interesting history and personal connections. French came from a well-to-do
English family and graduated from the Woolwich Military College in England and served briefly as a commissioned officer in the Royal Artillery. For reasons unknown and despite disapproval from his father, French traveled to the United States and enlisted in the 2nd Cavalry. Two years into his enlistment, a general courts-martial board sentenced him to prison at Alcatraz after a confrontation in which French refused to obey an officer’s orders.106
While undergoing his prison sentence, French appealed to an influential friend named
P.J. Thomas to help secure his release. Thomas owned a large printing and publishing company in San Francisco and wrote a letter to the Secretary of War arguing that French’s insubordination was the result of a “mental aberration” in his longer personal history.107 Thomas secured the support of Senator Leland Stanford in his appeal. Thomas’s letter and his reputation as a “man of the strictest integrity, excellent judgement and great care as to what he says and does” influenced officials like William S. Rosecrans into supporting the remission of French’s sentence.108
paperwork, it probably would’ve been easier to just sit on the paperwork and wait three months for James to be released. 105 Adams, Class and Race in the Frontier Army; Coffman, The Old Army; Dobak and Phillips, The Black Regulars, 1866-1898; McChristian, Regular Army O!; Rickey Jr., Forty Miles a Day on Beans and Hay. 106 Private John A.I. French, GCM Case File, SS173. Letter from P.J. Thomas to the Secretary of War 107 Letter from P.J. Thomas to the Secretary of War, no date, but probably written in 1891, part of Private John A.I. French, GCM Case File, SS173. 108 Letter from William S. Rosecrans to Redfield Proctor (Secretary of War) October 10, 1891, part of Private John A.I. French, GCM Case File, SS173. Like other soldiers, I am not certain about the result French achieved in attaining his release. 58
In 1880, Private Edward F. Schoch, a member of the 6th Cavalry, deserted his unit fleeing a cruel first sergeant. Remarkably, Schoch managed to avoid capture for eight years, before the federal government arrested and tried him as a deserter in 1888. Ultimately, the members of
Schoch’s general court-martial found him guilty of desertion and sentenced him to three years in prison at the Kansas State Penitentiary. However, members of the community where Schoch had lived during his eight years away from the army persuaded the Secretary of War to mitigate
Schoch’s sentence and release him prison early. On April 2, 1890, a group of citizens sent a letter to the President of the United States stating that Schoch had “been a good citizen and a steady man always at work.” Furthermore, the citizens promised to “see that [Schoch] would have work” as soon as he returned from prison.109 Over the eight years Schoch had resided in
Los Angeles, California, he had established a reliable social network with a constable, merchants, grain dealers, and carpenters that he relied upon to attain an early release from prison.
Schoch decided to sever his connections with the military and established a new network of influential men after he fled military service. That network served him well when he once again had to face the perils and uncertainty of the military justice system.
Changes in the military justice system accompanied broader shifts in the 1880s and 1890s related to the U.S. Army’s professionalization including: concentrating military units into larger garrisons, conducting more tactical and marksmanship training, undertaking greater efforts to advance soldiers’ formal educations, combating alcoholism, improving enlisted men’s health/living arrangements, and other matters.110 While these institutional changes certainly
109 Letter signed by multiple people from Wilmington, Los Angles California to the President of the United States, April 2, 1890, Private Edward Schoch, GCM Case File, RR3238. 110 There is a historiographical consensus surrounding this subject. The end of the Indian Wars and the securing of the frontier in the 1890s generally marked an end to the army’s constabulary role in the West. This meant that the army could focus less on fighting Native Americans and manning numerous forts in small units to 59 helped improve the quality of life for enlisted men, some changes in the conduct of courts- martial had profound consequences for enlisted men attempting to employ the rhetoric of reputation in the courtroom.
The army institutionalized consideration of enlisted men’s reputation as a formal part of general courts-martial proceedings in 1886 and included these instructions in an updated field manual for conducting courts-martial that the U.S. Army distributed to line officers in the field.
The new instructions authorized members of general courts-martial to consider previous convictions from summary and garrison courts-martial at the end of each accused soldier’s trial
“to see if the prisoner is an old offender and therefore less entitled to leniency than if on trial for his first offense.”111 Additionally, army regulations required officers to fill out a form that outlined soldiers’ previous enlistments and the character of discharge. In theory, members were not supposed to use information about soldiers’ previous enlistments or convictions to decide on an accused soldier’s guilt, but there was no official enforcement mechanism for this process.
When officers court-martialed Thomas Goodlow in 1882, no form outlining an individual soldier’s history existed. The absence of such a form provided Goodlow with space to narrate his own service history to the court,
devote time to training and becoming a more professional fighting force. Foner, The United States Soldier between Two Wars; Coffman, The Old Army; Millett and Maslowski, For the Common Defense. 111 Instructions for Courts-Martial Including Summary Courts Prepared Under Direction of Brigadier General Wesley Merritt by Lieutenant Arthur Murray, 1891, 52-53. 60
I am now on my third enlistment in the army and have served nearly seven years in Company D 24th Infantry-about four years of which I have served as a non- commissioned officer. During that period of service I have always borne a good character from my superior officers. I have never been in confinement or in any trouble or caused my Co. commander any before this.112
In some cases, formal consideration of enlisted solders’ disciplinary and service history simplified the process of using reputation as a legal strategy for enlisted soldiers. If soldiers wanted to direct the members’ attention toward their previous service records, they did not have to attempt to convey their service history or supply discharge papers to the court (they often lost them) because army regulations made consideration of soldiers’ history a formal part of the administration of military justice. Furthermore, if soldiers had not considered employing their reputation as a legal defense strategy, reputation was an additional tool institutionalized by changes in courts-martial proceedings. This was of course contingent upon officers following regulations and performing their duties honestly without misrepresenting soldiers to achieve results that officers deemed favorable. In 1892, the court originally intended to dishonorably discharge Private Charles Williams for theft, but ultimately mitigated his sentence after considering his previous ten years of service. On the other hand, the court dishonorably discharged Edward A. Stubbs after examining his previous convictions in lower courts.113
While new army regulations institutionalized consideration of soldiers’ history as a formal part of the military legal process, it did so on the narrow basis of soldiers’ criminality and the character of a discharge (usually based on one word “excellent”, “good”, “fair”, “poor”).
Beginning in 1891, the rhetoric of reputation that soldiers often employed in written or verbal statements at the end of trials became a more complicated process. Prior to the 1890s, soldiers
112 Sergeant Thomas Goodlow, GCM Case File, QQ3529. 113 Private Charles Williams, GCM Case File, SS849 and Private Edward A. Stubbs, GCM Case File, SS725. 61 had more space to potentially embellish their military service history and reputation as a soldier, but the revised regulations required soldiers to position their own versions of their service history against what officers had written about them in discharge papers and previous convictions. In the 1890s, the creation of a lower court-martial (summary courts) sped up the process of trying soldiers by court-martial. However, the ease with which officers could court-martial enlisted soldiers under this new system led to an increase in court-martial trials in the 1890s.114 In this respect, soldiers had lengthier paper trails for minor offenses that officers could potentially use against them for imposing harsher punishments for future infractions. For example, Private John
H. Dockett had six previous convictions between September and December of 1895 by summary courts-martial when he faced a general court-martial in February 1896, which ultimately led to officers dishonorably discharging him from the army.115 Therefore, the rhetoric of reputation became a contest in narrating an accused soldier’s history.
In many ways, black soldiers were following a script laid out for them by their officers and operating within the structures available to them in the regular army during the post-Civil
War era. Black enlisted men’s appeals based on reputation usually struck a deferential or humble tone catering to the attitudes of officers who viewed obedient and loyal soldiers more favorably than the more independent-minded individuals deemed disruptive to good order and discipline. Implicit in enlisted men’s appeals, was an expectation of officers to fulfill certain obligations as a reward for faithful and reputable service. After being found guilty and imprisoned for desertion, Charles H. Johnson wrote a letter to a former company commander
114 Coffman, The Old Army, 378. Here is another issue with summary courts-martial. Because sentences for summary courts-martial were often lighter than those of general courts-martial, officers frequently encouraged enlisted men to plead guilty and accept the sentence to speed up the process (and consequently make the officers’ job easier with less paperwork being required). A series of guilty pleas in numerous lower courts would count against the soldiers later in the general courts-martial even though the previous infractions were minor. 115 Private John H. Dockett, GCM Case File, 2911 62 reminding him, “you promised that if any of your men were sent to prison that you would do all you could to get them out.” Johnson then cited “persecution” as one of the reasons why he deserted.116 Rather than following the script that officers outlined for them, some soldiers deviated from it or constructed their own scripts altogether by directly critiquing officers and army life in general by specifically pointing out to what they perceived as injustices from officers and inadequate protections of soldiers’ rights. The next chapter turns to these more assertive claims.
116 Letter 772, September 19, 1876, Index of Letters Received Volume 5 1874-1876, Entry 4960, RG 393 Part I, NARA. 63
Chapter 2
“Without Just Cause”: Black Enlisted Men and the Rhetoric of Rights
At Fort Davis, Texas, in 1879, Private Thomas Johnson, a member of the 25th Infantry
Band, stood trial for willfully smashing his musical instrument and destroying his music book during band practice (amounting to $66 in U.S. government property). In a written statement submitted to the members of the court who ultimately decided the accused soldier’s fate, Johnson wrote that he had recently performed extra duty by serving as a cook for the band. Johnson learned that the band’s commanding officers had received complaints about the quality of food served to the band members. Johnson approached the officer seeking “to explain to him that I know nothing about cooking, and that I was doing the best I possibly could, but he ordered me to cease talking and ordered me confined. I also wish to state while confined I was required to attend Band Practice. . .I became terribly excited for the moment, thinking that I had been confined without just cause.”1 While officers turned to the military justice system to maintain good order and discipline within the ranks, enlisted men like Thomas Johnson expressed their own notions of justice, order, and how the military justice system should operate.
When officers prosecuted soldiers for infractions in trials by courts martial, they often expressed little interest in the intent or reasons why soldiers committed these infractions (or at least the case transcripts written by clerks do not reflect this interest). In Johnson’s case, the
Judge Advocate General and members of the court were primarily interested in establishing the specific set of events, place, and time to determine whether the band member had committed the crime. Yet, accused soldiers like Johnson often explained the intent behind their infractions or the circumstances that led to up to it in verbal and/or written statements for the members to
1 Private Thomas Johnson, GCM Case File, QQ1442. 64 consider in their deliberations on findings and sentencing. Much like appeals to reputability, soldiers hoped that these explanations would convince members of courts martial to impose lighter sentences or exempt them from punishment altogether. Thomas Johnson made no such appeal to reputability and instead emphasized that his act of sabotage was the result of the unfair treatment he had endured from officers who had confined him “without just cause.” Soldiers’ attempts to force intent into the proceedings offers a lens for understanding how soldiers understood and articulated notions of rights and justice during trials by court-martial.
Navigating the military justice system by making appeals based on reputability and claims based on rights were not mutually exclusive strategies, but they operated differently.
Appeals to reputation implicitly argued that soldiers had earned certain protections or favorable actions based on previous histories of respectable or upright behavior as an enlisted man; such requests rarely challenged to commissioned or non-commissioned officers to consider their own behavior. On the other hand, by expressing notions of rights or arguing against maltreatment, enlisted men made thinly veiled or outright criticisms of their leaders’ behavior or life in the U.S.
Army.
Desertion, insubordination, mutiny, and other infractions violated specific tenets of the
Articles of War, but officers often tried soldiers under the 99th Article of War. This article allowed officers to try soldiers for any conduct deemed prejudicial to good order and discipline that was not specified in other articles or regulations. Deciding what behavior constituted an infraction against this Article of War was ultimately at the discretion of officers. Officers wanted to maintain a rigid social order in the interest of preserving military discipline, but trials by court-martial reveal how enlisted men had their own visions and ideas about social order in the army. As enlisted soldiers in the regular army changed the political and social order in the 65
West by expanding and enforcing the physical boundaries of the United States, they also sought to expand the boundaries of their rights and protections within the army. Despite being at the bottom of the regular army’s social ladder, both black and white enlisted men in the regular army believed that they were entitled to certain rights such as: addressing their grievances with supervisors, protecting themselves from harsh treatment at the hands of non-commissioned officers and commissioned officers, and accessing proper food and healthcare. For enlisted soldiers, the absence of these rights and protections violated what they viewed as good order.
Enlisted soldiers understood that desertion, insubordination, and mutiny were punishable offenses, and yet in some cases, they justified these extralegal actions as last-ditch efforts to protect their rights and improve their material conditions as soldiers.
Over the years, scholars have been very effective at exploring the epidemic rates of desertion in the regular U.S. Army throughout the nineteenth century and how officials at all levels of command attempted to address this problem. Scholars have also emphasized that desertion, along with theft, insubordination, mutiny, and other disciplinary infractions were often enlisted men’s responses to the harsh material conditions that soldiers endured in the West.2
However, historians have not fully explored how enlisted soldiers themselves explained or discussed desertion and other disciplinary infractions when they faced trials by court-martial.
Scholars have often discussed how citizen-soldiers, individuals who temporarily volunteered for military service during wartime, carried their ideas about citizenship and rights into the army with them and frequently challenged the authority of officers. One of the critiques that the
2 In addition to internal factors that led to desertion, Jack D. Foner also stresses the external economic factors that led to desertion. During times of economic turmoil in the United States, enlistment rates increased while desertion rates decreased. Yet, in times of relative economic prosperity, enlisted soldiers bolted from the ranks to higher-paying jobs in the civilian employment sector. Foner, The United States Soldier between Two Wars, 9–10, 222–24; Rickey Jr., Forty Miles a Day on Beans and Hay; Utley, Frontier Regulars; Adams, Class and Race in the Frontier Army; Lahti, Cultural Construction of Empire; McChristian, Regular Army O! 66 general public held toward regular army soldiers was the supposed ease with which enlistees voluntarily surrendered their individual liberty to serve in an institution that was fundamentally undemocratic. Despite serving lengthier periods in the army than many volunteer soldiers, regular army men were also extremely conscious of their rights as soldiers and constantly pushed the boundary to ensure that officers and non-commissioned officers respected those rights. In this respect, there are more similarities between volunteers and regulars than scholars have previously acknowledged.3
African American men’s assertion of rights as enlisted soldiers in the U.S. Army dated back to the Civil War when 180,000 black soldiers served in the United States Colored Troops regiments. The very act of serving in the military during the military during the Civil War was a claim to rights, citizenship, and broader inclusion in the body politic of the United States. As some scholars have demonstrated however, black enlisted men undertook the process of rights- making within the U.S. Army against the coercion of racist officers, corporal punishment, and harsh material conditions in an institution that often seemed more reminiscent of slavery than freedom.4
3 This scholarship tends to focus these discussions about soldiers making declarations of rights on volunteer soldiers rather than regular army. There is a tendency to present regular army soldiers as being somewhat more adaptable and amenable to a rigid hierarchy than volunteer soldiers, which might be true to an extent. However, this doesn’t mean that they didn’t push the boundaries to protect what they perceived to be rights. Foos, A Short, Offhand, Killing Affair; Foote, The Gentlemen and the Roughs; Andrew S. Bledsoe, Citizen-Officers: The Union and Confederate Volunteer Junior Officer Corps in the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015); Lang, In the Wake of War. 4 Joseph T. Glatthaar, Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Officers (New York and London: Free Press, 1990); John David Smith, Black Soldiers in Blue: African American Troops in the Civil War Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Christian G. Samito, “The Intersection between Military Justice and Equal Rights: Mutinies, Courts-Martial, and Black Civil War Soldiers,” Civil War History 53, no. 2 (October 3, 2007): 170–202; Emberton, “Only Murder Makes Men”; Carole Emberton, Beyond Redemption: Race, Violence, and the American South after the Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Jonathan Lande, “Trials of Freedom: African American Deserters during the U.S. Civil War,” Journal of Social History 49, no. 3 (March 2016): 693–709; Lang, In the Wake of War, 158–81. 67
In May 1865, the XXV Infantry Corps composed of USCT regiments began deploying to
Texas for occupation duty. Rather than deploying to the interior of Texas where the federal government desperately needed troops to protect freedpeople, commanders would station most of black troops on the Rio Grande to secure the border against in the event of an invasion of the
United States by Mexican forces under Maximilian.5 On June 6, 1865, aboard the steamship
Thomas A. Scott near Mobile Bay, approximately 15 to 20 black soldiers from the 109th USCI confronted their white officers and demanded the release of two comrades who the officers had ordered confined in chains on the deck of the ship. Eventually, the officers with the assistance of some of the regiment’s non-commissioned officers, convinced the men to return to their bunks and tried the parties identified as being involved by general court-martial once the regiment arrived in Texas. For the officers, this behavior was a breach of military protocol and mutinous conduct, but for the soldiers, the mutiny was a justified opposition to a form of discipline that reminded them of their experience as enslaved people. According to one officer who testified during the ensuing general court-martial, one of the soldiers involved in the disturbance stated,
“’We came from home to get rid of such treatment.’” Insubordination or mutiny with the goal of protecting soldiers’ rights and protesting harsh treatment were rooted in many black enlisted men’s experience in slavery and their claims to citizenship; black men who served in the regular army would continue to advocate for such rights well into the post-Civil War era.6
A number of black men who served in USCT regiments during the Civil War opted to continue their military careers and transferred directly to the regular army units after the war, with others enlisting in the regular army after a short stint away from military life.7 Historians
5 William L. Richter, The Army in Texas during Reconstruction, 1865-1870 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1987), 17–18. 6 Corporal Jake Matlinger, GCM Case File, MM3244. 7 Dobak and Phillips, The Black Regulars, 1866-1898, 24. 68 have emphasized that black units in the regular army had lower desertion rates and higher reenlistment levels than white regiments. Military service appealed to many black men because racial discrimination limited the career and economic opportunities available to African
Americans in most other occupations, especially in the eastern part of the United States.8
Realizing that there were few available career prospects, it is all the more important to explore what led to black soldiers’ decisions to desert and how they discussed desertion. Trials by court- martial of unsuccessful deserters who were ultimately unsuccessful in their attempt to desert the army serve as the primary lens for understanding the motives for desertion, but it is possible that many other soldiers who successfully avoided capture and trial shared similar opinions; the attitudes of this second group are absent from the historical record. Although black men found the profession of arms appealing, they carried their ideas about rights and citizenship into the army with them and made appeals based on these ideas to improve the material conditions associated with their chosen careers.
In June 1872 three African American soldiers, Alexander Ezebb, Henry Coss, and
George James faced trials by general court-martial for desertion at Fort Duncan. The soldiers were all from different units, and they all made personal statements at the end of their respective trials, but they approached the subject of desertion in different ways. Henry Coss, was an enlisted soldier who originally hailed from Nova Scotia and was serving in his first enlistment when he deserted in April 1872.9 Coss offered an implicit criticism of the administration of discipline in his unit by outlining the pattern of treatment he endured at the hands of his
8 Leckie, The Buffalo Soldiers, 99, 163; Kenner, Buffalo Soldiers and Officers of the Ninth Cavalry, 1867– 1898, 1999, 23; Dobak and Phillips, The Black Regulars, 1866-1898, 44–66; Leiker, Racial Borders, 83; Adams, Class and Race in the Frontier Army, 171. 9 U.S. Army Registers of Enlistment, 1869-1870, A-O, 162, M233, Roll 36, https://www.fold3.com/image/310873954?rec=300241377. 69 supervisors that ultimately led to his desertion. “I have been trying to be a good soldier, but I have been punished for every little offense I committed,” Coss complained. “I was sent to the guard house and made to carry a log. I have been tied up a great many times and have been told at different times by the Captain of the company that I better desert. . .I got to believe that the captain did not want me any more and I followed his advice and deserted.” While Coss did not declare that desertion was a right or justified, he did present desertion as a last resort that was the result of what he believed to be the excesses of military discipline.10
As Coss’s case demonstrates officers and non-commissioned officers sometimes encouraged enlisted soldiers to desert. Although desertion deprived the army of critical manpower, desertion offered a means to remove soldiers they deemed troublesome or burdensome from their command. It was not uncommon for officers to attempt to court-martial soldiers for “worthlessness,” which as the JAG officer assigned to the Department of Texas explained, was not “classed as a crime.”11 Some of the soldiers were never heard from again, but capture could result in a trial court-martial and a dishonorable discharge to permanently remove them from the ranks.
Unlike Coss, Alexander Ezebb was a sergeant in the 25th Infantry Regiment and was an experienced soldier who had served since the Civil War. He was well acquainted with army regulations and maintained that he never intended to desert. For Ezebb, leaving his unit without
10 There is other evidence that officers and non-commissioned officers encouraged enlisted soldiers to desert. Desertion deprived the army of critical manpower, but for some officers it was a method for ridding the army of soldiers they deemed troublesome or burdensome. Some of the soldiers were never heard from again, but capture could result in a quick trial and a dishonorable discharge to permanently remove them from the ranks. Private Henry Coss, GCM Case File, PP2664. 11 This case involved a white soldier named Charles H. Gould from the 11th Infantry. H.B. Burnham, May 16, 1872, Judge Advocate General of the Department of Texas, LS, Volume 1, January 1871-December 1872, Entry 4956, RG 393 Part I, NARA. In a separate case, Frank Lucky, a black enlisted man in the 24th Infantry was tried for worthlessness, but in the end the court assigned him to a different company. Private Frank Lucky, GCM Case File, PP2493. 70 authorization was a last resort because the captain of his company “refused to give permission” for Ezebb’s wife to accompany his company when they were reassigned to a different post. Like
Coss, Ezebb indicated that his company commander had also encouraged him to desert. Ezebb testified, that “I left the command and returned to Eagle Pass with the intention of providing some means by which my wife could follow me to my new post. I believed that an absence of a few days would be sufficient to enable me to provide for my wife” and “procure the means of for her removal to my new station.”12 Ezebb did not declare a right to absent himself without leave to address family affairs, but his action is an implicit critique of a difficult situation stemming from army policies concerning soldiers’ families. The army did not explicitly prohibit enlisted men from marrying or having families, but recruiters preferred unmarried men and officers effectively barred enlisted men’s families from residing on military posts unless soldiers’ wives agreed to perform labor on the post as officers’ servants, unit laundresses, and other occupations.13 For many men who deserted, their family commitments exceeded their military commitments.14
12 Alexander Ezebb, GCM Case File, PP2664. For my relationships with civilian chapter, it’s important to note that the army captured Ezebb while he was hiding in the home of a Mexican woman in the town of Eagle Pass. Additionally, Seminole Indians provided the NCO who was searching for Ezebb with information about where he was hiding. The court found Ezebb guilty, but the members recommended mitigating his sentence because they believed that he planned to return to the unit and cited his good reputation as a soldier. Ezebb went on to finish his enlistment and served another. He settled in San Antonio, Texas and died sometime between 1880 and 1890. His widow Maria Robinson successfully applied for and was approved for a pension in August 1890. 13 Coffman, The Old Army, 307–14; McChristian, Regular Army O!, 294–310. To highlight the distinctions between the treatment of officers’ wives and enlisted soldiers’ wives, Emily K. Andrews’ experience is instructive. Andrews, the wife of an officer received a military escort in her move from Austin, Texas to a post in the Rio Grande Valley. See Emily K. Andrews Diary of Emily K. Andrews in her transit from Austin to Fort Davis, 1874, Box 2A137, Dolph Briscoe Center of American History, University of Texas-Austin. Throughout his book, Kevin Adams emphasizes the privileged life that officers enjoyed compared to enlisted men in terms of their material conditions, leisure culture, domesticity in Class and Race in the Frontier Army: Military Life in the West 1870-1890, (Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 2012). 14 James Wright GCM Case File, OO2743, Henry Taylor GCM Case File, PP2293, John Ware GCM Case File, QQ68, William Kelly GCM Case File, RR1353. 71
Of the three soldiers, George James, a member of the 25th Infantry’s regimental band, was most perhaps the most radical in articulating his ideas about rights and defending his decision to desert. James pled guilty to the charge and issued a personal statement for the court’s consideration in which he defended his decision to desert his unit. James claimed that the bandmaster had ordered him to carry a barrel on his shoulder as punishment for “some trouble”
James had with a fellow band member.15 “I refused to carry the barrel and he bucked and gagged me. I thought this an illegal punishment and ran away. I had been in the service one year and eight months. I know it was the adjutant’s instructions to the band master never to punish any man in his absence,” James stated confidently. The musician touted almost two years of experience in the army and relied on the legal education he had gained from this time to convey his understanding of how senior officers administered discipline at his post.16 James also explicitly expressed his view that his rights as a soldier protected him from punishment deemed illegal. “I reported the matter to the adjutant, but nothing was done,” James complained.17 For
James, desertion was a last resort to protect his rights as a soldier. He had exhausted all legal means at his disposal of protecting his rights as an enlisted soldier and resorted to extralegal means of resistance.18 If officers refused to protect his rights while in service, James felt that he was justified in departing the service altogether before the end of his enlistment. Although James and Ezebb clearly had different objectives in deserting, or temporarily deserting in Ezebb’s case,
15 James doesn’t elaborate on exactly what “some trouble” meant. My assumption is that James meant that he had some argument or physical altercation with the other band member; these incidents were very common among soldiers. 16 Martha S. Jones provides a useful analytical framework for thinking about the legal education that black sailors gained from naval service in the antebellum era. Martha S. Jones, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 50–58. 17 Private George James, GCM Case File, PP2664. 18 In a written statement, James Dayes employed similar language about feeling “compelled” to desert and having “just and sufficient cause” to do so after suffering physical abuse from his company commander. James Dayes, GCM Case File, QQ1568. 72 their experiences are representative of a larger trend among soldiers who believed strongly in their right to petition and expected officers to address their complaints. From the perspective articulated by many enlisted soldiers, when officers failed to address or satisfy the appeals of soldiers, desertion was the next logical step.
Only one of the articles of the war that governed the conduct of soldiers in the U.S. Army explicitly granted protections or rights to enlisted men, specifying that any soldier “who thinks himself wronged” could complain to the commanding officer of his regiment.19 After receiving a complaint from the soldier, officers were supposed to convene a regimental board to investigate the soldier’s claim. In short, this provided soldiers with the right to petition and address grievances with officers. Petitioning, by the very nature of the act, provided soldiers some space to press for greater rights and protections; exercising the right to address grievances with commanding officers was extremely important to black enlisted men. At Fort Quitman,
Texas, in 1869, Corporal Sampson Murray entered a building to see the officer of the day, but a quartermaster’s clerk ordered him to leave the building. Murray stated that he had asked the clerk “what he meant by talking to me like a dog and I told him that if he talked to me that way again, I would cut his head off.” Murray planned to visit the post commander to report the altercation after completing his tour of guard duty, but the quartermaster’s clerk had already informed Murray’s captain of the soldier’s threats against him. “The Captain ordered me in arrest and I did not get to see the Major at all,” Murray lamented.20 While enlisted soldiers like Murray expected officers to hear, investigate, and address their grievances, his experience demonstrates
19 Article 35 of the Articles of War as outlined in the Regulations of the Army of the United States, (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1861), 505. This article is listed as Article 30 in the revised edition of U.S. Army Regulations published in 1881. Regulations of the Army of the United States, (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1881), 397. 20 Corporal Sampson Murray, GCM Case File, PP775. 73 the often harsh reality that officers, believing that enlisted men’s complaints had little foundation, often ignored them.21
Enlisted men in the regular army constantly expressed opposition to the lengthy periods at which officers confined them in the guardhouse without trial or formally charging them. In
1870 at Fort Davis, Lewis White and David Sullivan spent nearly a year in confinement before their respective trials by general court-martial. White and Sullivan were among 25 soldiers at the post who awaited trial by court-martial.22 This practice was probably more a result of the exigencies of military operations rather than incompetence or lack of empathy among officers.
Officers often had to balance their regular military duties with the additional task of assembling and convening a group of officers for general courts martial with army units scattered throughout the West. Nevertheless, confinement without a trial agitated soldiers. In 1876, for example,
William Chase, a private in the 10th Cavalry, asked the court for leniency because he had already been confined in the guardhouse for nearly a month before his trial.23 In another instance, a group of soldiers held in the guardhouse near Fort Concho, Texas, made an agreement among themselves and refused to work until the commanding officer explained the charges against them and the reasons for their confinement.24
Non-commissioned officers were the authority figures with whom junior enlisted soldiers most regularly interacted and were the main individuals against which enlisted soldiers, especially new recruits, expressed grievances. At times, non-commissioned officers often
21 It is important to acknowledge some of the bureaucratic difficulties that made it difficult for officers to investigate enlisted men’s complaints. In many cases, officers ignored or failed to investigate enlisted soldiers’ claims because the necessity of performing various administrative duties in addition to their regular duties along with the dispersion of regiments’ companies in various locales, made it difficult for officers to assemble the numbers necessary to convene these investigative boards outlined in the Articles of War. 22 Semi-monthly reports of prisoners held in confinement at Fort Davis from January 1870 through December 1870, Fort Davis Post Records, Box 16, Entry 120-21, RG 393 Part V, NARA. 23 William Chase, GCM Case File, PP5021. 24 Charley Willes, GCM Case File, QQ2234. 74 provided cruel introductions to military life and discipline. In 1867, four enlisted soldiers from the 38th Infantry Regiment deserted at Fort Selden, New Mexico, and all cited the treatment they had endured at the hands of Sergeant William Yeatman as the reason why they had deserted.
Private Jacob Dismukes reported that Yeatman “punished me every chance he could get. I was not treated as they promised me when I was enlisted.”25 Dismukes was a new soldier and no doubt had difficulty adjusting to life in the military which no doubt influenced his decision to abandon his enlistment obligation and desert.26 At the same time, Dismukes presented the treatment he endured as a violation of his enlistment contract. For Dismukes, an enlistment contract was not simply an obligation of a volunteer to the U.S. Army, but rather a mutual obligation in which soldiers expected the army to fulfill certain expectations as well. From some soldiers’ perspectives, the army’s failure to meet its end of the bargain was grounds for dissolving the contract.27
Such views about enlistment contracts extended into soldiers’ views on their entitlement to the monthly pay they received as enlisted soldiers. When the federal government reduced soldiers’ pay in the early 1870s, desertion rates spiked throughout the army. Despite including evidence of men who claimed to desert because of the pay cut, some officers like, Zenas R.
Bliss, dismissed the idea that the pay reductions had increased desertion rates, but other officers
25 All soldiers were eventually dishonorably discharged from the army. I tend to view these cases with a degree of skepticism, but from a later incident involving William Yeatman, the soldiers’ description of him were probably accurate. Yeatman appears to have manipulated a series of events that led officers to believe that a mutiny was happening at Fort Bayard, New Mexico, the following year in May 1868, which led to a trial by general court- martial. Private Jacob Dismukes, Felix Battle, William Losson, and Frank Moore, GCM Case File, OO2923. 26 Dismukes had enlisted in April 1867 and deserted five months later. U.S. Army Register of Enlistments, 1867 A-O, 191, M233, Roll 33, https://www.fold3.com/image/310875450?rec=300275784. 27 Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 62–70. 75 disagreed.28 “The men seem to be of the opinion that the government in reducing the Pay
Clothing Allowance has broken faith with them, they having enlisted with the implicit understanding that they should receive the same pay and allowances during their whole term of enlistment,” one officer in a white regiment wrote.29 One African-American soldier explicitly articulated such a view in a letter requesting clemency and a remission of his sentence for desertion. “I deserted at the time of the reduction of the pay. I then believed that the government had broken their contract with me,” he wrote.30
Desertion also provides a lens into understanding how some European immigrants viewed enlistment contracts as a mutual agreement between the U.S. Army and recruit in which both parties needed to adhere to certain obligations. Distance was an even greater obstacle for some European immigrants who hoped to maintain some of their family and social connections to Europe. Yet some soldiers hoped to replicate, or at least reform, some of their European communities within the army. Army recruiting centers were often located in larger cities where many immigrants lived. With limited employment opportunities often available to immigrants and the army’s persistent personnel shortages, army officers heavily recruited from immigrant populations; immigrants comprised approximately 50 percent of the enlisted population in the
1870s.31 Two soldiers, Julius Aufferman and Matthias Hermes, had recently emigrated from
Germany to the United States and were both tried by court-martial for desertion. With neither soldier being fluent in English, the court employed an interpreter (likely another enlisted soldier
28 , Bliss was the post commander at Fort Duncan, Texas, which was garrisoned by black troops. Zenas R. Bliss to CO Department of Texas, August 12, 1871, Department of Texas, Letters Received, Box 10, Entry 4873, RG 393 Part I, NARA. 29 Henry B. Chamberlain to CO Department of Texas, August 13, 1871, Department of Texas, Letters Received, Box 10, Entry 4873, RG 393 Part I, NARA. 30 Charles Countee to Adjutant General Department of Texas, November 17, 1873, Department of Texas, Letters Received, Box 21, Entry 4873, RG 393 Part I, NARA. 31 Coffman, The Old Army, 330–31. 76 who spoke German). When the soldiers first agreed to enlist in the army, the recruiting officer had assured both of them that “that almost all the soldiers in [the] army were Germans, and that it would not be necessary to understand any English.” Both soldiers deserted from Fort Brown after their sergeant repeatedly punished them for failing to obey his commands. For Aufferman and Hermes, the army had not fulfilled its end of the enlistment contract by failing to allow them to replicate their German community in the army.32
Reasons for desertion varied from individual to individual and the actual process of abandoning the Army was often an individual endeavor. At times however, soldiers collaborated and deserted in larger numbers. With units often operating in isolated locations, moving throughout the territory in larger numbers offered greater physical safety than leaving the post alone. At the same time, operating in larger groups also heightened the risk of detection by military parties dispatched to capture deserters and civilians who hoped to earn cash rewards for returning them to the army.33 In the fall of 1869, seven members of the 10th Cavalry deserted
Fort Sill and eventually faced trial by general court-martial after the capture. At the end of their respective trials, each man made a verbal statement and attributed their decision to desert to the treatment they had endured at the hands of their troop first sergeant.34 Morrison Smith claimed,
“I did not leave the army because I was tired of soldiering, but because I was mistreated in the company.”35 Solomon Dickson alleged that he had been “bucked and gagged for 24 hours
32 Recruit Julius Aufferman and Private Matthias Hermes, GCM Case File, PP2712. 33 These two cases involved groups of African-American soldiers who were stationed at posts along the Rio Grande attempting to escape to Mexico. GCM Case File, PP 1712, PP2284. The U.S. Army offered a $30 reward to parties who returned deserters. It was not simply Anglo-American who took advantage of this. Native Americans and Hispanics also regularly returned to deserters to military posts where they faced trial. 34 All the soldiers mentioned an instance when the first sergeant referred to them as a “son of a bitch.” Sergeant William Gibson, Privates Solomon Dickson, George H. Freeman, Washington Lynch, Nathan Smith, Major Smith, and Morrison Smith, GCM Case File, PP1245. 35 GCM Case File, PP1245. 77 without the knowledge of the company commander.”36 The similarities in their statements gives some insight into the amount of collaboration that probably occurred between the men while awaiting trial. Confinement in the same guardhouse likely provided the soldiers with the opportunity to discuss which legal strategy to pursue in their upcoming courts martial.37
While soldiers most often expressed such sentiments during their trials by general court- martial, committing an infraction was not an impetus for soldiers’ attempts to protect and expand their rights. Soldiers most often expressed such sentiments during their trials by general court- martial, but soldiers sometimes wrote directly to high-ranking officers at department headquarters or in some cases to higher ranking War Department officials in Washington D.C. In boxes stuffed with hundreds of tri-folded documents, consisting of scouting reports, leave requests, and other correspondence, are letters from enlisted men voicing their complaints and requesting the intervention of higher-ranking officers to remedy perceived injustices.
In February 1871, for example, an anonymous African-American soldier from Fort
Quitman, Texas, on the Rio Grande sent a letter to the commander of the Department of Texas in which he outlined his grievances against the treatment enlisted men endured at the post. “The
Collard [Colored] Soldiers is treated more like dogs then like men & the men are worked like dogs,” he complained. The soldier also suggested that the federal government should hire other employees to perform this labor. Instead, “tha make the soldiers dou it and keep the money in thir pocket & works the Poor soldiers to Death & then cort marchal a man at this post for nothing
[sic],” the soldier reported. Making an explicit connection between reputable military service and rights/privileges, the anonymous author asserted, “If a good soldier does His Duty Well I think
He Had [ought] have permission to go any ware that he want [sic].” The writer ended the letter
36 GCM Case File, PP1245. 37 GCM Case File, PP1245. 78 by predicting that the low morale among the men stemming from their poor treatment at Fort
Quitman would likely discourage many troops from reenlisting.38 The department adjutant general forwarded the letter to the post commander at Fort Quitman, but the commander dismissed the complaint as solely being the gripes of a soldier named Charles Johnson who was in confinement at the time for desertion.
Many soldiers considered manual labor on posts to be completely divorced from combat, marksmanship, horsemanship, and other military tasks that enlisted men associated with more idealized visions of soldiering and manliness, but they did not associate the backbreaking labor they engaged in with femininity.39 The reference to being “treated like dogs” in the Fort
Quitman letter is likely an argument that soldiers were enduring subhuman treatment. A white soldier expressed similar sentiments in an anonymous column published in the Army and Navy
Journal, “The regular soldier on the frontiers is no more nor less than beast of burden, and what is still worse he is treated as such. . .Strangers and visitors from the East, often take them for convicts,” the soldier wrote.40
In April 1871, a group of white enlisted men at Fort Concho sent a similar letter to the headquarters of Department of Texas. Much like their African-American counterparts at Fort
Quitman who had submitted their letter two months earlier, the letter writer at Fort Concho,
Texas voiced similar complaints about enlisted men’s labor, but remained anonymous and only
38 Anonymous Soldier to Commanding Officer of the Department of Texas, Undated but probably written in February 1871, Department of Texas, Letters Received, Box 6, Entry 4873, RG 393 Part I, NARA. 39 Scholars have emphasized the lack of military training among soldiers from the moment they entered the army to arriving at the unit. 40 The Army and Navy Journal was a weekly newspaper disseminated to share news about the U.S. Army and U.S. Navy. Subject matter ranged from promotions, changes in stations for regiments, reports from campaigns, policy changes in the army and navy, opinion pieces such as the one indicated in the main text, and other matters. Army and Navy Journal, August 30, 1879, 63, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo.31924069759995&view=1up&seq=69, Hathi Trust Digital Library (accessed September 18, 2019). Hereafter abbreviated as ANJ with date of issue, page number, and URL. 79 identified himself as a non-commissioned officer from Company A of the 10th Infantry. “The duties of the enlisted men at this post are too severe and are solely to be attributed to hard labor,” the author wrote. Unlike the African-American writer, the writer at Fort Concho went a step further and explicitly threatened mass desertion among the garrison if the commander failed to intervene. “Believe me there are scores at this post now who never contemplated desertion,” but were now making “preparations to go as soon as they can,” the non-commissioned officer warned.41
The fact that the letters from both Fort Quitman and Fort Concho stressed the strong personal character and quality of soldiers implies that soldiers understood that their complaints would find mixed reception among the officer corps at best. Emphasizing that men “who never contemplated desertion” were now considering deserting was an attempt to head off criticism stemming from the scorn that officers and the general public held toward the type of men they believed joined the regular army. In the eyes of many men, disciplinary problems like desertion, were largely the result of the poor quality of the men the army recruited rather than the poor quality of army life. In a letter to the Army and Navy Journal, one writer urged recruiters to emphasize “quality over quantity,” describing the pool of enlistees as men who had only joined the army as a last resort after failing at every enterprise in their previous lives. “It is an undoubted and lamentable fact that many of the men who enlist in the Army are those who are not sufficiently trustworthy and temperate in their habits to obtain honorable employment in civil life,” the writer complained. “They carry their dissolute characters into companies, and the good men become discouraged and disgusted to find themselves obliged to be considered no better
41 Non-commissioned O to Colonel Joseph J. Reynolds, April 28, 1871, Department of Texas, Letters Received, Box 6, Entry 4873, RG 393 Part I, NARA. 80 than equals with this class,” the writer continued.42 In another opinion piece on recruiting published in the Army and Navy Journal, one officer called for the U.S. to “put a stop to all this enlisting of bummers, drunkards, boys, and ignorant foreigners.” “One good man is worth more than ten bad ones, and as the Service becomes more respectable a better class of men will offer themselves for enlistment,” the officer proclaimed.43
Despite the dismissive attitude that many officers adopted towards enlisted men’s complaints, the annual report of the Secretary of War from 1870 reveals how soldiers’ attitudes toward manual labor and notions of rights under enlistment contracts not only reached the highest levels of the federal government, but also drove some of the policy debates surrounding revisions to army regulations. William T. Sherman, the General of the U.S. Army, displayed a degree of sympathy for soldiers in writing that that labor on public buildings, roads, and other work “ought not to be imposed” on soldiers.44 However, Sherman also advised the Secretary of
War “to prescribe some plain rule, drawing a clear distinction between these two kinds of labor, and to publish in the Army in orders and regulations, so that it would enter into the contract of enlistment, and soldiers would not, as they frequently do, plead this cause in justification of desertion.”45 Although the policy proposal would have worked to the detriment of enlisted soldiers in making legal arguments in trials by court-martial, it does accentuate the influence of enlisted men’s actions and ideas on the decision-making processes at the highest levels of the
42 ANJ, April 29, 1871, 587, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo.31924069759904&view=1up&seq=593 (accessed September 19, 2019). 43 “Suggestions for the Army,” ANJ, May 6, 1876, 630-631, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008898673 (accessed September 19, 2019). 44 One officer, in anonymous column published in the Army and Navy Journal, acknowledged the important of labor to maintain the garrison, but also lamented the fact that garrison duties pulled soldiers away from field duty and prevented them from developing skills in scouting, marksmanship, tactics, and other areas. “The Army on the Frontiers,” ANJ, February 4, 1871, 391, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo.31924069759904&view=1up&seq=397 (accessed September 19, 2019). 45 Annual Report of the Secretary of War, 1870, 41st Congress., 3d sess., H. Exec. Doc. 1, 5. 81 federal government. Most importantly, it shows that enlisted men were more effective in at least convincing officers to devote attention to their grievances if they worked in groups.
Trials involving mutiny offers insight into how soldiers formed partnerships and worked in groups to protect what they believed to be were rights. In August 1873, enlisted soldiers and non-commissioned officers from the 9th Cavalry and 25th Infantry united with the objective of protecting soldiers’ rights at Fort Stockton, Texas (the garrison was composed entirely of black troops with the exception of the officers). The previous month, Private John Taylor, Civil War veteran and popular soldier on the post, died from an unknown illness after Peter Cleary, the post surgeon, repeatedly denied him treatment at the hospital.46 Cleary’s behavior was part of a larger pattern of discrimination in healthcare against black soldiers; Charles Kenner and Kevin Adams have highlighted that mortality rates among black troops were higher than those among white troops and that fewer black servicemen were admitted to hospitals and granted discharges for disability than their white counterparts.47
When Cleary finally admitted Taylor to the hospital, he dismissed Taylor’s complaints and ordered other soldiers to confine the ailing soldier in the guardhouse. A large group of soldiers watched angrily as the soldiers practically carried Taylor, who was too sick to walk on his own, to the guardhouse. According to the soldiers, “This strange and inhuman spectacle caused considerable excitement and sorrow among the men who witnessed it.” Upon learning that Taylor died shortly after he was placed in the guardhouse, black enlisted men organized meetings and drafted a resolution that they planned to send to the Adjutant General requesting an
46 Between April and July of 1873, Taylor repeatedly requested treatment from the post surgeon for headaches, but Cleary denied Taylor treatment. When Cleary finally admitted Taylor to the hospital in 1873, he dismissed Taylor’s complaints and ordered him confined in the post guardhouse. With Taylor too weak to walk, a group of soldiers practically carried Taylor to the guardhouse and a large 47 Kenner, Buffalo Soldiers and Officers of the Ninth Cavalry, 1867–1898, 1999, 22–23; Adams, Class and Race in the Frontier Army, 172–73. 82 investigation of the surgeon. The “maltreatments, abusive and harsh actions of this Surgeon, towards the enlisted men of the post who may happen to come under his care, has been going on for the past year or so,” the soldiers reported in the resolution. Over 100 soldiers from various companies in the garrison signed or placed their marks on the resolution.48
The soldiers’ actions eventually resulted in a general court-martial on the charges of inciting mutiny and censuring a superior officer (Peter Cleary). Officers at Fort Stockton were alarmed when they learned of the meetings and the resolution, but quickly realized that confining, trying, and potentially discharging over 100 men was unfeasible and would likely cripple the post’s ability to function. Instead, officers counseled all of the men who had signed the resolution and promised exemption from punishment if they removed their signatures from the resolution. Most of the soldiers accepted this offer, likely fearing the potential legal repercussions, but twenty-one soldiers (composed of both non-commissioned officers and junior enlisted soldiers) rejected the offer and opted for a trial by general court-martial. While officers characterized the entire incident as a mutinous plot led by noncommissioned officers, the testimony from the trial reveals a more complex and democratic process that involved both junior and senior soldiers attempting to secure their rights.
In the weeks following Taylor’s death, enlisted men held several meetings in the barracks to discuss what actions to pursue; the very act of organizing meetings was a declaration of a right and the moral high ground in the matter. During the trial, one witness stated that the enlisted
48 These quotes are from a copy of the resolution the men drafted which is a part of the general court- martial that eventually resulted from the soldiers convening these meetings. GCM Case File, PP3542. Charles Kenner offers a good summary of the events that preceded the “mutiny” and its trial and its aftermath. However, Kenner is more interested in exploring the relationships, or tensions in this case, between white officers and black enlisted men. However, there is far more at stake in this case than officer/enlisted men tensions. Soldiers are explicitly talking about rights. I am proposing a different reading of the sources to focus more on how the men organized the meetings and the democratic processes that persisted and factored into every decision they made in advocating for rights. Kenner, Buffalo Soldiers and Officers of the Ninth Cavalry, 1867–1898, 1999, 85–91. 83 men made no effort to conceal the meetings from the officers because “they believed they were in the right.”49 The testimony of the officers at Fort Stockton also makes it clear that the soldiers made no effort to hide their meetings from the officers. Although officers at Fort Stockton never participated in or were invited to the meetings, several testified that they could hear the meetings held in the barracks. Officers interpreted the raucous voices and excitement that they could only hear from a distance as signals that mutiny was imminent. However, the remnants of the vociferous meetings that officers and other post residents heard were more likely indicative of the democratic processes at work among the soldiers.50
Various witnesses who had either participated in the meetings or were aware of them recounted that the meetings were often loud, suggesting that soldiers vigorously debated how to proceed in protecting their rights. Soldiers expressed a wide range of opinions of just how far they should go in protecting their rights; some wanted to proceed with caution and take no action, but others advocated violence against the surgeon. According to one of the company commanders who testified in the trial, one sergeant and a private who had refused to sign the petition reported that “there was constant talk among the men of taking matters into their own hands and asserting their rights, and showing that they were not to be imposed upon.” Earlier in the trial this same sergeant stated that Private George Ringgold “told [him] that any man who would see his Comrade murdered and would not sign for his rights ought to be murdered.”
When pressed by the defendants’ legal representation, however, the sergeant admitted that no soldier had ever personally threatened him with violence and the majority of the soldiers intended to advocate for their rights without resorting to violence.51
49 William A. Dobak, “Licit Amusements of Enlisted Men in the Post-Civil War Army,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 45, no. 2 (spring 1995), 34-45. 50 GCM Case File, PP3542. 51 Some of the fearmongering among the officers about the prospect of mutiny came from soldiers. 84
The testimony of witnesses demonstrates how the meetings departed from the traditional army hierarchy and functioned in a more democratic manner. The garrison at this time consisted entirely of black troops from three different companies, and non-commissioned officers and privates from each unit attended the meetings, heightening the need for a more egalitarian process. With soldiers coming from a multitude of command hierarchies, it would have been difficult to determine who outranked whom. Naturally, the non-commissioned officers, who were often more educated in terms of both literacy and familiarity with army regulations, assumed leadership roles at the meetings. Yet despite their rank, non-commissioned officers and other enlisted men placed greater emphasis on convincing soldiers to participate in the meeting and sign the resolution, rather than relying on coercion. Several of the meetings’ attendees testified that before the first meeting began, one of the sergeants advised solders who did not want to participate to leave the barracks. Soldiers also voted to determine assignments to certain positions. One witness who attended the meeting remembered that “The majority voted that a committee be appointed to collect statements of the men who knew the ill-treatment of [Taylor] and others.” That committee was an assortment of both privates and sergeants and organized based on skills in literacy rather than rank.52 After a group of soldiers drafted the petition, “the statement was read two or three times” by a sergeant and a private who were both members of the committee. In another example of more junior soldiers assuming leadership positions,
Corporal James Cook and Private George Ringgold served as the chairman and secretary, respectively, at a meeting on July 11, 1873, where the men from Company K, 25th Infantry,
“unanimously adopted” a preamble and resolution commemorating John Taylor’s military
52 At the end of the trial, the defendants submitted a written statement and specifically mentioned their educational disadvantages and stated that the soldiers selected to draft the petition were “the only enlisted men at the post that can write.” GCM Case File, PP3542. 85 service and reputation as a soldier that they then submitted for publication in the Army and Navy
Journal and the New Orleans Republican.53
Throughout the trial, the defendants maintained that the resolution was lawful and that they had the right to draft and submit it. Although the soldiers pled guilty to holding meetings and writing/signing the resolution, they rejected the inclusion of the phrase (unlawful, authorized and mutinous) in their guilty plea. To counter the allegations that their actions constituted mutiny, the defendants repeatedly emphasized the peaceful nature of the meetings and reminded the court that their intent was only to protect their rights rather than overthrow their officers. At the conclusion of the lengthy trial, the soldiers on trial submitted a statement arguing,
“We were prompted solely by an earnest desire to secure what we believed to be our just rights. The interest of all the soldiers of the garrison being as regards any probable neglect or ill-treatment almost identical, we naturally felt it to be of the greatest importance to each and every one of us to obtain an investigation in regard to what we believed to be the neglect and ill-treatment of a fellow soldier.”
Like soldiers in other instances who articulated their rights, the men from Fort Stockton did not explicitly define the origins of their notions of rights but were extremely confident that the rights existed and that officers should respect them. The soldiers then explained that they refused to remove their names from the petition because they “believed that such withdrawal would be equivalent to an acknowledgement that the statement therein made were false.”54
The defendants concluded their written statement by attributing any errors in their actions to having “had no advantages of education which would enable us to properly, at all times, to
53 In the resolution, the committee mentioned that Taylor had served in the army since the Civil War and recognized him as embodying “the true spirit of the soldier as an example worth of all emulation.” The resolution was published in an August edition of the Army and Navy Journal. The soldiers’ choice of and connections to New Orleans remains unclear. However, this action reveals that despite their military service in the isolated regions of West Texas, they attempted to maintain or reestablish connections with the East. Perhaps this is where John Taylor was born, but I could find no evidence that the New Orleans Republican ever published it. ANJ, August 16, 1873, 15, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo.31924069759938;view=1up;seq=23 (date accessed February 13, 2019). 54 GCM Case File, PP3542. 86 interpret the true meaning of Regulations and articles of war.” Much like African Americans in the eastern United States along with their predecessors from the Civil War USCT regiments, black troops in the regular army professed a strong desire for education.55 The most important words in this final sentence are “interpret” and “true meaning.” Officers at Fort Stockton claimed that when they initially counseled the soldiers, they had read the Army regulations and
Articles of War to them and explained the meaning behind these documents. Yet, the troops on trial ignored their officers’ counsel and refused to remove their names from the letter they intended to send to the Adjutant General. The soldiers who opted to face trial by court-martial may have believed that officers were not fully forthcoming about the statutes and were simply trying to intimidate the soldiers into withdrawing the petition. One officer testified that the defendants’ “intention was to set all authority of their own officers at defiance and take a such actions as their own ideas of right and wrong might suggest to them. They certainly knew that sending the communication direct to the post commander was not the proper manner and showed a disposition to act independently of their Company Commanders.” Through literacy, soldiers hoped to gain further independence in interpreting Army regulations and the articles of war which might have allowed them to expand the scope and claims to rights.56
55 Keith P. Wilson outlines the tremendous enthusiasm for education among black soldiers during the Civil War; Heather Andrea Williams emphasizes the important role USCT veterans after the war in funding schools and serving as teachers. Wilson, Campfires of Freedom, 82–108; Heather Andrea Williams, Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 45–79; Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South, from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 89–102; Christopher M. Span, From Cotton Field to Schoolhouse: African American Education in Mississippi, 1862-1875 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 66; James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Ronald E. Butchart, Schooling the Freed People: Teaching, Learning, and the Struggle for Black Freedom, 1861-1876 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Hilary Green, Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (New York, N.Y.: Fordham University Press, 2016). 56 GCM Case File, PP3542. In 1884, and for the first time, the Army began issuing each soldier a Soldiers’ Handbook that outlined army regulations, the articles of war, the amount of clothing soldiers were issued, the rank structure, and other subjects. This was an important change that was a sign of the growing professionalization of the 87
After a ten-day trial with testimony from numerous soldiers, officers, and civilian employees, the members determined that there was insufficient evidence to convict the soldiers of mutiny. However, to discourage other men from taking similar actions in the future, officers at Fort Stockton wanted to assign some degree of culpability to the soldiers who refused to remove their names from the petition. In the findings, the members repeatedly substituted the term “unauthorized” for the word “unlawful” to describe the meetings and petition. In general, officers rejected the idea of holding meetings at all and claimed that the mutiny was the next logical step. Zenas R. Bliss, the president of the general court-martial, concluded that although the soldiers’ actions did not amount “technically to mutiny, [it] was the next thing to it, and was calculated to engender a state of affairs, from which it was not only possible but probable that a violent outbreak might have occurred at any moment.” Charles C. Augur, the commanding general of the department of Texas, agreed with Bliss’s sentiment and concluded that despite the emphasis on nonviolence at the meeting, the soldiers were “doing a thing provocative of violence in calling and holding it.” In Augur’s view, such behavior subverted military discipline and
“would speedily reduce the army to a mob.” In the end, the members sentenced the soldiers to dishonorable discharges from the army and confinement in the Texas State Prison for one to two years.57
In May 1879, Company E of the 25th Infantry Regiment departed Fort Davis, Texas, and marched south to Musque Canyon to construct a road. After over six months of strenuous labor, approximately fifteen of the company’s soldiers began holding secret meetings in which they discussed plans to return to Fort Davis to report their dissatisfaction with unit’s assignment to the
army, but one question I have is the extent to which this is a response to soldiers complaining about not being fully educated on the rules and customs of the army and having to rely on officers for this education. 57 GCM Case File, PP3542; In April 1874, Augur remitted the sentence of all twenty soldiers imprisoned at Huntsville. Special Orders No. 66, Headquarters Department of Texas, April 28, 1874. 88 post commander. The soldiers were angry about the absence of rations and harsh working conditions and intended to request that the post commander reassign the company to Fort
Davis.58 Officers from the company soon discovered the plot and in January 1880, charged two of the participants, William H. Finch and John E. Junior, for organizing/leading the gatherings and inciting mutiny in the company. Despite both Finch and Junior, along with numerous witnesses (some of whom attended the meetings), identifying Alfred Gradney as one of the leaders of the meetings, Gradney appears to have avoided trial by general court-martial.59
Unlike the incident involving black enlisted men at Fort Stockton earlier that decade, the meetings in Musque Canyon were composed entirely of junior enlisted soldiers. Yet, much like
Fort Stockton, a democratic spirit permeated the soldiers’ gatherings, which was a departure from the rank hierarchy that was the basis of military culture; democracy was perhaps more necessary because the soldiers who participated in the meetings were all Privates. Again, soldiers placed more emphasis on convincing soldiers to participate in the meetings and discuss possible actions rather than coercion. Multiple soldiers who attended the assemblies testified that Gradney lined the men up and counted the number of men who were willing to return to Fort
Davis. One soldier who later faced trial for coordinating the congregation of soldiers maintained it was “no organized meeting” and “that the men were all talking one to another.”
58 Complaints about the quantity and quality of food were persistent throughout the army regardless of unit. The army was at the helm of the settler colonialist project of securing westward expansion and that mission required the army to disperse units in small garrisons throughout the American West. This mission compounded the army’s logistical difficulties and made resupply. 59 Gradney was tried by general court-martial twice in 1869 and 1883. He and some of the other soldiers who participated the meetings may have been tried by Garrison Court-martial at Fort Davis which carried lesser sentences than General Courts Martial. At times, soldiers negotiated with officers to plead guilty for trials by garrison court-martial. In January 1874, William H. Singleton complained that the only soldier who testified against him in a trial by general court-martial was also under arrest. It is also possible that Gradney agreed with officers to testify against both Junior and Finch in exchange for immunity from prosecution. He was a witness for the prosecution in both Finch’s and Junior’s cases. William H. Singleton, GCM Case File, PP3740 89
Over the course of their respective trials, neither John Junior nor William French denied participating in the secret meetings among the men. Both soldiers acted as their own defense in court, emphasized the peaceful nature of the meetings, accused Gradney of lying about his role in the meetings, and repeatedly attempted to convince the court that they were not the leaders of the meetings. In his questioning of witnesses and the written statement submitted to the court,
Junior emphasized the peaceful nature of the meetings, but he also hinted at some of the divisions between “old soldiers” and new soldiers. In his verbal statement submitted before the court, Junior claimed to have stumbled upon the meeting where Gradney attempted to convince him to join the men and return to Fort Davis and report their grievances to the post commander.
Junior, who was on his second enlistment in the army, hesitated and reminded Gradney, “‘As we are old soldiers we had better keep out of this matter.’” Junior made a last-ditch appeal to their identity as “old soldiers” and implied that he associated this kind of behavior with new soldiers, suggesting that soldiers who had recently joined the army were more willing to push the boundaries of protecting rights and ensuring proper treatment in ways that older soldiers were not. Nevertheless, Gradney insisted that the soldiers “’intended to do this in a peaceable manner, and not disobey any orders.’”60
The judge advocate general also used the term “old soldiers” during the trial to distinguish between this group and “the recruits” when asking where the complaints about inadequate food emanated among the company. The status of being “old soldiers” did not mean that more experienced soldiers were immune from voicing the same complaints about army life as newer soldiers who were not yet fully acquainted with army life. Both the company first sergeant and a corporal stated that both groups of enlisted men were disgruntled with the food.
60 Private John E. Junior, GCM Case File, QQ1571; U.S. Army Register of Enlistments, 1878-1884, H-O, 138, M233, Roll 42, https://www.fold3.com/image/310874828?rec=300261262. 90
In fact, “old soldiers” touted their legal education, stemming from their lengthy service in the army, to convince less experienced soldiers to join them. At the end of his trial, William Finch submitted a four-page written statement to the court. He maintained his innocence and claimed that he was persuaded into participating in the entire endeavor “by men who called themselves old soldiers.” According to Finch, Gradney had repeatedly reassured Gradney that joining the meetings and reporting to the post commander at Fort Davis was legal, because he was “an old soldier” and thus more acquainted with army regulations. Finch also claimed that Gradney had also attempted convince him to a write a report “concerning the manner of our treatment on the road to the Secretary of War.”61
As a recent enlistee, Finch’s life as a soldier was clearly not what he expected. Since enlisting in the army earlier that year, “I have had but little instructions in soldiering,” he grumbled. Additionally, he claimed that since he had “never heard the Army Rules and
Regulations read” to him that he had “no other guide to the manner in which I should conduct myself but common sense.” Despite Finch claiming an ignorance of army rules and regulations, he wrote, “I had reasons to believe myself undergoing a treatment unreasonable. . .because we would build the road up one day and tear it down the next.” Finch also complained, “I was worked very hard and very often not half enough to eat and was also made to work when I was sick and unable to work, but I never once refused to work, but always done my best. I have often been compeled to spend more then one half of my monthly pay for something to eat.”62
While Finch clearly rejected the additional and seemingly unsoldierly labor assigned to his company, other soldiers attempted to leverage the extra duties and responsibilities associated with harsh military duty in the West as justification for demanding more rights and improved
61 Private William Finch, GCM Case File, QQ1678. 62 Private William Finch, GCM Case File, QQ1678. 91 material conditions. Some enlisted soldiers, particularly senior non-commissioned officers, asserted that the duties and responsibilities associated with their rank entitled them to greater benefits than other enlisted men. In 1879, the same year that Finch’s “mutiny” occurred near
Fort Stockton, the Army and Navy Journal described a formal request that a group of quartermaster sergeants and regimental sergeants major—the most senior enlisted men in the
Army—had submitted to Congress advocating for higher pay because ordnance and commissary sergeants, despite being inferior in rank, were paid at higher rates. Yet, for quartermaster sergeants and sergeants major, the stakes were higher than rank; the petitioners believed that the type of labor and demands involved in their positions meant that they possessed “superior intelligence, and both scholarly and soldierly qualifications, superior to any other class of non- commissioned officers.”63
Such a claim not only demonstrates that the process of claiming or petitioning for rights sometimes involved pitting enlisted troops against each other, but also provides insight into how soldiers made sense of differences among themselves and their comrades in ways that transcended the army’s rank structure. The reference to possessing “both scholarly and soldierly qualifications” is likely a dig directed towards groups of non-commissioned officers who occupied supposedly cushy, high-level staff positions and were immune from the some of the hardships associated with soldiering in the West; this suggests that the tension that existed between staff and line personnel may have permeated the enlisted ranks as well.64 Quartermaster sergeants and sergeants major believed that they undertook the more grueling life of soldiers by
63 “Sergeant-Majors and Quartermaster-Sergeants, ANJ, August 30, 1879, 63, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo.31924069759995&view=1up&seq=69. 64 Utley, Frontier Regulars, 30–33. 92 serving in senior leadership positions in line units while also performing many of the administrative duties that the army assigned to ordnance and commissary sergeants.65
Despite earning the highest salary of any group of enlisted soldiers, white clerks in high- ranking staff positions voiced their own complaints about inadequate financial compensation compared to civilian clerks. In a May 1879 edition of the Army and Navy Journal, a clerk from the General Service Corps, using the familiar rhetoric of rights and justice, demanded an increase of pay for all General Service clerks. “We deserve this consideration by every reason of right and justice. Our ability and standing certainly compare favorably with other clerks whom the
Government is willing to compensate with a salary more than double the aggregate of our pay,” the clerk wrote.66 Several months later, an anonymous writer who only identified himself as an army clerk, responded directly to the aforementioned column from the General Service clerk by claiming that civilian clerks performed twice the amount of labor as “that class of enlisted men.”
The writer also pointed out that line soldiers performed similar duties to general service clerks in addition to their regular duties without receiving extra financial compensation. “Many soldiers. .
.would willingly perform the duties of a G.S. clerk for less pay” than the $65 a month that general service clerks already received. In the eyes of this army clerk, General Service clerks constituted a class of enlisted men whose complaints had little foundation when considering the plights of other soldiers.67 The process of claiming or petitioning for rights reveals that enlisted men were not monolithic groups, but also demonstrates a degree of class consciousness among
65 Quartermaster sergeants, sergeants major, and other line non-commissioned officers found allies among some of the officers in the Department of Arizona and that this campaign had been ongoing since at least 1876. Annual Report of the Secretary of War, 1879, 46th Congress., 2d sess., H. Exec. Doc. 1, 447. 66 “The General Service Clerk,” ANJ, May 24, 1879, 773, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo.31924069759987&view=1up&seq=783. 67 “G.S. Clerks,” ANJ, September 6, 1879, 84, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo.31924069759995&view=1up&seq=90. 93 soldiers and how they understood and articulated the various meanings and value attached to their labor.
Yet arguments about labor and class among enlisted men, occurring largely among white enlisted men, held different meanings for black enlisted men, who understood that racial discrimination restricted their access to appointments to the general staff. In July 1879, an
African American soldier serving at Fort Stockton and writing under the pseudonym, “Knife,” sent a letter to the Army and Navy Journal expressing his dissatisfaction with the lack of career opportunities available for black soldiers.68 “I believe it to be a well known fact of long standing that not more than two or three colored soldiers have ever been rewarded. . .with an appointment as either ordnance sergeant, commissary sergeant, or hospital steward,” Knife wrote. Yet, as
Knife noted, black soldiers often performed these duties anyway without ever securing official appointments to the positions or the higher salary that accompanied such responsibilities. “I must say that there is either too much prejudice against the colored man in the Army, or else his officers are not sufficiently interested in him to see that the men are justly rewarded,” Knife concluded.69
Knife’s complaints should be situated in a broader pattern of discrimination against black soldiers in the postbellum U.S. Army. Black enlistees were only permitted to serve in the infantry and the cavalry and were barred from serving in the artillery, engineers, and other branches of the army. From the outset of the establishment of permanent black regiments in the regular army, high-ranking officials in the federal government, including some army officers,
68 The letter, dated July 1879, was written from Fort Stockton. The post returns from Fort Stockton indicate that the garrison at the time was composed entirely of black soldiers from the 25th Infantry and 10th Cavalry Regiments. The soldier likely withheld his name in fear of retaliation from white officers for criticizing them and suggesting that they change their behavior. 69 “Colored Men on the General Staff,” ANJ, August 30 1879, 64, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo.31924069759995&view=1up&seq=70 (accessed September 19, 2019). 94 questioned the proficiency of black troops and floated the idea of permanently disbanding black regiments altogether in the 1870s.70 These policy proposals were often rooted in the racist beliefs among many white army officers and other government officials that African Americans were intellectually inferior and therefore, less efficient/more difficult to train than white troops.71
Others believed that black units consumed more supplies, equipment, and other resources than white units, arguing that black regiments were too expensive to maintain.72 Despite these supposed inefficiencies, black regiments continued to perform duty in the Department of Texas, which many considered to be one of the harshest assignments from the late 1860s through the early 1880s. This policy prompted one writer to opine in the Army and Navy Journal that black regiments should be allowed to return “to a cantonment in the East for needed rest and recuperation, and where they would have good opportunity for military instruction and training.
These colored soldiers have now amply proved their right to precisely the same treatment, in a military sense, as their white brethren.”73
Despite their rough assignments, reenlistment rates remained high and desertion rates remained low in black regiments compared to their white counterparts. In 1882, the Department of Texas appointed a board of officers to study underlying causes of desertion among soldiers serving in Texas. The board produced a special report for each deserter and listed the deserter’s name along with biographical information outlining the soldiers’ places of birth, occupations prior to joining the army, age, place/date of enlistment, and a physical description of the enlistee.
Board members then interviewed officers, non-commissioned officers, and enlisted men from the
70 Dobak and Phillips, The Black Regulars, 1866-1898, 67–89. 71 ANJ, August 16, 1873, 12, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo.31924069759938&view=1up&seq=22; ANJ, June 24, 1876, 742 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo.31924069759953&view=1up&seq=742. 72 Testimony Taken by the Committee on Military Affairs in Relation to the Texas Border Troubles, 45th Congress, 2d Session, H. Mis. Doc No. 64, 103, 107. 73 ANJ, October 8, 1881, 210, 95 deserters’ former companies to gather information on why the soldier had deserted. It is important to note that the deserter himself did not supply the answers to questions the officers posed in these interviews, but the structure of the questions the surveyors asked and the answers they received, closely mirrored the complaints that soldiers had long voiced in their testimony during trials by court-martial. For example, questions centered on soldiers’ marital statuses, lengths of confinement in the guardhouse without trial, complaints of ill-treatment, insufficiency of rations, and other matters.74 In short, officers began showing an inclination to think about the problem of desertion from the perspective of enlisted soldiers.
Imprisonment as a result of verdicts reached in trials by general courts-martial did not mark an end to soldiers attempting to protect their rights and challenge the military justice system. Soldiers frequently continued to exercise their right to petition by requesting copies of their court-martial cases from the War Department. In 1882, the Judge Advocate General noted that his office had provided 238 parties tried by general courts martial with copies of court- martial records.75 Soldiers requesting copies of the court-martial proceedings was another aspect of soldiers exercising their right to petition. With the copies of their individual proceedings, soldiers often consulted external legal counsel or requested a formal review of their cases by the
U.S. Army JAG office and War Department as a part of their appeals for clemency.76
By the 1880s and 1890s, army officers serving in various departments began collecting data about desertion, soldiers’ complaints, along with other information and recommended addressing the problem by making life in the army more appealing and satisfying to enlisted
74 Board of Survey, JAG Records, Department of Texas 1882, Box 1, Entry 4980, RG 393 Part I, NARA. 75 The total number of individuals tried by general courts martial in 1882 was 661 which gives a sense of the larger proportion of individuals who sought further action on their cases. Synopsis of Annual Report Judge Advocate General 1882, Letters Received, Box 16, Entry 6, Records of Judge Advocate General, RG 153. 76 Buck Childs from the previous chapter on reputation is a good example of this. The military did not have legal jurisdiction in trying his case at Fort Bayard, New Mexico. 96 soldiers. In 1882, J.W. Groesbuck, the JAG from the Department of the Missouri relayed information he had gathered from his observations and communications with other officers. “I here merely report what I have heard from older officers during all my service, that the garrison life of the soldier should be made less irksome,” he wrote. Groesbuck advised the army to build gymnasiums, bowling alleys, and reading rooms to expand soldiers’ recreational options. In his view, recreation “would lessen the frequency and cost of punishing crimes” and would improve the “moral and physical condition of the soldier.”77 That same year, the Judge Advocate General of the U.S. Army compiled the reports he received from all of his subordinates and recommended an incremental increase in soldiers’ pay along with the opportunity for soldiers to obtain early discharges from the army.78 The following year, the JAG from the Department of
Texas, stated that the wide disparities in punishment stemming from trials by garrison court was
“a source of discontent among enlisted men.”79 Arthur Murray, the JAG for the Department of the Missouri, made a similar argument about reforming the army’s justice system in 1888 in recommending that officers end the practice of confining soldiers in the guardhouse without a trial. Murray also advised the army to avoid employing soldiers’ as laborers on posts writing that
“except in emergencies, strictly military work only should be required of the soldier” and providing better food to soldiers.80
77 J.W. Groesbuck, Annual Report for JAG, Department of the Missouri, October 1, 1882, Letters Received, Box 16, Entry 6, Records of Judge Advocate General, RG 153, NARA. 78 Synopsis of Annual Report Judge Advocate General 1882, Letters Received, Box 16, Entry 6, Records of Judge Advocate General, RG 153, NARA. 79 J.O. Clout, Annual Report of the JAG for the Department of Texas, October 1, 1883, Letters Received, Box 16, Entry 6, Records of Judge Advocate General, RG 153, NARA. 80 Arthur Murray estimated that between one half to two thirds of the men who officers confined in the guardhouse for trivial offenses were released without trial. Arthur Murray, Annual Report of the JAG for the Department of the Missouri, September 30, 1888, LR, Box 18, Entry 6, Records of Judge Advocate General, RG 153, NARA. 97
Some officers retained their derisive views of the men who enlisted in the regular army.
In his annual report, Henry Goodfellow, the JAG representing the Department of the Missouri, reiterated the argument that recruiting officers should emphasize “quality over quantity” and “if honest and good men only could be enlisted, there would be little or no desertion.”81 Another
JAG officer contended that there were no “inherent defects” related to the quality of life in the army and recommended shifting the army’s recruitment efforts to smaller towns and away from
“the idle and worthless class which gather about the great [city] centers.”82 At the same time, military officials who studied desertion and other disciplinary issues had to come to terms with the fact that these acts were a form of agency that deprived the army of critical manpower that officers had to acknowledge.
By the late 1880s and 1890s, the army began implementing reforms based upon these recommendations. Campaigns to secure Native American lands and resources had mostly ended by this time and the army began consolidating regiments into larger permanent posts and closing the smaller outposts that had served as bases of operations for the campaigns. This consolidation freed soldiers from the burden of performing manual labor to maintain these small posts and allowed them to focus more on professionalization (marksmanship training, instructions in
81 Henry Goodfellow, Department of the Missouri Annual Report for the Judge Advocate General of the Department of Missouri, October 10, 1883, Letters Received, Box 16, Office of the Judge Advocate General, RG153. The regimental commander of the 10th Cavalry used similar rhetoric in explaining the cause of desertion in his unit stationed mostly in Arizona reporting that, “the cause in each particular case was due to some inherent viciousness and want of character.” John K. Mizner, September 2, 1891, 82 Annual Report for the Judge Advocate General of the Department of the Platte, September 30, 1888, Letters Received, Box 17, Entry 6, Records of Judge Advocate General, RG 153, NARA. It is important to note that while some officers believed that recruiters would find the best enlistees if they shifted their recruiting efforts away from urban areas to rural locales, officers in black regiments pursued the opposite practice. In the early organization of black regiments, army officers initially held similar beliefs about black recruits, believing that they could obtain a steady stream of recruits in the South. However, the regiments quickly shifted their recruiting efforts from the deep South to the upper South and more urban areas because they believed that black southerners from rural areas were less educated than those from urban centers. Dobak and Phillips estimate that nearly six times as many black men enlisted in the regular army from the South compared to the North in 1866. By the end of 1867, over one half of the total number of black enlistees hailed from the North. Dobak and Phillips, The Black Regulars, 1866-1898, 9–10. 98 tactics, field exercises, attending special training schools, etc.). Officials also improved healthcare and barracks living conditions in post facilities, placed greater emphasis on the formal education of soldiers, increased the monthly pay of enlisted men, and worked to improve the military justice system. Historians have certainly emphasized these institutional changes made by high-ranking army officers and officials in the War Department to improve the quality of soldiers’ lives but have not fully explored how the complaints and active resistance among soldiers drove some of these changes. Desertion was an illegal act that deprived the army of manpower, but it was also a form of agency that soldiers exercised which ultimately forced the army to make broader institutional changes to improve enlisted soldiers’ satisfaction with life in the regular army.
Despite these reforms, responsibility for implementing and following the guidance under these reforms fell to officers in the field who often continued to discipline soldiers in ways they saw fit. Nevertheless, soldiers continued to push the boundaries of their rights. Perhaps the increased opportunities for becoming more acquainted with the profession of arms including greater opportunities for formal educations only heightened soldiers’ consciousness of their rights and better equipped them to submit petitions and challenge officers. William Ward wrote a letter to the Adjutant General’s office stating that he believed that keeping him in chains during his arraignment was illegal.83 Samuel Potts, a black enlisted man from the 10th Cavalry expressed similar sentiments in a letter he sent to the Adjutant General in Washington D.C. requesting a discharge from the army complaining of the “injustice and rigid discipline” imposed upon him by his commanding officer along with some of the inconsistencies in the army’s justice
83 Private William Ward, GCM Case File, RR3238. 99 system that allowed the officer to bring different charges against different men for similar offenses.84
John J. French was a European immigrant who enlisted in the 2nd Cavalry. Although
European immigrants made up a substantial portion of white regiments in the U.S. Army, French was exceptional because he had attended a military academy in England and had served as an officer in the British Army. In 1891, French stood trial for refusing to obey an order at the post that required soldiers to wear a specific uniform item for inspections. “I just rebelled against it for I considered the treatment of the men at this post during the months of March and April so despotic and tyrannous that it was time some protests was made against it,” French complained.
In his view, the requirement placed an additional financial burden on enlisted soldiers to purchase the uniform item along with paying the fees for having it cleaned. French assumed a transatlantic approach to criticizing officers and advocating for soldiers’ rights which was based on his experience in the British Army. French believed that that U.S. Army officers made a
“deadly error” in “trying to treat [enlisted men] as if they were English, German, or Russian soldiers.” French believed that these “old military traditions” had “descended to them from their
European ancestors, and [were] applicable rather to white slaves or military machines than to free men.”85 Lastly, French made an appeal to American exceptionalism that such treatment of enlisted men in the army was antithetical to the “atmosphere of individual freedom” in the
United States.86
84 Samuel Potts, GCM Case File, SS128. 85 Here French invokes race when he refers to “white slaves,” rather than just using the word “slaves.” He does not elaborate any further on what he means by this. Perhaps he means slavery or servitude is antithetical to white people and he’s more likely to associate it with black people. Therefore, it raises questions about whether he would apply the same logic to African-American soldiers. 86 Private John J. French, GCM Case File, SS173. 100
Although soldiers often made individual claims to rights and justice, acting in groups remained an important part of that process. In November 1890 at Fort Thomas, Arizona, thirty- one members of Company E of the 24th Infantry Regiment, in much the same way as their predecessors at Fort Stockton nearly two decades prior, signed and submitted a letter to the assistant adjutant general of the Department of Arizona. In this letter, the men outlined their grievances against their company commander, Captain A.C. Markley for his “cruel treatment of the men.” The men alleged that since Markley had assumed command of the company, he had mistreated the men by using profane language toward them during drill, had not ensured that soldiers had access to quality food. Finally, Markley, along with the company first sergeant, had forced the soldiers to participate in gambling card games from which Markley profited.
Submitting this letter resulted in a trial by general court-martial in San Carlos, Arizona based on the charges of mutiny and making false allegations against a commissioned officer. During the court-martial, the officer who defended the soldiers in court asked Willis Pearcall, one of the soldiers on trial, why he had signed the petition. Pearcall simply replied, that he had signed it the letter of his own free will “to obtain justice.” In a similar manner, Private Robert Ellis, who had spent 20 years in the army, testified that he had signed the petition of his own free will because he believed that “[his] treatment should be brought to justice.” James Rhett, who was an army veteran of nearly 25 years, testified that Markley generated “a great deal of dissatisfaction on my mind in regard to soldiering, and I would rather be out of the company than in it, being I had been in the service so long.” One facet of this case that does emerge is the alliances between new soldiers and older soldiers. It appears that most of the men involved in the case had served multiple enlistments which suggests that soldiers’ efforts to claim and protect rights was not simply a trend among younger soldiers who were having difficult times adapting to the 101 difficulties of army life.87 Another soldier mentioned that “the treatment, being illegal, from
Captain Markley” was the reason why he and a number of other enlisted men requested transfers to other units.88
In the end, the soldiers achieved mixed results. Although soldiers never advocated for
Markley’s removal as the commanding officer, Markley remained the commander of the company through 1897 and continued to serve with the 24th Infantry Regiment through the
Spanish-American War.89 Officials, including Carl Weichman, the officer who defended the enlisted men in court, still believed that the men who had written and signed the letter had operated on dubious legal ground. Although the soldiers’ action had not amounted to mutiny and did not specifically violate any army regulations, “a combination of soldiers is not a proper thing,” Weichmann argued in his closing statement.90 This view served as the basis of discipline for all of the parties involved. Unfortunately for the two sergeants and corporals involved in the letter, the army demoted them to the rank of Private and required them to forfeit $10 of pay for six months. The court sentenced the other private soldiers to surrendering the same amount of their monthly pay for three months. The commander of the Department of Arizona ordered the men to be released from confinement and restored to duty rather than dishonorably discharging them and rebuked Markley for the hostile environment he had created in his company.91
87 This may also have been a part of the soldiers’ legal strategy. Complaints about food and harsh treatment often emanated from younger soldiers or soldiers who had only recently enlisted in the army. Perhaps it was not easy to dismiss the accusations levied against Markley if the complaints came from more experienced soldiers. Additionally, the very notion of being an “old soldier” may be a way of claiming rights and privileges in itself. 88 GCM Case File, SS95. 89 Monthly Returns for the 24th Infantry Regiment 1890-1897, NARA, M665, Reel 248. 90 GCM Case File, SS95. 91 Samuel Mills, Benjamin Berry, Joseph Hayer, and Aleck Bennett, William Thompson all signed the letter and all were able to continue serving in the military before ultimately retiring in the late 1890s and early 1900s and therefore, secured a retirement pension which was a crucial source of income for themselves and their families once they left the service. 102
Thomas Crowe and Frank Butler offer one example of how black soldiers applied notions of rights and their legal education from the military justice system to their encounters with civilian legal systems in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. In September 1890, Crowe and Butler, both members of the 24th Infantry Regiment, ran into trouble with civilian law enforcement in
Dona Ana County in southern New Mexico in September 1890 after killing a calf from a civilian’s livestock. The district court found Crowe and Butler guilty of theft and sentenced them to two years in the state penitentiary.92 According to the Santa Fe Daily New Mexican,
Thomas Crowe accepted the sentence, but rejected an additional measure imposed by the court requiring him remain in the penitentiary until he paid. Crowe declared that this additional burden was “a hardship not justified by law or reason” because he was a “poor man” who had
“no means of paying it or prospects of acquiring such means.”93 Crowe filed a lawsuit in the
Santa Fe County District Court against the superintendent of the New Mexico State Penitentiary for unlawful imprisonment. Two days later, Judge Seeds of the Santa Fe district court ruled that the law allowing law enforcement officials to confine prisoners for failing to pay fines only applied to county jails and ordered the release of both Thomas Crowe and Frank Butler from the penitentiary. Additionally, the court ordered the release of Refugio Chavez, a native of
Chihuahua, Mexico, for similar reasons. In 1885, the district court in Dona Ana County had sentenced Chavez to serve a two-year sentence for stealing cattle, but Chavez had served an additional five years because of his inability to pay a $10,000 fine.94
92 In November 1890, commanders discharged both Crowe and Butler from the army probably because of their lengthy prison sentences. 93 “He Killed a Calf. And Yet Thomas Crowe Asks the Courts to Liberate Him from the Penitentiary.” Santa Fe Daily New Mexican August 9, 1892, 4. 94 Santa Fe Daily New Mexican August 11, 1892, 4. 103
Enlisted soldiers’ notions of rights and their efforts to protect them extended into their relationships with civilians. Although units often served in isolated locales throughout the West, soldiers did have frequent contact with post traders, civilian scouts, laundresses, and other people who resided on military posts. Government contracts in which local businesses supplied garrisons with critical supplies often fueled the economies of small towns and settlements located near military posts. Additionally, soldiers often spent their meager monthly pay in these locales to purchase goods or partake in recreational activities in saloons, billiards rooms, and other places. At the same time, however, these recreational social spaces could quickly turn into hostile and potentially violent atmospheres.
In early February 1881, tensions between soldiers (both black and white) and the civilian population at San Angelo ran high. San Angelo was a city in West Texas near Fort Concho which was occupied by three troops of black soldiers from the 10th Cavalry and one company of white soldiers from the 16th Infantry. Tom McCarthy, a white San Angelo resident, murdered a black soldier named William Watkins outside of a saloon in San Angelo. Watkins was part of the Fort Concho garrison on the edge of town, and one newspaper described him as a “very peaceful negro [who] amused the people by his songs and banjo picking.”95 The investigation that followed revealed that McCarty shot Watkins because Watkins refused to continue to entertain the crowd at the tavern due to fatigue. This was the second murder of a U.S. soldier in this town in just under two weeks. McCarty fled the scene but ran into the Fort Concho post guard who arrested him and later turned him over to custody of the local sheriff.96 On the evening of February 3, copies of a printed leaflet appeared in the streets of San Angelo. The
95 “A Negro Soldier Shot and Killed,” Dallas Daily Herald, February 2, 1881, 1. 96 A gambler man only identified as Watson shot and killed a white soldier stationed at Fort Concho and managed to escape. His comrades “vowed vengeance and made threatening demonstrations,” but were mollified when San Angelo residents offered a reward for Watson’s capture. Austin Weekly Statesmen, February 10, 1881, 3. 104 leaflet read, “We, the soldiers of the U.S. Army, do hereby warn the first and last time all citizens and cowboys, etc., of San Angelo and vicinity to recognize our right of way as just and peaceable men. If we do not receive justice and fair play, which we must have, someone will suffer if not the guilty the innocent. ‘It has gone too far, justice or death.’”97 The anonymous authors of the leaflet only identified themselves as U.S. soldiers, but the leaflet was a bold proclamation of their right to move freely throughout the town along with the right to self- defense if residents failed to recognize their rights. However, county and state officials focused more on the threats of well-trained and experienced soldiers, rather than the rights they claimed.
Likely in reaction to this leaflet and reports from San Angelo that soldiers had threatened to kill McCarty if the judge allowed bail, state government officials, at the request of the district judge and attorney in San Angelo, dispatched twenty-one men to San Angelo “to help preserve civil order. As the Federal Soldiers had threatened to burn and pillage their town.” Captain
Marsh, the commander of the state troops, discovered that on the evening prior to his arrival,
“soldiers both black and white some fifty or more strong had marched into the town and fired several hundred shots in rapid succession into the town,” resulting in damage to several buildings, but only injuring one person.98 According to William H. Leckie, soldiers had attacked
San Angelo because rumor reached Fort Concho that McCarty was moving freely throughout the town suggesting that the sheriff had released him from jail. In fact, the man spotted riding about the town, was McCarty’s brother, who closely resembled him in physical appearance.99
As in previous instances, legal repercussions often accompanied soldiers’ efforts to protect their rights. While official reports from the Texas Adjutant General’s office and official
97 Leckie, The Buffalo Soldiers, 235–36. 98 Letter from Captain Bryan Marsh to General John B. Jones, February 11, 1881, Texas Adjutant General Records, Box 401-400, Folder 11, TSLAC; Austin Weekly Statesmen, February 10, 1881, 3. 99 Leckie, The Buffalo Soldiers, 236. 105 military records indicated that both black and white troops were active participants in the shooting at San Angelo, the only participants who faced military discipline for an alleged role in the events leading up to the shooting were three African-American soldiers.100 Most local newspapers that covered the San Angelo shooting only attributed culpability to black soldiers and villainized black enlisted men while victimizing McCarty. A newspaper from Jasper, Texas, reported that state troops had arrived to “protect the town from being sacked and burned by the negro soldiers, and to guard McCarty. . . There was no positive evidence against McCarthy,” for the murder of William Watkins.101 Another paper reported that McCarty “is now at Austin for safekeeping.”102 The Galveston Daily News dispatched a correspondent to interview McCarty at
Austin; the paper reported that “McCarty was arrested on suspicion, and he frankly admitted that if the colored troops believed he was guilty they had reason to be incensed.” Furthermore,
McCarty and his legal counsel decided that “the feeling was very high. . . and deemed it best to offer no defense.”103 The article also indicated that a guard of white infantrymen escorted
McCarty to the local sheriff in San Angelo, despite officials having identified white soldiers as participants in the shooting.
In the end, the commanders employed a similar strategy that they applied whenever there was tension between civilian communities and black garrisons and ordered the Fort Concho post
100 Winfield Scott, Isiah Turner, and Adam Bush were all members of the 10th Cavalry. These men had the misfortune of being caught as they returned from the attack on San Angelo as they attempted to return carbines to the company arms rack which soldiers had broken into to retrieve weapons for the attack. All three men maintained their innocence and the court was ultimately, the court unable to prove that any of the men had been involved in the actual shooting at San Angelo. Adam Bush and Winfield Scott were forfeited $5 for missing roll call, but Isiah Turner faced a harsher charge of six months confinement and a $10 monthly forfeiture of pay for the same period because he faced charges of breaking into the company arms rack. GCM Case File, QQ2285. 101 “State Items,” Jasper News-Boy February 18, 1881, 2. 102 “State News,” Brenham Weekly Banner February 24, 1881, 1. 103 “McCarty Accused of Killing a Colored Soldier at Fort Concho, Interviewed-Military Convention- Organization Effected,” Galveston Daily News, February 17, 1881, 1. The jurors for McCarty’s trial in Austin returned a verdict of not guilty for murder. Leckie, The Buffalo Soldiers, 237. 106 commander to remove the soldiers “who are known to be most involved in the late trouble” from
Fort Concho to smaller, more isolated posts on the Texas frontier.104 The next month, commanders deployed Troops D and E of the 10th Cavalry to these smaller posts. Adam Bush,
Isiah Turner, and Winfield Scott, the only soldiers who faced general courts martial for charges related to the shooting, were all members of these units. Although no soldiers from Troop F of
10th Cavalry, the only other black unit at Fort Concho, faced trial by general court-martial for participating in the shooting, commanders ultimately removed Troop F from Fort Concho in May
1881, leaving a garrison composed entirely of white soldiers.105 With the exception of the anonymous leaflets, posted throughout the town, the perspective of black soldiers in the event was often absent from the official reports and newspaper accounts of the shooting at Fort
Concho. However, soldiers believed that they were the social equals of the civilians that the U.S.
Army often assigned them to protect.
Throughout the post-Civil War era, enlisted soldiers continuously sought to expand the boundaries of their rights and protections to improve their material conditions within the U.S.
Army’s social order. Appeals for rights and protections present the opportunity to piece together an intellectual history of black soldiers that seriously interrogates their ideas about who they thought they were as soldiers and how they believed the social order should operate. In many cases, black and white enlisted men believed that extralegal actions like desertion and mutiny
104 Christopher C. Augur to Benjamin Grierson, February 18, 1881, Letters Sent, Department of Texas, NARA, Washington D.C., M1165, Roll 6. Removal or relocation of black soldiers was a strategy that military officials often employed when there was tension between black units and local civilian populations. Although the shooting at San Angelo did not command as much attention, the federal government took similar action in the Brownsville Raid, the Houston Mutiny, and other events. 105 Black soldiers from the 10th Cavalry returned to Fort Concho in November 1881 and continued to intermittently garrison the post between November 1881 and December 1884, but in smaller numbers than those in February 1881. There appeared to be no further incidents or tension that occurred when black soldiers returned to Fort Concho. Monthly Regimental Returns for the 10th Cavalry Regiment 1881-1888, NARA, Washington D.C., M774, Reel 97. 107 were necessary last resorts to protect or expand their positions within the army’s social order.
Yet, these campaigns among enlisted men for rights and justice often occurred in conjunction with the military campaigns and expeditions in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands to solidify geographic/national boundaries and secure Native peoples’ lands and resources. As indicated by the clash at San Angelo in 1881, the physical geography of black men was not solely confined to military spaces. Interactions with civilians was a regular part of the lives of black soldiers both on and off duty. With settler colonialism and white supremacy at the core of westward expansion, questions remained as to how black soldiers made sense of their position within the physical, social, and political boundaries that their military contributions helped to reshape.
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Chapter 3
“On the Other Side”: Black Soldiers and Border People 1866 to 1890
In June 1872 at Fort Duncan, Texas, Zack Taylor, an African-American soldier serving in the 24th Infantry Regiment, approached his comrade William Hodges, and informed him that he knew where he could sell a musket for specie. Taylor promised Hodges a share of the profits if he helped with the transaction. Hodges agreed, and later that afternoon, Taylor handed Hodges a musket and instructed him to carry it downhill so that the men could conceal the weapon.
Sometime after dark, Taylor, and possibly Hodges, retrieved the firearm and sold it to “a
Mexican” who awaited the two soldiers on the banks of the Rio Grande. The musket was the property of the U.S. Army and had been issued to Clive Houston, who quickly reported that his firearm was missing to his first sergeant. According to Houston, Taylor was the only person who had the opportunity to take his musket. Hodges later confessed to the crime when officers discovered his involvement and claimed that he knew where to find the individual who had purchased the musket. After searching the nearby town (likely Eagle Pass) in vain, Hodges revealed that he “thought the Mexican who had the gun, was on the other side of the river.”1
Neither Hodges nor Taylor included details about how they arranged their scheme, but it is safe to assume that the plot required a significant amount of planning and coordination with the purchaser to determine what he wanted to buy and arrange the time and place for the exchange. Additionally, Hodges’ knowledge of where to begin and end his search in his attempt to recover the musket suggests that he was familiar with the purchaser’s place of residence or at
1 William Hodges was found guilty and ultimately dishonorably discharged from the army, but Zack Taylor’s argument that the evidence against him was entirely circumstantial (and that Hodges’ testimony against him was unreliable because he was charged with the same crime) appeared to sway the commander of the Department of Texas. The commander overturned the guilty finding against him and ordered him restored to duty. William Hodges and Zack Taylor, GCM Case File, PP2718. 109 least knew about the locations he frequented. Taylor’s and Hodges’s experiences in the courtroom offer a lens through which to view black soldiers’ relationships with civilians and how those relationships transcended racial, ethnic, and national boundaries.2
From 1866 through the 1890s, black soldiers in the regular U.S. Army garrisoned forts in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, policing a region that both the U.S. and Mexican governments viewed as volatile and disordered. For much of the nineteenth century, both the United States and Mexico had struggled to gain footholds and assert authority in a region which remained largely dominated by powerful polities of Native people.3 The army patrolled the borderlands to thwart raids conducted by Native people and outlaws of various racial and ethnic backgrounds that resulted in the loss of livestock and other property from vulnerable settlements on both sides of the border.4 While official military duties involved transforming the boundary into a border and imposing some restrictions on the population who resided in the region, black soldiers like
Taylor and Hodges also took advantage of the porousness and fluidity of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Soldiers integrated themselves into local border communities by participating in informal economies, engaging in recreational activities, and at times, fleeing military service.
The relationships between black soldiers and civilians who resided near military posts often
2 William Hodges and Zack Taylor, GCM Case File, PP2718. 3 Truett, Fugitive Landscapes; DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts; Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire; Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn; St. John, Line in the Sand; Baumgartner, “The Line of Positive Safety.” 4 Black regiments continuously garrisoned forts in Texas from the summer of 1865 through the 1880s, but also served intermittently in both Arizona and New Mexico in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. The 10th Cavalry served in Texas from 1873 through 1884 and then garrisoned various parts of New Mexico and Arizona between 1885 and 1897. The 9th Cavalry served in Texas from 1867 to 1875 and moved to New Mexico in 1876 where they remained until 1881. The 9th Cavalry spent most of their time in Nebraska, Utah, and Wyoming after throughout the 1880s and 1890s, but briefly garrisoned parts of Arizona, New Mexico and Texas after their return from Cuba after the Spanish-American War. Much like the 9th Cavalry, the 38th and 41st Infantry Regiments had served in Texas since 1867. The 38th and 41st Infantry Regiments consolidated in 1869 to form the 24th Infantry Regiment and remained in West and South Texas through 1880. In 1888, the 24th Infantry Regiment moved to New Mexico and Arizona where it remained until 1896. The 25th Infantry Regiment served in Texas from 1870 to 1880 and remained in the Mountain West thereafter until they returned to garrison parts of Arizona, New Mexico and Texas after the Spanish- American War. The 25th served in Texas for a time between 1906 and 1907, but the U.S. Army relocated them after the Brownsville Raid. 110 crossed the very racial, ethnic, and national boundaries that black soldiers were charged with enforcing.
In borderlands history, scholars have focused extensively on states’ efforts to use force to transform geographic boundaries into borders to control movement and delineate national differences, but they have also demonstrated how border people frequently undermined states’ assertion of new control over boundaries that had previously been nonexistent or porous.5 The actions of black soldiers in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands indicate that they assumed hybrid identities; they were border enforcers by day, but often became border people at night.6 On the one hand, as active agents of the U.S. government, black troops transformed the southwest borderlands by restricting movement of border people and strengthening some of the ethnic and national distinctions based on the boundary between the United States and Mexico.7 Yet, black troops’ presence in garrisons in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands—and their involvement in scouting
5 Baumgartner, “The Line of Positive Safety”; Katherine Benton-Cohen, Borderline Americans: Racial Division and Labor War in the Arizona Borderlands (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009); Ettinger, Imaginary Lines; Lim, Porous Borders; Martínez, Border People; St. John, Line in the Sand; Truett, Fugitive Landscapes; Truett and Young, Continental Crossroads. 6 Historians often make distinctions between parties who represent the interests of the State and everyday people who resided in the borderlands (border people). Black soldiers disrupt this dichotomy because they fit into both categories. Military records that outlined the daily interactions between enlisted men and civilians in the borderlands also provide alternative sources for learning more about the lives of border people. 7 Leiker makes an important contribution to borderlands scholarship by explicitly acknowledging that African Americans were “voluntary participants in the subjugation of Indian and Mexican peoples throughout the West” and that black soldiers played a profound role in reinforcing the geographic, racial, national, and ethnic boundaries in the southwest borderlands. My project adds more nuance to this approach in two ways. First, African American voices are largely absent in Leiker’s study which results in a narrative that focuses more on non- black populations’ attitudes toward black soldiers rather than the attitudes of black soldiers themselves. Second, Leiker argues that “mistrust and violence” characterized the relationships between black soldiers and other non- Anglo groups in the borderlands rather than cooperation or peace because black soldiers imposed new restrictions on movement and geographic boundaries that did not previously exist. Conflicts between black soldiers and civilians are particularly evident in the El Paso Salt Wars, Rio Grande City, Brownsville, and the expedition of black regiments into Mexico during World War I and was certainly an important part of the relationship between non- black civilians and black soldiers. Yet, court martial records illustrate that elements of cooperation were more important parts of cross-cultural encounters in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands than Leiker acknowledged. James N. Leiker, Racial Borders: Black Soldiers along the Rio Grande (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2002); Steven Hahn, A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910 (New York, N.Y.: Penguin, 2016), 377–94; Elizabeth D. Leonard, Men of Color to Arms!: Black Soldiers, Indian Wars, and the Quest for Equality (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010); Quintard Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528-1990 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), 163–64. 111 expeditions, campaigns, escort duties, and other military tasks—allowed black men to form relationships with border people that they could use to exploit the porousness and fluidity of the border to improve their material conditions when they were off duty.8 Perceptions of racial, ethnic, and national difference (and sometimes animosity based on these categories) certainly existed among soldiers and civilians; relationships therefore assumed many forms on a broad spectrum ranging from cooperation to conflict. Despite these differences and divisions, parties demonstrated a willingness to form economic relationships based more on convenience and the potential benefits that they could derive from them. When it came to recreation or interaction in social spaces, racial, ethnic, and national differences were more pronounced and posed a greater challenge to forming and maintaining these relationships.
From the outset of their arrival in the U.S-Mexico borderlands, black soldiers interacted regularly with other non-Anglo groups and a great deal of that interaction occurred on the posts soldiers occupied. In August 1868, William H. Shafter, the post commander at Fort Duncan along the Rio Grande, requested authorization from the headquarters of the District of Texas to hire an interpreter at a salary of $50 per month. “The services of an Interpreter are almost daily required and it is considerable annoyance to send out and find some person to act as such for each occasion,” he grumbled.9 Non-Anglo persons were among the laundresses, teamsters, peddlers, and other civilians who frequented military posts. For example, a farmer of Mexican descent named Teofilo Jaramillo regularly visited Fort Concho to sell vegetables and
8 It is worth noting that black soldiers worked with civilians on some of these tasks. For example, the U.S. Army was frequently aided by Native American, Mexican, and Anglo-American scouts in their expeditions. Prior to the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, the army also deployed enlisted men to join sheriffs’ posse to aid local law enforcement with many of them lacking the manpower to make arrests. 9 William H. Shafter to C.E. Morse, August 11, 1868, Fort Duncan Post Records, Letters Received, Box 1, RG 393, Part V, NARA. In his diary, John Bigelow, an officer in the 10th Cavalry, viewed the presence of people of Mexican descent at Fort Davis as an opportunity to improve his Spanish, John Bigelow, Garrison Tangles in the Friendless Tenth, 18. 112 watermelons to the soldiers residing there.10 At times, non-Anglo groups actively assisted the
U.S. Army in policing the U.S.-Mexico region. The post commander at Fort Davis reported dispatching sixty black cavalrymen and a “volunteer party of Mexicans” to recapture livestock recently stolen from a wagon train by Native Americans.11 In 1877, high-ranking officers court- martialed a captain in the 10th Cavalry for failing to properly execute a raid against a Native
American camp in Mexico. More importantly, this trial’s inclusion of testimony from Seminole
Indian Scouts, black soldiers, and Mexican guides offer further evidence of non-Anglo groups working together to police the borderlands.12
Therefore, general courts-martial cases involving civilians often reflected the ethnic and racial diversity of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Many Native Americans and people of Mexican descent spoke English, but officers regularly employed interpreters during courts martial proceedings so that non-English speakers could testify in court. In one case involving both
Mexican and Native American witnesses at San Carlos, Arizona, the court employed two interpreters.13 Although the army relied primarily on civilian interpreters, there were instances when soldiers served as interpreters, demonstrating the cultural exchange occurring in the borderlands. Private John T. Glass, a black soldier, served as the post’s liaison to the Apache scouts and resided in the Apache camp near Fort Apache in Arizona.14 Both Glass and a Native
American scout served as interpreters in a case involving a Native American woman who filed a complaint with military authorities at Fort Apache, Arizona, against a soldier from the 10th
Cavalry who had assaulted her. Glass, who spoke both Spanish and English, and the Native
10 Harry Nelson, GCM Case File, PP3549. 11 Wesley Merritt to C.E. Morse, September 15, 1868, Fort Davis Post Records, Letters Sent, Volume 21, 1867-1869, RG 393, Part V, NARA. 12 Captain A.B. Keyes, GCM Case File, QQ300. 13 Private Lewis H. Jackson, GCM Case File, RR3421. 14 In Arizona Territory and Indian Territory (Oklahoma) black soldiers’ interaction with Native people increased because many of their duties involved guarding reservations. 113
American scout, who was fluent in both Spanish and the Apache languages, worked together to translate witnesses’ testimony for the court.15 Even when soldiers having knowledge of Spanish was not an official part of soldiers’ military duties, black soldiers at times demonstrated some practical proficiency in the language, which they likely picked up from conversing with
Mexicans they met in the borderlands.16
Black soldiers’ associations with people of Mexican descent and other non-Anglo groups in the informal economy often originated in previous interactions that occurred between them on military posts. In the fall of 1868, several soldiers alleged that Henry Allen, a black cavalryman, had personally profited from selling weapons at both Forts Clark and Davis, including selling a carbine and a revolver to a Mexican man named Jesus who had formerly worked as a guide at
Fort Davis.17 That same year at a post in New Mexico Territory, several soldiers saw two of their comrades sneaking a small “Mexican blanket” out of the barracks with a bundle of stolen soldiers’ clothes that they planned to sell. In the ensuing trial by court martial, one soldier who appeared as a witness for the prosecution testified that although it was common for soldiers to dispose of clothes in the village of Contadero across the Rio Grande, he had “seen men selling clothing to Mexicans in the company quarters.”18
15 Private. J.H. Paynter, GCM Case File, RR3906. It is also worth noting that John T. Glass eventually married a woman of Mexican descent in New Mexico in the early 1900s. 16 Polk Anderson and Alexander Robinson, both members of the 9th Cavalry got into a physical altercation when Anderson refused to tell Robinson what another soldier had “said in Mexican.” Wagoner Polk Anderson, GCM Case File, PP2664. 17 Private Henry Allen, GCM Case File, PP310. 18 A brief note on geography. Across the Rio Grande in New Mexico does not carry the same meaning that it does in Texas. The Rio Grande is a national boundary between Texas and Mexico, but the river flows north to south rather than west to east in New Mexico and does not divide New Mexico from Mexico. Ezekiel Webb, GCM Case File, PP331. Historians of the antebellum U.S. South have illustrated how enslaved people engaged in informal economies that frequently transcended racial boundaries. Jeff Forret, “Slaves, Poor Whites, and the Underground Economy of the Rural Carolinas,” The Journal of Southern History 70, no. 4 (November 2004): 783– 824; Timothy J. Lockley, “Trading Encounters between Non-Elite Whites and African Americans in Savannah, 1790-1860,” The Journal of Southern History 66, no. 1 (February 2000): 25–48; Keri Leigh Merritt, Masterless Men (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 123–24; Dylan C. Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North 114
Enlisted men’s physical geography was rarely confined to the posts they garrisoned.
With the permission of their non-commissioned and commissioned officers, troops often visited local settlements in the southwest borderlands when off duty; in Texas, soldiers crossed the Rio
Grande to visit Mexico. Yet, the frequency of court martial cases involving charges for unauthorized absences from the post also illustrate that troops embarked on unsanctioned excursions beyond the limits of the post. Cary Hill, a black soldier who was prosecuted for leaving Fort McIntosh at night to purchase bread in a nearby town, remarked that he was in the habit of doing so two or three times a week.19 These brief trips outside of the fort most commonly occurred at night after the final roll call of the evening; under the cover of darkness and with most of the garrison asleep, men sneaked past the post guard and ventured out into the world beyond the post behaving more like everyday border people than border enforcers.20
The large number of court martial cases involving charges against enlisted men for departing the garrison without permission illustrates the scale of soldiers’ nighttime movements throughout the borderlands, but the scale of these nighttime movements was likely even larger; many other enlisted men were successful in avoiding detection and their furtive excursions
Carolina Press, 2003), 45–78 esp 60–78. Peter Andreas, Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America (London; New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); George T. Díaz, Border Contraband A History of Smuggling across the Rio Grande (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 2015); St. John, Line in the Sand, 96–103; Truett, Fugitive Landscapes. 19 Cary Hill, GCM Case File, PP2985. 20 The work of Stephanie M.H. Camp, Anthony Kaye, and Alan Taylor provide an excellent analytical framework for thinking about the restrictions and limitations of soldiers’ physical geography and activities at night. There is a major difference between enslaved people and people who served voluntarily as soldiers. Yet, in the same way enslaved people were not physically restricted to individual plantations, black enlisted men absented themselves at night from the military posts for recreational purposes and to exchange items in the informal economy of the borderlands. Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Anthony E. Kaye, Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013), 55–83. 115 beyond their posts are absent from the archive.21 Early one morning in December 1867 at Fort
Brown, just outside of the city of Brownsville, Texas, Corporal Thomas White, who was performing guard duty at the post guardhouse, was surprised when he discovered that several prisoners were not in their proper cells and was even more shocked when he realized that the prisoners were intoxicated and that two African-American women, identified by others as prostitutes, were in the cell with the prisoners and had spent the entire evening there. Officers immediately turned their attention to Sergeant David Wood, who had supervised the guardhouse the previous night.22
Like other cases involving secret activities at night, the testimony from general court martial that followed offers an opportunity to piece together a picture of enlisted men’s nighttime activities. Sometime in the middle of the night Wood allowed a black infantryman named
William H. Jones and a white artilleryman named Henry Peachman, who were both serving sentences in the post guardhouse, to leave their cells and visit Brownsville to purchase some whiskey. William H. Jones stated, he “got about 400 yards from the guardhouse when I met two
Mexicans I asked them if they could tell me where I could get some whiskey. They asked me if I had the money for it. I said yes. One of them pulled a bottle out of his bosom and let me have it.” When Jones and Peachman returned to the guardhouse, they shared the whiskey with David
Wood and one of the other sentries. Both prisoners were more evasive in outlining the events that led up to their meeting two women, bringing them back to the guardhouse, and spending the remainder of the night with them. Jones was also dubious in describing how he secured the means to purchase the whiskey from the Mexican people he met when he ventured out of the
21 One evening in December 1873, for example, seven African American enlisted men at Ringgold Barracks left the post without permission and visited the nearby town of Rio Grande City; they all eventually faced trial for the offense. GCM Case File, PP3657. 22 Sergeant David Wood, GCM Case File, OO2766. 116 guardhouse. The specifications of the charges against David Wood alleged that Jones and
Peachman had first walked to Brownsville to sell a pair of cavalry boots “and purchased whiskey with the proceeds.”23
Soldiers like Jones and Peachman mostly came from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds and entered military service with few personal possessions of their own to barter or sell to civilians. The meager monthly salary of a private in the U.S. Army also did little to help men accrue wealth. Instead, soldiers often sold or traded whatever they had available including clothing, equipment, weapons, food, and other material in exchange for items and services they desired. For many enlisted men, participating in this informal economy allowed them to improve their material conditions and made their experiences in the remote environments where they served more bearable.24 For example, Private Alexander Fisher crossed the Rio Grande without permission and unlawfully disposed of two coats at Paso del Norte, Mexico in December 1873.
Barely a week later, Fisher’s first sergeant caught him attempting to sneak out of the post at night with two pairs of underwear and a canteen, likely intending to cross the river to sell them. When his commanding officer confronted him, Fisher reportedly remarked, “Well sir, these are my property and I propose to swap them off for a little Whiskey.”25 Most soldiers who faced comparable charges did not assert notions of property rights as boldly as Fisher, but they likely held similar views about their right to dispose of the items as they saw fit. In a complex arrangement at Fort Davis, William Price informed his commanding officer that he had surrendered his coat to a civilian tailor “until pay-day as security or settlement for debt.”26
23 Sergeant David Wood, GCM Case File, OO2766. 24 Soldiers often complained about both the quality and quantity of food. Private Joseph Jackson rendezvoused with a Mexican man one night at an abandoned building on the outskirts of Fort Craig and traded a stolen set of wagon sheets for peaches and grapes, Private Joseph Jackson, GCM Case File, PP333. 25 Private Alexander Fisher, GCM Case File, PP3740. 26 Private William Price, GCM Case File, PP3796. 117
Regardless of personal use by soldiers, the military officers declared these items to be U.S. government property and tried soldiers by court martial for illegally disposing of it. The testimony from the trials by court martial documents the army’s efforts to regulate the informal economy, but also provides some insight into the economy’s participants.
Obtaining details about soldiers’ clientele in the informal economy is more difficult, but the few inklings offered about them in trials by court martial show that the people who engaged soldiers often faced dismal economic conditions themselves. Some of the soldiers’ patrons were local merchants or traders who had greater access to liquid capital and could pay soldiers higher prices for the goods they offered, but more often the informal economy involved transactions with poorer people.27 Despite racial, ethnic, and at times national differences, black soldiers and civilians who occupied similar class backgrounds formed partnerships when their economic interests aligned. When army officers could identify soldiers’ clients in the informal economy, officers requested that they testify in court as witnesses against the soldier. The patrons often simply identified their occupations as “laborers.” Some of the very items that soldiers traded offer additional clues about the economic status of their trade partners in the informal economy.
Although military occupation imposed some restrictions on the movement of border people, the presence of military garrisons ensured a steady stream of supplies that might have been more difficult for border communities to access. Soldiers often circulated firearms in the informal economy, but the bartering of underwear, pants, shoes, coats, and other basic clothing items was more common, suggesting that these were materials the surrounding populations often lacked and needed. David Forsett, a black soldier in the 38th Infantry Regiment, admitted to
27 For example, John Anderson stole 100 pounds of coffee from his unit storeroom at Fort Stockton and sold it to James Riddle, a trader who resided in the nearby town of Eagle Pass, Private John Anderson, GCM Case File, PP4019. 118 visiting a “Mexican village” in New Mexico without permission and selling six pairs of shoes and a coat to a man only identified by the name “Chavez.”28 Soldiers often endured dismal conditions in the West, but the case of a soldier named Hannibal Bentford illustrates that civilians in the same locales lived under similar or worse circumstances. Miguel Perez testified that he saw Bentford enter a Mexican woman’s house near Roma, Texas, with an army tent and left without it, suggesting that Bentford had sold or traded the item to the residents. When soldiers eventually recovered the tent, officers ordered them to burn it because the woman who had purchased it from Bentford had small pox and was using the tent as a mattress when they recovered it.29 Soldiers overwhelmingly came from impoverished backgrounds and may have established some solidarity with people of Mexican descent who were also of limited financial means.30
While court-marital records are valuable, it is important to note that these records only illustrate certain aspects of informal exchanges between soldiers and civilians. First, these records only depict the soldiers who authorities were successful in catching and prosecuting for engaging in these types of transactions. In many cases, soldiers were certainly able to evade detection in carrying out their informal economic transactions. Secondly, because these records reflect the army’s efforts to police this economy, there is less focus on legal transactions between soldiers and civilians that were also prevalent. In addition to official traders who often resided on military posts, soldiers visited nearby towns and settlements where they used their monthly pay and any personal possessions available in purchasing or bartering for items that they wanted
28 Private David Forsett, GCM Case File, OO3040. 29 Private Hannibal Bentford, GCM Case File, PP3782. 30 Adams, Class and Race in the Frontier Army; Coffman, The Old Army, 137–46, 334; McChristian, Regular Army O!; Rickey Jr., Forty Miles a Day on Beans and Hay. 119 from civilians and vice versa.31 Jane Montgomery, a house servant for a doctor at Fort Duncan,
Texas, recounted that she and Elijah Smiley, a black soldier, walked together down the street in the nearby town of Eagle Pass; during their stroll, she visited a “a Mexican store.”32 Lastly, one army officer proposed sending a detachment of soldiers to the state of Chihuahua in Mexico to purchase potatoes and other food, indicating that the formal economy extended across the Rio
Grande.33
In many instances, soldiers often performed additional duties in garrison that were quite different from the traditional image of soldierly duties. Due to limited funds/personnel and much to the chagrin of enlisted men, army officers assigned soldiers to perform physical labor in constructing/repairing buildings, gardening, cleaning officers’ yards, and other tasks associated with posts’ maintenance. In November 1874, Alfred Canada and Frank Dunmore both took advantage of extra duties involved in their assignment to the post garden just outside of Fort
Stockton, Texas, to make personal profits. One day, Canada’s non-commissioned officer ordered him to deliver onions to the post, but Canada made a slight detour to sell onions to two Mexican men on the way.34 Frank Dunmore, in collaboration with Alfred Canada and other soldiers who worked in the post garden at Fort Stockton, sold a hog that he had raised with other soldiers to a local rancher of Mexican descent by making the arrangements with the rancher’s employee.
When the rancher was unable to pay the full price previously agreed upon, the soldiers stole the
31 David M. Delo, Peddlers and Post Traders: The Army Sutler on the Frontier (Salt Lake City: Univesity of Utah Press, 1992); Thomas T. Smith, The U.S. Army and the Texas Frontier Economy: 1845 - 1900 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1999); Robert Wooster, Soldiers, Sutlers, and Settlers: Garrison Life on the Texas Frontier (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1987), 64–82; Linda English, By All Accounts: General Stores and Community Life in Texas and Indian Territory (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013); Michael P. Gray, The Business of Captivity: Elmira and Its Civil War Prison (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2001), 74–88; Lang, In the Wake of War, 82–104. 32 Elijah Smiley, GCM Case File, PP2401. 33 William H. Shafter to H. Clay Wood, November 6, 1871, Fort Davis LS October 1871 to October 1873, Volume 3, Entry 120-2, RG 393 Part V, NARA. 34 Private Alfred Canada, GCM Case File, PP4285. 120 hog and sold it to an officer at Fort Stockton and returned a portion of the money gained from this sale to the rancher to compensate him for the money he had originally paid for the hog.35 In the end, members of the general court martial board decided to dishonorably discharge Dunmore.
Despite committing a similar infraction, Canada received a comparatively lighter sentence, which likely stemmed from his good reputation in his unit and the fact that he had testified for the prosecution in Dunmore’s case.36
Much like black soldiers, white soldiers participated in the informal economy to improve their material conditions and frequently crossed racial, ethnic, and geographic boundaries to do so. Private Patrick Stapleton, a soldier in the 8th Cavalry who supervised his unit’s food supply, faced trial for stealing and selling excess grain and corn to a civilian near Fort Clark, Texas, in
1881; he planned to use the funds obtained from selling items to purchase other food for the soldiers in his unit. Stapleton asserted that selling the grain was the result of “a desire springing from a kind heart, to see my comrades live well.”37 A U.S. commercial agent, based in Piedras
Negras, Mexico, outlined an intricate scheme in which white soldiers from the 4th Cavalry crossed into Mexico from Corpus Christi to sell their weapons with an intent to return to Mexico at a later date to sell more weapons and horses and desert to Mexico.38 The racial integration of army posts in the late 1870s and 1880s increased the opportunities for white and black soldiers to
35 Private Frank Dunmore, GCM Case File, PP4283. 36 Soldiers continued the practice of turning their extra duties into personal profit in other parts of the southwest borderlands. Nathaniel McClellan performed extra duty as the post baker at Fort Grant, Arizona in 1889 and established an entire personal enterprise in which he sold extra bread to a local restaurant owner and other soldiers for cash or exchanged the bread for other types of food. Private Nathaniel McClellan, GCM Case File, RR3443. 37 Private Patrick Stapleton, GCM Case File, QQ2568. Soldiers often complained about both the quality and quantity of food. Private Joseph Jackson rendezvoused with a Mexican man one night at an abandoned building on the outskirts of Fort Craig and traded a stolen set of wagon sheets for peaches and grapes which Jackson shared with another soldier. 38 William Schuhardt to Major F. Perry, May 5, 1870, LR, Fort Duncan Post Records, Letters Received, Box 1, RG 393 Part I, NARA. 121 collaborate on acts of theft to acquire items to circulate within the informal economy. At Fort
Concho in 1882 for example, Stephen Boardley, a black soldier, in company with two white soldiers from the 16th Infantry stole saddle blankets from the post stables to sell them to civilians who resided in the nearby town of San Angelo.39
While white and black soldiers both participated in the informal economy, one black soldier stationed near the Rio Grande at Fort Clark criticized the population surrounding his post for castigating black soldiers for theft while ignoring similar crimes among white soldiers. In
1877, the Brenham Daily Banner summarized a letter that the soldier sent to the San Antonio
Herald “in defense of his fellow colored soldiers.” “He says the colored troops steal less than the white ones; the charge that they commit three times as many crimes as the whites is characterized as a romance,” the paper reported.40 Although both black and white soldiers committed acts of thievery, the soldier’s letter suggests that Anglo-Americans reacted more vehemently to crimes committed by black soldiers rather than white soldiers.
Yet, the acknowledgement of troops’ theft pointed to one of the major problems with the informal economy for border civilians and individual soldiers. Civilians often allied themselves with soldiers in circulating items in the informal economy, but depending on the circumstances, soldier-civilian alliances quickly fell apart. While soldiers often secured items by dubious means to sell or trade to civilians, they sometimes stole from or robbed civilians of their personal property and used the plunder for their own proceeds. At the same time, soldiers could also become the victims of civilians, especially with troops being dispersed in smaller numbers at military posts. Edward Hatch, the post commander at Fort Davis, harshly described civilians
39 Private Stephen Boardley, GCM Case File, QQ3118. 40 The Daily Banner, November 17, 1877, 1, University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History. 122 who lived nearby. “Most of the population are strolling Mexican thieves and prostitutes,” he wrote. “Arms, clothing, and horses are stolen at this Post and it is only a few days ago that a
Soldier of my Band was waylaid and killed,” Hatch complained.41
When soldiers stole from or physically harmed civilians, border people appealed to military authorities and claimed access to military courts to resolve their disputes with soldiers in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Many of these episodes exist in the historical record because civilians and soldiers reported these incidents or infractions to non-commissioned and commissioned officers who ordered the arrest and subsequent trial of accused soldiers; on numerous occasions, civilians themselves testified against the soldiers for the prosecution.
Officers ultimately decided how to adjudicate these disputes and determined which cases merited legal action. There are likely many complaints that officers decided to remedy outside the courtroom or simply ignored altogether that are absent from the historical record.
The civilians in the best position to appeal to military authorities for recourse were those who resided on or near military posts, especially laundresses, servants, and post traders.42 Sallie
Plant, a laundress in the 9th Cavalry at Fort Quitman, successfully recovered most of the $100 worth of clothing that an enlisted man had stolen from her home and attempted to sell in
Mexico.43 Through an interpreter, Galistia Matriel, a Mexican woman, recounted in court how two African American enlisted men had forcibly removed her and another woman from their home at Fort Stockton, Texas, and stole personal property from them.44 In both instances, the
41 Edward Hatch to H Clay Wood, October 18, 1870, Fort Davis LS July 1869 to October 1871, Volume 2, Entry 120-2, RG 393 Part V, NARA. 42 Officers court-martialed Allen Brice and Jessie Gardiner for failing to pay their debts to post traders. Allen Brice, GCM Case File, PP 775; Jessie Gardiner, GCM Case File, PP 3782. 43 Joseph Ford, GCM Case File, PP2268; Ellie Russell, GCM Case File, PP2268. 44 George Washington, GCM Case File, PP2306; Robert Gregory, GCM Case File, PP2306. 123 testimony of civilians was critical in holding the accused soldiers accountable and officers severely punished the soldiers involved in the incidents.
Civilians’ ability to resolve disputes with soldiers through the military justice system was aided by the fact that some officers viewed the civilians who lived and worked on army posts as members of the military community. William H. Shafter, who was the commander of the 9th
Cavalry and post commander at Fort Davis in 1871, articulated such views in a letter to a Justice of the Peace from Presidio County. Whenever the county sheriff “has official Business to transact on the post. . .with any officer, soldier, employee, or other camp follower he must come to me before attempting to enforce any civil action against any of the above mentioned class of persons.”45 That same day, Shafter wrote another letter to the Justice of the Peace for Presidio
County informing the J.P. that he had learned from several people that the Sheriff had “publicly threatened to kill [him].” Shafter banned the county sheriff from Fort Davis and threatened to arrest him if he discovered the sheriff on the post’s premises.46 The question of jurisdiction was often a complicated issue that military officers and civilian officials both collaborated and clashed. As the U.S. Army attempted to solidify geographic boundaries between the U.S. and
Mexico, officials struggled to delineate boundaries between U.S. military and local civilian jurisdiction and to determine the extent to which border communities exerted authority over border enforcers.
The Articles of War outlined various military offenses that enlisted men and officers could commit, but the articles were less clear on the question of military courts’ jurisdiction over incidents involving both military personnel and civilians. Nevertheless, army officers had a very
45 William H. Shafter to S.R. Miller (Justice of the Peace of Presidio County), November 6, 1871, Fort Davis LS, Volume 3, Entry 120-2, RG 393 Part V, NARA. 46 William H. Shafter to S.R. Miller (Justice of the Peace of Presidio County), November 6, 1871, Fort Davis LS, Volume 3, Entry 120-2, RG 393 Part V, NARA. 124 powerful tool at their disposal in the 99th Article of War (conduct prejudicial to good order and discipline). This article allowed officers to prosecute soldiers for any action deemed disruptive to military order that was not specified in other articles. The power in this statute was its lack of specificity; determining actions that constituted conduct prejudicial to good order and discipline was ultimately at the discretion of officers. In this respect, “good order” also applied to the social order or harmony that military officials hoped to maintain among border people and soldiers who occupied the same spaces on and near military posts.47
Even when civilians resided beyond the limits of garrisons, military courts still served as a conduit for border people to resolve their disputes with soldiers and in many cases offered a speedier legal recourse than turning to local county courts that met irregularly. In July 1876, as a squad from the 9th Cavalry traveled with a wagon train north in New Mexico from Fort Bayard to
Santa Fe, several cavalrymen seized, killed, and ate a cow near the town of Socorro that was the property of William A. Smith, a deputy tax collector. Smith appealed directly to one of the military officers stationed at Fort Bayard for compensation and listed the names of two Anglo men and two Mexican men who had witnessed the killing of the cow.48 The soldiers admitted to killing and eating the cow, but stated that they only did so “under the force of circumstances and not with a willful intent to rob or damage the owner of the said Cow.” The soldiers agreed to surrender money from their next monthly salary to compensate Smith for the cow.49
47 Laura F. Edwards informs my thinking here. Officers approached administering the military justice system as not only regulating behavior within the ranks, but also helping to maintain the social order for everyone residing on the post and the area surrounding it. Laura F. Edwards, The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). 48 William A. Smith to Charles Beyer, August 5, 1876 and William A. Smith to Charles Beyer, August 30, 1876, LR District of New Mexico, NARA, Washington D.C. M1088, Reel 27. 49 Affidavit of Henry C. Turner, Edward L. [illegible], Thomas Gilliard, August 30, 1876, LR District of New Mexico, NARA, Washington D.C., M1088, Reel 27. 125
Enlisted soldiers themselves were also aware of these arrangements between the army and civilians. Three African-American soldiers from the 9th Cavalry, passed through San Jose,
New Mexico, while serving as escorts for a wagon train. While the escort halted temporarily for supplies, one of the soldiers sneaked into the home of Bernardo Chavez, a local merchant, and stole several articles of clothing. When Chavez noticed that the items were missing, he suspected that one of the soldiers was involved in the burglary and complained to one of the soldiers waiting with the wagons. The soldier, conversing with Chavez through an interpreter, offered to take Chavez to visit the local post commander at Fort Craig to address the issue.50
Civilians’ appeals to military authorities to resolve disputes with soldiers did not mean that soldiers were protected from adverse legal action under the jurisdiction of civilian courts.
In June 1878, Fannie Cooper, a white woman who was romantically involved with a black soldier named William Johnson, appealed to both civilian and military authorities and accused
Johnson of threatening her with a razor.51 In the end, the Justice of the Peace for Tom Green
County collected a sworn statement from Cooper but ceded the case to the military authorities at
Fort Concho, even though the confrontation between Johnson and Cooper happened away from the military reservation in the nearby town of San Angelo. Such a move worked to Johnson’s benefit since he enjoyed a good reputation in his unit as a non-commissioned officer. In the ensuing general court martial, Johnson’s gendered attacks on Cooper’s reputation as a woman who did not adhere to proper sexual morals resulted in Johnson’s acquittal. The stakes for
Johnson would have been higher had he faced trial before the county court. As one attorney wrote in a pardon application for another black soldier who did face trial in civilian court for a
50 Ewing was the soldier alleged to have been involved in the burglary. The court found him guilty and t Private Peter Ewing, GCM Case File, QQ2407. 51 Sergeant William Johnson, GCM Case File, QQ740. 126 separate incident, in the same county at about the same time as Johnson’s court martial, “It is a well known fact here that in the early days of 1878 and thereabout a negro soldier from Fort
Concho. . .could be convicted of any offense. . .upon very slight evidence.”52
In instances involving violence between civilians and soldiers, officers in black regiments expressed fears that black enlisted men would not receive fair trials in civilian courts. In 1869,
James Fisher, a black soldier at Fort Quitman faced accusations of murdering a man named
Pablo Flores in the nearby town of Eagle Springs. When the Sheriff of El Paso County arrived at
Fort Quitman and requested that the post commander release Fisher to his custody, the post commander refused, writing “that owing to the excitement caused by the killing of this man and strong prejudice already existing against colored troops, a fair and impartial trial cannot be had before the civil authorities.”53 A military commission eventually acquitted Fisher of the charge, but civilian legal officials in El Paso County issued a warrant for his arrest and requested that military officials transfer the accused soldier to their custody. A.P. Morrow, an officer in the 9th
Cavalry, vehemently protested this action. “The whole community are violently prejudiced against him probably because he is a negro soldier. . .he would be mobbed by a lawless crowd who have sworn to kill him,” Morrow wrote to headquarters. He also warned commanders that if the army transferred Fisher to El Paso County, “I shall be compelled to send a company to El
Paso for his protection.”54
52 Letter from [illegible names] to Governor L.S. Ross, December 14, 1888, Philip Playter Pardon Application, Box 2-9/408, Applications for Pardons, 1840, 1845-1938, Texas Secretary of State Records, Texas State Library and Archives Commission. The men were writing in support of Playter who at the time had served 8 years of a 25-year sentence at the Texas State Penitentiary. L.S. Ross eventually pardoned Playter in 1890. 53 George A. Pennington to Louis O Caziarro, March 14, 1869, Fort Quitman Post Records, LS, Volume 1, Entry Number 367-1, RG 393, Part V, NARA. 54 Major A.P. Morrow to Brevet Colonel H. Clay Wood, September 7, 1869, Fort Quitman Post Records, LS, Volume 1, Entry Number 367-1, RG 393 Part V, NARA. 127
Aware of the complicated arrangements between local legal authorities and military authorities, enlisted soldiers often found themselves wedged between both systems, making their dual identities as border enforcers and border people more of a hindrance than an asset. In his haste to avoid the scrutiny of local civilian authorities, Jefferson Knox, a black trooper in the 9th
Cavalry, committed a military infraction for which he eventually faced a trial by court martial. In
February 1875, Knox was part of a small detail of soldiers escorting government wagons from
Edinburg to Ringgold Barracks. While en route, Knox left the wagon train, visited Solices
Rancho, and later lied to Edward Hatch, the regimental commander, about visiting the ranch. The cavalryman pled guilty to both charges, but submitted a written statement alleging that the sergeant supervising his escort had ordered Knox “to buy for him some chickens from the
Mexicans.” “On account of there being present some civil officers whom I thought I would be turned over to I did denie [sic] going to the ranch as there had been some rumor of soldiers disturbing Mexicans at that ranch,” Knox wrote. Lying “was not for the purpose of deceiving my commanding officer at all it was only to save myself from the hands of civil authorities,”
Knox continued. Knox distinguished between the risks of facing a trial by court martial or prosecution by civilian legal authorities and expressed a clear preference for the former.55
Knox was certainly aware of the difficulties black soldiers encountered when civilian legal authorities prosecuted them. His unit, along with several other companies of black troops, garrisoned Ringgold Barracks from March 1873 until the army reassigned them to New Mexico in the fall of 1875. During that period, eleven black enlisted men from Ringgold Barracks had encounters with the local court system in the nearby town of Rio Grande City. Sentences for these soldiers ranged from $100 fines and short sentences in the county jail to lengthier prison
55 Corporal Jefferson Knox, GCM Case File, PP4517. 128 sentences in the Texas State Penitentiary in Huntsville.56 In the same month that Knox made an unauthorized visit to the ranch and made a false statement about it to his commander, local law enforcement from Rio Grande City arrested another black cavalryman named John Williamson on murder charges.57 This fear of civil authorities extended into the 1880s and into other parts of
Texas. In 1882, a board of officers established to investigate the circumstances surrounding individual cases of desertion in Texas concluded that at least two soldiers had deserted to avoid prosecution by civilian authorities.58
Enlisted soldiers often expressed frustration with being wedged between the military and civilian justice system and questioned where the jurisdictional boundaries were. Clemons W.
Clark, a white soldier from the 19th Infantry, expressed similar sentiments after civil authorities arrested him for excessive intoxication and physically assaulting another soldier from his company in Rio Grande City, Texas. Clark maintained his innocence, but he rejected having to serve a twenty-day sentence in the county jail for the offense and then subsequently facing trial for the same offense in a military court. “Is it the proper method in when soldiers have personal difficulties to go to the civil authorities,” Clark asked. Clark reasoned that neither he nor the soldier he had attacked were “citizen[s] of Starr County, Texas” and that because they were both
56 The monthly returns for each regiment listed the status of each enlisted soldier who was absent from duty. One such status was “in the hands of civil authority.” The monthly returns listed the name of the soldier with the date taken into custody and the location. This offers a route for determining the names of black soldiers who had some engagement with the civilian criminal justice system. With those names and a rough date at which the alleged offense occurred, a search of local court records reveal greater details about each case. Starr County Office of the District Court, Reel 1017266, Vol. A3 (1860-1879), University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. 57 The monthly returns for the 9th Cavalry listed John Williamson as being “in the hands of civil authorities” in Rio Grande City on February 12, 1875. The minutes of the Starr County District Court shows that Williamson was arrested, tried for, and eventually found guilty of murder. The court sentenced to him life in prison at the Texas State Penitentiary in Huntsville. In February 1894 after nearly 20 years in prison, Williamson received a pardon from the Governor of Texas and was released from prison. Texas, Convict and Conduct Registers, 1875- 1945, TSLAC; John Williamson Application for Pardon, Applications for Pardons, 1840, 1845-1938, Texas Secretary of State Records, Box 2-9/447, TSLAC; 58 Separate Special Reports for Sergeant Edwin L. Adams, 8th Cavalry and Private William H. Barney, 10th Cavalry, Reports of Board of Survey in Cases of Deserters 1882-96, Judge Advocate General for the Department of Texas, Box 1, RG393 Part I, Entry 4980, NARA. 129 soldiers they should be tried in a military court. “The confinement awarded to me by the civil court was illegal and the absence from the 4th to the 23rd December 1882, should be not held as against me in any way to my detriment,” Clark declared.59 Clark declared his status as a border enforcer and an exemption from the civilian legal system that applied to other border people.
The court ultimately acquitted Clark of the charges against him, but Clark was correct in worrying about the military court using his county jail sentence against him. In 1889, civilian authorities arrested George Rit, a black cavalryman, for disorderly conduct in the town of
Solomonville and sentenced him to forty-five days imprisonment in the county jail. The same day that Rit returned to his unit, officers arrested him and tried him by general court martial under the blanket charge of prejudice to good order and discipline for “depriving the government of his services” while he was serving his jail sentence. “I did not have the money to pay my fine and had to go to Solomonville county jail to serve it out. . .I did not stay away of my own free will,” Rit explained. The cavalryman also outlined the financial costs of serving the county jail sentence and his subsequent confinement in the post guardhouse for two months while awaiting his trial by court martial. “My pay as a soldier for the time of my absence has been stopped against me and I have been in confinement here nearly two months.” Despite Rit’s pleas, the court sentenced him to two more months of confinement and forced him to surrender $10 of his pay for the same period.60
Soldiers were aware of some the dubious boundaries between military and civilian jurisdiction and attempted to turn the ambiguity to their advantage. In his personal statement before the court at the end of his trial by court martial, Frank Hagan requested that his “sentence be no more severe than would be awarded by the local courts for a like offense.” In the end, the
59 Private Clemons W. Clark, GCM Case File, QQ3719. 60 Corporal George Rit, GCM Case File, RR3870. 130 court sentenced Hagan to ten years in prison at the Texas State Prison in Huntsville.61 James
Easley, a soldier serving at Fort Bayard, New Mexico pled guilty to the charge of physically assaulting his wife, but he argued that the military did not have jurisdiction because his crime had occurred in the nearby town of Central City rather than on a military reservation. Easley also argued that despite his wife being married to a soldier, her residence in Central City meant that she had no connection with military community. Easley’s argument appeared to sway the members of the general court martial because they gave him a very light sentence.62
The ambiguous boundaries of jurisdiction also applied to disputes between U.S. soldiers and Mexican civilians that occurred in Mexico. Gabriel G. Cordero, a magistrate in Piedras
Negras just across the Rio Grande from Fort Duncan, sent two letters in the spring of 1869 reporting to the post commander that a group of inebriated African-American soldiers had
“committed various disorders” and “insulted some Mexicans.” In both letters, Cordero mentioned the international implications of these incidents by stating that the continued harmonious relationships between the U.S. and Mexico depended on resolving this dispute.63
Military officials did not ignore these appeals. In a response to a separate incident, a U.S. commercial agent in Piedras Negras arranged a payment of $58 to a Piedras Negras resident as compensation “for all damage done by U.S. troops Aug. 6th 1869 to property in this vicinity.”64
61 Frank Hagan, GCM Case File, PP3446. In this case, Frank Hagan was accused of being boisterous and disorderly in the nearby town of Rio Grande City and using “improper language” in front of civilians near a merchant’s store. An officer attempted to arrest him, but Hagan fled the scene. The charges allege that Hagan drew a pistol and attempted to fire at the officer, but Hagan claimed that it was a matter of self-defense because the officer had drawn his sword and threatened him first. This probably explains why the sentence was so severe. Enlisted soldiers, both black and white, committed acts of violence against each other all the time, but these incidents were not punished as severely as those involving enlisted men engaging in physical altercations with officers. 62 James Easley, GCM Case File, RR3562. 63 Gabriel G. Cordero to the Commander of the Fort Duncan, March 17, 1869 Fort Duncan Post Records, LR, Box 1, RG 393 Part V, NARA; Gabriel G. Cordero to the Commander of Fort Duncan, April 12, 1869, Fort Duncan Post Records. 64 William Schuchardt to Commanding Officer at Fort Duncan, January 7, 1870, Fort Duncan Post Records, LR Box, 1, RG 393 Part V, NARA. 131
In a separate incident that year, Mexico successfully secured the transfer of Lewis Taylor and
Charles K. Clay from Fort Quitman to Paso del Norte, Mexico, and tried them for killing a
Mexican citizen at a disturbance in a saloon.65
Mexican residents did not always turn to or wait for their local government officials and diplomats to voice their complaints against U.S. soldiers. Despite not residing on U.S. military posts or in the United States, Mexicans who lived south of the Rio Grande sometimes crossed the border and appealed directly to U.S. military authorities. Ramon Arsola, who resided in the small town of San Lorenzo, Mexico, just across the Rio Grande from Fort Quitman, crossed the river and reported the involvement of several soldiers from the garrison in the theft of a trunk filled with over $400 in paper currency and silver from his residence. Despite officers often issuing orders that restricted men from leaving post to visit nearby towns without permission, soldiers often visited these locations for recreational purposes anyway, including excursions into
Mexico.66 Pursuing prosecution of the soldiers and the return of his property in the U.S. military justice system was probably a more convenient legal recourse for Arsola that allowed him to avoid the complex diplomatic hurdles that would involve having the soldiers tried under
Mexican jurisdiction. Arsola’s direct social and economic connections with soldiers from Fort
65 A.P. Morrow to H. Clay Wood, December 15, 1869, Fort Quitman Post Records, LS, Volume 1, RG 393 Part V, NARA. In Lewis Taylor’s case, transferring him to Mexico may have also provided a convenient outlet for army officers to rid themselves of a soldier that they considered troublesome. At one point while officers were attempting to determine the proper course for transferring him to Mexico for trial in accordance with the extradition treaty between the U.S. and Mexico, Taylor was serving a sentence in the post guardhouse for drunkenness on duty. It also reveals A.P. Morrow’s flexibility in dealing with civilian legal authorities. Morrow expressed more opposition to transferring James Fisher to local custody but was willing to transfer Taylor and Clay to Mexico for trial. 66 The experience of Corporal Lewis Johnson offers a portrait of recreational life of soldiers. Johnson was in charge of a guard detail at Fort Duncan and one night he took a portion of the guard with him to the nearby town of Eagle Pass, According to one soldier, the first place they visited in town was the home of a woman named “Jane.” The soldier then went to John Cooke’s gambling saloon where they remained for about an hour and then went to “White’s Hall” to attend a ball. Corporal Lewis Johnson, GCM Case File, PP1699. Private William Chase, a cavalryman stationed at Fort Davis, Texas crossed the Rio Grande without permission and got intoxicated in Presidio Del Norte just across the river, Private William Chase, GCM Case File, PP5021. 132
Quitman also made military authorities more receptive to assisting Arsola with his case. During the ensuing trial by court martial of the soldiers that Arsola accused of involvement in the theft, multiple soldiers who testified exhibited a high level of personal familiarity and acquaintance with Ramon Arsola and frequently referred to him by his first name. The soldiers also revealed that Arsola’s home doubled as a saloon that soldiers frequently visited to socialize, gamble, and participate in other recreational activities. One soldier wrote in a letter to the Secretary of War that it was “[the] custom” of soldiers from Fort Quitman to purchase items in Mexico and “to visit that place daily during the hours they were off duty.”67
The perceived ease of association and mingling among black soldiers and other non-
Anglo groups led some high-ranking officers and congressional officials to question the national loyalties of black soldiers in an 1877 hearing before the Committee on Military Affairs. The primary purpose of the hearing was for Congress to gather information about the military situation in Texas along the Rio Grande, particularly the U.S. Army’s efforts to suppress the raids conducted by outlaws and Native Americans in that region. One congressman expressed concern about “the tendency of greater demoralization” among black troops than white troops because of the “small posts surrounded by people of mixed blood, with no marked color line of distinction between them and the blacks.” Philip H. Sheridan replied that, “it was his belief that the population along the Rio Grande fraternize very readily with the colored troops.”68 The chairman of the committee was more direct in questioning an army officer about the relationships between people of Mexican descent and black soldiers. “Are the colored soldiers more apt to be friendly with the Mexicans or to desert into Mexico than white soldiers are,” he
67 Privates William H. Jackson, Henry Williams, and William H. Singleton, GCM Case File, PP3740. 68 Testimony before the Committee on Military Affairs in Relation to “The Texas Border Troubles,” 45th Congress 2nd Session, Washington Government Printing Office, 1878, 70. 133 asked. The army officer replied, “Colored soldiers do not desert nearly as much as white soldiers do. Generally speaking, they are quite friendly with Mexican women. In fact there is no prejudice on the other side in regard to color. In 1867, during the Mexican war of independence, the war of Maximilian, many colored soldiers from our side deserted and were made officers in
Mexico.”69
The discussion at the congressional investigation mirrored the larger views among senior officials about how easily groups deemed non-white mingled and collaborated despite their differences. At Fort Clark, Texas, in 1875, Edward Hatch urged commanders to grant the
“Seminole Negroes’” request of providing funds so that the group could move to Florida “where they can obtain a living for themselves.” Hatch feared that the group would relocate across the
Rio Grande to the San Carlos Mountains in Mexico if the government failed to meet their demands. “There they can obtain land, depredate the Ranches of Texas and furnish an asylum for deserters white and black from this Frontier,” Hatch wrote.70 The assumption of black and
Native cooperation is one of the reasons why military officials assigned companies of Native
American soldiers to white regiments, but never assigned them to black regiments in a short- lived experiment in the early 1890s.71 In 1889, a New Mexico newspaper, published a report from a U.S. Army scout who attributed the “restlessness” of Apaches “to their association with the negro soldiers.” “The average buffalo will sell whiskey and ammunition to any Indian who has money and makes love to the squaws, all of which is highly demoralizing to the Indians.”
“You can’t demoralize a buffalo,” the report concluded.72 Even when the army moved soldiers
69 Testimony before the Committee on Military Affairs in Relation to “The Texas Border Troubles,” 142. 70 Edward Hatch to Assistant Adjutant General of Texas, August 7, 1875, Department of Texas, Letters Received, Box 31, Entry 4873, RG 393 Part I, NARA. 71 Dobak and Phillips, The Black Regulars, 1866-1898, 84–85. 72 The word buffalo is likely a reference to the nickname applied to black soldiers in the post-Civil War era, “buffalo soldier.” The origins of this term remain unclear, but it soon became a generic term that non-black groups used to “other” or distinguish black soldiers from white soldiers. More importantly, black soldiers’ in their 134 from the southwest borderlands to assume new duties and responsibilities in the northern plains of the United States, the informal economy continued to exist and some, like the scout, believed that this economy undermined the U.S. imperial project of pacifying Native American populations.
The reality on the ground of relationships between black soldiers and people of Mexican descent was more complex, and Washington congressional and military officials may have overestimated the level of fraternalism that existed between the two groups. In 1878 at Ringgold
Barracks in southeast Texas, the same year that Congress collected testimony on military affairs occurring along the U.S.-Mexico border, soldiers from the 24th Infantry hosted a dance in their company quarters. Corporal Logan Goodpasture noticed a Mexican man standing outside with his wife observing the dance through a window. Goodpasture approached the spectators and, in
Spanish, invited Ramos and his wife inside to join the dance. According to several witnesses,
Ramos declined the invitation and said he did not attend “nigger dances.” Insulted, Goodpasture ordered Ramos to leave and hurled a handful of loose gravel at him as Ramos walked away.
Ramos turned around and attempted to attack Goodpasture with a stick, but Goodpasture overpowered him, seizing his weapon and then delivered several blows to Ramos’s head.73
Ramos, confident in his status as a cook for a high-ranking officer on the post, reported the incident to both the local authorities and military authorities. Members of the general court marital found Goodpasture guilty of assault, but the members removed the phrase “without just cause or provocation” from the charge and only sentenced him to a fine of five dollars. This
testimony in courts martial and in other documents did not refer to themselves as “buffalo soldiers.” For this reason, this dissertation avoids using the term. Western Liberal, October 4, 1889, 3, Chronicling America, Library of Congress. Although not featured as prominently in this chapter, Native Americans were a part of the informal economic exchanges with the military as well. Native American involvement is more pronounced in the 1880s and 1890s when black soldiers served in New Mexico and Arizona. By this point, their military duties were more focused on keeping Native Americans on reservations. 73 Corporal Logan Goodpasture, GCM Case File, PP3553. 135 light sentence was perhaps a tacit approval of both Goodpasture’s self-defense claim and his reaction to a racist insult. More importantly, this entire case is evidence that people of Mexican descent did not always welcome sharing the same social spaces as black soldiers.
Balls and dances were intricate parts of the lives of black soldiers who behaved more like border people at night rather than border enforcers.74 Some soldiers hoped to raise funds to host a ball by participating in the informal economy and crossing the Rio Grande to sell uniform items in Mexico.75 But in the social spaces of saloons, brothels, and restaurants, a receptive or pleasant atmosphere could quickly degenerate into violence. William Weaver ventured into
Mexico without permission and while there engaged in a fight where he suffered a gunshot wound that kept him out of action for two months.76 Weaver, likely wishing to avoid more trouble with officers, pled guilty but offered no details on the incident that led to the wound.
Against the orders of their commanders, soldiers often carried small weapons on their persons for self-defense when they visited settlements or small towns near their posts and when they crossed into Mexico.77
Clashes in social spaces reveal that balls, dances, and other social events often transcended racial and ethnic boundaries, with violence emerging as an important aspect of constructing communities and establishing boundaries within them. Other cases involved soldiers who were more forthcoming than Weaver. In their objective of maintaining military
74 The cases of Sergeant Ameal Morris, Musician David Jones, and Private Alfred Pinkston all involved incidents of soldiers sneaking out of post without permission to attend dances or balls hosted nearby, GCM Case File,s PP1712, PP3611, PP5157. 75 Private Walter F. Gilmore, GCM Case File, PP2875. 76 Private William Weaver, GCM Case File, PP1256. 77 Such practices were also considered illegal in the local communities they visited. For example, the local sheriff’s register of prisoners in Grant County, Mexico listed six black soldiers as serving sentences in the county jail for carrying a deadly weapon in the 1890s when black soldiers garrisoned the nearby post of Fort Bayard. Register of Prisoners Confined in the County Jail of Grant County, New Mexico, 1877-1895, Grant County, New Mexico Records, Collection 1974-019, New Mexico State Library and Archives. 136 discipline and preserving the social order and harmony, officers’ investigations of the circumstances leading to violence in these spaces, offer more details about the incidents themselves and the participants. At a ball near Fort Quitman, a black enlisted man stabbed one of his comrades and the victim of the attack later died from the wounds. Officers collected sworn statements from multiple enlisted men and civilians, illuminating that several women of
Mexican descent had been in attendance.78 In a similar event occurring near Fort Quitman in
1873, an army officer informed the district attorney that a “Mexican woman named Juana” and two black enlisted men were witnesses to the fatal stabbing of a black soldier.79
Mexican women were certainly among the soldiers’ clientele in the informal economy and attended the same social events as black soldiers, but several cases demonstrate that black soldiers interacted with these women in intimate spaces, too. Ramona Hidalgo, who lived in a small house in Mexico, recalled that several African-American servicemen visited her during breakfast time and were sitting on her bed. Hidalgo demonstrated a degree of familiarity with the soldiers and referred to them by name. Frank Marshall, one of the soldiers who had visited
Hidalgo, displayed the same level of familiarity by playing a practical joke on Hidalgo and stealing her shawl from her.80
Encounters in these intimate spaces led to sexual relationships and in some cases marriages between Mexican women and black soldiers. John H. Sanders, a soldier assigned to guard prisoners in confinement on post, was court-martialed for allowing Charles Gilpin to escape across the Rio Grande into Mexico, forcing another guard to pursue him across the river
78 This incident occurred a few hundred yards from the house of an Anglo-American tailor named Jacob Morrow. A few months after this event, Morrow was hosting a ball at his home and denied soldiers entry to the ball. 79 Charles Bentzoni to Carnes B. Hague, November 17, 1873, Fort Quitman Post Records, LS, Volume 3, RG 393, Part V, NARA. 80 Private Frank Marshall, GCM Case File, PP3773. 137 and arrest him. Sanders stated, “I let Gilpin go across the river to see his wife on my own responsibility,” suggesting that Gilpin was married to a woman who lived in Mexico.81 The post surgeon at Fort Duncan referenced several cases of venereal disease among the enlisted men at the post and believed that “the disease originated from the association of the men with several women of bad character said to live in the adjacent town.”82 In one instance, an officer from the
24th Infantry Regiment submitted an inquiry to the Department of Texas headquarters asking whether or not officers could punish enlisted men for being unable to perform their duties due to venereal disease.83
While women and soldiers often formed consensual relationships in the West, it is important to acknowledge women’s vulnerability to both physical violence and rape at the hands of both black and white soldiers on and near military posts. Soldiers committed physical violence against women in personal disputes, but violence or the threat of violence often accompanied soldiers’ attempts to steal the personal property of women to circulate these items in the informal economy. Additionally, women’s presence in an environment where the gendered power dynamics were weighted heavily against them made them vulnerable to rape.84
African-American, Anglo-American, Mexican, and at times, Native American women reported
81 Private John H. Sanders, GCM Case File, PP1712. James Leiker briefly outlines several cases of black soldiers who deserted to Mexico, married Mexican women, and in some cases deserted to Mexico or followed their wives’ families into Mexico Leiker, Racial Borders, 78. 82 Assistant Post Surgeon to Charles Parker, December 7, 1869, Fort Duncan Post Records, Letters Received, Box 1, RG 393, Part V. 83 Captain Lewis Johnson to Assistant Adjutant General Department of Texas, August 28, 1873, Index to Letters Received, Entry 4960, RG 393, Part I, NARA 84 For more on sexual violence against women in the post-Civil War army garrisons see Robin S. Conner, “Gendered Garrisons: Masculinity, Femininity, and Class Identity in the Post -Civil War Western Army, 1865– 1898” (Ph.D., United States -- Georgia, Emory University, 2008), 279–342. 138 these attacks to army officers to seek some form of legal recourse against soldiers in both military and civilian courts.85 Women achieved varying degrees of success in seeking justice.86
In general, military officers in the court lent more credence and sympathy to white women, whom officers deemed as upper-class and reputable, rather than African American,
Mexican, or Native women. Other than a handful of black chaplains and line officers, the officer corps was overwhelming white, with most officers coming from wealthier families in the East.
This trend manifests itself most clearly in the findings and sentences involving different groups of women, with officers showing propensity to issue harsher punishments when the victim was a white woman. One black soldier, who faced accusations of raping a white hospital matron named Emma Richardson, recalled that one officer was “in a great passion and said ’you ought to be hung.’”87 However, in the case of Jenny Montgomery and Jane Folley, two black women who accused a black enlisted man of rape, officers considered the “bad character” of both women and questioned “whether any evidence that these women might present was of sufficient importance to put the U.S. to the expense of issuing and enforcing a subpoena for their attendance.”88 In short, officers’ perceptions of women’s reputations often intersected with class and race.
85 J.H. Paynter, GCM Case File, RR3906. 86 For more examples studies on military occupation and sexual violence see E. Susan Barber and Charles F. Ritter, “Dangerous Liaisons: Working Women and Sexual Justice in the American Civil War,” European Journal of American studies 10, no. 1 (March 2015); Crystal N. Feimster, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2009), 7–36; LeeAnn Whites and Alecia P. Long, Occupied Women: Gender, Military Occupation, and the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009). 87 Thomas Robeson, GCM Case File, QQ2914. 88 In the end, the court relied on the accused soldier’s previous conviction from a civilian court in St. Louis to find him guilty and dishonorably discharge him from the army. The Judge Advocate General in the general court martial wrote to an attorney in St. Louis and received a response in which the prosecutor in the St. Louis case provided the Judge Advocate General with details about an assault against three other women that the accused soldier had been involved in. It is unclear how he knew or learned about this previous conviction. Private Edward James, GCM Case File, RR3705. 139
Black soldiers held conflicting attitudes about interracial and interethnic marriages. In
June 1874, a divergence of views on marriages between Mexican women and black men was the cause of a heated argument that later turned into a violent altercation between George McKay and James Holt in Rio Grande City. Although McKay and Holt disagreed over who was the first man to physically attack the other, both agreed about the cause of the dispute. The argument began when James Holt barged into Faustina Sanchez’s house and found her talking with
McKay. Sanchez worked as a bartender at Harris’s Saloon in Rio Grande City. With the assistance of an interpreter, Sanchez stated, “McKay and I were talking about Mexican women married to negroes. I told Holt who was there that I did not want to marry him, and he said he did not want to force me to.” At the end of the trial, McKay expanded upon the conversation he had with Sanchez. First, McKay gestured towards a personal rivalry between he and Holt for
Sanchez’s affections in stating, “James Holt has a Mexican woman that is very fond of me and he accused me of persuading her to leave him.” McKay stated that he asked Faustina Sanchez,
“how is it that when a colored man marries a Mexican woman that the Mexican men don’t like it and tries to kill him.” According to McKay, Sanchez replied, “I don’t know the reason, but that is the truth.” He then claimed that Sanchez agreed with him in his assessment of interracial marriages. “It is best for Mexican men to marry Mexican women and colored men, colored women,” McKay stated. According to both Sanchez and McKay, Holt grew angry about
McKay’s sentiments toward interracial relationships. Holt may have also resented the fact that he had discovered another man talking to Sanchez when he barged into her house. McKay and
Holt disputed how their altercation became physical, but disagreements about interracial relationships ultimately led to physical violence in Rio Grande City.89
89 George McKay, GCM Case File, PP4037. 140
In 1873, Private Henry Jenkins attacked Pioquinto Abracon near Fort Davis and attempted to steal his great coat. The physical assault occurred just outside of Archer Smith’s saloon. Smith was an Anglo-American man who was hosting a dance that evening. Much like other civilians, Abracon chose to address his dispute in the military courtroom and reported the incident to officers at Fort Davis. Smith, who had seen the beating, served as one of the prosecution’s witnesses and testified that he had implored Jenkins to stop assaulting Abracon.
According to Smith, Jenkins replied, “’God damn you, you want to take up for the Mexicans, do you.’”90 The implication of this reply, if that is indeed what Jenkins said, is that people of
Mexican descent were of a lower social status and deemed unworthy of assistance in disputes with non-Mexican parties. Of course, one African-American soldier’s comments about Mexicans in the middle of a fight and another soldier’s views about intermarriage between Mexican women and black men do not represent the attitudes of an entire population, but they do show that racial/ethnic tension between the groups did occur.
For black servicemen, much like white servicemen and Anglo-American residents in the borderlands, “Mexican” constituted distinct racial, ethnic, and national categories based on preconceived notions largely associated with physical appearance, customs, class, and language.91 Black soldiers often used the word “Mexican” to describe people they believed to be of Mexican descent whether the people were actually from Mexico or not. This category was a way of othering and distinguishing Mexicans from other people that black soldiers encountered in the borderlands, but black troops’ racial sentiments were often absent from court martial
90 Henry Jenkins, GCM Case File, PP3052. 91 Foos, A Short, Offhand, Killing Affair, 113–54; Thomas R. Hietala, Manifest Design: American Exceptionalism and Empire (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003), 152–66; Lang, In the Wake of War, 22–27; Carrigan and Webb, Forgotten Dead; Foley, The White Scourge; León, They Called Them Greasers; Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You; Meeks, Border Citizens; Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986. 141 records, making it difficult to fully show clear patterns of affability or animosity toward
Mexicans as a group.
One means of understanding how and what black soldiers thought about Mexico is to examine the actions of black soldiers themselves. Soldiers who served in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands engaged in numerous scouting expeditions along the U.S.-Mexico boundary and at times, these expeditions involved incursions into Mexico.92 These military duties likely familiarized soldiers with the paths and crossing points that aided them in their escape to the other side. The clerks who submitted the monthly returns for the 9th Cavalry maintained records of soldiers who deserted and those apprehended from desertion. Between 1870 and 1875, the 9th
Cavalry regiment listed 16 soldiers as having deserted to Mexico, but this number is likely higher because soldiers wanted to maintain secrecy about their plans for desertion to avoid leaving any clues about their destination that could possibly lead to their apprehension.93 Additionally, black troops spent most of their time garrisoning military posts that were very close to the U.S.-Mexico border, making flight to Mexico a safer avenue of escape than fleeing deeper into the Texas interior. Over the course of two months, the 25th Infantry Regiment listed the names of 30 soldiers suspected of deserting to Mexico.94 In fact, Willy Boyd wrote a letter to the commanding general of Texas in which he expressed his grievances against his company first sergeant’s poor treatment of the men. “If he is in the company much longer. . .all of the men will go to Mexico,” Boyd threatened. At the time, Boyd’s company garrisoned the post at
92 Walter Finley, a white officer in the 9th Cavalry, recounted a scouting expedition into Mexico in a letter to his mother. Transcripts of Walter Lowrie Finley Letters, 1879-1881, November 4, 1879, Box 10845, Folder 19, New Mexico State Library and Archives, Santa Fe, New Mexico. 93 Monthly Returns for the 9th Cavalry Regiment, January 1870 through December 1875, NARA, Washington D.C., M744, Reel 88, NARA. 94 Monthly Returns for the 24th Infantry Regiment February 1873 and March 1873, NARA, Washington D.C., M665, Reel 255. 142
Brownsville on the Rio Grande and was in perfect position to carry out the threat and fully transform from border enforcers to border people.
Mexico appealed as a destination because black soldiers were aware of the protections that being on foreign soil potentially offered to deserters from U.S. authority. Such knowledge likely came from their official military duties and the protection that crossing the boundary offered to raiders. William Schuchardt, a U.S. Consul agent in Piedras Negras, reported to the
U.S. Secretary of State about how Native American groups escaped from the army when conducting raids in Texas. “On many occasions the troops have arrived at the bank of the river on the U.S. side as the Indians were going out of the river on the Mexican side where they could not be pursued.” Parties of black cavalrymen and infantrymen had first-hand knowledge of international laws and agreements between U.S. and Mexico diplomats that required the U.S.
Army to halt any pursuit of Native American raiders and Anglo or Mexican outlaws if their adversaries crossed the U.S.-Mexico boundary.95
Black and white enlisted men believed that such international arrangements also applied to them if they wished to leave the army before the expiration of their enlistment contracts.
Joseph Ross expressed such sentiments in a conversation with civilians, which he later explained to have been the result of excessive indulgence in alcohol. Ross proclaimed, “If I am over the
River. . .Major Morrow, has no god damn business with me; and by God, I would not take orders from him or any other officer.”96 Sergeant David Long and his lawyer incorporated these ideas about the protection of being on foreign soil into their legal defense during Long’s trial by general court martial. Long’s attorney argued that the court martial did not have jurisdiction in
95 William Schuchardt to Hamilton Fish, June 25, 1870, Despatches from U.S. Consul in Piedras Negras, NARA, Washington D.C., M299, Roll 1. 96 Joseph Ross, GCM Case File, PP1426. 143 the case because Long’s alleged infraction of making false statements to a U.S. Consul about a
U.S. Army officer had occurred in Matamoros, Mexico, and Long was on foreign soil voluntarily and not on any official military assignment at the time.97
The U.S. Army’s constabulary role often resulted in arresting civilians and confining them with soldiers in the post guardhouse. Logistical difficulties and personnel shortages made holding prisoners in different facilities and assigning additional guards more burdensome for the army. Confining civilian and military prisoners in the same facilities allowed African-American soldiers to engage and form alliances with civilians from different racial and ethnic backgrounds.
In January 1870, Franciso Mendoza, a Mexican prisoner held in the Fort Duncan guardhouse for horse stealing, formed an alliance with three black soldiers who were serving sentences in the same space for various military offenses. Together, all four men escaped the facility through a broken window and crossed the Rio Grande to the town of Piedras Negras in Mexico.98 In another act of collaboration between black soldiers and Mexican civilians, military authorities discovered Alexander Ezebb, who had left his post without permission to visit his wife in Eagle
Pass, Texas, hiding under a bed at a Mexican woman’s house.99
Although uncommon, some African American soldiers crossed the U.S.-Mexico boundary and joined the Mexican Army. Zenas R. Bliss, a white officer in the 25th Infantry, wrote about such men in his personal reminiscences of his career in the army. While Bliss was serving at Fort Clark in the fall of 1871, “several discharged soldiers from our Army enlisted with the Federals, and were all promised Captaincies. . .if they stayed through the Rebellion.” In
1871, there were no black officers in the U.S. Army so the promise of an officer’s position likely
97 Sergeant David Long, GCM Case File, PP5472. 98 F.W. Laggard to E.A. Rigg, January 19, 1870, Fort Duncan LR Box 1, RG 393 Part V, NARA. 99 Alexander Ezebb, GCM Case File, PP2664. 144 convinced some soldiers to employ their skills as soldiers elsewhere.100 Bliss also recalled visiting a trader’s store near Fort Clark and seeing “a dozen American Negroes, who had enlisted under Winker, make a sortie against a house the Rebels occupied.”101
African-American soldiers may have learned about greater opportunities in the Mexican
Army from Mexican soldiers. Matamoros was a city in Mexico situated just across the Rio
Grande from Brownsville, and the city’s saloons were a frequent destination for black soldiers who garrisoned Fort Brown intermittently in the 1870s. John Clynch, an Anglo-American bar and restaurant keeper in Matamoros stated that “colored people have drunk with Mexican officers” at his establishment.102 Clynch did not offer any details about the conversations that
African Americans had with Mexican officers, but the shared professions among these men likely gave them some common ground to discuss their experiences in their respective armies. In these conversations, black soldiers could learn about opportunities for advancement in the
Mexican Army that were unavailable in the U.S. Army. In short, a drink at a saloon became a recruitment opportunity for Mexican officers.
In 1873, Edmund Lewis, Richard Williams, and James Taylor, all faced general courts martial for deserting their post at Fort Brown and joining the Mexican Army.103 Of the three soldiers, Edmund Lewis’s case is the only one that offers some details about the circumstances surrounding his enlistment in the Mexican Army. Lewis joined an artillery battery in Mexico.
Service in an artillery unit was not an opportunity that would have been open to Lewis in the
100 Henry O. Flipper would graduate from West Point in 1876 with John Alexander and Charles Young following soon after him in the 1880s. 101 According to Bliss, a revolution against Benito Juarez, the president of Mexico, broke out in 1871 in northern Mexico. Black Americans appear to have joined the federal army to put down the rebellion. “Winker” was an officer in the Mexican Army who was a friend of Bliss. Zenas R. Bliss Reminiscences 1854-1876, Volume V, 159, 165, Zenas Randall Bliss Papers, Box 2Q441, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, UT-Austin. 102 Sergeant David Long, GCM Case File, PP5472. 103 James Taylor, GCM Case File, PP3367; Richard Williams, GCM Case File, PP3265; Edmund Lewis, GCM Case File, PP3410. 145
U.S. Army at the time. Aside from some soldiers who served as hospital stewards or worked in the quartermaster corps, the U.S. Army restricted most black soldiers to service in the infantry and cavalry.
Lewis’s service in the Mexican Army did not permanently sever his connections with his former comrades in the U.S. Army. One soldier from Fort Brown testified that he had encountered Lewis several times in Matamoros just across the Rio Grande from Fort Brown and had seen him wearing the uniform of a Mexican soldier. Despite joining the Mexican Army and the threat of apprehension on the U.S. side of the Rio Grande, Lewis continued to move back and forth across the river. Barely two months after the U.S. Army reported Lewis’s desertion, officers arrested him in the city of Brownsville. Lewis admitted that he joined the Mexican
Army but maintained that Mexican authorities had forced him into military service.104
Dispatches from the U.S. Consul in Matamoros suggest that there was some credibility to
Lewis’s assertion. In 1867, Thomas W. Scott reported that he had contacted a Mexican commanding officer for the region and secured the release of two American citizens whom
Mexican military officers had impressed into the army.105
Unlike Edmund Lewis, Thomas Gowans and another soldier stationed at Fort Duncan had no intention of deserting the army when they crossed the Rio Grande into Mexico in 1872.
Gowans and his comrade had obtained a pass to visit Mexico where they planned to go on a
“[drinking] spree.”106 However, the soldiers overstayed their pass and alleged that they encountered another group of soldiers in Mexico (potential deserters?) who advised them to
104 Edmund Lewis, GCM Case File, PP3410. 105 Thomas W. Scott to F.W. Seward, December 20, 1867, Despatches from U.S. Consul in Matamoros, NARA, Washington D.C., M281, Roll 3. 106 Spree was nineteenth-century army slang for a drinking spree and other recreational activities that soldiers participated in when they received a short pass or furlough to leave military posts. For a glossary of soldier slang, see McChristian, Regular Army O!, 601–7. 146 remain in Mexico because they had been away from Fort Duncan for too long and would face trial as deserters if they returned to Texas. Like other soldiers, Gowans and his comrade were aware of some of the protections that remaining in Mexico offered to enlisted men hoping to escape military prosecution, but this shows that soldiers learned about these protections through networks of other soldiers.
Eventually, the company first sergeant crossed the Rio Grande and found Gowans in the town of Piedras Negras and promised him a trial by garrison court martial, which carried lighter sentences, if he returned to Fort Duncan.107 Piedras Negras was a small town just across the Rio
Grande and appeared to be a common destination for soldiers stationed at Fort Duncan on temporary furloughs based on Gowans’ testimony of the interaction he had with other soldiers in the town. At the same time, the town was also a destination for soldiers who sought to permanently remove themselves from military service. In one month, the 9th Cavalry listed the names of five soldiers they suspected of deserting to Piedras Negras. Piedras Negras had long served as a refuge for enslaved people who escaped across the Rio Grande from Texas,
Louisiana, and Arkansas in the antebellum era. There are clear distinctions between escaping from enslavement and fleeing from enlistment contracts that black men entered voluntarily, but as a space, Piedras Negras continued to offer a refuge for black soldiers in the postbellum era.108
Some soldiers fled to Mexico not only because of the protection they believed being across the border offered, but also because they thought they could earn better wages in Mexico.
107 When Gowans and another soldier did return across the Rio Grande on their way back to Fort Duncan, they stopped to get something to eat at a house in Eagle Pass, but were arrested by another group of soldiers as deserters who were likely unaware of the arrangement that Gowans had made with his company commander and first sergeant. In the general court martial that followed, Gowan was found guilty of being absent without permission which was a less severe charge than desertion. Private Thomas Gowans, GCM Case File, PP2288. 108 Tyler, “Fugitive Slaves in Mexico”; Sean Kelley, “‘Mexico in His Head’: Slavery and the Texas-Mexico Border, 1810-1860,” Journal of Social History 37, no. 3 (March 2004): 709–23; Cornell, “Citizens of Nowhere”; Nichols, “The Line of Liberty”; Damian Alan Pargas, Fugitive Slaves and Spaces of Freedom in North America (Gainesville, Fla: University Press of Florida, 2018), 232–50. 147
William Seymour and August W. Seldr, two white soldiers from 19th Infantry, deserted from Fort
Duncan in 1883 and fled to Mexico with plans to work on the railroad linking Eagle Pass, Texas to Piedras Negras.109 The presence of the U.S. Army in the borderlands helped secure the region for white settlement. The resulting infusion of capital to transform the borderlands into lucrative economic enterprises also expanded employment opportunities for soldiers. One black soldier who had deserted from the U.S. Army was working on the railroad when he encountered some trouble with law enforcement resulting in his arrest. However, the cases of both Lewis and
Gowans also demonstrate that desertion to Mexico did not completely sever connections between deserters and soldiers who remained in the army on the other side of the border.
In at least one instance, deserters in Mexico communicated with and received advice on how to avoid capture from soldiers who remained on the U.S. side of the U.S.-Mexico boundary.
In 1889, Corporal Daniel H. Williams, a black cavalryman serving at Fort Bayard, New Mexico, received a letter from Joseph Seon and Curley Long from an address in Mexico. Williams did not share this information with his commanders and instead warned Seon and Long to stay in
Mexico. According to the charges against him Williams wrote, “But for God’s sake Joe, stay over the line and tell Curley the same.”110 Williams pled guilty to the charges, but in a written response to the charges Williams seemed confused about the regulations surrounding his actions and why officers had charged him. “For not reporting my reason was this the man was in a forigen country and I did not fully understand the regulations on post not acquainted at all with that part and I did not consider as adding [sic] him by what I did,” Williams wrote. “Of course
109 Separate Special Reports for Privates William Seymour and Augustus W. Seldr, 19th Infantry, Reports of Board of Survey in Cases of Deserters 1882-96, Judge Advocate General for the Department of Texas, Box 1, RG393, Part I, 4980, NARA. 110 Unfortunately, the court martial case file does not include a copy of the original letter that Williams received from Joseph Seon or a copy of the letter that Williams tried to send in response to him. The specification of charges against Williams offer the only hint about what the soldiers wrote to each other. 148 we were the best of friends and he did not let me know that he was a going [to] do any thing of the kind until he was gon and in a forigen country [sic],” Williams continued. Because “he was already gon I thought it no harm to tell him to stay away [sic].”111 Here, Williams’s statement illustrates his ideas about the protection that being across the border offered deserters in advising
Joseph Seon and Curley Young to stay in Mexico. Without the original letter that Joseph Seon sent to Daniel H. Williams, it is only possible to speculate about the content. Williams’s warning to remain in Mexico might have been in response to Seon asking about whether it was safe to return to the U.S. As indicated by the experience of Thomas Gowans, who voluntarily returned to Fort Duncan, black soldiers who crossed the Rio Grande did not always permanently remain there.
In February 1869, George Hog, a white officer in the 41st Infantry Regiment serving at
Fort Duncan, Texas, requested permission from Department of Texas to restore Willis Deedman to duty without trial. Deedman was a black enlisted man who had deserted to Mexico in
September 1868. Hog, much like Daniel H. Williams twenty years later, was able to maintain contact with soldiers who had deserted to Mexico. “A short time since, I heard that [Deedman] was about 10 miles from here on the other side” and “sent him word that if he would return voluntarily and give himself up, that I would make an application to have him restored to duty without trial,” Hog wrote. But Hog also hoped to use Deedman to reshape soldiers’ perceptions of Mexico and discourage others from deserting across the Rio Grande. “[Deedman] will cheerfully testify to the soldiers of this command that it is much better in each respect to remain
111 I can find no evidence of Joseph Seon or Curley Young ever being apprehended by the U.S. government so perhaps they received and heeded Williams’ warning. Daniel H. Williams, GCM Case File, RR3760. 149 the service then to go into Mexico,” Hog reported.112 That same month, Deedman, along with another soldier from the 41st Infantry who had deserted to Mexico, returned to Fort Duncan.113
Deedman and other soldiers like him did not elaborate on their motivations for returning to the
United States.114 Desertion allowed soldiers to escape from military service, but their status as fugitives meant that they faced a persistent threat of capture; soldiers simply grew exhausted with living as fugitives in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. As one Texas newspaper put it, “four deserters from the United States army, growing tired of skulking” approached a U.S. Marshal
“and surrendered themselves, requesting to be sent back to Fort McIntosh,” but threat of capture for deserters often came from both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border.115
Army officers consistently implored local law enforcement to assist the army in capturing deserters. In 1868, an army officer from Fort Davis contacted the Chief Police of San Antonio seeking his assistance in arresting Buck Taylor and Spencer Lewis, two black cavalrymen who had deserted their post.116 Additionally, local police forces hoping to earn the thirty-dollar reward that the War Department actively participated in apprehending deserters. The El Paso
Times reported an instance where two deserters from the 10th Cavalry who had “been staying in
Mexico since their desertion ventured to the Texas side for the first time only to be caught” by two police officers who received a reward of $60 from the U.S. government.117 The Las Vegas
112 Hog mentioned a similar case involving a musician from his regiment. George Hog to L.V. [illegible], February 11, 1869, Fort Duncan LS March 1868-June 1869, Volume 1, RG 393, Part V, NARA. 113 Monthly Returns for February 1869, 41st Infantry Regiment, NARA, Washington D.C., M665, Reel 296. 114 In a similar fashion, Charles Book, a member of the 9th Cavalry who deserted to Mexico in August 1871, eventually returned to Fort Duncan and surrendered himself to military authorities four months later. He pled guilty to the desertion charge, but never explained why he returned to the U.S. to face imprisonment. Private Charles Booker, GCM Case File, PP2401. This trend continued into the 1880s. Andrew Harden, a soldier in the 10th Cavalry, surrendered to military authorities after deserting to Mexico in 1883. He pled guilty to the charge of desertion but offered no explanation as to why he returned. Andrew Harden, GCM Case File, QQ4384. 115 San Antonio Light, November 22, 1883, 1. 116 James F. Coffett to Chief of Police (San Antonio), March 13, 1868, Fort Davis LS, 1867-1869, Volume 21, RG 393, Part V, NARA. 117 El Paso Times, December 12, 1884, 4, University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, texashistory.unt.edu. 150
Daily Gazette, a New Mexico newspaper, offers some insight into why the army turned to civilians to apprehend deserters. “It would be a foolish thing to send an officer known by every man in the regiment to hunt around and catch deserters. He would be immediately recognized by any of the men, whatever disguise he might assume,” the paper proclaimed. Instead, officers could “set the police and other parties, not suspected by deserters, after them, who may have some chance of bagging their game.”118 In 1879, one New Mexico paper published an article warning civilians about the legal repercussions of assisting deserters. According to one account, a deserter from Fort Bayard was “traced to and found concealed in the house of a resident of
Silver City.”119 In short, civilians could reverse roles with soldiers making the original party that conducted most of the policing and constabulary duties the target of policing.
In a written address before the members at his trial by court martial, Jackson Haskins expressed his frustration with this practice among policeman and his vulnerable status. Haskins claimed that his company commander provided him with five days of rations and “ordered [him] away” while the company was on detached service in Austin, Texas, because the officer no longer wanted Haskins in the unit. Haskins maintained that he obeyed his captain’s order, left the unit, and found a job in Austin with the full knowledge of his commander and many other men from his company. “There was no attempt made to arrest me while the company was there nor until 2 or 3 months after, when a policeman then arrested me as a deserter probably knowing that under the circumstances he could get a reward for doing so.”120
118 Las Vegas Daily Gazette, July 16, 1881, 4, Chronicling America Historic American Newspapers, Library of Congress. 119 Grant County Herald, August 9, 1879, 3; Grant County Herald August 16, 1879, 3, Silver City Public Library, Box 344. 120 Private Jackson Haskins, GCM Case File, PP4788. 151
Even when soldiers avoided U.S. Army officers and noncommissioned officers, threats of apprehension came from Mexican authorities who assisted the U.S. Army by arresting deserters and turning them over to the custody of the U.S. Army under an extradition treaty. In 1871,
Lasero Veisco, a chief policeman in Mexico, just across the Rio Grande from Fort Bliss testified that a U.S. military officer had visited his house in Mexico with the local mayor and requested his assistance with capturing deserters and provided him with the soldiers’ physical descriptions.121 With the assistance of a local informant who lived near Monte Lupido and informed the policeman that “there was a colored man there,” Veisco tracked and apprehended
Walter Lewis Scott as he was hiding in a vineyard.122
Veisco’s apprehension of James A. Harashaw in Mexico, approximately eight or nine miles south of El Paso, illustrates how soldiers adopted new tactics to avoid apprehension in the immediate vicinity of the border. Veisco claimed to have spotted Harashaw sleeping on the back of a wagon traveling on the road to the city of Chihuahua. When the Mexican policeman confronted the soldier, Harashaw dismounted the wagon and immediately showed him a document and tried to convince the policeman in Spanish that he was a discharged soldier.
Veisco ignored Harashaw’s protests and with the assistance of the wagon’s other passengers, arrested the soldier and returned him to U.S. custody.123 In his trial by court martial, James
Harashaw insisted that he never planned to desert, but traveling farther into the Mexican interior would have enabled the soldier to avoid people searching for deserters. Everett Montgomery, a
121 Lasero Veisco’s testimony outlining his exchange of information exchange is a part of Private James A. Harashaw’s case file. Veisco was probably involved in the apprehension of Charles E. Williams, who was another soldier who deserted from Fort Bliss and was later apprehended in Mexico. His case file was very short and had few details because he pleaded guilty to the charge of desertion. Private Charles E. Williams and James A. Harashaw, GCM Case File, PP2284. 122 Private Walter Lewis Scott, GCM Case File, PP2284. In a similar fashion, Mexican authorities captured and returned Henry Miller in Presidio del Norte shortly after he deserted to Mexico, Private Henry Miller, GCM Case File, PP4551. 123 Private James A. Harashaw, GCM Case File, PP2284; Leiker, Racial Borders, 84. 152 black infantryman serving in Brownsville, Texas, was more explicit about understanding the vulnerability of remaining close to the border and his plans to flee deep into the Mexico interior.
George F.B. Vega, a county constable, recognized Montgomery and confronted him as he prepared to board a ferry to cross the Rio Grande. According to Vega, Montgomery informed him that “he was not going to stop in Matamoros but was going to Monterey, Mexico.”124
Apprehending deserters was also a lucrative business outside of the law enforcement officials in Mexico. Although people of Mexican descent and other civilians collaborated with black soldiers in the informal economy or participated in recreational activities in the same social spaces, they often quickly shifted their allegiances to the U.S. government and against black servicemen when the opportunity presented itself. Richard B. Musick hired a group of
“Mexicans” to pursue a group of African-American servicemen who had fled to Mexico. One of the men lured the soldiers into his home by pretending to offer them a place to hide, allowing
Muzick and the rest of his team to surround the house and arrest them. Musick returned the deserters to Fort Quitman and collected a $30 award for each soldier, which he presumably split among the men he had hired.125 Despite their increasing marginalization in the West at the hands of the U.S. Army and civilian settlers, Native Americans also assisted the army in apprehending deserters.126
124 Private Everett Montgomery, GCM Case File, PP3884. The case of Joseph Stein provides an example of Mexican authorities assisting in the apprehension of white soldiers and shows that the practice of extraditing American deserters to the U.S. continued well into the 1880s, Private Joseph L. Stein, GCM Case File, RR1897. 125 GCM Case File, PP310; In a separate incident another army officer mentioned dispatching “a party of Mexicans” who pursued and captured three black enlisted men who had deserted from Ringgold Barracks, James Holman, Elijah B. Johnson, and Henry Mack, GCM Case File, PP3884. 126 This trend is not as prominent in Texas, but is more pronounced when black soldiers served in Oklahoma (Indian Territory) and Arizona (Arizona Territory). In those states, military operations for black regiments involved more contact with Native Americans who resided on reservations near military posts. In those instances, you see more informal economic transactions between Native Americans and black soldiers, but the army also regularly employed Indian Scouts to assist in the apprehension of deserters. RR2044; RR1136; Henry H. Wright outlined an instance where an officer from the 9th Cavalry crossed into Mexico from New Mexico with Indian Scouts on the trail of black cavalrymen who had deserted. Henry H. Wright to Post Adjutant at Fort Bayard, August 9, 1877, District of New Mexico, Letters Received, NARA, Washington D.C., M1088, Reel 29. 153
Yet, much like their U.S. counterparts, Mexican military officials faced their own problems with manpower and pursued deserters from the Mexican Army who fled across the Rio
Grande into Texas.127 In April 1880, William Schuchardt, a vice consul working for the U.S.
State Department in Piedras Negras, reported that in the course of their attempted escapes,
Mexican guards fired at the soldiers “while they were in the water but also when already on the
American side seeking shelter in bushes.” “On all occasions the bullets endanger the lives of the people in the town of Eagle Pass where they sometimes whistled in the crowded streets,”
Schuchardt wrote.128 U.S. officials soon arrested two Mexican officers at Eagle Pass because two civilians were wounded in the shooting.129 Later in the summer of 1880, Schuchardt outlined other means by which Mexican military officials sought to replenish their manpower and the vulnerable people the Mexican Army targeted. “In order to fill the places of deserters the
Mexican military make by force soldiers of Mexicans and colored men, citizens of the United
States, in case they are arrested by the civil authorities or custom house officials for slight offenses, not giving them the benefit of a trial,” the vice consul wrote. He then summarized specific instances in which the Mexican Army impressed five U.S. citizens into the army: four were men of Mexican descent who were visiting family members and the fifth was a discharged black soldier who resided in Piedras Negras. Schuchardt also mentioned that Mexican military officials targeted “only the poor and friendless” in this way.130
One lingering question is whether black soldiers stood a better chance of being apprehended than white soldiers. Black regiments generally had lower desertion rates than white
127 Robert J. Knowlton, Church Property and the Mexican Reform, 1856-1910 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1976). 128 William Schuchardt to William Hunter, April 26, 1880, Despatches from U.S. Consul in Piedras Negras, Microfilm 299, Roll 1, NARA. 129 Denison Daily News, April 28, 1880, 1, Portal to Texas History. 130 Schuchardt to Hunter, August 15, 1880, Despatches from U.S. Consul in Piedras Negras, NARA, Washington D.C. M299, Roll 1. 154 regiments. As other historians have noted, military service was one of the few occupations that accepted African Americans and provided many black men with a degree of economic mobility and social status that was more difficult to attain in other parts of the United States.131 At the same time, black soldiers who wished to remove themselves from military service before the expiration of their enlistments were also likely aware that the probability of capture was relatively high. Some estimates indicate that approximately eighty percent of deserters avoided arrest and trial. An examination of two white regiments, the 10th Infantry and 20th Infantry, who served along the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas during the same period as black regiments confirms these calculations by revealing that military authorities only captured roughly 25 and
31 percent of deserters, respectively. Much like soldiers from white regiments, most black soldiers who deserted were able to make their escapes permanent, but the rate of apprehension for black troops was higher at 35 percent in the 25th Infantry and 42 percent for the 24th
Infantry.132 Although most black soldiers were able to evade capture, these statistics suggest that in some cases, arrest was more likely for black deserters than white deserters.
131 This is a common historiographical trend associated with black regulars and desertion in the post-Civil War era and I agree with it, but it is important to ask different questions about black soldiers and desertion and analyze their motivations for deserting. I am trying to push the conversation about black soldiers and desertion in a different direction to ask different questions about their motivations for deserting. These questions illustrate how black enlisted men conceived of the protection that national boundaries offered, their ideas about Mexico as a destination, and how desertion is policed in the borderlands. Dobak and Phillips, The Black Regulars, 1866-1898; Fowler, The Black Infantry in the West, 1869-1891; Kenner, Buffalo Soldiers and Officers of the Ninth Cavalry, 1867–1898, 1999; Leckie, The Buffalo Soldiers; Leiker, Racial Borders; Schubert, Outpost of the Sioux Wars. 132 I was able to calculate this data from the Monthly Regimental Returns for each regiment which reported the number of desertions and the number of soldiers apprehended from desertion each month. However, there are some limitations to this study. Posts and their surrounding locales often differed greatly. Some posts in the U.S.- Mexico borderlands were more geographically isolated than other posts. A careful analysis of the terrain and avenues of escape could help explain the disparities. Additionally, for much of the 1870s, army posts were segregated. An area of future research would be to study and compare the apprehension rates among white and black soldiers who happened to garrison the same posts at the same time. Monthly Returns for the 24th Infantry Regiment, January 1870-December 1880, NARA, M665, Reel 245 and 246; Monthly Returns for the 25th Infantry Regiment, June 1870-August 1880, NARA M665, Reel 254 and 255; Monthly Returns for the 10th Infantry Regiment, January 1871- April 1879, NARA M665, Reel 115; Monthly Returns for the 20th Infantry Regiment, January 1878-December 1881, NARA M665, Reel 212. 155
African Americans composed a small segment of the population residing along the U.S.-
Mexico border with the majority of people in the region serving as soldiers. Therefore, military authorities, local policeman, and civilians often assumed that black men who appeared “out of place” along the U.S.-Mexico border were deserters. Colorism adds a new dimension to this question. African-American soldiers with lighter skin complexions were better positioned to blend in with local populations of border people than those with darker skin complexions.133 A return to David Long’s case offers a potential answer to this question. The charges alleged that
Long, a deserter who resided in Matamoros, Mexico, had contacted the U.S. Consul in
Matamoros and made false statements alleging that an army officer named Rous and a post trader at Fort Brown (just across the Rio Grande) were involved in a conspiracy to illegally sell thousands of dollars’ worth of government property. Long maintained that he had contacted the
U.S. Consul’s office at the behest of another army officer who had a personal vendetta against
Rous. Although they disagreed about the circumstances and discussions surrounding the meeting, both Long and Mixon agreed that they had met in Matamoros. Long testified that he brought another man named LaVigne to “hear the conversation” and passed him off as a
“Mexican.” “The man is not a Mexican, he is an American, but I stated that he was so as to carry out my object,” Long testified. Mixon testified that he saw Long standing next to a man
(LaVigne) on the sidewalk and asked who he was. According to Mixon, “[Long] said he was a
Mexican which was untrue, he is a colored man.”134 It remains unclear if LaVigne was a former soldier in the U.S. Army, but it does demonstrate that soldiers like David Long understood how
133 William Ellis was able to exploit the porousness of the color line and the border line in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Jacoby, The Strange Career of William Ellis. 134 Sergeant David Long, GCM Case File, PP5472. 156 to exploit the color line and turn some of the ambiguity associated with racial categories in
Mexico to their advantage.135
A column from the Las Vegas Daily Gazette illustrates the scrutiny that law enforcement officers applied to black men they believed to be “out of place.” A local police officer “had his eye on [William Brown] for some time.” According to the paper, Brown had deserted his unit at
El Paso a few months earlier and had escaped from the city jail in Ysleta, Texas, after engaging in a “row with some Mexicans” and shooting two of them. At the time of his arrest, Brown was working for a railroad company and did not appear to be violating any laws that invited the attention of law enforcement. The paper likely learned of these other crimes after turning Brown over to military authorities in Santa Fe.136
Between the late 1860s and early 1890s, black soldiers were active agents of settler colonialism and transformed the U.S.-Mexico borderlands into a region that both Anglo-
Americans and people of Mexican descent viewed as more welcoming for future business investments. Despite official military duties as border enforcers that involved hardening boundaries and augmenting the power of the State in a region that many viewed as volatile, black soldiers took advantage of the porousness of the region off duty and formed connections with border people that frequently transcended the very boundaries that black soldiers were charged with enforcing. At times, black soldiers relied on these boundaries to permanently remove themselves from military service. Black soldiers’ connections with non-black groups did not follow a clear pattern of cooperation or conflict, and black enlisted men certainly endured racism in border communities, but some African-American servicemen decided to remain in the U.S.-
Mexico borderlands after completing their enlistments. Black veterans completed their
135 Sergeant David Long, GCM Case File, PP5472. 136 Las Vegas Daily Gazette, July 16, 1881, 4. Chronicling America, Library of Congress. 157 transformations into border people by marrying local women and integrating themselves into border communities. The social connections formed with these communities would be critical for black veterans and their families when they applied for disability and service pension from the U.S. government.
158
Chapter 4 Black Veterans in the Southwest Borderlands: Intermarriages, Community Integration, and Claims-making In June 1929, Petronila Flunnoie, an elderly woman of Mexican descent residing in Las
Cruces, New Mexico, applied to the U.S. government for a widow’s pension based on the military service of her late husband, William Flunnoie. William Flunnoie was a black veteran who had served in the 24th Infantry Regiment during the late nineteenth-century Indian Wars and had died some years earlier in Laredo, Texas. Ultimately, Petronila needed to provide proof of her marriage to William Flunnoie so that the Pension Bureau could approve her application and add her to the pension rolls. However, Flunnoie explained that she and William had married nearly sixty years prior in Paso del Norte, Mexico, and that crossing the border to obtain a copy of their marriage record would be difficult. Although the widow failed to mention children in her pension application, Texas birth records demonstrate that Petronila’s claim had some merit.
In November 1881, a woman named Petra Acuna and William “Floumoy” christened two children, Maria Aurelia and Tomas Marcelo, at a church in Ysleta, Texas, near El Paso, and just across the U.S.-Mexico boundary from Paso del Norte (or Juarez as it would eventually be known).1 Petronila’s pension file contains fewer than ten documents and the Pension Bureau never assigned a certificate number to the file, indicating that Petronila likely was unable to complete the application.2
1 In her pension application file, Petronila listed Acuna as her maiden name. "Texas Births and Christenings, 1840-1981," database, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:F658-YW1 : 11 February 2018), Petra Acuna in entry for Tomas Marcelo Floumoy, 26 Jan 1874; citing , reference ; FHL microfilm 25,530; "Texas Births and Christenings, 1840-1981," database, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:F6PK-ZGZ : 11 February 2018), Petra Acuna in entry for Maria Aurelia Floumoy, 01 Sep 1879; citing , reference ; FHL microfilm 25,530 2 William Flunnoie, Petronila Flunnoie Pension File, Application 1645895, RG 15, NARA, Washington D.C. Hereafter cited with the applicants’ names, pension application number, and certificate number (if applicable). According to the Find a Grave Index, a woman named Petra Acuna de Flenoy died in April 1941 and was buried at a cemetery in El Paso, Texas. "Find A Grave Index,” 159
The U.S.-Mexico borderlands transformed dramatically between the period when
Petronila Flunnoie first married William Flunnoie in the 1870s and 1929, when she first applied for a widow’s pension. Black veterans and their family members residing in the region applied for invalid and service pensions between the late 1890s and 1920s at a time when more Anglo-
Americans began migrating to the U.S. West. Newly arrived Anglos attempted to more clearly demarcate racial, national, and geographic distinctions in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands with the intent of establishing a more rigid social order that more closely resembled that of the east.3
However, interracial couples not only continued to contest and demonstrate the porousness of these boundaries, but also called on federal officials to recognize their unions in the form of financial compensation. Pension claims of black veterans and the non-black women they married offer alternative sources for uncovering more details about interracial relationships, families, and social relations within the communities in which interracial couples lived.
While many of the questionnaires, interviews, and correspondence from the pension application and review processes focused on veterans’ experiences in the military, pension files provide a lens for exploring veterans’ experiences after returning to civilian life, including marriage. Previously, historians have relied on court records and demographic information from census data to examine questions and patterns surrounding interracial marriages.4 Unlike census records, applications for marriage licenses, and some court cases, pension files often include written correspondence and verbal testimony from the parties involved in these interracial
database, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QPRS-74SK : 28 September 2018), Petra Acuna de Flenoy, ; Burial, , Canutillo Cemetery; citing record ID 191462749, Find a Grave, http://www.findagrave.com. 3 Foley, The White Scourge; Benton-Cohen, Borderline Americans: Racial Division and Labor War in the Arizona Borderlands; Ettinger, Imaginary Lines; St. John, Line in the Sand; Lim, Porous Borders. 4 Hodes, Sex, Love, Race; Pascoe, What Comes Naturally; David Wallace Adams and Crista DeLuzio, On the Borders of Love and Power: Families and Kinship in the Intercultural American Southwest (University of California Press, 2012); Acosta, Sanctioning Matrimony; Erika Pérez, Colonial Intimacies: Interethnic Kinship, Sexuality, and Marriage in Southern California, 1769-1885 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018). 160 relationships (although sometimes mediated through interpreters for non-English speakers and federal officials who recorded the testimony). Testimony from pension records provide an avenue for understanding how interracial couples viewed and understood their marriages rather than focusing on how Anglo-Americans viewed and attempted to regulate these relationships.5
Although this chapter focuses on intermarriages between black men and Mexican women, pension applications could also aid scholars in more deeply exploring intermarriages between veterans of European descent and women of Mexican descent, which constitute the largest proportion of intermarriages in the southwest borderlands. Secondly, while it is beyond the scope of this project, soldiers who advanced the U.S. government’s imperial endeavors abroad during the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars sometimes decided to remain in Cuba and the Philippines after leaving the military and married Cuban and Filipino women.6 Much of the scholarship exploring the experiences of black men and black women with the Pension Bureau during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries primarily does so from a binary race relations perspective; transcending the black/white dichotomy adds new complexity to our understandings of race and veterans’ pensions, by demonstrating how non- white groups interacted and formed communities.7
5 Although Tiya Miles and Fay Yarbrough both focus on relationships between Native people and African Americans, they both provide examples of how scholars can examine intermarriages from the perspective of people involved in them. Tiya Miles, Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (Berkley: University of California Press, 2005); Fay A. Yarbrough, “Power, Perception, and Interracial Sex: Former Slaves Recall a Multiracial South,” The Journal of Southern History 71, no. 3 (August 2005): 559–88. 6 Lauriana del C. Pettigrew and Manuela Cooper were both Cuban women who claimed to be the widows of black veterans who lived in Cuba. Pettigrew Pension Application 1665411; Cooper Pension Application 1174861. In a complicated case for the Pension Bureau, Agripina Galang and Romana Pivalta, two Filipino women, filed separate claims in which both claimed to have been married to Albert Sims, a black veteran, who had settled in the Philippines after completing his enlistment. The paperwork for both women is a part of Albert Sims pension file. Pension Application 1496813/ Certificate Number 1259330, RG 15. 7 Brandi C Brimmer, “Black Women’s Politics, Narratives of Sexual Immorality, and Pension Bureaucracy in Mary Lee’s North Carolina Neighborhood,” Journal of Southern History 80, no. 4 (November 2014): 827–58; Barbara A. Gannon, The Won Cause: Black and White Comradeship in the Grand Army of the Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 131–41; Tera W. Hunter, Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 161
In the army, enlisted men’s relationships with women assumed various forms which couples often derived to cope with the burdens that military service placed upon soldiers.
Military life placed a great deal of strain on the ability of soldiers and women to maintain long- term relationships, because soldiers’ duties often involved transferring from post to post or departing on long campaigns and scouting expeditions. Most black enlisted men who joined the regular army were born and raised in the eastern United States, but military service ultimately brought them into contact with other non-white groups in the southwest borderlands. Attending dances along with visiting saloons and other social spaces in nearby towns and settlements presented opportunities for soldiers to meet women. Court martial records and other military records offer a glimpse into connections between black enlisted men and non-black women in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. In 1868, for instance, black enlisted men from the 41st Infantry hosted a New Year Eve’s ball at Fort Quitman that several Mexican women attended.8 Felix
Olevia, a first sergeant in the 9th Cavalry at Fort Quitman, faced a trial by general court martial for disobeying orders because he “was in the habit of crossing the river” without permission to visit a woman in Mexico.9
Post surgeons and line officers frequently vented their frustrations with enlisted men for contracting various diseases from women who frequented the establishments near military posts.
When a former cavalryman named John Lilly first filed a pension claim in 1898 for loss of
2017), 274–78; Elizabeth A. Regosin and Donald R. Shaffer, Voices of Emancipation: Understanding Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction through the U.S. Pension Bureau Files (New York, N.Y.: New York University Press, 2008); Donald R Shaffer, After the Glory: The Struggles of Black Civil War Veterans (Lawrence, Ks.: University Press of Kansas, 2004). James N. Leiker briefly explores relationships between black enlisted men and non-black women in Racial Borders, but devotes little attention to more permanent unions involving interracial couples, Leiker, Racial Borders, 82, 85-88. 8 This incident made it into the military records because several soldiers accused a non-commissioned officer of threatening them with a pistol when they tried to convince him to allow other soldiers to dance with a Mexican woman he had brought to the ball. Sergeant Thomas White, GCM Case File, PP310. 9 First Sergeant Felix Olevia, GCM Case File, PP775; James Leiker also briefly references this case. Leiker, Racial Borders, 82. 162 eyesight in the line of duty, Pension Bureau officials were skeptical and interviewed several of
Lilly’s comrades to determine whether Lilly had contracted a sexually transmitted infection in the service that led to that infection. “I don't know how he got his disease he must have gotten it from those Mexican women. He used to run out a good deal with them at Fort Davis and
Stockton and Quitman he talked their language,” one of Lilly’s comrades testified. According to this same veteran, when Lilly had once complained about his eyes after contracting an infection, other soldiers warned, “[Lilly] ought to stop running with those Mexican women or it would put his eyes out.”10
Relationships between Mexican women and black men could also become more permanent, with some couples ultimately opting to formalize their bonds through marriage.
While army officers did not prohibit enlisted men from marrying or having families, they required enlisted men to request permission before marrying. A soldier’s meager salary was thought insufficient for supporting a family and officers did not want to assume the responsibility of providing financial support to soldiers’ families. Therefore, many officers discouraged enlisted men from marrying and the army effectively barred enlisted men’s families from residing on military posts unless soldiers’ wives agreed to serve as official employees (as officers’ servants, unit laundresses, and other positions).11
Alexander Ezebb, a veteran soldier in the 25th Infantry Regiment, faced this problem directly when his company commander “refused to give permission” for Ezebb’s wife to
10 John Lilly Pension File, Application 729192. 11 Coffman, The Old Army, 307–14; McChristian, Regular Army O!, 294–310. To highlight the distinctions between the treatment of officers’ wives and enlisted soldiers’ wives, Emily K. Andrews’ experience is instructive. Andrews, the wife of an officer received a military escort in her move from Austin, Texas to a post in the Rio Grande Valley. See Emily K. Andrews Diary of Emily K. Andrews in her transit from Austin to Fort Davis, 1874, Box 2A137, Dolph Briscoe Center of American History, University of Texas-Austin. Throughout his book, Kevin Adams emphasizes the privileged life that officers enjoyed compared to enlisted men in terms of their material conditions, leisure culture, domesticity in Class and Race in the Frontier Army: Military Life in the West 1870- 1890, (University of Oklahoma Press, 2012). 163 accompany Ezebb’s unit when headquarters reassigned his company from Fort Duncan to a new post. Although Ezebb was a non-commissioned officer who was well acquainted with army regulations, the sergeant left his company while traveling to Fort Clark without authorization and returned to Eagle Pass, Texas, where his wife resided. In a verbal statement at the end of his trial by court martial for the offense, Ezebb insisted that his absence was only temporary and that he never planned to desert. “I left the command and returned to Eagle Pass with the intention of providing some means by which my wife could follow me to my new post. I believed that an absence of a few days would be sufficient to enable me to provide for my wife [and] procure the means for her removal to my new station,” Ezebb testified.12 Ezebb’s action is an implicit critique of a difficult situation that resulted from official army policy regarding soldiers’ families. For many men who deserted, their family commitments exceeded their military commitments.13
While the military justice system primarily served as a vehicle for maintaining good order and discipline within the ranks, enlisted men also viewed the military courtroom as a space for resolving disputes with each other in the hopes of reclaiming stolen property, seeking justice for mistreatment, and other matters, but some trials by court martial involved quarrels between enlisted men over women. At Fort Quitman, Texas, in May 1871, James Fisher, a private in the
9th Cavalry, faced trial for attempting to attack James H. Bush, a quartermaster sergeant, with an
12 Alexander Ezebb, GCM Case File, PP2664. The court found Ezebb guilty, but the members recommended mitigating his sentence because they believed that he planned to return to the unit and cited his good reputation as a soldier. Ezebb went on to finish this enlistment and served another enlistment. He settled in San Antonio, Texas and died sometime between 1880 and 1890. His widow Maria Robinson successfully applied for and was approved for a pension in August 1890. It appears that a William Ezebb who might have been Ezebb’s son or related to him in someway enlisted in the same regiment as Alexander Ezebb during the Philippine-American War. William Ezebb remained in the Philippines after his discharge, married a Filipino woman and lived in the Philippines until his death in the 1930s. 13 James Wright, GCM Case File, OO2743; Henry Taylor, GCM Case File, PP2293; John Ware, GCM Case File, QQ68; William Kelly, GCM Case File, RR1353. 164 axe after Bush ordered him to leave the company kitchen. According to Fisher, the “first beginning of the fuss” was when Bush and another non-commissioned officer discovered that
Fisher was “at a Mexican woman’s house” with whom Bush also claimed to have a relationship.
“[Bush] knocked on the door and the woman would not let him in, he broke the door open and asked me what I was doing there with his wife. The woman told him she was not his wife,”
Fisher stated.14
As part of their vision and positions as the mediators of good order and discipline, officers not only adjudicated disputes between enlisted men, but also among soldiers and other civilians who resided and worked on military posts, including disputes between soldiers and women. In September 1888 at Fort Apache, Arizona, Juana Velasquez, a Mexican woman who worked as a laundress on post, reported that Sprague Sims had chased her across the parade grounds with a razor in his hand threatening to kill her. At some point that same day, Velasquez delivered a letter explaining the incident to the officer of the day the officer of the day a letter
Velasquez, who eventually testified during Sims’s general court martial with the assistance of an interpreter, admitted that she did not know the exact contents of the letter. However, the officer who received the letter stated that he had asked Velasquez some follow-up questions about the note and said “she stated just what was in the paper.” The letter was attached to the transcript of the general court martial and was written in first person. It is likely that another soldier probably wrote the note for Juana and recorded her account of the events as she explained them. One part of the note read, “I went down to the garden to day and caught my husban [sic] with Lulu
Roberson carrying on in an undecent manner with her and I spoke to him about it and he drew a razor and called me all sorts of names,” The letter also listed Juana’s last name as Sims. As
14 Private James Fisher, GCM Case File, PP2356. 165 written, the note explicitly claimed that Sprague Sims was Velasquez’s husband and implicitly called upon officers to police Sims’s behavior ensuring that he adhered to proper moral standards that Juana associated with being a husband. Velasquez offered more details about her relationship with Sims during the trial. She recalled asking the sergeant of the guard to accompany her while she retrieved money that Sims was holding for her because she “feared that
[Sims] would spend it because he was drinking.” In a written statement proclaiming his innocence, Sims hinted at the women of various ethnicities and races who lived on or near Fort
Huachuca. “An Indian Squaw had told Juhuana. . .that I was down to the garden with some women,” Sims wrote.15
The physical proximity of Native scout camps and reservations to military posts allowed black soldiers to form interracial relationships with Native people. Throughout the late nineteenth century, the U.S. Army embarked on numerous campaigns against Native Americans throughout the West in support of settler colonialism. Native people often resisted these encroachments by the U.S. government and settlers, but some groups, like the Seminoles and groups of Apaches, formed alliances with the U.S. government by enlisting as scouts in the army.16 John T. Glass, an African American soldier from the 10th Cavalry, interacted regularly with Native people in his position as the chief of scouts and resided in a house at the Apache
Camp just outside of Fort Apache.17 In fact, interactions between Native American scouts and the U.S. Army led William Gairy to meet his future wife, “Beckie” Factor, who was a member of
15 Sprague Sims, GCM Case File, RR3238. 16 Kenneth W. Porter, The Black Seminoles: History of a Freedom-Seeking People (Gainesville, Fla: University Press of Florida, 1996); Kevin Mulroy, Freedom on the Border: The Seminole Maroons in Florida, the Indian Territory, Coahuila, and Texas (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1993); Kevin Mulroy, The Seminole Freedmen: A History (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016); Shirley Boteler Mock, Dreaming with the Ancestors: Black Seminole Women in Texas and Mexico (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012). 17 Private Joseph Adams, GCM Case File, RR3456. 166 the Seminole community near Fort Duncan, Texas. Beckie Factor may well have been a relative of Dindie Factor who served as a Seminole scout in the U.S. Army.18
In 1870, John Kibbit, the leader of the Seminole community near Fort Duncan, testified that William Gairy had visited him and requested permission to marry Beckie. Kibbit agreed to allow Gairy to marry Beckie on the condition that the soldier obtained approval from his commander and Beckie’s parents. Further evidence of Gairy’s acquaintance with Dindie Factor is that Factor summoned Kibbit on the day that the wedding occurred so that the leader could attend. Unbeknownst to some members of the Seminole community, William Gairy had not only lied about receiving authorization from the post commander to marry Beckie but had also convinced John. F. Marrell, a fellow soldier, to disguise himself as a preacher and officiate the wedding ceremonies.19 Much to the confusion of the attendees who attended the wedding ceremony, Marrell appears to have improvised a series of rituals and vows throughout the entire process, but eventually declared William and Beckie to be husband and wife.20 Officers at Fort
Duncan later court-martialed Gairy and Marrell and attempted to dishonorably discharge both men, but the commander of the Department of Texas overturned the findings and sentences because the soldiers’ actions did not “constitute a military offense.”21
Despite the questionable circumstances surrounding the marriage from the perspective of army officers, the federal government recognized the legitimacy of the couple’s union when
Beckie Factor applied for an Indian War Widow’s pension in April 1930. After completing his enlistment in 1872, Gairy remained in Texas and joined his wife’s community and moved with
18 Dindie Factor, Pompie Factor, and Hardy Factor were all members of Seminole communities and all served multiple enlistments as U.S. Army scouts during the 1870s; Indian Scouts U.S. Army Register of Enlistments, M233, Roll 70; https://www.fold3.com/image/311038775. 19 Although officers often discouraged enlisted men from marrying, they did sanction marriages if enlisted soldiers first obtained permission to marry. 20 William Gairy and John Marrell, GCM Case File, PP1673. 21 General Court Martial Orders for the Department of Texas, 1871, Microfiche Publication, NARA. 167 the Seminoles to a reservation on Fort Clark, Texas. Gairy, or Gerry, as listed in the enlistment rolls, used his membership within the community to enlist as a Seminole scout in 1873 and served in that capacity for nearly two years. Between 1900 and 1906, Gairy attempted to secure an invalid pension for wounds he claimed to incur in skirmishes with Native people during his enlistment in the 9th Cavalry, but the Pension Bureau rejected his claim due to his “inability to furnish the necessary satisfactory evidence” that the injuries he had sustained had occurred in the line of duty; Gairy likely died before he could appeal to reopen his claim.22
Nearly twenty-five years after William Gairy’s death, Rebecca Gairy submitted a widow’s pension claim under the Indian War Widows class and was ultimately successful. Her primary obstacle in securing a pension was her inability to provide documentary proof of her marriage to William, but the Pension Bureau deemed Rebecca’s application credible enough to deploy a special examiner named G.M. Milburn to investigate her claim. Milburn did not hide his disdain for the Seminoles in the summary of his report. “Considering the ignorance of these
Seminole-Negro Indians as a class, the evidence submitted is the best obtained,” the field examiner wrote. Milburn described Rebecca Gairy as “densely ignorant” but also stated the she had “impressed [him] as being truthful.” Multiple witnesses, comprising members of the
Seminole Community and former comrades of William Gairy in the Seminole Scouts, recounted some details of the wedding near Fort Duncan that John F. Marrell had officiated in the 1870s and affirmed that the couple’s marriage had lasted well into the twentieth century until William
Gairy’s death. In short, Rebecca Gairy, along with her network of family members and friends,
22 U.S. Army Register of Enlistments, M233, Roll 70; available through https://www.fold3.com/image/311038784?rec=300954261. William Gairy’s service in the Indian Scouts was the basis of his pension claim, which ultimately was successful. William Gairy, William Gerry, or Bill Gerry (the spelling varies throughout the documents) Pension Application Number 44775, Certificate Number 13733. 168 were successful in convincing federal officials to recognize the legitimacy of a marriage that the local government had never formally documented.23
In some cases, desires to continue relationships with Mexican women who lived near military posts also motivated some soldiers to desert.24 Reports of individual deserters from the post of Fort Davis list two men as deserting for romantic pursuits. For example, a group of officers concluded that Private James T. Martin had deserted to Presidio del Norte in Mexico because “he was very much in love with a Mexican girl” who lived there. Unlike Martin,
Sergeant Charles O. Johnston was a non-commissioned officer with eight years of service in the regular army and had a great reputation among the officers in his unit; they rated his general character as “excellent.” Unbeknownst to his company commander and first sergeant, Johnston had recently married a Mexican woman and soon after, Johnston’s wife and her family left Texas for Mexico, with Johnston ultimately deciding to desert and follow them.25
In July 1900, Charles Whitman deserted from the 9th Cavalry at Fort Huachuca, Arizona.
His reasons for doing so may have stemmed from the trial by general court martial he had faced the previous month.26 Whitman also may have wished to avoid serving overseas; he deserted a few days before his troop left Arizona for California to sail to the Philippines. The regimental returns for the 9th Cavalry listed Whitman as a deserter whose whereabouts remained unknown,
23 Burial records indicate that Rebecca Gerry died in 1938 and was buried in Brackettville, Texas in the Seminole Indian Scout Cemetery. Rebecca Gerry, Pension File, Application Number 1667.400, Certificate Number A-1-18-32/ XC 2.631.631; https://www.familysearch.org/search/record/results?count=20&query=%2Bgivenname%3Arebecca~%20%2Bsurna me%3Agerry~%20%2Bresidence_place%3Atexas~%20%2Bresidence_year%3A1900-1900 24 Although this section focuses on relationships formed in the borderlands, it is also important to acknowledge that some soldiers were already married to other women before they ventured to recruiting stations in the East to join the army. In many cases, soldiers deserted to return home in the eastern United States to rejoin their wives and other family members. 25 Reports of Individual Deserters 1883-1891, Fort Davis Post Records, Entry Number 120-23, RG 393 Part V, NARA also see Leiker, Racial Borders, 85. 26 Charles Whitman, GCM 16795. 169 but Fort Huachuca’s proximity to the U.S.-Mexico border offered the soldier an avenue of escape.27
In 1924, Rita Andrade, a Mexican woman and Charles Whitman’s wife, applied for a widow’s pension based on Whitman’s service during the Spanish-American War. Andrade’s application offers some clues as to Whitman’s whereabouts and post-army life that are absent from other military records, suggesting that sometime between July 1900 and July 1904,
Whitman had indeed fled to Mexico. Andrade recounted that she and Whitman were legally married by a justice of the peace in Cumpas, Mexico, in the state of Sonora in July 1904. She also listed names and birth locations of the couple’s five children, born between their marriage in
1904 and Whitman’s death in 1916. The children’s birth locations show that the family lived in
Mexico for at least eight years before migrating to a small town just east of San Antonio, Texas between 1912 and 1916. Although Charles Whitman had served in the 9th Cavalry during the
Spanish-American War, the Pension Bureau rejected Andrade’s claim on the grounds that her husband had deserted during his second enlistment in 1900.28 Charles Whitman himself never applied for a service pension because he probably understood that federal officials would disapprove his request on the grounds of desertion. Additionally, men like Whitman, Charles O.
Johnston, and James T. Martin likely decided not to apply for pensions because they feared inviting scrutiny from the federal government that might seek their arrest.
Court martial records and other military records in the cases of men like Martin,
Johnston, and William Gairy offer some brief snippets of the relationships between black soldiers and non-black women, but pension applications offer more specific details surrounding
27 Returns from Regular Army Cavalry Regiments, 1833-1916, Monthly Returns for the 9th Cavalry Regiment for July and August 1900, M744, Roll 91. 28 Rita Andrade Whitman Pension File, Application Number 1223.346. 170 these relationships. In Charles Whitman’s situation, information related to his residence in
Mexico and his marriage to a Mexican woman is completely absent without the aid of pension records. A search of the pension records at the National Archives in Washington D.C. reveals at least twenty pension applications involving marriages between women of Mexican descent and black veterans. Some pension files only consist of a few documents, but other files contain numerous documents stuffed into several manila envelopes or document binders symbolizing the contentious process of applying for pensions that could often take years. Regardless of the time and resources that veterans, widows, and other family members devoted toward defending their pension claims, there were no concrete assurances of gaining admission to the pension rolls.29
At its core, a disability pension application and the subsequent review by the Pension
Bureau was essentially a contest in history between individual applicants and government officials, with the contest weighted heavily in favor of the federal government. For veterans, the objective was to convince pension examiners that they had incurred the physical disability for which they sought compensation in the line of duty during an active military campaign. If veterans lived to the age of 62, they could apply for service pensions, which provided veterans who were advanced in age with critical financial support when many of them were too old to work and earn their own income. The burden of proof was on the applicant who needed to supply the necessary evidence: proof of identity, discharge papers, a surgeon’s certificate of disability, marriage certificates (for women applying for a widow’s pension), and a host of other
29 For example, Eulogia Terrien, the wife of a black veteran, first applied for a widow’s pension in 1915, but did not receive approval until 1928. Eulogia Terrien, Pension File, Application 1046396; also see Indian War Widow Application 13257/Certificate 12045. Robert Coleman, a black veteran first applied for a pension in 1891, but the bureau initially rejected his claim. He refiled in 1907 and was finally added to the pension rolls in 1910, but he died shortly after in September 1911. See Robert Coleman Pension File, Application 1004026/Certificate 1163737. 171 documents.30 Such documents were often inaccessible to black veterans or lost in the years between their discharge from the army and the time at which they initiated their claims.
Additionally, black veterans frequently faced racist government officials who viewed their applications with greater skepticism than they did white veterans. Navigating the Pension
Bureau’s complex process was grim enough, but disadvantages stemming from racial discrimination, illiteracy, lack of financial funds, and other issues compounded these difficulties.
When black veterans were unable to supply discharge certificates for disability, medical records, personal identification, and other official documents to support their claims, the Pension bureau often assigned a special examiner to evaluate the validity of veterans’ claims by interviewing them in person. However, this action was at the discretion of the Pension Bureau; federal agents only dispatched special examiners for cases deemed legitimate enough to warrant further investigation. Reputation was institutionalized as a part of this process. In large part, officials from the pension bureau based these special examinations on the reputation of the applicant. For example, on the first page of the index to each special examiner’s report, the investigator identified each interviewee with an additional column listed under the heading
“reputation” where the examiner offered a one-word assessment of each interviewee’s reputation such as: “good,” “fair,” “unreliable,” “excellent,” or other term. In the summary of their reports, special examiners offered a more expansive description of witnesses’ reputations.
30 Donald Shaffer also emphasizes the experiences and the difficulties that black Civil War veterans had in navigating the pension application process compared to white Civil War veterans. Shaffer, After the Glory. 172
31
In many respects, the emphasis on reputation in the pension application process reveals continuity in the importance of black men’s reputability during and after their military careers.
In fact, a veteran’s reputation as a soldier among officers could directly impact his prospect for receiving approval for a pension application. In 1881, Amos Blakeney, who had been a soldier in the 9th Cavalry during the 1870s, applied for a disability pension as compensation for the loss of the index finger on his left hand after accidentally firing his carbine while serving on escort duty. In an absence of official documents to confirm Blakeney’s story, officials at the Pension
Bureau turned to the officers who knew Amos Blakeney during his enlistment to verify his story and ultimately decide whether he qualified for a pension. In December 1883, Captain Michael
Cooney, who commanded Blakeney’s unit in the army, doomed any prospect of Blakeney attaining approval for his application. Cooney wrote that Blakeney was one of “several discharged on application as worthless and whose discharge would benefit the service.”
Blakeney’s former officer admitted that Blakeney had sustained the injury in the service but accused the soldier of purposely injuring himself. Despite nearly a decade passing since
31 Harry Planter served in the 9th Cavalry and was also a Civil War veteran who had served in the 69th USCI regiment. This is a photo of an index to a special examiner’s report based on interviews he conducted with various witnesses to look into Planter’s pension claim. The examiner used the words “fair,” “good,” “doubtful,” and “unreliable” to rate the reputation of each witness showing that witnesses faced similar levels of scrutiny in the arena of reputability as the applicants themselves. Harry Planter Pension File, Application 358.948/Certificate 528.634. 173
Blakeney’s discharge and probably his last contact with Cooney, the officer still believed he could offer a candid assessment of Blakeney’s capacity to perform labor. “I certainly do not think the loss of the joint interferes with his earning a living by labour. He was one of the lazy sulky kind of soldiers we sometimes find in the army,” Cooney wrote. Soon after receiving this scathing letter from Michael Cooney, the Pension Bureau rejected Blakeney’s pension application. Likely encouraged by changes in military pension laws that were more favorable to veterans of the late nineteenth-century Indian Wars, Blakeney reapplied for a pension in 1917 and 1923 but was again denied by the Pension Commissioner.32
Special examiners often based their assessment of applicants not only on their reputation in military service, but also their reputations after leaving the army and returning to civilian life.
In part, investigators scrutinized veterans’ post-military lives to understand how applicants’ physical conditions had deteriorated over time as a result of the injuries they claimed to sustain in military service and to determine how much to pay the applicant. At the same time, focusing on details about veterans’ lives afforded the examiner the opportunity to verify the character of veterans, specifically their reputations for truthfulness. Black veterans’ previous experiences in the military courtroom, whether as accused soldiers or witnesses, likely functioned as a form of legal education that black veterans applied when conducting interviews with Pension Bureau officials.
In engaging with officials from the Pension Bureau, black veterans employed similar strategies that accused black soldiers had relied upon in navigating the army’s justice system.
When the Pension Bureau requested that applicants assemble witnesses for interview by a special examiner, black veterans often relied on networks of people who could not only validate their
32 Amos Blackney Pension File, Application Number 356.121. 174 stories about how they incurred disabilities, but also speak to their reputation within the community. Therefore, the engagement between officials at the Pension Bureau and applicants often involved numerous other parties: lawyers, employers, politicians, family members, friends, and comrades from the military. The correspondence and documents generated from the pension application and review process provided an outlet for applicants to tell their own stories about their military experiences and their subsequent lives as civilians. Pension files from black veterans who resided in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century offer details about their relationships with non-black women they married in the region, their families, and the social relations within the communities they lived.33
Although black veterans, or for that matter African Americans in general, composed a small proportion of the population residing in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, they maintained close bonds with each other, which was crucial in the pension application process. While conducting an interview with a federal official in support of another soldier’s pension application, William A. Henderson remembered the importance of camaraderie among military men in Silver City, New Mexico. “We had lots of soldiers in Silver City-every branch of the service was represented and when these soldiers got together they naturally discussed their military service,” Henderson reminisced.34 Although soldiers submitted individual applications for pensions, they often turned to these social connections for aid when they were required to testify before a special examiner in support of another person’s pension application by verifying soldiers’ personal identities, confirming stories about injuries or illnesses sustained in line of
33 There is certainly a greater number of intermarriages between black soldiers and women of Mexican descent Black veterans and their family members may have been unable and/or unwilling to apply for pensions. An area of further research is to use these networks to reassemble a larger list of black veterans who married Mexican women. 34 Robert Coleman Pension File, Application 1004062/Certificate Number 1163737. 175 duty, and other matters. In fact, some of the applications from black veterans overlap. In Patrick
Straw’s pension application for example, Squire Jackson and George Gwyn, two of Straw’s former comrades submitted neighbor’s affidavits affirming Straw’s deteriorating physical condition stemming from injuries he suffered in military service.35 When George Gwyn applied for a pension, Squire Jackson and Patrick Straw were among the list of former comrades that
Gwyn suggested interviewing as part of the Pension Bureau’s special examination of his claim.36
These connections also allowed African-American veterans to collaborate and offer advice about navigating the pension review process. In an interview before a special examiner, Charles R.
Loomis, a lawyer in El Paso, stated that he had assisted eight black veterans with their pension applications.37 John Lilly, who was living in New Mexico at the time he submitted his pension claim, expressed confidence that if he could travel to El Paso, he would be able to contact some former comrades residing in the city who could verify his military service history.38
In addition to former comrades, some black veterans sought assistance from political representatives to support them in their pension claims. Perry served in the 19th USCI during the
Civil War and served in the regular army for a short period after the war before deserting and settling in Las Vegas, New Mexico.39 Perry contacted a delegate for the Territory of New
35 Squire Jackson and Patrick Straw actually worked together at the same hotel in Santa Fe, New Mexico and saw each other daily. Patrick Straw Pension File, Application 697362/Certificate 474.946 36 George Gwyn Pension File, Application 770762 37 Robert Coleman Pension File, Application 1004062/Certificate Number 1163737. 38 John Lilly Pension File, Application 729192; Lilly was never approved for a pension, but his wife Ruperta Lilly was added to the pension rolls when she applied for a widow’s pension. Ruperta Lilly, Pension File, Application 1731793/Widow’s Certificate A-12-5-33 39 In his interview before the special examiner, Perry admitted that he had served his full enlistment during the Civil War, but had deserted his regiment in the regular army as they traveled to New Mexico after he heard a rumor about a plan to take soldiers “down south and sell [them] as slaves.” Based on the information he provided, it is likely that Smith served in the 38th Infantry Regiment. However, Smith applies for a pension based on his service in the U.S. volunteers during the Civil War instead of regular army service. This demonstrates how veterans who served in multiple conflicts could skirt the boundaries of pension laws and submit applications based on various aspects of their military service. At various points in his life between his military service in the Civil War and first applying for a pension in the 1890s, Landon Perry was also known as William Smith, Julian Smith, and Jose Julian Hersy making proving his identity the most difficult part of the pension application. This was a persistent problem 176
Mexico, Bernard S. Rodey, requesting his assistance with his pension claim. “I am very sick and poor and my pension or rather my application does not seem to make any headway,” Perry complained. Yet, Perry did not simply portray himself as a needy veteran. Instead, the former soldier reminded Rodey that he had mobilized a great deal of political support for the delegate and believed that the delegate should repay his debt by assisting him. “I am a republican and always have been. I have worked diligently for the said party, and at the last election I did all I could for your nomination. So please try to do all you can for me in this case,” Perry argued.
Rodey wrote multiple letters to the Pension Bureau over the next few years requesting information about Landon Perry’s claim, mentioning in one of his letters to federal officials that
Perry visited his office every few days inquiring about the status of his claim. The delegate emphasized Perry’s strong reputation within the community and encouraged federal officials to assign a special investigator to “make a personal examination of the witnesses here who know this man.”40 In short, Rodey was confident that Perry’s reputation within the community would convince the federal government to “allow [Perry’s] claim.”41
for black veterans. For example, Robert Coleman, another veteran who had served in both the Civil War and the regular army after the war, had changed his last name to Coleman from Dent after the war because he no longer wished to use his former owner’s name. This became a problem later for black veterans when they applied for pensions because their adopted names often did not match the original names recorded by officers in their service records. Robert Coleman (alias Robert Dent) Pension File, Application 1004026/Certificate Number 1163737. For more on name changes among black veterans and the resulting obstacles in applying for pensions, see Regosin and Shaffer, Voices of Emancipation, 25–48; Shaffer, After the Glory, 119–42. 40 The 1910 census lists Landon Perry’s occupation as a cook and listed private families as his place of employment. To add to the confusion surrounding Perry’s name is listed as William L. Percy Smith on the census. Cooking for prominent families who could afford his services may have allowed Perry to expand his social network of people who would be willing to support him in claim. "United States Census, 1910," database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:MGSV-L67 : accessed 29 October 2019), Wm L Percy Smith, Vegas, San Miguel, New Mexico, United States; citing enumeration district (ED) ED 202, sheet 5A, family 17, NARA microfilm publication T624 (Washington D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1982), roll 917. Landon Perry alias Julian Smith, Pension Application 1163080/Certificate Number 1122003; 41 Landon Perry alias Julian Smith, Pension File, Application 1163080/Certificate Number 1122003; Another delegate, W.H. Andrews also wrote to the Pension Bureau requesting information about the application of John Lilly who was living in Albuquerque at the time; John Lilly Pension File, Application 729192. 177
42
Eventually, the Pension Bureau assigned William S. Fitch to examine witnesses in Las
Vegas and compile a report on his findings. Fitch’s report reveals that the network that Bernard
S. Rodey referred to in his letter was an interracial one consisting of a black man, Anglo-
Americans, and people of Mexican descent. People of Mexican descent, especially the children of Perry’s godparents, were crucial in explaining the circumstances surrounding his name change. Perry claimed that his godparents “mixed up” his name during his baptism when he joined the Catholic Church in 1875. “It was a mistake. We did not understand each other. I did not understand Spanish and they did not understand English. . . I noticed that whenever I gave the name ‘William’ to the Mexican people they pronounced it “Hoo-lee-ahn,” being the pronunciation of the name Julian,” Perry testified. Julian became Perry’s nickname in the
Mexican household in which he lived.43
Donaciano Otero and Filomena Otero de Polaco were the children of Perry’s godparents affirmed that they had known Perry since their childhood and that he had lived with members of their family for eight years. “I stood up with the claimant as godmother when he was baptized,”
Filomena Otero de Polaco stated. Most importantly, Donaciano and Filomena corroborated
Landon Perry’s narrative about the circumstances surrounding his name change, mentioning
42 This is a photograph that Julian Smith sent to the Pension Bureau hoping to prove his identity. 43 Landon Perry alias Julian Smith, Pension File, Application 1163080/Certificate Number 1122003. 178 mentioned that they had often heard Perry discuss his military service during the Civil War.
According to the special examiner’s report, Donaciano affirmed that “[Perry] always claimed he had been a soldier and it was my understanding that he had served as Landon Perry.” William S.
Fitch, the special examiner, employing a backhanded compliment based on racist stereotypes about black southerners described Landon Perry a.k.a. Julian Smith as “an old-time darky, very well thought of in the community where he resides, ignorant, illiterate, full of idiosyncrasies and regarded as truthful.” “A number of prominent citizens of Las Vegas have interested themselves in his case and all like him. They would like to see him get a pension,” he reported. The campaign on behalf of Perry’s neighbors and family members was ultimately successful and the
Pension Bureau added him to the pension rolls.44
Unlike other veterans, Landon Perry had lost contact with many of his former comrades making the local network he had established vital for supporting the stories he shared about his time in the army and his subsequent return to civilian life when he settled permanently in Las
Vegas, New Mexico. The general absence of African Americans of from Las Vegas made establishing an interracial social network all the more necessary. George Scott, the only black witness interviewed in Perry’s claim, alluded to this isolation in recounting how he first met
Landon Perry in 1868 while working as a cook in Las Vegas. “I went up the street one afternoon and met this claimant. I had not seen a colored man for a long time,” Scott said. Perry and Scott lost contact after this first meeting, but reconnected later when George Scott recognized Landon
Perry when he saw him working as a cook at a local hotel in Las Vegas. Shortly after that meeting, Scott began working at the same hotel as a porter and eventually, Landon Perry invited
44 Landon Perry alias Julian Smith, Pension File, Application 1163080/Certificate Number 1122003. 179 him to meet his family. Scott learned that Landon Perry had converted to Catholicism, married a woman of Mexican descent, and now answered to his nickname Julian Smith.45
Daily interaction with people of Mexican descent, converting to Catholicism, adopting
Spanish nicknames, and learning Spanish were all forms of cultural immersion that allowed black veterans to better integrate themselves into Mexican communities in the southwest borderlands, especially since black populations in this region were too small to form their own communities. Julian Smith referenced the language barrier between him and those who attended his baptismal ceremony in the 1870s, but by the time he sat before his interviewer in 1906, the special examiner mentioned that Smith “now speaks Spanish as well as English.” Although neither Smith nor any of the other witnesses, offered any details upon Smith’s employment as a cook at a local hotel, increasing his familiarity with ethnic cuisines may have been another form of cultural immersion for the black veteran.
Marrying women of Mexican descent offered another route for black men to integrate themselves into Mexican communities. Although people of Mexican descent were legally white,
New Mexico did not have state anti-miscegenation laws that barred white people from marrying non-white people. In fact, interracial couples who resided in neighboring states circumvented anti-miscegenation laws by traveling to New Mexico, where they were able to obtain marriage licenses.46 This also explains why nearly half of the cases sampled involving marriages between black veterans and women of Mexican descent are from couples who married and resided in
45 Landon Perry alias Julian Smith, Pension File, Application 1163080/Certificate Number 1122003. 46 Acosta chronicles interracial couples (black men and Mexican women or Chinese men and Mexican women) who resided in Arizona but traveled to New Mexico where interracial marriage was legal to formalize their ties. Additionally, Grant County, New Mexico appears to be a common destination for these couples. Black regiments had garrisoned Fort Bayard in Grant County intermittently from the 1860s-1880s. Perhaps this region was more accepting and accustomed to these interracial ties than other regions, because of the long history of a black presence in the locale. Acosta, Sanctioning Matrimony, 41–42. 180
New Mexico.47 In 1879, Julian Smith (Landon Perry) married a Mexican widow named
Faustina Lucero in a Catholic church and the couple continued their relationship until Julian
Smith’s death in December 1910. Faustina L. Smith submitted and ultimately received approval for a widow’s application to continue receiving monthly payments.
Legally recognized marriages had clear legal and financial benefits to widows of veterans. Marriage presented an avenue for women to transfer or retain control of property and other financial assets after their husbands’ deaths and in the case of pensions, enabled them to join the pension rolls as widows and continue receiving monthly payments from the federal government for their late husbands’ military service. Federal officials required widows to furnish evidence that they had indeed been married to veterans to approve their pension applications. Much like black veterans, the Pension Bureau assigned special examiners to investigate claims when widows lacked official documentation affirming their marriages to soldiers. In response, widows of black veterans and their neighbors testified before federal officials who delved deep into the claimants’ marital histories and reputation in the neighborhood before ultimately deciding whether to accept or reject claims.
However, admission to the pension rolls did not bring an end to the federal government’s scrutiny of widows. As the federal pension system began to expand in the 1880s, officials placed greater emphasis on counteracting perceived fraud and wasteful spending. As a part of this process and under the Pension Act of August 7, 1882, the Pension Bureau initiated attempts to scrutinize and regulate the sexual behavior of widows. Under this law, remarrying, cohabitating with men, or the mere suspicion of engaging in relationships with men deemed “immoral” or
“adulterous” threatened the financial livelihood of women. As Brandi C. Brimmer writes,
47 I have approximately 25 pension files that involve interracial marriages. Eleven of these files feature black veterans and women of Mexican descent who married and resided in New Mexico. 181
“Sexual morality became indicative of women’s deservedness and worthiness in both law and practice.” Racist views surrounding African American women’s supposed promiscuity and sexual immorality made black women pensioners especially vulnerable to intense scrutiny.48
Additionally, the wide range of marital practices among black couples formed and adopted under slavery did not always conform to white Americans’ ideas about marriage.49
The threat of removal from the pension rolls could come from the community in which widowed pensioners lived. Neighbors or residents who had some personal vendetta against pensioners were aware of the potential consequences for women who violated these moral and sexual norms endorsed by the Pension Bureau and reported their alleged behavior to government officials. When bureau officials arrived to investigate the allegations against them, widows fought to retain their pensions by mobilizing social networks of family members, neighbors, and employers who could testify on their behalf and vouch for their reputation and respectability within their communities.
In the 1890s, Fannie Blackwell, a black woman and the widow of William Blackwell, faced the threat of having her monthly payments from the federal government severed. The
Pension Bureau dispatched a special examiner to investigate Blackwell for her alleged involvement in an affair with a preacher named A.L. Todd based on reports from two black veterans named Samuel S. Jones and Thomas Brown. In response to the allegations, Blackwell stated that the two veterans who had reported her to the Pension Bureau with accusations of
48 For further reading on ideas about gender and sexuality held toward black women see Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1985); Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 187–212; Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); LeFlouria, Chained in Silence; Haley, No Mercy Here. 49 Brimmer, “Black Women’s Politics, Narratives of Sexual Immorality, and Pension Bureaucracy in Mary Lee’s North Carolina Neighborhood,” November 2014; Hunter, Bound in Wedlock, 2017, 274–75. 182 adultery only did so because she refused to give them a share of her monthly pension. Blackwell maintained that “I never had sexual intercourse with Todd or any other man since my husband died because I have had no desire for any man” and confidently stated, “I am willing to leave the matter to my neighbors as to whether my actions have been suspicious.”50 Blackwell mobilized a network of both black and white neighbors who lived nearby her in San Antonio to corroborate her story. Special examiners like Charles M. Walker often placed more value on the testimony of white witnesses because they often conflated credibility and reputability with whiteness.51 In the end, Walker admitted that the Pension Bureau had erred in opening an investigation into
Fannie Blackwell writing that “the pensioner bears a splendid reputation, among those who have no prejudice against her, as being honest, industrious, and upright.” In the end, Fannie Blackwell survived the threats to her reputation and economic wellbeing and remained a pensioner until her death in July 1914.52
Faustina Lucero de Smith, Julian Smith’s (Landon Perry) widow, faced the threat of removal from the pension rolls in Las Vegas, New Mexico under similar circumstances to Fannie
Blackwell. Shortly after her husband’s death in December 1910, Faustina submitted a widow’s pension application which the Pension Bureau soon approved. Between 1914 and 1918 the
Pension Bureau received three unsigned letters alleging that Faustina Smith “does not deserve a pension because she is a woman of bad conduct.” The writer of the letters accused Smith of involvement in an immoral relationship by cohabitating with Jose Lino Gonzalez without being married. Upon receiving the third letter in July 1918 about Faustina Smith’s illicit relationship,
50 Blackwell testified that she did Todd’s laundry and occasionally cooked meals for him. 51 Walker uses the language that he had first opened the investigation because he believed that Brown’s reliability was “as good as the average negro,” lending further credence to the argument that reputability and reliability are characteristics that he more readily associated with whiteness. 52 Fannie Blackwell Pension File, Application 358.551/Pension Certificate 258.437 183 the Pension Bureau dispatched a special examiner to Las Vegas to investigate the allegations against Smith. In August 1918, the acting commissioner of the Pension Bureau warned a high- ranking official in the Special Examination about the “difficulties” of dealing with people of
Mexican descent. “Las Vegas is practically divided into two towns, one of which is inhabited by natives and the other principally by Americans. It is difficult for an American who does not speak Greaser Spanish to get into touch with the people on the Mexican side of town,” he wrote.
Clearly, the official conflated “American” with Anglo-American despite the fact that some of the residents of Mexican descent were U.S. citizens; he also employed the derogatory term “greaser” to describe them. Near the end of the letter, the acting commissioner warned that, “The
Mexicans are clannish and inclined to stand by each other unless ill feeling exists between them.”53 In the words of one scholar people of Mexican descent had legal whiteness, but were often treated as socially non-white. In short, Pension Bureau officials sometimes applied similar ideas about unreliability and disreputability toward both people of Mexican descent and African
Americans.
Much like Fannie Blackwell in San Antonio, Faustina Smith and others in her neighborhood used the language of reputability to convince the special examiner that the rumors were false. A network of Smith’s neighbors, including Jose Lindo Gonzalez himself, vouched for Smith’s reputation in the community and informed the investigator that Gonzalez paid Smith for cooked meals and renting space in an adjoining house. Luis E. Armigo, an assistant district attorney in Las Vegas, described Faustina Smith as a woman who was “living a proper life.”
Trinidad G. de Baca testified, “As far as I know or have heard, [Faustina] bears a good reputation. She is always at home and working and I have not heard any rumors to indicate her
53 Faustina L. de Smith Pension File, Application 956947, Widow Certificate 718271. 184 reputation was not good.” Much like Fannie Blackwell and her neighbors, Faustina Smith and her associates faced a series of invasive questions from the special examiner about Smith’s private life, including inquiries about where family members slept in her home and whether
Gonzalez and Smith had ever occupied the same bed. At one point during Faustina Smith’s interview, Smith granted the examiner permission to search a chest of drawers in one of her rooms (presumably to see if Gonzalez was keeping clothes or other items in the same drawers).
In the end, the Pension Bureau decided that the rumors against Faustina de Smith were baseless and allowed her to remain on the widows’ pension rolls until her death in 1924.54
Aside from learning about the contests involved in individual pension claims between applicants and the Pension Bureau, pension files reveal some larger patterns associated with black veterans and intermarriages with women of Mexican descent in the southwest borderlands.
Julian and Faustina’s experience mirrored the behavior of other interracial unions between black veterans and women of Mexican descent in New Mexico. Ex-soldiers who moved to Mexico and married Mexican women also mentioned marrying in catholic churches.55 Marriage certificates also listed the names of family members who attended wedding ceremonies as witnesses, suggesting in some cases that the families of Mexican women were aware of their unions with black men and sanctioned them. Black men, who had moved West as soldiers and left most of their families in the eastern United States, often had no immediate relatives present at these ceremonies. When Robert Coleman married Arcadia Olivar in Silver City, New Mexico
James Dayes, another black veteran, attended their wedding and was listed on the marriage certificate as a witness.56
54 Faustina L. de Smith Pension File, Application 956947, Widow Certificate 718271. 55 In his pension application, Moses Robison mentioned marrying a Mexican woman (did not provide her name) in a Catholic church in Saltillo, Mexico. Moses Robison Pension Application 1331528. 56 Robert Coleman Pension File, Application 1004026/ Certificate Number 733301. 185
Cultural immersion was prominent among African-American men who lived in the U.S.-
Mexico borderlands and intermarried with Mexican women, but they did not necessary surrender all aspects of their identity. For example, local priests encouraged “non-Catholics” to convert to
Catholicism as a prerequisite for marriage, but some black veterans chose not to do so. When
George Miller, a black veteran of the 9th Cavalry, married Mariana Lobato in May 1890, he remained a Methodist but promised the priest that he would leave Mariana free to “practice her religion” and “to christen and educate their children in the catholic church.” In Silver City, New
Mexico, Robert Coleman, who the church also listed as a “non-Catholic party” on the marriage certificate, made a similar commitment when he married Arcadia Olivar.57
Adopting Spanish nicknames was another form of cultural immersion among black veterans and their Afro-Mexican descendants that allowed people of African descent to freely navigate and engage Mexican neighborhoods, but they also reflect some of the divisions among various racial/ethnic communities.58 Like Landon Perry, people knew John Lilly by different names in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Richard Harrison informed a special examiner that
African Americans in the city knew Lilly by a different name than other communities in the city.
“He has a Mexican wife and speaks Spanish and the Mexicans call him Juan Chaves. I don’t know why they call him Chaves. The Mexicans are not like we are. They will give a man a name and keep it up till he dies. The colored people here know his right name, but the Mexicans and those who do not know his right name call him Chaves,” Harrison stated. Another black veteran who resided in Albuquerque agreed with Harrison’s assessment. “The colored people
57 George Miller Pension File, Application 1002050/Certificate Number 774231. 58 Here I am using Afro-Mexican as more of a racial category than a national category. Afro-Mexican normally applies more to African-descended people who reside in Mexico. 186 here all know his right name, but the Mexicans and those who do not know his right name call him Chaves,” the veteran claimed.59
In a similar fashion, Pamfilio Crowder, the son of Maria Guadalupe Ramos and a black veteran named Riley Crowder, attempted to mitigate some of the confusion surrounding the various names associated with his younger brother in the Texas border town of Eagle Pass.
Clarifying this information was crucial because Crowder’s younger brother and sister were the basis of the minor’s pension claim he submitted to the Pension Bureau shortly after his father’s death in 1919.60 “There is no Jose or Joe Crowder in this family. Jesus Crowder is sometimes called by the Americans ‘Joe’ but his real name is Jesus Crowder and he was baptized under that name,” Pamfilio insisted.61 Pamfilio later explained that “Jesus is often called Jose by the
Mexicans and Joe by the Americans.” The words “Mexican” and “American” functioned as both ethnic and national categories for Pamfilio and reflected the frequent interaction that occurred between groups in some of the binational communities that developed in the southwest borderlands, with residents from both the United States and Mexico frequently crossing the U.S.-
Mexico border.62
Aside from properly identifying the applicants, the Pension Bureau also devoted a great deal of attention to determining whether Riley Crowder and Maria Guadalupe Ramos had legally married and without proof of marriage to verify the legitimacy of their children, federal officials
59 John Lilly Pension File, Application 729192. 60 Under United States pension laws, the children of veterans who were under the age of 16 qualified for a pension in the event of the death of both parents. The payment normally went to the guardian of the children. Pamfilio Crowder’s mother had died shortly after the death of the birth of her last child, so there was no widow’s pension to file. 61 The baptismal certificate actually lists Jesus Crowder’s name as Jose. A priest at the local church where Jesus was baptized informed a bureau official that “the reasons for name Jesus being added was that the Church would not allow a person to use the single name of Jesus and that his parents insisted on the name Jesus, so the priest added Jesus to their son’s name making the name Jose-Jesus Crowder. 62 St. John, Line in the Sand, 63-89 (esp 83-89); Truett, Fugitive Landscapes. 187 could reject Pamfilio Crowder’s pension claim for his siblings.63 Like many other family members, Crowder was unable to access to marriage certificates and other documents to prove the legality of the marriage. Due to both the absence of documents and confusion concerning the children’s names, federal officials eventually assigned a special examiner to Maverick County to investigate Crowder’s claim. The special examiner’s report consisted of interviews with
Crowder’s social network of family members, friends, and employers and illuminates greater details about his parents’ marriage. More importantly, the investigation demonstrates how patterns associated with interracial marriages among couples who lived in Texas differed from those who resided in New Mexico.64
After completing his five-year enlistment with the 9th Cavalry at Fort Duncan in 1872,
Riley Crowder remained in the area and found employment as a ranch hand at Tulia Ranch just west of Eagle Pass, Texas.65 Multiple neighbors who had known Riley Crowder for a number of years testified that Crowder had first cohabitated with Ramona Sandoval for a time, but never legally married her.66 Neighbors claimed that eventually Sandoval returned to her hometown of
Jimenez in Mexico where she eventually died. A few years after Sandoval’s death, Riley
Crowder met Maria Guadalupe Ramos and the couple eventually decided to cross the Rio
Grande to wed in Jiminez. Eduardo Gomez was a fellow ranch hand who had known Riley
Crowder since Crowder first began working at Tulia Ranch in 1872; Gomez stated that he did not “know why they went across the river to be married except that it was nearer to Jimenez,
63 For laws concerning pension eligibility for veterans’ dependents see William H. Glasson, Federal Military Pensions in the United States, (London: Oxford University Press, 1918), 125–27. 64 Pamfilio Crowder Pension Application 1148823/Certificate Number 943623. 65 It is important to note that Riley Crowder was also a Civil War veteran and at the time of his death was drawing a pension for his service during that war. Pamfilio Crowder’s application was to ensure that the family continued to receive that pension on the basis of Crowder having two children under the age of 16. Riley Crowder Pension Application Number 1391470/Certificate Number 1162050. 66 Crowder and Sandoval did have three children, two of whom reached adulthood and lived in the same area as Crowder’s other children. 188
Mexico than to Eagle Pass, Texas.” According to multiple witnesses, Guadalupe and Riley only remained in Mexico for a short time before returning to Tulia Ranch in Texas. For Riley
Crowder and Maria Guadalupe Ramos, crossing geographic boundaries allowed them to transcend legal restrictions that would have posed a barrier to their marriage, but their son
Crowder appealed for and successfully received federal recognition of his parents’ marriage despite its technical illegality under state law.67
Family members did not explain why Texas couples traveled across the border to marry, but state anti-miscegenation laws that banned white people from marrying non-white persons likely posed a barrier to marriage between black soldiers and Mexican women in Texas.68
Although many Anglo-Americans considered people of Mexican descent as distinct in whiteness from other groups of European descent, Mexicans were still legally white according to the U.S.
Census until 1930.69 For a broad range of reasons, federal officials were interested in obtaining as many details about marriages between veterans and wives as possible. From the information assembled in pension files, some patterns associated with intermarriages and their variations from state to state emerge. Over half of the pension applications surveyed are from couples who resided in New Mexico and with the exception of one intermarried couple, all parties who filed pension claims in New Mexico informed federal officials that they had married in the same state.
67 In the end, Pamfiio Crowder Pension Application Number 1148823/Certificate Number 943623. 68 Julian Lim explains that in the 1880s and 1890s in places like El Paso, Texas, Anglo-Americans attempted to regulate interracial relationships, including those between black veterans and Mexican women. Lim, Porous Borders, 63–94. 69 León, They Called Them Greasers; Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986; David G. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkley: University of California Press, 1995); Foley, The White Scourge; Linda Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999); Laura E. Gómez, Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race (New York: New York University Press, 2007); Meeks, Border Citizens; Benton-Cohen, Borderline Americans: Racial Division and Labor War in the Arizona Borderlands; Carrigan and Webb, Forgotten Dead; Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You. 189
One immediate question that arises is the extent to which the surrounding communities sanctioned and permitted these marriages that crossed racial and ethnic boundaries.
Pension applications were a means of getting the federal government to sanction and recognize interracial relations when the state government did not. The Crowders are one of six interracial couples who lived in Texas that are part of a sample of 25 pension files analyzed for this chapter.70 Only one out of the six couples who resided in and submitted pension applications from Texas stated that they had actually married in Texas; the remaining five couples all married in Mexico. For example, when Feodora Sanchez de Foster applied for a widow’s pension in
May 1903 shortly after her husband’s death, she submitted an affidavit stating that she had married Foster in Matamoros, Mexico, in December 1878. Much like the Crowders, however, the couple appears to have only remained there a short time before returning to live in Laredo.
At the time, William S. Foster was still serving his enlistment so remaining in Mexico was not a feasible choice unless he wanted to desert. Marriage in Mexico would have helped Foster and
Sanchez avoid state anti-miscegenation laws, but crossing the border also enabled soldiers to marry in secret and avoid the scrutiny of officers who often frowned upon enlisted men’s marriages.71
70 There is certainly a greater number of intermarriages between black soldiers and women of Mexican descent. Black veterans and their family members may have been unable and/or unwilling to apply for pensions. Additionally, focusing on marriages recognized by local and state governments does not encompass the full spectrum of relationships that existed among men and women in the southwest. As illustrated by Riley Crowder and Ramona Sandoval, men and women often established more permanent relationships without choosing to marry. An area of further research is to use these networks to reassemble a larger list of black veterans who married Mexican women. 71 William S. Foster Pension File, Application 515.306/ Certificate 280.812; Feodora S. de Foster Pension Application 785.296. During the l860s and through the 1870s, William S. Foster served multiple enlistments in the 38th and 24th Infantry Regiments. In 1883, the Army discharged foster with a certificate of disability due to injuries and ailments he sustained in the service. Foster presented this discharge certificate to the Pension Bureau and received a monthly pension from November 1887 until he died in April 1903. Feodora Foster does not have a certificate number assigned to her name which suggests that she never was approved for a pension. However, neither the 1910 nor 1920 Census indicates that she ever remarried. 190
Yet, the one file from a couple that did wed in Texas, serves as a useful reminder that state anti-miscegenation laws did not completely outlaw interracial marriages; ultimately local officials made decisions about issuing marriage licenses to couples who wanted to marry.
Thomas Stone first married Petra Acosta Montes and later married Santiaga Gamboa after
Petra’s death. In a special examination for his pension claim, Thomas Stone recalled first marrying Petra in 1868 near El Paso while he was serving in the 9th Cavalry. He mentioned that a Baptist preacher had married them, but that he and Petra never obtained a marriage certificate.
The couple lived together as husband and wife for well over forty years in the border town of
Presidio, Texas, with the full knowledge of the community until Petra died in 1913. Thomas
Stone then remarried Santiaga Gamoa who was also widowed, but unlike his first marriage
Thomas and Santiaga obtained an official marriage certificate in 1914 from the justice of the peace and remained married until Thomas Stone died in 1921.72
Soon after Thomas’s death, Santiaga Stone applied for a widow’s pension. In a summary of a report investigating Santiaga Stone’s claim, C.R. Franks acknowledged that the existence of state anti-miscegenation laws differed from the local practice of enforcing them in Presidio,
Texas. “In so far as their lives were concerned in and around Presidio there was no bar to their intermarriage,” the examiner wrote. Franks interviewed witnesses of both Mexican and Anglo-
American descent who resided in Presidio to gather information about Santiaga Stone and none of the interviewees attempted to conceal the fact that Santiaga and Thomas’s union was an interracial one. They frequently referred to Stone as a “colored man” and casually referred to his first marriage to Petra Montes and his second marriage to Santiaga. Some of the witnesses themselves were women of Mexican descent who had married Anglo-American men; in a
72 Thomas Stone Pension File, Application 1078977/Certificate Number 1158635. 191 heterogenous border community like Presidio marriages that transcended racial and ethnic boundaries were common.
Instead, maintaining class distinctions was likely more important to the community than racial or ethnic boundaries, especially with people of African descent composing only a small fraction of the population. Santiaga Stone’s neighbors described her as “a harmless old peon” to the special examiner. Franks himself described Stone as a “very ignorant” woman who depended on others for support and believed that rating her reputation as “fair” would “do her justice.” Franks’ assessment of Stone’s reputation was also based in part on his belief that she did not adhere to what Franks believed were proper standards of respectability among women.
He praised Stone for her honesty, but in the same breath scorned the applicant for making no attempt to conceal the fact that prior to meeting and marrying Thomas Stone she had once lived with another man for forty years without ever officially marrying him. Franks, however, offered a glowing review of another woman who he considered to be “a Mexican of the better class” and the widow of an Anglo-American man. The pension examiner voiced similar sentiments about a woman of Mexican descent who was married to a prominent Anglo-American landowner.73 The community might have viewed the marriage between Thomas and Santiaga with more hostility if
Santiaga had been an elite Mexican woman.
73 Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century when Anglo-American settlers first began arriving in the U.S.- Mexico borderlands, women from elite Mexican families often intermarried with Anglo-American men. The rates of these intermarriages declined somewhat as more Anglo-American women began arriving in greater numbers in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries. Montoya, Translating Property, 124–45; Andrés Reséndez, Changing National Identities at the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800–1850 (Cambridg ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 46–65; María Raquél Casas, Married to a Daughter of the Land: Spanish-Mexican Women and Interethnic Marriage in California, 1820-1880 (Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press, 2007); Benton-Cohen, Borderline Americans: Racial Division and Labor War in the Arizona Borderlands, 36–41; Acosta, Sanctioning Matrimony. 192
In fact, many of the Mexican women who married black veterans were from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds.74 Mariana L. Miller, the widow of a black veteran who had served in the 9th Cavalry emphasized the desolate circumstances she faced. “I am a poor widow with a large family of small children, and my only income, is from doing washing for other people. . .My health at the present time is in such condition that it is all most impossible for me to work at times and if this pension can be granted it will certainly be a ‘God’ send to me.”75 “I use [sic] to do crochet to help me a little but now I am half blind,” Arcadia O. de
Coleman complained.76 Eulogia Terrien, in a letter to the Pension Bureau during the Great
Depression, wrote, “I would like to know if you could do something for me even if you don’t give me all of what I am supposed to get. But help out for the last few days of my life that I have got which will not be very long. I am very very poor I have got to eat I have got two boys which could keep me but there is no work. Times are pretty hard things look pretty bad all over.”77
With wives and other members of Mexican enclaves in the southwest insisting on rearing their Afro-Mexican descendants in Catholic churches, the children became more integrated in
Mexican communities and likely identified socially and culturally as Mexican.78 This cultural
74 Black veterans in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands were also part of the working class. Many veterans who listed their occupations appeared to work in the service industry as cooks, barbers, waiters, and porters. Some served as ranch hands. In terms of occupations, there was not a significant difference between black veterans and other African Americans who did not have military backgrounds. Racial discrimination often restricted African Americans in the urban locates in the West to jobs in the service industry. Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier, 194, 224. 75 The Pension Bureau approved her claim and added Miller to the pension rolls. She remained on the pension rolls until she died in 1939. Like other veterans and widows, she also demonstrated her savviness with navigating the various pension laws by reclassifying from the general pension laws to the Indian War Widow class in 1931 after Congress passed more laws that were more favorable to this class of veterans. Mariana L. Miller Pension Application 923310/ Widow Certificate 974480. 76 Arcadia Olivar de Coleman Pension File, Application 970051/ Widow Certificate 733301. 77 Eulojia Terrien, Pension File, Application 1046096/ Indian War Widow Application 13257/Widow Certificate 12045. Originally, Terrien applied for a pension under the regular invalid establishment, but she found more success by applying for a pension under the Indian War service law as pension laws became more favorable toward that class of veterans. 78 This is even more likely to be the case for Afro-Mexicans who were born and raised in Mexico. 193 upbringing and mingling with other people of Mexican descent likely enabled Afro-Mexican descent to meet potential partners for marriage and as indicated by both the United States census records and the testimony of many black veterans and their family members in the pension files, many Afro-Mexican descendants married other people of Mexican descent. Furthermore, people of European and Mexican descent composed the majority of these small border towns making the prospect of finding a partner of African descent slim.
The ambiguousness of the color line in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands combined with the cultural immersion of Afro-Mexican descendants allowed them to blend in with the rest of the population. Dating back to the 1830s and 1840s when Anglo-Americans first began migrating in greater numbers to the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, they often described Mexicans as “mixed-race” people whose racial purity had long been tainted by “intermixing” with non-white people.79 As previously mentioned, black veterans, Mexican women, and their children often spoke Spanish in their households. Census records offer some clues as to how federal officials attempted to make sense of the racial identity of Afro-Mexican descendants. Federal officials’ tendency to associate Afro-Mexicans with blackness depended on whether or not the children’s African-
American fathers were present in the household. Census officials were more likely to list Afro-
Mexican descendants as “mulattoes” if black men were present in the household, whereas an absence of black men increased the likelihood of officials listing Afro-Mexican descendants as white. For example, Riley Crowder lived in Maverick County, Texas, with five of his children in
1910 and census officials tallied all of the children as “mulatto.” After Riley Crowder died and no other persons residing in the household fit the phenotypical description of a black person,
79 Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986; Foley, The White Scourge; Gómez, Manifest Destinies, Second Edition; Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (Cambridge, U.K.; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 91–96; Acosta, Sanctioning Matrimony, 48–51; Lim, Porous Borders. 194 federal officials listed his Afro-Mexican descendants as “white” or “Mexican” in the 1930 and
1940 censuses. Crowder had also married a woman from Mexico, and census officials who heard residents speaking Spanish likely assumed that the home’s occupants were people of
Mexican descent and made no inquiries about black ancestry.80
In another example, Maria Melquiades Terrien, the daughter of a black veteran named
John Terrien and Eulogia Torres, underwent an interesting journey. She married a white man named William Abner Calkins in Silver City, New Mexico, in 1916 and eventually moved with him to California. The birth certificate for their son William Wallace Calkins lists Maria’s name as Mary and her race as “Spanish-American.” The 1930 census still lists her name as Mary, but simply lists her race as white at a time when Census officials ceased tallying people of Mexican descent as white.81 James Terrien, one of John Terrien and Eulogia Torres’ sons, is also identified as white on his California death certificate with his father’s first name listed as
“Juan.”82
80United States Census, 1930," database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:33SQ-GRZ4-3Z1?cc=1810731&wc=QZF7- RF8%3A648808001%2C649554801%2C648821003%2C1589282427 : 8 December 2015), Texas > Maverick > Precinct 3 > ED 8 > image 4 of 10; citing NARA microfilm publication T626 (Washington D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 2002); "United States Census, 1940," database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3QS7-89MY-863V?cc=2000219&wc=QZX5- BQ4%3A792575201%2C803340701%2C792731201%2C803346301 : accessed 29 October 2019), Texas > Maverick > Justice Precinct 4 > 162-10 Justice Precinct 4 outside Eagle Pass City > image 2 of 5; citing Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940, NARA digital publication T627. Records of the Bureau of the Census, 1790 - 2007, RG 29. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 2012 (accessed August 15, 2019). 81 St. Vincent De Paul Silver City, New Mexico Volume 4 May 28, 1908 to March 27, 1937, 196, via Family Search https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3Q9M-CSQB-ZS65-S?i=515 (accessed October 29, 2019); "United States Census, 1930," database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:33S7-9R4K-NJK?cc=1810731&wc=QZFS- 714%3A648807101%2C648807102%2C650199401%2C1589286912 : 8 December 2015), California > Los Angeles > Los Angeles (Districts 0751-0795) > ED 790 > image 36 of 55; citing NARA microfilm publication T626 (Washington D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 2002) accessed October 29, 2019. 82 "California, County Birth and Death Records, 1800-1994," database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3QS7-89SV-8WMP?cc=2001287&wc=SJ55- 7M9%3A285176601%2C285590701 : 26 September 2019), Los Angeles, Los Angeles > Death certificates 1953 no 18100-20460 > image 2387 of 2861; California State Archives, Sacramento. 195
While people of Mexican descent certainly faced a great deal of discrimination in the
Southwest, it is important to ask whether some black veterans and their Afro-Mexican descendants intentionally distanced themselves from blackness to gain advantages and opportunities that were unavailable to black Americans.83 Perhaps what is absent from the scholarship associated with racial passing when it comes to African Americans is those who successfully passed as Mexican. When a special examiner asked Lucia Canter de Barrera about the racial identity of her late husband who had served with the Seminole-Negro Indian Scouts, the widow distanced him from blackness.84 “He was a Mexican. He may have been part Indian, but he was not part Negro,” Barrera insisted. Lucia Barrera, herself was a Mexican woman, who had moved from Mexico to a small border town in Texas in Val Verde County. Legally, Barrera was white, and perhaps feared inviting scrutiny from local officials if she mentioned that her husband had any trace of African ancestry.85
The plight of desperation also extended to widows of black veterans who were Mexican citizens residing in Mexico; they too petitioned the U.S. government for financial relief based on their husbands’ military service. The U.S. Consul’s office in Mexico described a former USCT soldier’s widow as being “in very destitute circumstances-she desires to know if there be any way she can get any recognition from the Pension Bureau.”86 That request for recognition came from her connection to an African American soldier who had crossed into Mexico and established a life there.
83 Karl Jacoby, The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016). 84 The correspondence among Pension Bureau officials suggests that they were primarily concerned with Espetacion Barrera’s race so that they could confirm that the person identified in the death certificate and the scout indicated in War Department Records were the same person. Espetacion Barrera’s death certificate listed him as white, but the Indian Scout enlistment rolls listed his skin complexion as “copper.” In the views of some federal officials, this description of skin complexion did not meet the bar of whiteness. 85 Lucia Canter de Barrera Pension File, Application 1702.286/ WC A-6-29-32 XC 2644451. 86 Armand Populus, Pension File, Application 1188551. 196
As they had both on and off-duty as soldiers, and much like other border people, black veterans who decided to remain in the borderlands after completing their enlistments continued to move back and forth across the U.S.-Mexico border. African-American soldiers played a crucial role in securing the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and transforming the region into a space that was more appealing to American and Mexican investors, albeit at the expense of Native
American groups who had previously controlled the lands and resources in these locales. These investments spurred the development of railroads, mines, and other industries. Some black veterans relocated to Mexico in pursuit of jobs associated with these industries, but many of these jobs were in the service sector. For example, William J. Dooley found employment as a porter on the railroad route between San Antonio and Mexico City.87
Much like their counterparts on the other side of the border, black veterans understood the importance of establishing networks of people who could vouch for their reputations and verify the claims they made in pension applications; black veterans residing in Mexico often sought the support of former comrades living nearby. Charles Crosby, who applied for a pension in Monterrey, contacted John E. Tonsall and Frank Johnson who also lived in the city and hand known Crosby for 25 and 35 years, respectively.88 Yet, Tonsall in his own application demonstrated that he understood the importance of respectability politics in forming networks of fellow veterans. Mexico was a frequent destination for soldiers, both black and white, who had deserted and Tonsall knew that including the names of deserters would not strengthen his pension application. Deserters were disreputable men in the eyes of many, including Tonsall himself. “I new men of my own Race and they was [deserters] from the Arme and some from
87 William J. Dooley Pension File, Application 1152227/Certificate Number 892035; John H. Smith worked as a cook at a railroad camp in Mexico and remained in Mexico until he died in Mexico City. John H. Smith Pension File, Application 1418390. 88 Charles Crosby Pension File, Application 1179700/Certificate 1175955. 197 the 9th U.S. Cavalry [sic].” “I am a colored man but I have the same thought of a man who
[deserts]. . .I did not think thay was fit to singe my paper becuse they all have outher names
[sic],” Tonsall added.89
In the absence of former comrades or due to an inability to communicate with them, black pension applicants relied on social networks they had formed in Mexico after leaving military service to vouch for their reputations; these networks included employers, neighbors, doctors, and others. Moses Robison moved to Mexico in 1871 after a five-year stint in the army at Fort Duncan and lived there continuously until he first applied for a pension in 1905. Robison listed four different residential addresses in Mexico and provided the names of a cashier agent from the Hidalgo Mining Company, along with the superintendent of the Parrol and Durango
Railroad, and the name of an official from the U.S. Consul’s office in Parrol who could verify his identity and provide assurances about his reputation.90
However, moving to Mexico did not permanently sever black veterans’ connections to the United States. George Anderson worked as a cook for an engineering company in Mexico, but his wife and children resided in the Texas border town of Eagle Pass. A special examiner assigned to investigate Anderson’s pension claim commented on how Anderson maintained regular contact with his family, including a complex arrangement in which Anderson’s daughter collected his mail and forwarded important items to him in Mexico. In 1908, George Anderson sent a letter to Theresa Howard, a relative of his former owner in Kentucky, and requested her
89 John E. Tonsall Pension File, Application 488631/Certificate 375405. 90 It is possible that Moses Robison was not being honest about the circumstances of his service and how he ended up in Mexico. The Pension Bureau was unable to find any record of his service in the War Department Records using the company and regiment he provided, but a search of the Army Register of Enlistments shows that a black soldier named Moses Robinson who served in a different regiment deserted from Fort Duncan on May 31, 1871. The reason why I suspect it’s the same person is because the names are similar, and the soldier enlisted at the same location where the applicant claimed to enlist. Moses Robison, Pension File, Application 1331528. 198 assistance with confirming his identity. The letter along with Anderson’s persistent appeals to both the U.S. Consul’s office in Durango and the Pension Bureau is particularly symbolic of the veteran’s transition from slavery to emancipation and exercising his rights as a U.S. citizen.91
The very act of entering the office of a U.S. Consul illustrates that although African-
American soldiers seized advantage of the porousness of the U.S.-Mexico border to pursue marriages and economic opportunities, they continued to exercise their rights as U.S. citizens by calling on the U.S. government to assist with their pension claims.92 Engaging the U.S. Consul was not an unprecedented action for black Americans. In the late 1860s, George Cinio, a black veteran residing and working in Piedras Negras, contacted the U.S. Consul in Piedras Negras and requested the office’s assistance in securing his release from Mexican military authorities who had kidnapped and impressed him into the Mexican Army. The consul attempted to intervene in
Cinio’s case along with four other men of Mexican descent claiming U.S. citizenship who military authorities had also forced into the Mexican Army. Eventually, Cinio managed to escape from the unit during its march to Monterrey and crossed the Rio Grande into Texas.93
However, white government officials working at the U.S. Consul offices posed a barrier to black veterans exercising their rights as citizens in seeking aid from government agencies.
John E. Tonsall was a black veteran who had served both as a volunteer in a USCT regiment during the Civil War and as a regular army soldier after the war. He filed for and received
91 The primary difficulty for George Anderson in getting his application approved was the fact that he had changed his name after emancipation. Anderson had served under the surname Howard during the Civil War. In the letter, Anderson explicitly referenced the names of people in the neighborhood in Kentucky where he had grown up and mentioned a specific incident in which Theresa Howard’s dog bit him when he visited their home on an errand. In the end, Howard obliged and confirmed his identity for the Pension Bureau. 92 Scholarship demonstrating that courtrooms served as a space where African Americans could claim broader inclusion in the body politic offers a useful model for thinking about these actions. Jones, Birthright Citizens; Schoeppner, Moral Contagion; Welch, Black Litigants in the Antebellum American South; Twitty, Before Dred Scott; Kennington, In the Shadow of Dred Scott. 93 William Schuchardt to William Hunter (Assistant Secretary of State), August 15, 1880, Despatches from the U.S. Consul in Piedras Negras, NARA, Washington D.C. M299, Roll 1. 199 approval for a pension due to various physical ailments he incurred during military service in
Texas with the 9th Cavalry Regiment after the Civil War.94 At some point, between the early
1890s and early 1900s, Tonsall left San Antonio and moved to Mexico. In 1902, Tonsall’s worsening physical condition compromised his ability to perform manual labor and he applied for a pension increase because the monthly payment he received at the time did not offer adequate support. In a letter to the Pension Bureau, Tonsall mentioned visiting the U.S. Consul’s office in San Luis Potosi, Mexico, and observing an agent approve a white veteran’s pension paperwork and provide him with an envelope to mail the papers. Tonsall, who followed the white veteran in line, wrote that the agent “refuse to give me [an envelope] because I am a colored man. I asks to sell me one and he said that he did not do any [favors] to my pepal [sic].”95
In addition to racial discrimination, Tonsall expressed his frustration with government agents at the U.S. Consul’s office who had “no honor.” “I all ways thought that a [Counsel] employed by U.S. government had to be a able-baday man like a Soldier but I find that any kind of a man can get in the survice [sic],” Tonsall opined. The veteran chastised the agents at the office for promising to fabricate “any kind of paper” he wanted to send the Pension Bureau if he agreed to pay them.96 Tonsall also questioned the government agents’ motivations for coming to
Mexico who he viewed as self-interested, “money making. . .men” and stated it was in stark contrast to his reasons for settling in Mexico. “Not one of them say what they came to Mexico
94 While a soldier during the Civil War, Tonsall learned to read and write which greatly benefitted him in attaining positions of higher rank in his unit with many other black enlisted men not having had the opportunity to receive an education. Tonsall’s literacy also aided him during the pension application process. 95 John E. Tonsall Pension File, Application 488631/Certificate Number 375405. 96 Tonsall was having difficulty assembling a network of men and doctors who could offer testimony confirming how his condition had debilitated between the years he was initially approved for an invalid pension and the time at which he requested an increase. For example, Tonsall recounted that he had seen several doctors since 1891, but they were unable to submit paperwork to support his claim because “they only make them in Spanish.” Tonsall later wrote that he had seen many other veterans abuse the system in this manner with men signing sworn affidavits in support of a claim even though the signers had “never seen the [veteran] before.” 200 for. I can say I am hear for health I can say I am hear for libity [sic],” Tonsall wrote. “I wish I was a man of some learn so I could just speak how the government survice is being Abuse
[sic].”97 The disgruntled applicant’s experience at this U.S. Consul’s office likely encouraged him to move farther west to the city of Aguascalientes, where he had more luck with the U.S.
Consul’s office there. Beginning in 1904, documents that Tonsall sent to the Pension Bureau listed the address of the U.S. Consul’s office in this latter locale rather than the former. Shortly after John E. Tonsall died in Mexico City in August 1917, Andia A Vinde Da Tonsall, a Mexican citizen, initiated a widow’s claim for pension based on her husband’s military service.98
However, she does not appear to have completed the claim.
Mexican citizens who were the relatives of black soldiers also entered U.S. Consul offices in Mexico seeking assistance from diplomats with submitting widows’ pension applications to the U.S. government. After receiving an administrative discharge from the U.S.
Army in 1881 due to difficulties with tuberculosis, Robert S. Flint, an African-American veteran, moved to the city of Chihuahua in Mexico, found employment as a carpenter, and eventually married a Mexican woman in 1886.99 Due to the fact that the former soldier had contracted tuberculosis in the line of duty and provided documentary evidence that his discharge was the result of a disability, Flint’s pension application was likely smoother than other veterans and was soon added to the pension rolls. Sometime after the birth of their youngest child, Isabel, in
97 John E. Tonsall Pension File, Application 488631/Certificate Number 375405. 98 John E. Tonsall Pension File, Application 488631/Certificate Number 375405. 99 Much like their counterparts in New Mexico, when black veterans moved to Mexico, they often married women in catholic churches and/or obtained marriage certificates from local civil officials in Mexico. For example, Moses Robison married a Mexican woman in 1881 at a Catholic church by the city mayor in Satillo, Mexico. Moses Robison Pension File, Application File 1331528. 201
December 1890, Flint’s wife died and Flint himself succumbed to cancer at the age of 35 in 1895 leaving behind three young children.100
At the time of his death, Flint received a monthly invalid pension from the U.S. government because he had contracted tuberculosis in the line of duty while serving in the 9th
Cavalry. Shortly after the veteran’s death, Flint’s mother-in-law, serving as the guardian of the children, and a doctor named Ignacio Torres, charged with executing all of Flint’s financial affairs, submitted a pension application to request monthly financial support for Flint’s children, who were all under the age of 16.101 We do not know the conversations that took place between
Robert S. Flint and his family members prior to his death, but Flint was well-acquainted with the pension process from his previous engagements with the U.S. Consul. He likely provided instructions and advice to both his mother-in-law and Torres about how to navigate the process so that his family could continue receiving financial support from the U.S. government. Torres collected the necessary documents in Chihuahua that affirmed the marriage of Robert Flint to
Villanueva along with baptismal records for each child and sent them to the U.S. Consul’s office, but the claim appears to be incomplete.102
Veterans and their family members residing outside of the continental United States had to navigate complex government bureaucracies and communicate with federal officials who were often miles away from where they lived. William Armstead had originally filed his claim at the
U.S. Consul’s office in Durango, Mexico, and received notice from the Commissioner of
Pension to receive a medical examination from a surgeon, but he was unable to find “aney
100 Robert S. Flint Pension File, Application 1153226/ Certificate Number 871566; Torres Ignacio Pension Application for Minors 613624. 101 Under the U.S. Pension laws, the guardians of veterans’ children under the age of 16 qualified for pensions if both the mother and father were dead. 102 The Pension Bureau never assigned a certificate number to the claim. 202
American doctor in that country” at the time. Armstead later moved to El Paso but left his discharge paperwork in the possession of the U.S. Consul in Durango for safekeeping and reported difficulty communicating with the consul’s office to arrange the return of his papers.103
Francisca Crosby, a Mexican widow of a black Civil War veteran, applied for a widow’s pension in 1916. Francisca’s husband Charles had moved to Mexico after completing his military service and made his home in Monterrey. He met and married Francisca in 1892. The couple remained in Mexico, but eventually relocated to Eagle Pass, Texas in the 1910s, likely attempting to flee the violence stemming from the Mexican Revolution. Francisca wrote that she was unable to furnish copies of her marriage records to the Pension Bureau to prove that she was the soldier’s wife because the journey back to the city in Mexico where the couple had wed was too dangerous.104 Ironically, Mexico had served as an avenue of escape for the couple to marry legally, but now posed a significant barrier for obtaining proof of the union to gain marital benefits in the United States. Aside from the violence in Mexico, the U.S. government increasingly militarized the border between the 1910s and 1930s, making physical crossings and communication more difficult. While the U.S.-Mexico border had previously served as a bridge for greater economic opportunities and an escape for a couple whose marriage might have been illegal in Texas, the border became a barrier.105
Black veterans and their families encountered similar difficulties when they applied for pensions from other locations outside of the United States. After completing their enlistments
103 William Armstead Pension File, Application 738018. 104 Francisca Crosby Pension File, Application 1094558. 105 Miguel A. Levario, Militarizing the Border: When Mexicans Became the Enemy (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2012); Julian Lim, Porous Borders: Multiracial Migrations and the Law in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017); Rachel C. St. John, Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U.S.-Mexico Border (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); Samuel Truett, Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). 203 during the Spanish-American War and the Philippine-American War, some black soldiers decided to remain in Cuba and the Philippines and intermarried with Cuban and Filipina women.106 Manuela Cooper, the widow of a black veteran named Joseph Cooper, sent a written affidavit in Spanish to the Pension Bureau affirming the validity and legality of her marriage to
Cooper and explained that she could not afford to pay to have the document translated into
English.107 In a complex web of marital ties spanning the Pacific Ocean, Agripina Galang and
Romana Pivalta submitted separate pension applications claiming that they had been married to
Albert Sims, an African-American veteran who settled in the Philippines after his enlistment in the U.S. Army expired. Both Galang and Pivalta eventually learned that the U.S. government deemed them ineligible because Sims had never legally divorced his first wife in the United
States before he deployed to the Philippines.108
In many ways, pension files offer a comprehensive view of themes already surveyed in this project. Respectability politics were an important part of applying for pensions. Just as they had within the military justice system, black soldiers mobilized networks of people who could support their claims and vouch for their reputations within their communities. The pension application process provided a means for soldiers and their families to request financial support to improve their material conditions when old age or physical ailments prevented them from adequately supporting themselves. At the same time, many veterans did not simply view submitting a pension application as a matter of petitioning; veterans and their family members believed that admission to the pension rolls also represented the federal government fulfilling its
106 Although they are not the focus of this chapter, white veterans also settled in Cuba and the Philippines and intermarried with local women. Additionally, European immigrants composed a significant proportion of enlisted men in the U.S. Army in the late nineteenth century; some returned to Europe after military service and submitted pension applications from Ireland, Germany, and other locations. 107 Manuela Cooper Pension File, Application 1174861. 108 Albert Sims Pension File, Application 1496813/Certificate 1259.330; Agripina Galang Pension File, Application 1593.067; Romana Pivalta Pension File, Application 1643.185. 204 obligations to veterans for military service rendered often under harsh conditions that resulted in permanent disabilities.
One question that does emerge with pension applications is how black regular army veterans, who served during a series of conflicts that would eventually become known as the
Indian Wars, fit in with the larger community of veterans associated with other U.S. wars. Much like their counterparts in other parts of the United States, pension files reveal how applicants responded to changes in U.S. pension laws that affected various groups of veterans in different ways. Many black veterans had served in multiple conflicts and their pension files indicate that they emphasized specific aspects of their military service histories in some instances while choosing to highlight other parts of their service histories in other circumstances. At times, veterans’ widows followed similar strategies and even filed pension claims under different pension laws than their departed husbands. The decisions of these veterans and widows to stress one aspect of their military service over others raise important questions about how the federal government distinguished between different groups of veterans and how these groups engaged, leveraged, or challenged these distinctions to determine where they fit in the social order of veterans to obtain the best possible outcome in applying for pensions. 205
Chapter 5
“When Is an Indian War Veteran an Indian War Veteran”: Veterans of the Indian Wars and Public Memory in the Twentieth Century
In December of 1918, a frustrated woman of Mexican descent named Eulogia Terrien, sent a letter to the Pension Bureau requesting an explanation for the bureau’s dismissal of the pension claim she filed a several months earlier under the Pension Act of March 4, 1917, which extended service pensions to veterans who had served in the Indian Wars in the post-Civil War
Era. “I wish you would let me know what else you need for me to do,” Eulogia wrote. This was
Eulogia’s second attempt with filing a pension claim and she believed that she met all the requirements for a widow’s pension under the act; she had married John Terrien, a black soldier, in Grant County, New Mexico, in the 1870s and remained married until John died of heart disease in 1904. However, the Pension Bureau rejected the application on the grounds that the soldier did not “participate in any war or campaign named in the act of March 4, 1917.”1
Ten years later, Eulogia’s third attempt to secure a pension based on her husband’s service during the Indian Wars proved successful. Under the Act of March 3, 1927, applicants had to prove they served in a “zone of active Indian hostilities” rather than demonstrating that they had participated in a specific campaign. Terrien attempted to cover all her bases in an affidavit for a pension application alleging that her husband had served in “New Mexico,
Arizona, Texas, and elsewhere” during his five-year enlistment in the 9th Cavalry from 1867 to
1872. This service satisfied the Pension Bureau’s requirement for what constituted service in the
Indian Wars, and eventually the bureau dispatched a special examiner to investigate Eulogia
Terrien herself. Terrien mobilized a network of family members of friends who lived in New
1 Initially, in 1915, Eulogia Terrien had first attempted to secure a pension under the notion that John Terrien had served during the Civil War (which was not the case). Widows of Indian War veterans qualified for pensions under the act of March 4, 1917 if the applicants had married their husbands before the passage of the act. 206
Mexico who vouched for her personal reputation and verified her marriage to John Terrien. At
87 years of age and after a nearly fifteen-year struggle, the Pension Bureau finally added Eulogia to the pension rolls in March 1931, but only back-paid her to March 1928 when she initiated her third claim.2 Eulogia Terrien only enjoyed her benefits as a pensioner for two years before dying in Los Angeles, but her frequent engagement with the Pension Bureau demonstrated her ability to adapt to changes in pension laws.
In May 1934, a veterans’ newspaper, Winners of the West, published excerpts of a letter to the editor from Alfred B. Douglas, a black veteran who had also served in the 9th Cavalry.
The newspaper’s target audience was regular army veterans who had served in the western
United States during the post-Civil War Era. Much like Eulogia Terrien, Douglas was frustrated with the U.S. pension laws and requested information from the editor because he was “puzzled as to [his] eligibility to an Indian War pension.” Douglas wanted to know whether his service with the 9th Cavalry in Utah placed him in the “’zone of active Indian hostilities’” as outlined in the law of March 3rd, 1927. “What is that zone, how is it determined, measured, and outlined, and who is the judge,” Douglas asked. In response, the editors confessed that they had received hundreds of similar inquiries from other veterans, but declined to answer so as to avoid offering
Douglas and other veterans false hope, even though they were “always anxious to say a word that would be a comfort to any Veteran.” According to the editor, there were hundreds of veterans who could not prove participation in an actual campaign but who were in the zone of active Indian hostilities. At the same time, “Other hundreds have cursed the zone feature” of the pension adjudications for Indian War veterans because they had not served in a hostile zone as defined by the War Department. The editors therefore urged veterans like Alfred Douglas
2 Eulogia Terrien 1046396, Indian War Widow Application 13257, Certificate 12045, RG 15, Pension Records. 207 simply to try. If the Pension Bureau accepted the pension claim, Douglas would receive important financial support, but if the Pension Bureau rejected his application, “he might just as well try to make an opening in a granite wall by butting it with his head.”3
Douglas’s letter to the editor and Eulogia Terrien’s fifteen year-quest for a widow’s pension reflected the sentiments that many other veterans and widows of the late nineteenth- century Indian Wars expressed towards the federal government and the general public. As demonstrated in the previous chapters, reputability was extremely important for black soldiers in navigating the military justice system and remained important for veterans and their family members in the individual battles with the Pension Bureau to secure pensions. However, this chapter examines black veterans’ participation in the larger public campaigns of Indian War
Veterans in the twentieth century to gain broader recognition for their military contributions.
Many veterans of the Indian Wars felt underappreciated and excluded from the larger community of veterans from other U.S. wars. In many ways, this group of veterans believed that there was a hierarchical social order for veterans in the United States, but it was an order they rejected and sought to upend. Therefore, veterans of the Indian Wars employed historical portrayals of their military service to bolster their reputations in public memory. They called for greater recognition of their contributions to settler colonialism and an end to the public’s distinctions between volunteer soldiers who had served in other conflicts and regular army men who had served in the Indian Wars.4 In so doing, black and white veterans expanded upon the rhetoric of
3 “Was He In The Zone,” Winners of the West, May 30, 1934, 3. 4 A brief note on terminology here in my distinctions between volunteer soldiers and regular army men. With the exception of military drafts, all individuals who chose to enlist in the military are volunteers, but the distinction between volunteers and regulars is based on when individuals enlist. Individuals who chose to enlist in the army whether in wartime or peacetime is a volunteer. However, volunteer soldier in this instance refers to soldiers who volunteered for military service during times of war. Regular army soldiers or regulars were often men who served in the military during peacetime. 208 reputation and rights that they had employed during their earlier days as soldiers in the regular army.
From 1923-1944, Winners of the West was a newspaper that offered space for veterans of the Indians Wars to reflect on their military experiences and to reconnect with fellow servicemen from their units. The newspaper was the arm of the National Indian War Veterans Association, an organization based in St. Joseph, Missouri that lobbied for pension increases for veterans of the Indian Wars. George W. Webb, one of the primary organizers of the National Indian War
Veterans Association, served as the editor of Winners of the West from its inception until his death in November 1938.5 Due to the newspaper’s popularity, publishers quickly shifted from a quarterly publication schedule to a monthly one.
Throughout its twenty years of publication, Winners of the West followed a similar format and structure. The paper began with updates from Washington, D.C., about the federal government’s actions, or often inaction, surrounding military pensions for veterans of the Indian
Wars. The paper also provided veterans and the widows of veterans with instructions for filing pension applications and information about joining local chapters of veterans’ associations throughout the country. Yet, the editors of Winners of the West also afforded its readership the opportunity to contribute to the newspapers. Veterans of the Indian Wars submitted narratives of military campaigns against Native Americans and offered their opinions on the federal government’s treatment of veterans. Additionally, the editors often published snippets of letters from subscribers in its “brieflets” section where veterans, both black and white, attempted to reconnect with comrades from their units, expressed their appreciation for the veteran organization’s work on their behalf, and other issues. However, this is also one of the great
5 Greene, Indian War Veterans, xxiii–xxxiii. 209 weaknesses of the source. Editors were the arbiters who made decisions about which letters and other correspondence received from veterans and other subscribers to include in the newspaper.6
Despite the biases and limitations that factored into the production of these sources, the issues of
Winners of the West do provide some insight into the opinions and memories of veterans of the
Indian Wars. Webb, along with the wide array of contributors to the newspaper, viewed restoring and bolstering the reputation of Indian War Veterans as being the heart of their project.
Veterans of the Indian Wars employed historical memory to prove that they deserved the same recognition that other groups of veterans received in the United States. They felt that the general public did not fully appreciate their military contributions of securing the Western
United States for settlement, but they viewed the federal government’s neglect of their group as the most damaging. Initially, veterans who served during the Indian Wars received less financial support in the form of pensions than veterans from other conflicts. In the end, this group of veterans believed they were fundamentally different from other veterans. In large part, that feeling of exceptionalism originated in the distinctions the federal government and general public made between veterans of the Indian Wars and veterans from other conflicts in the form of recognition and pensions. Yet, these regular army men also made their own claims to exceptionalism based on the type of war they fought, the enemies against whom they waged war, and the implications of their military contributions for U.S. prosperity.
Historians have used former contributions from Winners of the West, along with other personal reminiscences/campaign narratives, and interviews to craft portraits of enlisted men’s
6 In the July 1935 issue, for example, the editors mentioned receiving a “flood of letters” from veterans that had a lot of “historical value.” However, due to limitations in space in the paper the editors could only publish a “few of these at each issue.” The editors decided on what letters to include and which to exclude. Winners of the West, July 30, 1935, 3. 210 military experiences from the perspective of enlisted men.7 Such materials are particularly valuable given that the individual ideas and opinions of enlisted men, especially black enlisted men, are often absent from official military records (with the exception, as we have seen, of court-martial records). However, publications like Winners of the West also shed light on the lived experiences of veterans of the Indian Wars years after ending their stints in the regular army. Rather than using the veterans’ contributions in Winners of the West solely to reexamine their experiences in the army, this chapter situates enlisted men’s recollections in the context of the politics surrounding veterans’ pensions and collective memory in the twentieth century. In so doing, this chapter serves as an intellectual history of veterans of the Indian Wars that reveals how this group understood and communicated the meaning of their military service and developed a group identity based on a sense of shared history.
Settler colonialism—though they would not have described it as such—was at the heart of the historical narratives crafted by veterans of the Indian Wars and was the central argument the group used to justify their demands for greater public recognition and pension support from the federal government.8 Regular army men cast themselves as important agents of civilization in what would become the American West and provided the foundation for U.S. prosperity in the region. Perhaps the most obvious evidence of this argument is the choice of the title for the newspapers; Winners of the West itself is an explicit celebration of conquest and imperialism. In one of the earliest issues of the newspaper, the editors not only celebrated what they believed to
7 Rickey Jr., Forty Miles a Day on Beans and Hay; Schubert, Outpost of the Sioux Wars; Schubert, On the Trail of the Buffalo Soldier; Dobak and Phillips, The Black Regulars, 1866-1898; Leiker, Racial Borders; McChristian, Regular Army O! Greene, Indian War Veterans. Greene’s book offers a short introduction to veterans organizations associated with the Indian Wars, but it is mostly an anthology of republished campaign narratives submitted by enlisted soldiers to Winners of the West. 8 When I use the term settler colonialism, I am referring to the process by which a group of outsiders arrives, seizes territory, and displaces and/or destroys the original inhabitants of said territory. Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native”; Veracini, Settler Colonialism, 2010; Veracini, “‘Settler Colonialism,’” June 1, 2013. 211 be their dominance and complete victory over Native people in the West, but also suggested that the lopsided victory in the war made Indian War veterans different from other U.S. veterans.
“There may be other civil wars. There probably will be other wars with Mexico. There is likely to be a World War at any time. There will never be another Indian War in America to the end of time,” the editors proclaimed. “Millions of money is now being spent by this government in behalf of the Indians. For God's sake do a little something for the men who [whipped] him until he became a ‘good Indian,’” they implored.9
The column’s elation about conquest also demonstrates how editors and contributors depicted Native people in Winners of the West throughout its publication. Aside from Native scouts who aided the U.S. government, editors and contributors to the newspaper portrayed
Native people as static historical actors who impeded the progress of white settlers attempting to establish themselves in the West. Articles in Winners of the West also focused a great deal of attention on Native American atrocities against U.S. troops and white settlers while devoting very little attention to the carnage that Native Americans suffered at the hands of settlers and the
U.S. government.10 It is also important to situate these depictions of Native people in the context of broader debates surrounding the extension of U.S. citizenship to Native people and the provision of greater economic support to Native groups under the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act and other legislation. Some veterans of the Indian Wars clearly held zero-sum views of financial support from the federal government, believing that veterans who had subdued Native people were more deserving of government aid than Native groups. Aside from disparaging depictions of Native Americans, veterans rarely referenced the racial and ethnic diversity that characterized
9 “What is a Good Pension Bill for Indian War Veterans,” Winners of the West, January 1924, 4-5. 10 For more on memory and the Indian Wars, see Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn; Ari Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013). 212 the West with African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and other groups who resided in the West remaining mostly absent from these narratives.11
Although the bulk of published letters and campaign narratives came from white veterans, correspondence and reminiscences from black veterans were not uncommon in Winners of the West. At times, interviews and photographs included some black veterans, but the published snippets of letters from black servicemen are the most prominent African-American contributions to the paper. African-American veterans, like white veterans, often identified themselves in these letters by including their name, rank, company, and regiment, and years of service. Because of racial segregation in the army at the time, it is easy to identify letters from black veterans; the 9th and 10th Cavalry Regiments along with the 24th and 25th Infantry
Regiments were composed entirely of black enlisted men.12 White men served in the other regiments.13
Black soldiers’ participation in military campaigns against Native people ultimately helped secure white supremacy in the West while white Americans simultaneously denied black
Americans civic inclusion in the broader political community. Over the years, scholars have demonstrated that black Americans in general viewed the U.S. West as a space to escape from
11 There are a few examples of Hispanic soldiers who served in the army submitting some reminiscences of their participation in some campaigns of the Indian Wars. 12 With the Army Reorganization Act of 1866, Congress originally established two black cavalry regiments (9th and 10th Cavalry Regiments) and four infantry regiments (38th, 39th, 40th, and 41st Regiments). In 1869 however, Congress reduced the number of infantry regiments from forty-five to twenty-five. The 9th and 10th Cavalry remained intact, but the 38th and 41st Infantry consolidated to form the 24th Infantry Regiment with the 39th and 40th Infantry combining to form the 25th Infantry Regiment. 13 I do want to acknowledge the possibility that some men of African-American descent may have been passed as white and joined white regiments. For example, William J. Dooley was an enlisted man who served in both white and black regiments in the 1890s and early 1900s. During his second enlistment he transferred from the 5th Cavalry to the 9th Cavalry and served in black regiments in subsequent enlistments. In his pension application, Dooley listed all regiments in which he had served. William J. Dooley, Pension Application 1152.227/Pension Certificate 892.035, RG 15, NARA.; Army Register of Enlistments, 1798-1914, NARA Microfilm Publication M233, Roll 47, 213 racial oppression in the Eastern U.S. to more fully enjoy their rights as citizens.14 While some historians have acknowledged and analyzed the complex social position of black troops in policing a mostly non-black population in the West, they have not fully explored how black soldiers understood this paradox.15 Memories of military service is one area where African-
American veterans most explicitly endorsed or celebrated their role in settler colonialism.
These celebrations among African Americans predated the existence of Winners of the
West. Herschel V. Cashin, armed with written contributions and interviews from black soldiers, published Under Fire with the Tenth Cavalry in 1899. The book primarily focused on the famed soldiers from 10th Cavalry Regiment who had attained national prestige for their actions during major battles of the Spanish-American War. Black participation in these events was a source of racial pride for many black Americans who hoped that valor in combat and displays of patriotism would result in broader civic inclusion for African Americans in the body politic. However, the book also included a chapter summarizing the early history of black regular regiments in the U.S.
West in the post-Civil War era. According to Cashin, “the settlement and civilization of the
West is largely due to the sacrifices, hardships, and arduous duties performed by these noble specimens of the Negro Race.”16 The “maiden effort” of black regulars involved “subduing the wild, hostile, and savage Indian for the purpose of advancing the civilization of the Western
14 Mozell C. Hill, “The All-Negro Communities of Oklahoma: The Natural History of a Social Movement,” The Journal of Negro History 31, no. 3 (July 1, 1946): 254–68; W. Sherman Savage, Blacks in the West (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1977); Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier; Kendra T. Field, “‘No Such Thing as Stand Still’: Migration and Geopolitics in African American History,” Journal of American History 102, no. 3 (December 2015): 693–718; Charlotte Hinger, Nicodemus: Post-Reconstruction Politics and Racial Justice in Western Kansas (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016); Herbert G. Ruffin and Dwayne A. Mack, Freedom’s Racial Frontier: African Americans in the Twentieth-Century West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018). 15 Leiker, Racial Borders; Leonard, Men of Color to Arms!; Lim, Porous Borders; Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier, 165–67. 16 Herschel V. Cashin, Under Fire with the Tenth U.S. Cavalry : Being a Brief, Comprehensive Review of the Negro’s Participation in the Wars of the United States (New York and London: Arno Press, 1899), 41. 214
World” and in Cashin’s view, contributing to settler colonialism in the West was evidence of
African-American patriotism.17
Twenty-five years after Herschel V. Cashin published his book about the 10th Cavalry,
George W. Ford, a former first sergeant in the regiment, employed similar rhetoric in a column for the October 1924 issue of Winners of the West. Ford believed that the conditions veterans of the Indian Wars faced placed them on equal footing with veterans of other wars. The former non- commissioned officer wrote,
Our country has seen several wars, but no soldiers saw harder service, battled with such a ruthless enemy than the Veterans of the Indian Wars. For these Indian fighters capture meant certain death preceded by unutterable torture, and is it therefore a wonder that every soldier always kept the last bullet for himself to avoid that horrible death.
After this dehumanizing depiction of Native Americans, Ford concluded that the “sacrifices and hardships” of U.S. troops “opened up great empire to civilization.” Ford ended his letter by arguing, “We have been patient and modest too long. Now let us all ask that we be treated as all other defenders of this great country are treated.” In Ford’s eyes, a “grateful country should show its appreciation” for the military service of veterans of the Indian Wars.’”18 Scott
Lovelace, another veteran of the 10th Cavalry, mirrored Ford’s rhetoric in a letter to Winners of the West. “I have slept many a night on the cold frozen ground covered with five foot of snow, without an overcoat, blanket or shelter tent, with half rations, chasing the redskins to help blaze a right of way for the settlers of the wild west,” Lovelace wrote.19 When another black veteran named Henry McCombs received a pension increase in 1927, he rejoiced in writing, “We sure
17 Cashin, 26. 18 “We Have Been Patient and Modest too Long,” Winners of the West, October 1924, 4. 19 “It Was Tough Soldiering For the Old 10th U.S. Cavalry,” Winners of the West, December 30, 1926, 2. 215 deserve all that Uncle Sam gives us in the way of pensions. We made the west; defeated the hostile tribes of Indians; and made the country safe to live in.”20
For some veterans, the unawareness or amnesia associated with Indian War veterans’ military contributions to settler colonialism were most noticeable during Memorial Day observances. One former army officer angrily recounted his experience at a Memorial Day event he had attended at the Presidio in San Francisco, California in 1926. According to his account, the speaker at the event did not pay “any tribute to the men who lost their lives in frontier fighting with the Indians” and told the audience that “from 1865 to 1898 our country had enjoyed profound peace.” The officer chastised the speaker for “[forgetting] that during that ‘peaceful’ period, our regular army and its volunteer helpers were engaged in some of the bloodiest little wars of our history.”21 In 1928, another white veteran voiced a similar sentiment about
Memorial Day. Orators “seldom mentioned” the contributions of soldiers who served in the
West and “few people know the cost of the settlements they now enjoy in the Great West entirely due to the courageous work of the Regular Army boys,” he complained.22 W.F. Haynes recalled a visit from a Census official in 1930 who asked him if he served in any wars. Haynes was flabbergasted to learn that the interviewer “had World wars, Spanish wars, Mexican wars, Boxer
Insurrection, and most any other old thing entered as wars, but to my amazement he had nothing under which he could enter that one had taken part in Indian Wars.”23 Finally, a white New
Jersey veteran was irate when he requested information from the Philadelphia Enquirer about
20 “Thanks to the Good God. It Filled His Heart with Joy,” Winners of the West, December 30, 1927, 3. 21 Winners of the West, August 30, 1926, 8. 22 “Attention Memorial Day Orators, Don’t Forget the Indian War Veterans,” Winners of the West, April 30, 1928, 2. 23 “No Column Under Which To Enter Indian Wars,” Winners of the West, April 30, 1930, 2. 216 pension rates for Indian War Veterans and the paper responded by sending him information about the “French and Indian War” instead.24
Public campaigns to include more narratives about the history of the veterans of the
Indian Wars went beyond commemorations of Memorial Day or establishing monuments to soldiers who fought in the Indian Wars, but also extended into assisting public institutions with research and education associated with western history. On multiple occasions, historical organizations contacted the editors of Winners of the West requesting older issues or information that they could use as source material for historical research. In December 1935, Webb published a list of previous articles, largely consisting of veterans’ campaign reminiscences, that appeared in Winners of the West that were of historical value because they “contained matter based on previous experiences.” Webb acknowledged the limitations that using campaign narratives composed from memory as sources, but stated that they were “often the only data at hand and therefore of considerable value,” Webb wrote.25 It is important to note that this list only included three narratives from black veterans. The next month, the superintendent of the
Nebraska State Historical Society requested three extra copies of the list praising Webb for his
“value work for western history.”26 In a similar fashion, a librarian representing the State
Historical Society of Idaho wrote a letter to George W. Webb thanking him for sending the society all issues of the newspaper from 1930 to 1936. “We feel sure that we will find a great deal of source material on the Indian Wars of Idaho in these publications which will be of interest to our historians and all students of northwest history,” she wrote.27
24 “Indian Wars are Unknown by Majority,” Winners of the West, December 1939, 1. 25 “List of Historical Data in ‘Winners of the West’,” Winners of the West, December 1935, 5. 26 A.E. Sheldon, “Nebraska State Historical Society,” Winners of the West, January 1936, 1. 27 Altha E. Fouch, “State of Idaho Historical Socieity,” Winners of the West, February 1937, 5. 217
Organizations within the U.S. Army in the early to mid-twentieth century also contacted
Winners of the West for resources to compile their unit histories. In May 1934, Winners of the
West published a letter from John Thomas, a black veteran of the 10th Cavalry, responding to a regular army officer’s inquiry for information about the early history of Fort Sill in Oklahoma.28
In 1938, the regimental sergeant major of the 10th Cavalry contacted George W. Ford and requested a photo of him to include in the regiment’s archives; Ford was the oldest known survivor of the original group of men who had enlisted in the 10th Cavalry when the regiment first formed in 1867.29
Although veterans of the Indian Wars desired greater public recognition for their military contributions, the federal government’s adjudication of pensions was more important to their material lives and financial wellbeing. During the Civil War and its immediate aftermath, veterans who had fought for the U.S. Army only qualified for invalid (disability) pensions if they sustained an injury or contracted an illness during military service. By 1890, and largely through the efforts of the veterans’ organizations like the Grand Army of the Republic, Congress passed the Dependent Pension Act. The act effectively created service pensions for Civil War veterans by expanding pension eligibility to servicemen who were disabled and unable to perform manual labor even if their ailments were not directly connected to their military service.30 Over the next
30 years, Congress incrementally increased the pension rates for Civil War veterans and by 1920, most Civil War veterans could expect to receive at least $50 per month from the federal
28 John Thomas “Fort Sill Again,” Winners of the West, May 1934, 4. In a similar fashion, the adjutant of the 1st Cavalry Division submitted a check to pay for a subscription of the magazine seeking “more detailed information of the personal lives and experiences of former members of the [1st Cavalry Regiment]” to compile a unit history. B.C. Andrus, “Headquarters 1st Cavalry (Mechanized),” Winners of the West, March 1936, 1. 29 “Oldest Known Survivor,” Winners of the West, June 1938, 7. 30 Stuart McConnell offers a good overview of the political discourse surrounding the passage of the Dependent Pension Act. Stuart Charles McConnell, Glorious Contentment: The Grand Army of the Republic, 1865- 1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 125–65. 218 government. Veterans of the post-Civil War Indian Wars were not formally recognized as a class for service pensions until 1917 with the Keating Bill, which lumped veterans who served in the Indian Wars after the Civil War with other veterans who participated in conflicts against
Native people in the antebellum era.31 By the 1920s, most Indian War veterans were physically disabled and unable to work due to their advanced age. Service pensions provided them with important sources of income, at $20 per month, the pension rates for this group of veterans was lower than that of Civil War veterans.
In 1924, Mary Smith, the widow of a black cavalryman named John Smith, was a subscriber to Winners of the West and sent a letter to the newspapers and outlined how the disparities in pensions also extended to widows. “It was for 15 years working and toiling and spending my money trying to get what money was due an Indian War widow, and finally after 15 years of trying and red tape, I received $12 per month,” Smith explained. She also remarked on the insufficiency of the payment in writing, “I am 70 years old, and am hardly able to do anything myself and that little money is all I have to depend on. Therefore I am putting myself on record as in favor of the U.S. congress taking action on any bill that is just and helpful to the
Indian War veterans and widows.”32 By contrast, the widows of Civil War veterans received $30 per month with an additional $6 per month for each child under the age of 16.33 Eventually,
Congress took the action that Smith and many others advocated by passing the Leatherwood-
Smoot Bill in March 1927 and increasing the monthly pension rate for Indian War veterans to a maximum of $50 (age dependent); widows like Smith received $30 with an additional $6 to
31 Prior to this act, veterans of the Indian Wars only received pensions through the regular establishment clause which required them to prove that they had contracted an injury or illness connected to military service. 32“Widow of the 10th Cavalry Worked 15 Years to Secure a Pension,” Winners of the West, November 1924, 2, 5. 33 Act of May 1, 1920, H.R. 9369, Sixty-Sixth Congress, Sess. II. Ch. 165 219 support minors.34 Congress had more than doubled the monthly payments for Indian War veterans and widows, but had also increased the rates for Civil War veterans and widows the previous year, leaving the disparities in place.35 Unfortunately for Smith, her pension payment card indicates that the Pension Bureau ceased Smith’s payments in 1925, suggesting that she likely died that year before she could enjoy the benefits of the 1927 Leatherwood-Smoot Bill.36
In stark contrast to veterans of other U.S. conflicts, the federal government assumed a very nuanced and complicated approach for determining whether regular army men qualified for service pensions. This complex and often frustrating process prompted one white veteran to ask,
“when is an Indian War veteran an Indian War veteran?”37 To qualify, veterans needed to prove that they had engaged in combat and/or participated in an actual military campaign for at least 30 days during their enlistment. The problem for many Indian War veterans was that Congress had relied on the War Department to designate and compile a list of campaigns that many viewed as incomplete. Edward Keating, one of the primary authors of the bill, later admitted, “I am now convinced that there are a great many ‘campaigns’ or ‘wars’ which were omitted by the war department, which should have been included in the bill.” William Gurnett, a veteran of a white cavalry regiment, claimed to have served in campaigns against both the Apaches and Sioux during his enlistment between 1871 and 1876, but was unable to draw a pension because he had
34 Chapter 320, “An Act Granting Pensions to certain soldiers who served in the Indian Wars from 1817 to 1898, and for other purposes, March 3, 1927, H.R. 12532, Sixty-Ninth Congress. Sess. II. 35 Chapter “An Act granting pensions and increase of pensions to certain soldiers, sailors, and marines and to widows of said soldiers Sixty-Ninth Congress, July 3, 1926. 36 The Index to the Pension Records and Pension Payment cards show that Mary Smith was not exaggerating about the time it required for her to gain admission to the pension rolls. Smith’s husband died in 1900 and she first applied for a widow’s pension under the regular establishment in 1901. Yet, there was never a certificate number assigned to her application which suggests that this application was disapproved. In April 1917, one month after Congress passed the Keating Bill establishing the Indian War veterans class, Smith submitted a new pension application as an Indian War widow, secured admission to the pension rolls, but did not begin receiving payments until 1919. 37 “When is an Indian War Veteran an Indian War Veteran?” Winners of the West, May 30, 1929, 4. 220 not served in any of the campaigns named in the Keating Bill. “It pensioned men who fought the
Sioux in 1876, and rejected men who fought the Sioux in 1873-4. It pensioned men who fought the Apaches in 1874 and rejected men who fought the Apaches in 1876. Why? God knows,”
Gurnett grumbled.38 Even when congress passed the Leatherwood-Smoot Bill in March 1927 and substituted the more ambiguous language of “zone of active Indian hostilities” for the enumerated list of campaigns, applying for pensions remained a confusing process for Indian
War Veterans, the Pension Bureau, and the War Department. In the end, both the Keating and
Leatherwood-Smoot Bills were essentially contests in history between veterans of the Indian
Wars and Congress in which both groups argued over the temporal boundaries, regional scope, and the specific conditions or circumstances that constituted an “Indian War” being an “Indian
War.”
The federal government did not apply this specificity and nuance to individuals who had served in the U.S.-Mexico War, Civil War, and Spanish-American War. Veterans of the U.S.-
Mexico War qualified for pensions after sixty days of service with Spanish-American and Civil
War veterans qualifying for pensions after ninety days of service. Furthermore, veterans associated with other U.S. conflicts were not required to provide evidence that they had ever participated in any military campaigns or engaged in direct combat. Many veterans who served during the Indian Wars, believed that the government was discriminating against them and making unnecessary distinctions between “volunteers” and “regulars.” Veterans of the Indian
Wars expressed gratitude for the tangible economic benefits stemming from the pension increases they did receive under the Leatherwood-Smoot Bill in 1927, but the disparities in
38 “The Keating Bill,” Winners of the West, December 1923, 5-6. 221 pensions continued to agitate them. Ultimately, they supported equal pensions among veterans regardless of the war in which they served.
A central part of these contests in memory between veterans and the federal government was a struggle to define the distinctions between peacetime and wartime. The federal government’s restricting of pensions to veterans who had served in active campaigns or zones of hostilities was based largely on the idea that military service in the West outside the designated campaigns constituted peacetime. Veterans who served in the regular army in the post-Civil War era vehemently rejected describing the period between 1865 and 1898 as “peacetime,” and instead remembered and referred to that period as the Indian Wars. In so doing, veterans challenged the federal government’s historical narrative of regular soldiers’ experiences in the
West and advanced their own histories. Veterans believed that the phrase “Indian Wars” most aptly described the series of conflicts and hardships they endured in the late nineteenth century.
Although narratives of campaigns and skirmishes often dominated Winners of the West, soldiers spent the bulk of their enlistments in the West performing garrison duties in forts. However, veterans rejected categorizing garrison service as “peacetime;” the hardships faced in guarding forts and escorting wagon trains was just as much a part of the Indian Wars as actual combat.
One former white non-commissioned officer testified that “many of the boys performed the same hazardous, important, and valuable service to their country as those who actually happened to be in the severe campaigns against hostile Indians.”39 Benjamin Ratliff, a black veteran, argued that while he “never had a chance to be in any of the long hard expeditions or campaigns,” he still deserved a pension. Ratliff claimed that he was “often in momentary danger of attack by the savages” while guarding mail stations “during the seething hot days of summer as well as the
39 F. Gahlsdorf, “All Comrades Are Equally Worthy-All Should be Included in a Special Bill,” Winners of the West, September 1924, 7. 222 severe cold weather of winter.”40 Henry R. Boynton, a white soldier who had served in the U.S.
Army Signal Corps, voiced similar sentiments about garrison service in the West, but he also reminded readers that many men during the Civil War served in non-combatant roles in northern cities. “Washington was full of soldier clerks who never crossed the Potomac. How much did such men campaign,” Boynton asked rhetorically.41 Furthermore, regular army veterans believed that they faced the same, if not greater, hardships that volunteer soldiers had faced in other conflicts.
The prestige and admiration that the general public attached to volunteer soldiers in both the Civil War and Spanish-American War was a frequent target of criticism from Indian War veterans. Indian War veterans readily acknowledged the importance of military service in other wars but argued that veterans from all wars should be placed on equal footing, especially in terms of pension payments. George W. Webb and Lorena Webb rejected the distinctions that many Americans made between “volunteers” and “regulars.” Webb believed that the public held volunteer or citizen soldiers who served temporarily in the military enlisted in time of war in higher esteem than soldiers who served in the regular army for longer periods of enlistment. He wrote,
writers [referred] to Veterans of the Civil War and of the Spanish-American War as ‘Volunteers’ in which the inference is very plain that there is a particular and peculiar credit due men who enlist at such periods when a special call for troops is issued by the President, over and above the credit due to men who voluntarily enlist in the regular standing army of the United States whether any special call has been made, or emergency exists.
Webb concluded that this distinction was unnecessary because every soldier who enlisted in the
Regular Army of the United States was indeed a volunteer (with the exception of the First World
40 Benjamin Ratliff, “A No-Pension Comrade Out In The Cold,” Winners of the West, September 1924, 7. 41 Henry R. Boynton, “Non-Combatants So Called,” Winners of the West, February 28, 1931, 3. 223
War). The “discrimination against the Indian War Veterans, a large majority of whom are
Regular Army men is a disgrace to Americanism, and ought not to be tolerated.”42
In this criticism, the Webbs waded into a discourse that spanned U.S. history about
American citizens’ high regard for citizen-soldiers and the general disdain many held toward soldiers who served in the regular army.43 In the eyes of many people, serving as a career soldier was not a reputable occupation because soldiers voluntarily surrendered their liberty to serve in a hierarchical institution that they believed was antithetical to the egalitarian society that they believed America to be. The articles and rhetoric in Winners of the West offer a lens for understanding how regulars responded to these criticisms and demonstrates that they believed in the same principles of rights and egalitarianism that the public often accused them of abandoning. Lorena J. Webb, George Webb’s wife, wrote a column arguing that the federal government’s practice of dividing pensioners into distinct classes with higher rates for some as opposed to others was “one of the unjust and unequal laws that unquestionably violates the true intent and spirit of the Constitution.”44 In October 1927, Maston Harris, a veteran of the 9th
Cavalry, echoed Webb’s rhetoric in his call to applaud citizens who signed petitions in support of regular army veterans’ pension increases “because they believed in righteousness and equal
42 “Volunteer Soldiers vs. Regulars,” Winners of the West, May 30, 1930, 4. 43 This tradition dates back to the 18th century. Many works devote a great deal of attention to the ideology surrounding the citizen-soldier and the challenges posed to it by long wars and periods of occupation. A recurring theme in this literature is the general disdain and mistrust that many Americans held toward the standing army and the soldiers who enlisted in the regular army. However, with the exception of Kevin Adams in Class and Race in the Frontier Army, this literature has not really addressed how soldiers in the regular army responded to this criticism or how they viewed themselves in relation to volunteer soldiers. Bledsoe, Citizen-Officers; Coffman, The Old Army; Foner, The United States Soldier between Two Wars; Foos, A Short, Offhand, Killing Affair; Lang, In the Wake of War; Utley, Frontier Regulars, 59–69; Peter Guardino, The Dead March: A History of the Mexican- American War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 36–46; Richard Bruce Winders, Mr. Polk’s Army: The American Military Experience in the Mexican War (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2001). 44 Lorena J.Webb, “Equal Rights For All-Special Privileges For None,” Winners of the West, July 31, 1926, 2. 224 justice to Indian War Veterans.”45 Ironically, calls for equality among both black and white veterans of the Indian Wars were based on military service that had involved enforcing discriminatory policies against Native people.
Indian War veterans not only criticized the public and federal government for their adulation of Civil War and Spanish-American War veterans, but also directed their scorn toward veterans of these conflicts themselves. In the eyes of many, the public sometimes offered certain benefits to veterans of the Civil War, Spanish-American War, and other conflicts at the expense of Indian War Veterans. For example, one black veteran who served in the regular army suggested that Civil War veterans owed much of their prosperity in the post-war era to the regulars. “’Regular soldiers’ had to make the west safe for the soldiers of the Civil War to get homesteads in, and $72 per month pensions, while we poor ‘regulars’ get nothing,” he wrote.46
In his opinion, Civil War veterans who acquired land in the West through the Homestead Act benefited from the security provided by soldiers serving in the regular army. This veteran was advocating for an extension of the pension system, but ironically, suggesting that Civil War veterans had greatly profited from high pension rates at the expense of others mirrored the very tropes that other groups had employed in voicing opposition to the initial dramatic expansion of the pension system in the late nineteenth century. These tropes were often based on ideas about dependency and manliness. Many opponents to the expansion of Civil War pensions argued that truly independent and manly citizens should not rely on government assistance. Some depicted
45 In March 1927 Congress passed the Leatherwood Bill that created a new class of pensioners under the Indian Wars that allowed many pensioners to gain increases in their monthly pensions. “Transferred from Regular Establishment to Indian Wars Class,” Winners of the West, October 30, 1927, 5. 46 “Colored Troopers’ Hair Too Short For Scalping,” Winners of the West, July 1924, 7. 225
Civil War veterans as shiftless scammers who wanted to collect monthly payments without doing anything to earn or deserve it.47
A white veteran made a similar argument, “No one class of people was to a greater extent the beneficiary of the. . .Indian War Veterans, than the survivors of the Civil War,” he wrote.
“The Indian War Veteran who stood guard on then plains while others were accumulating lands and fortunes, waited 50 years for any recognition” and still received lower pensions than Civil
War veterans, he complained.48 Lastly, the State of Texas allowed certain groups of veterans to travel for free on Texas railroads. Until 1931, when the state legislature amended the law, veterans of the Indian Wars were excluded from enjoying this benefit.49 The irony was certainly not lost to veterans of the Indian Wars who had played a prominent role in seizing Native
American lands that ultimately set the conditions for the railroads’ construction.50
Both veterans’ references to land ownership also hint at the complex role that enlisted regular army soldiers exerted in the process of settler colonialism, particularly in relation to land ownership. Although the regular army was one of the main engines of Native dispossession, other parties remained the primary beneficiaries stemming from Native dispossession. Scholars have demonstrated that African Americans were often locked out of claiming land.51
Veterans of the Indian Wars expressed clear dissatisfaction with what they perceived as a social order of veterans in the United States that discriminated against them and often ignored
47. McConnell, Glorious Contentment, 125–65; Larry M. Logue and Peter Blanck, Race, Ethnicity, and Disability: Veterans and Benefits in Post-Civil War America (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 23–39; Marten, Sing Not War, 199–243. 48 “Civil War Veterans Owe Much to Veterans of Indian Wars,” Winners of the West, January 31, 1927, 4. 49 “Free Transportation In Texas to Indian War Veterans,” Winners of the West, September 30, 1931, 4. 50 One column reported that Confederate veterans was the only group supported in Texas with soldiers’ homes and stated that Texas owed a great debt of attitude “No Old Soldiers Home in Texas Except for Confederates,” Winners of the West, September 30, 1931, 4. 51 Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier, 134–63; David A. Chang, The Color of the Land: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Landownership in Oklahoma, 1832-1929 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). 226 them in public memory. This group envisioned a new social order that promoted equal adulation among all classes of veterans from all U.S. conflicts with equal pensions. While Indian War
Veterans often advocated for equality among all veterans, at other times regular army veterans questioned whether veterans from other conflicts truly deserved the statuses they occupied in terms of pensions and public recognition in the U.S. community of veterans. In short, if it was necessary to organize groups of veterans into distinct classes in a hierarchical social and economic order, Indian War veterans believed that they should compose the highest class of veterans because of their accomplishments and the hardships they endured.
Comparing hardships in different wars often constituted a contest in masculinity in which different groups of veterans argued over “who had it worse.” For example, Henry Stroup, a black veteran from the 10th Cavalry wrote, “We never went to war in Pullman cars; no one handed us oranges through the car windows; no one threw roses at us; but we went to war on our two feet. It is a shame that we have been overlooked and discriminated against this length of time.”52 Michael Roberts, a white veteran, wrote that many Spanish-American War veterans only served for a few months and returned home: “many of them never even heard a shot fired.”
On the other hand, Indian War veterans served longer and “suffered more hardships than any other class of soldiers who served under the Flag.”53 During their military service, soldiers in the regular army often rejected the poor material conditions, physical isolation, and strenuous physical labor that often accompanied their daily experiences as soldiers. In memory, however,
52 Although he is not specific, my assumption is that this veteran is throwing shade at Spanish-American War and World War I veterans. “An Old Survivor of the ‘Fighting 10th,’ Veteran of the Apache Campaign,” Winners of the West, March 15, 1926, 8. 53 “Soldiers’ Homes Are Government Poor Houses for Indian War Veterans,” Winners of the West, September 30, 1926, 8. 227 they often discussed these tough experiences to distinguish themselves from other groups of veterans to advocate for greater rights and benefits.
The conversation of which group of veterans endured harsher conditions was not simply a discussion that occurred among men. The disparity in pensions among different classes of veterans also extended to women and other dependents. Widows associated with other U.S. conflicts received larger pensions to support themselves and their children than Indian War widows. Widows such as D.W. Compton argued that, “Very few veterans of the Spanish-
American War saw much service, yet they were remembered by a raise in their pensions. We can no longer say we live under a government which gives equal rights to all and exclusive rights to none.”54 However, Lorena Webb reasoned that the wives of regular army men were exceptional because they had endured the same deplorable conditions as soldiers in the West.
“What Spanish-American War widow ever accompanies her husband to the front, or endured the hardships of a campaign against a savage foe,” Webb demanded. In her view, women who resided in the West were not removed or separated from intense combat zones like white women who resided in the north during the Civil War or women who remained in the United States when soldiers deployed to the Caribbean and the Philippines during the Spanish-American and
Philippine-American Wars.55 Webb continued by stating that many women residing in the West
54 “Indian War Veterans Have Made A Brave Hard Fight For Their Rights,” Winners of the West, July 31, 1927, 2. 55 It is important to note that Webb’s portrayal did not include black women, white southern women, Cuban or, Filipino women in this description. Many women would have disagreed with Webb’s portrayal because they were close to combat and occupying soldiers. Whites and Long, Occupied Women; Thavolia Glymph, “Rose’s War and the Gendered Politics of a Slave Insurgency in the Civil War,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 3, no. 4 (November 16, 2013): 501–32; Stephanie McCurry, Women’s War: Fighting and Surviving the American Civil War (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2019). 228
“had to learn the use of the rifle, revolver, and even of the knife and axe; not only to protect their own person from the savage brutes, but to assist in actual combat with hostile bands.”56
Arthur W. Winston, another black veteran, mirrored Lorena Webb’s rhetoric in opining,
“To my way of thinking there is great distinction made between the Civil War veterans and the
Indian War veterans, which should not be, for we of the Indian Wars are just as deserving of a large pension as they are.” “What class of soldiers suffered more hardships and fought more cruel a foe than the boys of the Indian Wars,” Winston asked rhetorically. Winston continued,
“The fearless soldiers of the plains braved all kinds of weather, suffered severe hardships, often without shelter or food, and when wounded we were as a rule without the aid of a doctor.”57
Arthur Winston’s and Lorena Webb’s argument about fighting “a [crueler] foe” and
“savage brutes” also demonstrates how racist depictions of Native people intersected with the gendered contests over which group of veterans “had it worse.” Veterans of the Indian Wars believed that they faced more combat and endured harsher conditions than the general public recognized at the time, but these veterans also attempted to emphasize the distinct or exceptional nature of the Indian Wars by arguing that they fought a “different” enemy than men who fought in the Civil War or Spanish-American War.58 In their reminiscences published in Winners of the
56 “Twelve Dollars Per Month the Highest Pensionable Value as yet Placed on Widows of Indian Wars,” Winners of the West, March 1924, 4-5. Mabel F. Lester recalled spending a great deal of her childhood at Fort Yates where she frequently interacted with soldiers and saw “hordes of Indians,” in “News from Our Widows,” Winners of the West, November 30, 1930, 2. 57 Arthur W. Winston, “There Should Be No Distinction Between Indian War Veterans and Others in the Matter of Pensions” 58 Both Stuart McConnell and Barbara A. Gannon explore tension between Civil War Veterans and veterans of the Spanish-American War. Both McConnell and Gannon agree that both groups of veterans remembered the Civil War, but Gannon argues that both groups’ memories and interpretation of the Spanish- American War are also important. In general, Civil War veterans were more dismissive of Spanish-American War veterans because they viewed their conflicts as “short and relatively bloodless conflicts with few postwar consequences.” Veterans of the Indian Wars are absent from both these studies. Stuart C. McConnell, Glorious Contentment: The Grand Army of the Republic, 1865-1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 233-238; Barbara A. Gannon, “‘They Call Themselves Veterans’: Civil War and Spanish War Veterans and the Complexities of Veteranhood,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 5, no. 4 (December 2015): 528–50, esp 544. 229
West, both black and white veterans described Native Americans as a savage, uncivilized, brutal
“other” arguing that the nature of the army’s foe in the Indian Wars made military service and combat more dangerous than in other U.S. conflicts by default. Veterans often emphasized
Native American atrocities in their campaign narratives. In a letter to the editor, Scott Lovelace, a black veteran and longtime subscriber to Winners of the West, shared a recollection of an instance in which Native Americans captured his comrade and “tied him to a tree[,] and burned him alive.” Lovelace also claimed to see “an emigrant train of wagons all burned and the white people all scalped and murdered.”59 Campaign narratives that focused on Native American atrocities or depredations were prominent in Winners of the West, but they were not always popular among the newspaper’s audience. In one issue, George W. Webb published a letter responding to the critiques of readers who wanted the newspaper to cease including these types of narratives.60 Webb defended himself against the criticism by claiming that he was simply telling a truth that had “never been told regarding the true Indian character of former days.”61
Webb also explicitly differentiated between the nature of the foe in the Civil War compared to
59 This is just one example, but Winners of the West frequently published similar stories in its issues. Scott Lovelace, Letter to the Editor, Winners of the West, April 30, 1934, 3. 60 It is unclear who these readers were and whether they were veterans or not. The newspaper’s main audience was other veterans, but articles indicate that its readership extended outside the circles of veterans. State historical societies were often very interested in Winners of the West. 61 In this letter, Webb also rejects the “current generation’s” portrayal of the “noble red man” as he put it. In his eyes, it does not do justice to the role of the army in helping to “civilize” Native Americans, but he also feels that the American public is engaging in some historical amnesia about Native Americans in the twentieth century. He is not fan of some of the more romanticized depictions of Native Americans in literature and movies in general that were becoming more prominent during this time because he does not feel that it accurately captures his experience in the West. It is important to note that both Webb’s attitudes toward Native Americans nor the more romanticized portrait of Native Americans includes the perspective of Native Americans themselves. They are both based on white people’s ideas about Native Americans, but it does demonstrate some divisions among white people about how Native Americans should be depicted. “And Ye Shall Known the Truth, and the Truth Shall Make you Free,” Winners of the West, July 30, 1929, 4. For more on depictions of Native Americans in literature, movies, art, etc in the twentieth century see Matthew Basso, Laura McCall, and Dee Garceau, Across the Great Divide: Cultures of Manhood in the American West (New York and London: Routledge, 2013), 109–30, 251–74; Shari M. Huhndorf, Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001); Alan Trachtenberg, Shades of Hiawatha: Staging Indians, Making Americans, 1880-1930 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004). 230 the Indian Wars writing that “The Civil War. . .was not fought between civilized white men on one side and uncivilized savages on the other. On both sides, the armies were made up of the cream of the civilized, cultured, wealthy young manhood of America of that period.”62
Webb’s response to readers’ criticism is also a reminder to exercise caution in overstating the level of racial solidarity that existed among Indian War veterans. Native Americans were the primary target of Webb’s degradation in describing the wars as conflicts “fought between civilized white men and uncivilized savages,” but his portrayal effectively erased African-
American military contributions from the history of the Indian Wars. In a special illustrated edition of Winners of the West in January 1932, the commander-in-chief of the National Indian
War Veterans organization proclaimed, “When the last Indian War Veteran answers his last earthly roll call he will close the record of WINNING THE WEST for the white race.”63 In this respect, black veterans of the Indian Wars and other U.S. conflicts faced similar problems.
While Indian War veterans in general felt that the public ignored their military contributions, historical amnesia of African-American military contributions remained rampant regardless of the war.64 In August 1933, and likely in response to other campaign narratives and letters published in the newspaper that frequently labeled the Indian Wars as a series of conflicts between white people and Native people, an African-American author wrote in a short column that the four black regular army regiments “deserve a full share in the honor of Winning the
West.” The newspaper did not list the author’s name, but the author demonstrated their
62 “And Ye Shall Known the Truth, and the Truth Shall Make you Free,” Winners of the West, July 30, 1929, 4. 63 Edmond Graham, “’One For All’ ‘All For One,’” Winners of the West, January 30, 1932, 3. 64 Blight, Race and Reunion; Gannon, The Won Cause. 231 affiliation with the African-American National Indian War Veterans camp in San Antonio by listing the names and ages of some of the camp’s charter members.65
Ironically, exclusion and discrimination remained a problem within a community of veterans that often employed the rhetoric of inclusion and equal rights in its appeals to the federal government and public at large for greater recognition and financial support. Like many other times in U.S. history, fear of armed black men was rampant among white Americans in the
1920s. Memories of the Houston Mutiny, the Brownsville Affair, lynchings of black soldiers, and racial violence from the Red Summer of 1919 (in which some black World War I veterans were involved), were relatively fresh and white Americans had a long history of fearing armed black men.66
Some Indian War veterans’ camps did celebrate interracial membership in places like
Pittsburg and New Jersey, but black veterans did not occupy the senior leadership positions within these organizations.67 At least one camp associated with the National Indian War
Veterans organization’s camps was a segregated camp. On October 14, 1929, African-American veterans of the Indian Wars established their own camp in San Antonio, Texas, which they
65 “Colored Indian Veterans, 9th and 10th U.S. CAV 24th and 25th Infty,” Winners of the West, August 30, 1933, 3. 66 William M. Tuttle, Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1970); John D. Weaver, The Brownsville Raid (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1970); Robert V. Haynes, A Night of Violence: The Houston Riot of 1917 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976); Christian, Black Soldiers in Jim Crow Texas, 1899-1917; Leiker, Racial Borders; David A. Davis, “Not Only War Is Hell: World War I and African American Lynching Narratives,” African American Review 42, no. 3/4 (Fall-Winter 2008): 477–91; Vincent P. Mikkelsen, “Fighting for Sergeant Caldwell: The NAACP Campaign Against ‘Legal’ Lynching after World War I,” The Journal of African American History 94, no. 4 (October 2009): 464–86; Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy. 67 In a letter to the editor, James A. Waugh reported on the Memorial Day program at a National Indian Wars Veterans camp in Pittsburg. He wrote that his camp had “both white and colored veterans and ladies.” James A. Waugh, Letter to Editor, Winners of the West, July 30, 1929, 7. Picture of veterans from National Indian War Veterans Camp No. 6 in Newark, New Jersey included one black veteran from the 9th Cavalry, William H. Powell, Winners of the West, May 30, 1930, 1. Occasionally, the editors published racist jokes about African Americans in Winners of the West. In one example, the newspaper mocked the alleged cowardice of black soldiers in World War I. “To the Rear,” Winners of the West, August 1924, 15. 232 named after Abraham Lincoln.68 They elected their own officers and planned to incorporate black veterans who resided in the surrounding region from Texas, Oklahoma, Mississippi,
Arkansas, and Louisiana.69 According to the reports from Winners of the West, African-
American veterans, led by Thomas J. Dilwood, Thomas P. Martin, William H. Williams, Thomas
Holley, Robert T. McKeen, Stephen Jackson, and William H. Kelly, formed this camp on their own, but their motivations for doing so remain unclear. The writer claimed that black veterans named the camp after Abraham Lincoln because of Lincoln’s connections to both settler colonialism and emancipation. Lincoln was “universally recognized as the friend of their race” and had fought against Native Americans in the Black Hawk War in his youth.70
At the time that the veterans established the camp, there was already a National Indian
War Veterans’ camp located in San Antonio, but this camp may have restricted its membership to white veterans.71 Even if the camp did accept black veterans, the camp might have excluded black veterans from serving as officers or in more senior leadership positions. As Barbara
Gannon notes, black veterans sometimes formed their own camps that better suited the needs of black veterans and the larger African-American communities of which they were a part.72 The
November 1929 issue of Winners of the West, reported that the Texas state commander of the
National Indian War Veterans presented the Abraham Lincoln Camp with a U.S. flag during one of the its meetings and that the camp’s “membership is building up rapidly.”73
68 I have checked the San Antonio Express to see if there was newspaper coverage of this event, but have not found anything yet. 69 “A New Camp of National Indian War Veterans, U.S.A. in San Antonio, Tex,” Winners of the West, October 30, 1929, 7. 70 “A New Camp of National Indian War Veterans, U.S.A. in San Antonio, Tex,” Winners of the West, October 30, 1929, 7. 71 Camp No. 14, San Antonio, Texas is frequently mentioned in the Camps brieflets section in Winners of the West. 72 Gannon, The Won Cause, 35–46. 73 “Abraham Lincoln Camp Presented with Flag,” Winners of the West, November 1929, 3. 233
Reports on the camp’s activities are scant in Winners of the West, but the San Antonio
Register, an African-American newspaper, offers a few details about the camp. Black veterans from various conflicts in San Antonio exhibited the solidarity among different groups of veterans that the editors and contributors in Winners of the West called for. Robert T. McKeen published a notice in the Register inviting “veterans of all wars, their families, widows and the public at large” to the annual sermon that the Abraham Lincoln Camp was hosting at a local church.74 A few months later, Spanish-American War veterans from the David B. Jeffers Camp and Ladies
Auxiliary associated with the United Spanish War Veterans. “Indian War vets, World War vets, and their lady friends” were among the invited guests at an event celebrating Theodore
Roosevelt’s birthday.75 In addition to participating in commemorations and celebrations, veterans also actively involved themselves in local and state politics. When Thomas J. Dilwood, one of the founding members of the Abraham Lincoln Camp died in September 1933, the paper described him as a “pioneer citizen” of San Antonio who was “active in local civic affairs” and
“an active politician” during the “Cuney regime.”76
In September 1935, the San Antonio Register referenced the national encampment of
United Spanish War Veterans association occurring in San Antonio the following week and urged the association to remember black military contributions in all U.S. wars (including the
Indian Wars). “In all of America’s battles, Negro blood has been willingly spilt. And in all
American histories, studied in American schools, ‘historians,’ and teachers alike have ignored
74 “Notice to Public,” San Antonio Register, July 1, 1932, 7, University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting UT San Antonio Libraries Special Collections. 75 “Spanish War Vets Auxiliary Celebrate,” San Antonio Register, November 4, 1932, 1. 76 “Pioneer Citizen Laid to Rest Here Yesterday,” San Antonio Register, September 22, 1933, 1. The Cuney Regime is likely a reference to the African American politician Norris Wright Cuney, who was one of the most powerful figures in Texas politics from the 1870s through the 1890s, including service as the Texas national committeeman of the Republican Party. Handbook of Texas Online, Merline Pitre, “Cuney, Norris Wright,” http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fcu20. 234 completely, or very grudgingly acknowledged, the patriotism, the valor, the courage, the undying devotion of the nation’s soldiers of color,” the writer opined.77 In December 1938, John
Richardson, a black veteran who served in both the 10th Cavalry and 24th Infantry, expressed a similar complaint to Winners of the West showing that the newspaper had not improved its coverage of black military experiences in the West. “I never see anything in this paper concerning the colored soldiers, the 9th or 10th Cavalry or the 24th Infantry or 25th Infantry,”
Richardson protested. “I enjoy reading the ‘Winners of the West.’ But would enjoy it more if I could read something some time about my old Comrades,” Richardson added.78 Richardson’s complaints echoed those of black veterans from other U.S. conflicts.79
Although black veterans certainly were exempted from equal membership and did not read as much about their military contributions in the Indian Wars as they desired, subscribing to
Winners of the West ensured that they were a part of a larger veteran community in the twentieth century to some degree. The wide distribution and readership of Winners of the West helped veterans reconnect with old comrades and forge new connections; the reach of the newspaper even extended across the Atlantic, demonstrating the military contributions of European immigrants who had comprised a substantial percentage of the U.S. Army in the late nineteenth century; many eventually returned home to Europe.80 When J.J. Grimes, a white Indian War
77 The paper included snippets of numerous newspaper accounts from 1898 that praised black troops for their performance at San Juan Hill in Cuba. “Lest We Forget, Lest We Forget,” San Antonio Register, September 13, 1935, 4. 78 John Richardson, “Doesn’t Hear,” Winners of the West, December 1938, 2. 79 David Blight and Barbara Gannon demonstrate how emphasizing black military contributions was a central part of African Americans’ campaigns to ensure that white northerners continued to acknowledge slavery as the cause and emancipation/black citizenship as the most important legacy of the Civil War. W. Fitzhugh Brundage and Chad L. Williams also show that celebrating and remembering black military contributions is a form of resistance to white supremacy, but they also reveal some of the dissension within black communities regarding the process of collective memory. Blight, Race and Reunion, 192–98, 338–45; William Fitzhugh Brundage, The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 71–75; Gannon, The Won Cause, 57–81; Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy, 299–344. 80 William Deane, “A Message from Dublin,” and Lawrence Lee “A Good Letter from Faraway Norway,” Winners of the West, November 30, 1931, 6. News from Camp No. 11 St. Joseph, Missouri boasted that its 235
Veteran, was planning his vacation to Ireland, he requested the names and addresses of veterans/subscribers who lived there. A few months later, William Deane, an Irish Indian War veteran, wrote that Grimes had visited him at his home in Dublin and that he “appreciated it immensely.”81 No evidence suggests that Deane and Grimes had soldiered together or knew each other before this visit. While soldiers still maintained pride and never erased their identification with their individual units and military experiences from memory, they also began to embrace the larger identity of being Indian War veterans and building a larger veteran community.
The exigencies of the regular army’s occupation duties in the late-nineteenth century may have hindered the development of Indian War veterans’ associations and the process of embracing the broader identity of being an Indian War veteran. Prior to the 1890s, regular army regiments rarely consolidated and occupied the same posts. Instead, patterns of warfare required the army to operate in smaller units (mainly at the company level) to cover as much territory as possible. The army’s dispersal of companies in isolated garrisons throughout the West made it difficult for soldiers to forge larger communities of soldiers beyond the company level.
Furthermore, frequent personnel turnover driven by the arrival of newly enlisted soldiers and the departure of discharged soldiers made it difficult to maintain connections and relationships within these smaller units.
This trend associated with military occupation and garrisoning manifests itself in the brieflets section of Winners of the West. In this section, former soldiers almost always identified
membership resided in Canada, Cuba, England, Ireland, Scotland, Germany, France, the Philippines and other countries, April 30, 1932, Winners of the West, 5; Pedro E. Prepose (member of the Philippine Scouts), “Hard Times Also Hit the Philippines,” Winners of the West, August 30, 1933; Jacob Howarth, “From England,” Winners of the West, April 30, 1934, 3. For more on immigrants in the U.S. Army see Allan Millet, For the Common Defense and Edward Coffman, The Old Army. 81 “Ireland Comrade Entertains Guest from United States,” Winners of the West, September 1939, 2. 236 their units by the troops or companies in which they had served along with the regiment. In addition to their unit information, both black and white veterans normally included their years of service along with a brief note inviting comrades from their units to contact them, allowing them to reestablish social ties with comrades with whom they had lost contact over the years.82 The practice became so prominent that editors of Winners of the West launched an initiative to publish the names, regiment, and years of service of the newspaper’s subscribers, with a plan to
“act as a special delivery boy” by forwarding letters from one former comrade to another (editors did not publish private addresses in the newspaper).83 Yet, as much as the Winners of the West was designed to educate the public about the contributions of the Indian War veterans, reading the paper was also a source of education for Indian War veterans themselves, allowing them to learn about the diverse range of soldiers’ experiences who served in other regiments and participated in other campaigns in different parts of the West. As the name of the publication suggests, conquest emerged as the unifying idea for veterans, regardless of unit, duty location, or date of military service.
This is not to suggest that regimental affiliation, difficulties maintaining contact with former comrades, and diversity of military experiences were not prominent among veterans of the Civil War. However, campaigns, battles, and even garrisoning during the Civil War often unfolded on a much larger scale and consumed greater public attention than the post-Civil War
Indian Wars. Furthermore, emancipation, expansive mobilization of communities to support the war effort, and the massive number of deaths related to the war, fundamentally altered the lives of millions of people, providing Civil War veterans, along with others who lived through the
82 There are many examples of this trend in Winners of the West, but Levi Scott’s note is a good place to start, “Brieflets,” Winners of the West, June 30, 1928, 5; “Brieflets,” Winners of the West, October 30, 1929, 3. 83 “Uncle Charley,” Winners of the West, September 30, 1935, 3. 237 war, with larger collective experiences around which to organize themselves than people associated with the Indian Wars. In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, organizations like the Grand Army of the Republic not only promoted camaraderie among veterans, but also emerged as a powerful advocate for former soldiers’ benefits, including pensions.84 In direct contrast to the GAR, associations devoted exclusively to veterans of the Indian Wars did not emerge until the end of the nineteenth century and remained fragmented until the creation of the
National Indian War Veterans Organization in 1909; this group later changed its name to the
National Indian War Veterans Assocation.85 The publication and wide readership of Winners of the West continued the process of cultivating a fragmented community.
The most critical component of the community of veterans constructed by the outreach of
Winners of the West was information exchange. With veterans scattered throughout the country,
Winners of the West offered an opportunity for veterans and widows of veterans to collaborate on strategies for applying for pensions and earning pension increases. Veterans often received and shared information what language or laws to use in pension applications and along with news concerning congressional bills and changes to pension laws. Perhaps the most vital information was news about the passing of the Leatherwood-Smoot Congressional Bill in March 1927.
Many veterans confessed that without the information they received from Winners of the West, they would have remained unaware of some of the changes in pension laws that were more favorable to Indian War veterans. James Lyons and Robert Jackson, black veterans of the 10th and 9th Cavalry respectively, were among numerous veterans who wrote that they successfully filed for and earned pension increases due to valuable information that they learned from
84 By 1891, the GAR had 400,000 members and with over 6,000 local GAR posts established nationwide. McChristian, Regular Army O!, 592. 85 McChristian, Regular Army O!, 593. 238
Winners of the West.86 At the same time, Thomas H. Brown, a former member of the 24th
Infantry, expressed his concerns about the limitations of the newspaper’s outreach. Brown wrote that “hundreds of [veterans]” remained unaware of the passage of the Leatherwood-Smoot Bill in
March 1927. Nearly three years had passed before Brown himself knew about the bill and he estimated that this had cost him over $1200 which would have been critical “in a city like
Chicago with its high costs of living.”87 In a similar fashion, Loula La Velle, the widow of a white veteran, estimated that she would not have been “deprived of over two thousand dollars of pension,” had she known of the paper’s existence sooner.88
The answer to the question “when is an Indian War veteran an Indian War veteran” was always complicated, but veterans at times avoided answering this question altogether if they served in other U.S. conflicts. Veterans and widows of the Indian Wars often employed historical memory of the Indian Wars to bolster their reputations among the government officials and the general public, but they did not hesitate to recast themselves as Civil War or Spanish-American
War veterans if that action presented a stronger prospect of attaining more favorable pension rates. Although most veterans were not career soldiers, it was very common for soldiers to serve multiple enlistments. In some cases, veterans who had served in multiple conflicts sometimes skirted the boundaries between the Civil War, Indian Wars, Spanish-American War, Philippine-
American War and other conflicts. Joseph M. Sanger, who had joined the army at the end of the
Civil War and served in the 4th Infantry Regiment through 1868, confessed that he had applied
86 Robert Jackson, “62 Years Old-Pension- $6.00,” Winners of the West, January 30, 1929, 5 and “Brieflets” July 30, 1929, 5. James Lyons, “Brieflets” Winners of the West, February 28, 1930, 3. Although I’m focusing on black veterans, white veterans also obtained useful information from the paper about applying for pensions. 87 “A Comrade of Company E, 24th U.S. Infantry,” Winners of the West, March 30, 1932, 9. 88 Loula La Velle, “Would Have Received Two Thousand Dollars if She had Known of Winners of the West,” Winners of the West, August 30, 1935, 9. 239 for a pension as both a Civil War and Indian War veteran and failed in both attempts.89 The ability to attain a Civil War pension may have been one of the reasons why James W. Bush, a black veteran of the 54th Massachusetts and a member of the 9th Cavalry after the war, wrote, “I truly think more of my vol service, than I do of the regular army service.”90 Overall, veterans who had served in the regular army were proud of their identity as regulars who had fought during the Indian Wars, but that identity was fluid; soldiers, especially those who fought in multiple conflicts, emphasized different aspects of their service histories to gain the best possible benefit from a government that distinguished between classes of veterans. Widows of Indian
War veterans employed similar strategies. Henrietta A. de Boer admitted that her husband had served in both the Indian Wars and the Spanish-American War. Initially, de Boer identified as a
Spanish-American War widow, but after the federal government lowered rates for pensioners associated with the Spanish-American War during the Great Depression, de Boer secured a larger pension by transferring to the Indian War veterans’ class.91
Widows often bore an additional burden when applying for pensions after their husbands died. In addition to verifying their husband’s identity and military service, widows also had to prove their identities and that they were indeed married to the men for whom they claimed a pension. In many cases, a veteran “died with his lips sealed. His Company, Regiment, date of enlistment, date of discharge, place of enlistment, place of discharge, where, when and under whom or with whom he served is entirely unknown except to himself.”92 In short, veterans failed to disclose this important information about their military experiences to immediate family
89 Joseph M. Sanger, “No Pension-Served in the Civil War,” Winners of the West, October 30, 1936, 8. 90 James W. Bush, Pension File, Pension Application 674.386/Certificate Number 596.465, RG 91 The editor noted that many Spanish-American War Widows and Veterans transferred to the Indian Wars Class and that many Indian Wars Veterans transferred to the Spanish-American War class when they could secure better pensions, Henrietta de Boer, “Both Spanish American and Indian War Widow,” Winners of the West, July 30, 1935, 1. 92 “Deplorable Situations,” Winners of the West, April 30, 1937, 4. 240 members who needed it to ensure that widows, fathers, mothers, and minors in some cases could continue drawing a pension after the veterans’ eventual deaths. Ella E. Smith encountered this problem when her husband Frank E. Smith died in December 1927. Ella Smith, whose husband had served multiple enlistments under different names, wrote to Winners of the West attempting to contact any soldiers who had served with him in the 10th and 1st Infantry Regiments to assemble information about Smith’s history in the army for her pension application as a widow.93
The fact that Smith had once been known by the name, Horace E. Tanker, probably compounded
Ella Smith’s difficulties, but the Pension Bureau ultimately approved Ella Smith’s application.94
George Patterson’s wife, Katie Patterson, faced more difficult circumstances in applying for a pension than Ella Smith, but employed a similar strategy. Unlike Smith, Patterson did not have access to her husband’s enlistment papers and only knew that he had served in one of the four black regiments (she was not certain as to which one). Patterson wrote to Winners of the West hoping to contact her husband’s comrades to aid her in her pension application process.95
George Patterson himself had died nearly thirty years prior to Katie filing her pension claim.
Although she likely traveled a more difficult path than Smith, Patterson was ultimately successful in earning approval for her application.96
93 Ella E. Smith’s letter in “News from Our Widows,” Winners of the West, January 30, 1927, 2. 94 Records indicate that the Pension Bureau ultimately approved Ella Smith’s application. Smith’s application has a certificate number assigned which indicates that her application was approved. I have not had the chance to look at Smith’s pension file, but she was probably seeking to contact other soldiers from her husband’s unit to serve as witnesses for a special examiner. Ella Smith, Pension File, Pension Application 1598527/Certificate Number A6-19-30, Organization Index to Pension Files of Veterans Who Served Between 1861 and 1900, 1st Infantry Regiment, Microfilm Publication T289, NARA 95 “Brieflets,” Winners of the West, December 30, 1929, 5. 96 George Patterson’s widow’s name is not listed in her letter, but her name is listed as Katie Patterson in the Index to Indian War Veterans Pension Files, 1892-1926. Her husband served in Troop L of the 10th Cavalry. Based on the date of the application (July 30, 1929) and the time at which Patterson’s brieflet appeared in Winners of the West in December 1929, she is most likely attempting to contact her husband’s comrades to assemble witnesses who knew her husband for a special examiner to interview. The Pension Bureau eventually assigned a certificate number to her application which indicates that her application was ultimately successful. 241
For both Patterson and Smith, their husbands had died before imparting important details about their military service to their spouses. At the same time, however, the editors of Winners of the West assigned as much blame to the wives of Indian War veterans as the veterans themselves for allowing men “to go down to the grave with no information in their possession which will enable them to secure their widows pension.” According to the editors, women showed “very little interest in the army service or their husbands or in anything that is being done by the
[veterans] organization that is constantly working in the interests of both themselves and their husbands.”97 Accusing the wives of Indian War veterans of being disinterested in their husbands’ military experience somewhat mirrored criticism that the Indian War veterans organization expressed toward the broader public; however, the editors argued that widows’ unacquaintedness with their husbands’ histories in the Indian Wars resulted in a significant economic cost.98
Yet, portraying women as uninterested in their spouses’ service history is misleading and disconnected from the reality of women’s actions on the ground. The newspaper itself reported on the development of women’s associations affiliated with the Indian Wars and contributions from widows frequently appeared in both the “brieflets” and “News from our Widows” sections of the newspaper. Furthermore, widows achieved more success than their husbands in securing admission to the pension rolls. Some veterans died before the Keating Bills in 1917 and the
Leatherwood-Smoot Bill of 1927 passed, but widows quickly applied or reapplied for pensions and increases upon learning of favorable changes to pension laws. For example, John H. Davis, who lived in San Antonio, initially applied for a pension under both the regular establishment
97 “Deplorable Situations,” Winners of the West, April 30, 1937, 4. 98 Based on some of the Indian War groups for widows that whose activities Winners of the West reported on and the frequent engagement of widows and other family members in the brieflets and “News from our Widows” sections, the criticism is somewhat disconnected from the reality of what’s happening. 242 and the Indian War veterans’ classes in 1894 and 1917, respectively, but never gained admittance to the pension rolls and eventually died in December 1920. Shortly after Davis’s death, his wife,
Arinda, submitted her own pension application in 1921 as an Indian War widow and was ultimately successful.99
As examined in the previous chapter, officials from the Pension Bureau scrutinized women’s personal reputations with the intent of deciding whether they were truly deserving of the financial benefits they claimed. Therefore, women faced the double burden of not only constructing a narrative surrounding their husband’s military service, but also constructing a narrative about their own personal reputations that pension examiners would look upon favorably to accept their pension applications. Racial disparities existed in the approval of pension applications between white and black veterans, but those disparities widen upon closer examination of widows of black veterans compared to widows of white veterans.100 This suggests that the Pension Bureau subjected the wives of black veterans (the majority of whom were black women) to greater scrutiny than the wives of white veterans (mainly white women).101 Such trends resembled the experiences of black women’s engagement with the
Pension Bureau, whose husbands were affiliated with other conflicts.
In many respects, veterans’ and widows’ reminiscences and letters represented a series of contests in the process of collective memory. One contest involved a struggle among Indian War
99 Arinda Davis Pension File, Indian War Widow Application 15326/Certificate 11828, RG 15. 100 Overall, I have found that approximately 77 percent of white veterans received an approval for their pension applications while approximately 63 percent of black veterans’ applications were approved. That gap widens when the focus is redirected to widows’ pension applications. On average, 76 percent of widows of white veterans (consisting mostly of white women). However, among the widows of black veterans (most of whom were black women) the average approval rate drops to less than 55 percent. See Appendix 1 for more details on the methodology used to arrive at these conclusions. 101 At a minimum, these disparities warrant further investigation, but it is beyond the scope of my project with the research materials I have available at this time. With the files that I do have, it appears that Pension Bureau officials consistently rated black women’s reputation as lower than white women. 243 veterans to demand greater recognition for their military contributions. Veterans often believed that the federal government and general public ignored or minimized the Indian Wars because of flawed interpretations and remembrances of the conflicts; they viewed themselves as offering a more accurate depiction of their experiences and accomplishments in the conflict. Often both explicit and implicit in contributions to Winners of the West, is the idea that veterans were not a monolithic group; instead they often had a diverse range of experiences and interests. Ironically, within a group of veterans, that based most of their appeal on criticizing others for forgetting them, African American veterans often believed that black military contributions to the Indian
Wars did not always receive the recognition that they deserved. Much like other instances, whether in remembrances of wars or in general portrayals of the United States, black contributions to major historical developments were minimized or erased altogether. 244
Epilogue
“Are Any Survivors of that Fight Still Left”
By the 1930s, most veterans of the Indian Wars were very advanced in age. Reuben
Waller, a veteran of the 10th Cavalry, sadly reported that only he and another former comrade from his regiment had attended the sixty-year reunion for the Beecher Island Rescue; Waller wondered if there were “any survivors of that fight still left.”1 In February 1938, George W.
Ford wrote that he had recently observed his 90th birthday and was “the only living survivor of the original regiment, the 10th U.S. Cavalry, who marched away towards the Rio Grande, 1225 strong in 1867.”2 In March 1940, J. Lyman Brown, who had served for over twenty-six years in multiple black regular regiments, died shortly after his 100th birthday. Brown had “soldiered all over [the] U.S., Cuba, Philippines,” and had even traveled “all over the world” with “Buffalo
Bill,” serving as his personal cook.3 That same year, Reuben Waller celebrated his 100th birthday. In a short column dedicated to Waller, the newspaper described him as “a constant subscriber and reader of Winners of the West from its beginning in late 1923 and up until the loss of his sight forced him to give up reading.”4
Like Waller, Scott Lovelace was a veteran of the 10th Cavalry whose eyesight became so poor that he was unable to read Winners of the West on his own. Lovelace was eighty years old at the time with no family and had recently moved to California from Florida, seeking a cure for his blindness. “My next door neighbors and they are Indians who can neither read nor write,”
Lovelace wrote. Yet, instead of ending his subscription to Winners of the West, Lovelace relied
1 Brieflets, Winners of the West, March 30, 1930, 2. 2 Ford’s chronology of the 10th Cavalry’s service history may be inaccurate here. Although the 10th Cavalry eventually ended up serving in Texas, military records indicate that the regiment spent its first five years in Kansas and Indian Territory (Oklahoma). Winners of the West, February 1938, 3. 3 “Taps,” Winners of the West, May 1940, 2. 4 Reuben Waller “Celebrated 100th Birthday on January 5, 1940,” Winners of the West, January 1940, 6. 245 on a “Spanish-American Veteran friend” who lived nearby to read the newspaper to him.
Although veterans of the Indian Wars often rejected the notion that veterans of other conflicts received more favorable pensions and recognition, this tension did not discourage them from establishing some solidarity with other veterans.5 In fact, Lovelace expressed concern that his friend had not received a pension for nine months.6 At the sole National Indian Wars Veterans camp reserved for black veterans in San Antonio, Arthur D. Matthews and William H. Kelley, were elected as the camp adjutant and camp commander, respectively. “We are both Veterans of the World War and are feeling proud of holding these important offices in such a great Camp, as we feel it to be a great honor,” the new leaders wrote. “It is now up to the younger Veterans to carry on the great work. The aged Indian War veterans have done their full duty as far as life could avail them to do. So we, the Sons of Indian War Veterans, are here to fill our fathers’ places and to carry the old Camp on.”7 The connections of Indian War veterans to younger groups of veterans represented the passing of the torch from one group of veterans to another.
Despite their combat experience, the War Department stationed the black regular army regiments to Hawaii, the Philippines, and U.S.-Mexico border to perform garrison duty during
World War I, rather than deploying the regiments to Europe. Memories of the violent clash between black soldiers and white Texans during the Houston Mutiny in August 1917 remained fresh in the minds of federal policymakers in making this decision.8 However, 250 experienced black soldiers and non-commissioned officers transferred from the regular regiments to the newly formed 92nd Infantry Division, taking important leadership positions as both non-
5 On multiple occasions, Indian War Veterans participated in conventions associated with other veteran groups. “Indian War Veteran Spellbinders at United Spanish War Veterans’ Conventions,” Winners of the West, July 30, 1931, 5 6 “Personal,” Winners of the West, April 30, 1934, 4. 7 “Abraham Lincoln Camp No. 30 San Antonio, Texas,” Winners of the West, October 30, 1930, 7. 8 Haynes, A Night of Violence; Christian, Black Soldiers in Jim Crow Texas, 1899-1917; Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy, 29–39. 246 commissioned and commissioned officers and providing critical military experience to a unit composed primarily of black draftees.9 Although black soldiers who had served in the Indian
Wars rarely referred to themselves as “buffalo soldiers,” the 92nd Infantry Division’s shoulder sleeve insignia included a buffalo, adopting the nickname the “Buffalo Soldiers Division” to symbolize their connections to black regular army regiments. Even after deploying African-
American units, including the 92nd Infantry Division, to Europe during the war, U.S. officials remained committed to regulating the color line, expressing grave concerns about the egalitarian treatment that French civilians often extended toward black servicemen. Officials specifically attempted to police sexual relationships between black troops and white French women, carrying their fears about interracial sex posing a direct threat to white supremacy and the color line across the Atlantic.10 Racial discrimination in the military along with anti-black violence in the immediate postwar era, including targeting black veterans, quickly illustrated that white
Americans remained committed to denying African Americans inclusion in the body politic despite their wartime service. In the face of these setbacks however, many black veterans returned home from World War I and became active participants in a range of organizations and groups dedicated to dismantling white supremacy.11
The National Indian War Veterans Association published the final issue of Winners of the
West in the late fall of 1944 as the World War II continued to rage in both Europe and the
Pacific. During the war, a new generation of black soldiers in the reactivated 92nd Infantry
Division saw extensive combat duty in Italy. Upon returning home from military service the next year, many U.S. veterans took advantage of Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, more
9 Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy, 44–45, 67. 10 Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy,145–73, esp. 167–72. 11 Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy, 261–98. 247 commonly known as the G.I. Bill. The G.I. Bill funded educations at colleges or trade schools and ensured the availability of low-interest mortgages, allowing many Americans to own homes for the first time. The bill was a central part of the economic prosperity in the post-World War II era and ultimately led to the expansion of the modern U.S. middle class. Although the law providing these benefits was color-blind on its face, local officials retained authority of allocating resources and determining which groups of veterans were eligible for benefits. As a result, black veterans, especially those who returned to the U.S. South, confronted a wall of white supremacy that restricted their access to these benefits at disproportionate rates, denying them a share of the postwar benefits that were available to others. Much like their predecessors from the Civil War, the Indian Wars, Spanish-American War, and the First World War, black
World War II veterans returning home from military service meant returning to another war to secure broader civic inclusion in the United States.12 Although the time of the group who identified themselves as the “winners of the west” had passed, new generations of veterans assumed the lead in fighting white supremacy in the United States.
12 Hilary Herbold, “Never a Level Playing Field: Blacks and the GI Bill,” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, no. 6 (Winter /1995 1994): 104–8; David H. Onkst, “‘First a Negro... Incidentally a Veteran’: Black World War Two Veterans and the G. I. Bill of Rights in the Deep South, 1944-1948,” Journal of Social History 31, no. 3 (Spring 1998): 517–43; Sarah Turner and John Bound, “Closing the Gap or Widening the Divide: The Effects of the G.I. Bill and World War II on the Educational Outcomes of Black Americans,” The Journal of Economic History 63, no. 1 (March 2003): 145–77; Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York, N.Y.: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006); David M. P. Freund, Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 176–240; Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York; London: Liveright Publishing, 2017). 248
Appendix 1
Overview
All data comes from the National Archives and Records Administration’s Organizational
Index to Pension Files. My findings are based on a sample of pension applications submitted to the pension bureau between 1880 and 1930. These records are organized according to the unit associated with each pension applicant. This sample consists mostly of veterans of the Civil
War, the Indian Wars, the Spanish-American War, and the Philippine-American War. Although this index mostly consists of soldiers who served between the years 1861 and 1900, it also includes some veterans who served in the twentieth century, including World War I, but they are in the minority.1
Methodology: Data and Sampling
The conclusions drawn from this database are based on a sample of soldiers who served in eight different regiments: 4th Cavalry, 6th Cavalry, 10th Infantry, and 11th Infantry (white regiments); 9th Cavalry, 10th Cavalry, 24th Infantry, and 25th Infantry (black regiments). From
1866-1869, the 24th and 25th Infantry were white regiments. In October 1869 after another reduction in the size in the army, the 38th, 39th, 40th, and 41st Infantry Regiments (black units) consolidated to form the 24th and 25th. White soldiers who served in the 24th or 25th Infantry regiments were either discharged or transferred to other regiments. Therefore, I have removed white soldiers who served in the 24th and 25th Infantry Regiment from the sample of these regiments so that it does not skew my results. I chose these white regiments for my sample because their regimental service histories roughly mirrored that of black regiments. All of the
1 Organizational Index to Pension Files of Veterans Who Served Between 1861 and 1900, Company/Troop A for the 4th Cavalry, 6th Cavalry, 9th Cavalry, 10th Cavalry, 10th Infantry, 11th Infantry, 24th Infantry, and 25th Infantry. NARA Microfilm Publication T289, via fold3.com. 249 regiments sampled generally served lengthy periods in what would eventually become the southwestern United States (Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Oklahoma) throughout the 1870s and 1880s. Their service histories begin to diverge in the 1890s when the Indian Wars ended.
The regiments consolidated into larger garrisons distributed throughout the southwest and mountain west before deploying to the Caribbean and the Philippines at the end of the century to serve in the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars.
I examined pension applications submitted to the Pension Bureau from Company/Troop
A for the 4th Cavalry, 6th Cavalry, 10th Infantry, and 11th Infantry (white units) and the same companies/troops for the 9th Cavalry, 10th Cavalry, 24th Infantry, and 25th Infantry. The
Pension Bureau listed the various aliases that under which some soldiers served in each index card pension file. I used this information to avoid double-counting soldiers. The organizational index listed each soldier’s alias on a separate index card but filed them under the same application number. Each index card also listed the various units in which soldiers served.
Again, this assisted me in avoiding double-counting soldiers when I compiled my information.
Perhaps one limitation of this is that I am relying heavily on the assumption that Pension Bureau officials recorded information about soldiers accurately. Information about the various units in which soldiers served demonstrates that this sample represents broader trends across the army because soldiers often served multiple enlistments in different units. Some soldiers reenlisted while they with their old units which allowed them to remain in the same unit. Many other soldiers departed temporarily for a few months for rest and an opportunity to visit family before returning to recruiting stations to reenlist. Much to the chagrin of this second group of soldiers who wanted to rejoin their old units, the needs of the army frequently required the army to assign 250 them to new units with to help fill critical personnel shortages. Personnel shortages were also a driving force behind the army’s practice of transferring soldiers from one company to another.
What is a successful pension application? For the purposes of my research, I defined a successful pension application as having a certificate number assigned. This means that at some point during their lives, a veteran, widow, or some other family member of a veteran received a monthly payment from the federal government after submitting a pension application. However, this is a very surface-level reading of very rich sources. Fully examining the pension files and engagement between veterans, widows, and federal officials reveal that individual applicants often defined a successful application differently. The Pension Bureau had a complex system for assessing veterans’ physical disabilities and determining how much money that the federal government should pay each veteran. As I demonstrated in the main text of this chapter, veterans were often dissatisfied with the ratings that the Pension Bureau assigned to them and frequently appealed to the federal government for pension increases. From the perspective of applicants, the process of applying for pensions was often a mix of both successes and setbacks, making it essential to couple any quantitative analysis of pension files with deeper textual analysis.
Findings for Veterans and Veterans’ Widows
In general, the mean approval rates for white veterans in this sample was around 77 percent, whereas the average approval rate among black veterans was approximately 63 percent.
However, disparities in pension approvals widen when considering the success rates among widows of white veterans compared to widows of black veterans; the majority of white veterans’ widows were white women, with black women composing the majority of black veterans’ widows. There is a slight decrease in the average approval rate among white veterans’ widows 251 at just over 74 percent, but the average approval rate for widows of black veterans is 55 percent.
Percentage of Veterans Approved for Pensions 90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0 4th Cavalry 6th Cavalry 10th Infantry 11th Infantry Average 9th Cavalry 10th Cavalry 24th Infantry 25th Infantry (white) (white) (white) (white) (black) (black) (black) (black)
Percentage of Widows Approved for Pensions 90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0 4th Cavalry 6th Cavalry 10th Infantry 11th Infantry 9th Cavalry 10th Cavalry 24th Infantry 25th Infantry Average (white) (white) (white) (white) (black) (black) (black) (black)
252
Bibliography Abbreviations ANJ: Army and Navy Journal and Gazette CO: Commanding Officer GCM: General Court-Martial JAG: Judge Advocate General LR: Letters Received LS: Letters Sent NARA: National Archives and Records Administration RG: Record Group TSLAC: Texas State Library and Archives Commission USCT: United States Colored Troops Archival Sources National Archives and Records Administration, Washington D.C. Record Group 15 Records of the Veterans Administration Record Group 94 Records of the Adjutant General’s Office Record Group 153 Records of the Office of the Judge Advocate General (Army) Record Group 391 Records of U.S. Regular Army Mobile Units, 1821-1942 Record Group 393 Records of U.S. Army Continental Commands, 1821-1920 Texas State Library and Archives Commission, Austin, Texas Applications for Pardons, 1840, 1845-1938, Texas Secretary of State Records Records Relating to the Penitentiary, 1846-1921 Starr County District Court Minutes Texas Convict and Conduct Registers, 1875-1945 (via ancestry.com) Dolph Briscoe Center of American History, University of Texas-Austin Zenas Randall Bliss Papers Emily K. Andrews Diary Earl Alonzo Brininstool Collection 253
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