Leonard - Men of color to arms!: Black soldiers, Indian wars, and the quest for equality

Early one morning several years ago, my son Anthony, who was six or seven years old at the time, crawled into bed with me to snuggle and, as he loves to do, to chat. Mom, he asked me on this particular occasion, is it true that the Union army freed the slaves and then went out and killed the Indians? Although I had long since steeled myself for such predictable and inevitable questions as Where do babies come from? I was caught off guard by this seemingly precocious and morally challenging query. I groped in vain for an answer that fit comfortably with my own desire for both honesty and happy endings, but soon realized I would have to choose between them, and I went with honesty. Yes, honey, its true. Anthony pressed on. But why? he asked. Why would the army free one group of people and then go off and kill another group?

Although he did not say so, I knew that what troubled Anthony most was the idea that both groups in question were people of color: having freed blacks from slavery in the American South, the U.S. army then set out to subordinate (and perhaps extinguish) the continents Native people. Moreover, something that Anthony did not yet know was that in order to accomplish its mission against the Indians on the frontier, the army enlisted thousands of the black men it had previously been responsible for emancipating. Men of Color to Arms! arises directly from my clumsy efforts to provide my older son with meaningful answers on that memorable day, although years of research, contemplation, and conversation with other scholars have enabled me to reach well beyond the fundamentals that Anthony and I originally discussed.

The books title comes from an 1863 broadside designed by leading African Americans in Philadelphia, such as Frederick Douglass, to encourage black men to enlist in the United States Colored Troops (USCT). It begins with an exploration of the connections between the USCTwhose final duties took them, in disproportionate numbers, as occupation forces to the still fiercely inhospitable Southand the creation of six black regiments in the postwar Regular army. Turning west, Men of Color to Arms! examines the postwar black Regulars contributions to the success of the nations primary agenda after Appomattox: subjugating all remaining hostiles among the Native American people on the frontier and clearing the way for white settlement and the spread of civilization.

As will be seen, black men hoped that their efforts to do the nations work by serving in the army would produce substantial and irrevocable results in relation to their overall quest for the rights of full citizenship. Within the army itself, their aspirations exceeded the place that had been carved out for them in the enlisted mens ranks: Men of Color to Arms! also considers black mens bitterly contested efforts to desegregate what was then the nations premier officer training school, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Driving the entire narrative of this book is a simple question: was Frederick Douglass right in the summer of 1863, when he assured black men that enlistment in, and faithful service to, the U.S. army was a sure path to equal citizenship with white men?

Men of Color to Arms! spans roughly three decades, from the 1860s establishment of the USCT and the black Regular regiments, through the frontier wars of the 1870s and 1880s that led inexorably to the collapse of Indian resistance at the Battle of Wounded Knee (1890), to the massive commemoration of national progress signified by the Worlds Columbian Exposition in Chicago (1893) and the stunning blow to black equality represented by the U.S. Supreme Courts 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson affirming the principle of racial segregation. Against the backdrop of the larger social, political, and racial developments of the late nineteenth century, Men of Color to Arms! offers a complex reflection on the meaning and broad implications for their equality of black mens military service in the U.S. army.

Over the years I have spent researching, writing, revising, and, finally, seeing this book through to production, I have benefited enormously from the thoughtfulness, skills, wisdom, and support of many individuals. I am pleased to be able to offer my thanks to a number of key people in this traditional, simultaneously public and intimate way.

First, I would like to thank Mr. John V. Gibson, who many years ago, in honor of his parents, John J. and Cornelia V. Gibson, endowed the history chair I have occupied at Colby College since 2004. This endowed chair accords me an annual fund that covers a substantial proportion of the expenses associated with my ongoing scholarly research. Without this fund and living in central Maine, my ability to reach crucial archival repositories and other important research sites would be severely limited. Mr. Gibson has never asked me for a thingnot even a thank-you notein return for his generosity. This is my unsolicited thank-you note.

I would also like to thank my colleagues, past and present, in the History Department at Colby, especially Peter Ditmanson, Ben Fallaw, Jason Opal, Raffael Scheck, Larissa Taylor, John Turner, James Webb, and Robert Weisbrot. These brilliant and accomplished historians are wonderful teachers, too, and over the past eighteen years they have made coming into the office every day a pleasure and an honor. More broadly, I wish to express my appreciation to all of the scholars who have gone before me carving out the rich historical terrainincluding Civil War, postCivil War, African American, Native American, and U.S. military historyinto which this particular study fits. I am in your debt.

The staff of a number of libraries have been immensely helpful to me in the course of my research: Colby Colleges Miller Library staff are always resourceful and good-natured as they try to locate items for me that can be deeply obscure, or housed in some distant location, or both. Library Director Clem Guthro and Head of Acquisitions Claire Prontnicki deserve a special acknowledgment for having agreed to locate and purchase thirty years worth of Army and Navy Journal microfilm for my use. Martin Kelly, our Visual Resources Librarian, was helpful in the end stages of the manuscripts production, digitizing some of the images I have used here.