Buffalo Soldiers: Sorting Fact from Fiction

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In the summer of 1866, a year after the Civil War ended and more than six months after the 13th Amendment finally abolished slavery throughout the country, the United States needed the largest peacetime army in its history. Several tasks required such a sizable armed force: occupying the recalcitrant South, patrolling the Mexican border, protecting construction of transcontinental railroads, and guarding wagon routes to the Colorado and Montana goldfields. The expanded military would include black soldiers. The U.S. Colored Troops (USCT) had proved their worth during the Civil War, and emancipation had made available several hundred thousand potential recruits. The Army Reorganization Act of 1866 provided for 30 new regiments, including two cavalry and four infantry regiments ‘composed of colored men.’ The law had nothing to do with the Civil Rights Act passed earlier that year, but legislators clearly saw a connection between citizenship and military service. ‘It is … either a burden or a privilege to serve in the Army,’ Henry S. Lane, a senator from Indiana, told the Senate, ‘and … the colored people are equally entitled to bear the burden or equally entitled to participate in the privilege.’

Within a week, orders went to Maj. Gens. William T. Sherman and Philip H. Sheridan to raise four of these regiments. In Sherman’s Military Division of the Missouri, the 38th Infantry organized at Jefferson Barracks, near St. Louis, and the 10th Cavalry at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., while Sheridan’s Department of the Gulf provided the 39th Infantry and the 9th Cavalry, both organized in or near New Orleans. Elsewhere, the 40th Infantry recruited largely in Baltimore and Washington, while the 41st Infantry, taking most of its men from Kentucky and Louisiana, concentrated at Baton Rouge. Floods and crop failures in the lower Mississippi valley in 1866 provided plenty of recruits for the 39th Infantry and 9th Cavalry. The other regiments formed more slowly.

From New Orleans, the 9th Cavalry sailed to Texas ports and marched inland to posts in the western part of the state and along the lower Rio Grande, while the 39th Infantry settled in at forts around the mouths of the Mississippi River. The 10th Cavalry and 38th Infantry moved west into Kansas to guard railroad construction; half of the 38th eventually followed the Santa Fe Trail all the way to New Mexico Territory. The first companies of the 40th Infantry sailed from Alexandria, Va., to the Carolinas, where the rest of the regiment organized. The 41st Infantry took ship at Baton Rouge for the mouth of the Rio Grande, and marched to posts in south and west Texas. The Army’s Quartermaster Department, bound by a stingy budget, moved troops by water — the cheapest means — whenever possible.

Congress soon decided that it had established too large and too costly an army. In 1869, the Army Appropriation Act contained a single sentence to the effect that no money would become available ‘until the total number of infantry regiments is reduced to twenty-five.’ Although the law did not specify the survival of any black infantry regiments, Sherman–by now the Army’s commanding general–quickly decided to march companies of the 38th Infantry from Kansas and New Mexico Territory to join the 41st in Texas and make the new 24th Infantry. During the Civil War, Sherman had expressed some fiercely bigoted opinions of black people and their abilities, but in 1869 many of the same men who had written the Regular Army’s black regiments into law three years earlier were still sitting in Congress. They could have made things uncomfortable for the military if they saw their handiwork destroyed. Meanwhile, the 40th Infantry left North Carolina by rail to join the 39th in Louisiana. A year later, the new 25th Infantry took ship for Texas, where it served for the next 10 years.

In time, the idea arose that the Army kept the black regiments in Texas ‘on the theory,’ as Sherman told a congressional committee in 1874, ‘that that race can better stand that extreme southern climate than our white troops.’ Sherman must have forgotten his own reaction when he got news of the Fetterman Massacre near Fort Phil Kearny (in what would become Wyoming) in December 1866: ‘I will see if the two new colored regiments … can be made available by April 1,’ he wrote to Army headquarters. In a pinch, Sherman was ready to use black soldiers wherever they were needed; but testifying in Washington, it would have been impolitic for a general to say that black troops stayed so long in Texas because Congress would not allocate money to move them.

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Tags: 19th Century, African American History, Historical Conflicts, Historical Figures, Wild West