About half of the black men who joined the Regular Army in the late 1860s had served in the Civil War. Of these, more than 500 transferred directly from USCT regiments that were mustering out in the fall of 1866. Many other USCT veterans who joined the Regulars told recruiters that their occupation was’soldier’ when they signed on again. The many veterans helped to offset the shortage of educated men in the ranks of the new regiments and furnished ex-perienced comrades for recruits fresh from civilian life.

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The black regiments especially needed men who could read and write. Before the Civil War, state laws across the South had forbidden the education of slaves. Everywhere in the South, the vast majority of the black population remained illiterate, and it was hard for recruiters to find men educated well enough to serve as clerks and noncommissioned officers. Daily reports, bimonthly muster rolls, requisitions for supplies, and the mountain of other documents that constituted the Army’s routine paperwork–these all required attention.

By late 1866, most recruiting officers admitted the futility of trying to enlist literate men in the South. Colonel Edward Hatch reported in November that no 9th Cavalry recruits had ‘the necessary education for company clerks and sergeants.’ Officers from several of the black regiments had succeeded in enlisting literate men in some Northern cities, even though the public education afforded black pupils was segregated and rudimentary. Regimental commanders began increasingly to send their recruiters north, and by spring 1867 all the black regiments had established offices in two or more large cities.

Limited by education, training, and the social and economic barriers raised by American society, few black men in the 19th century had advanced much beyond the status of unskilled laborers. The new regiments’ need for skilled workers often became desperate. Officers continually complained that their regiments and companies could not function without artisans. The cavalry in particular required blacksmiths, horseshoers and saddlers.

Given the Army’s vast responsibilities, the War Department did not dare reduce the effectiveness of one-tenth of its still relatively small force by discriminating against the black regiments in the distribution of weapons and equipment. When the Springfield arsenal began converting muzzleloading infantry rifles to breechloaders soon after the Civil War, the new weapons became available to the black regiments as they were needed. The 38th Infantry was one of 10 infantry regiments that had received the breechloaders by June 1867. These regiments covered the country between the Arkansas River and the Yellowstone–including the main routes to the gold fields of California, Colorado Territory and Montana Territory–where there had been bloody fighting with the Plains Indians during and after the Civil War. The 39th Infantry in Louisiana and Mississippi and the 40th Infantry in North Carolina did not receive their breechloaders until 1868. Distribution of the new weapons depended on available transportation and on the troops’ immediate need for them, not on the racial composition of a regiment.

A few years later, when the Army adopted the Model 1873 Springfield rifle and carbine and the Colt revolver, the Ordnance Department took more than a year to distribute the new weapons. The 10th Cavalry, at posts near the Comanche-Kiowa reservation, was one of the first regiments to receive the carbines because, as General Sherman wrote, it would be among ‘the first to have a chance to use them.’ That summer, four companies of the 9th Cavalry, scattered at posts in west Texas, received new carbines. Supplies came slowly to the 9th, but no more slowly than they did to the three white cavalry regiments in New Mexico Territory, Arizona Territory and the Pacific Northwest. By March 1875 nearly all companies of cavalry of whatever race had received Springfields and Colts.

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