Military justice, though, recognized the legal doctrine of ‘fighting words.’ At Ringgold Barracks, Texas, Corporal Logan Goodpasture noticed an officer’s servant, Appolenos Romero, peering through a barracks window at a dance that was going on inside. Speaking in Spanish, Goodpasture invited Romero to come in. Romero replied, also in Spanish, that he did not ‘dance with niggers,’ and Goodpasture ordered him in English to ‘clear out.’ Words soon led to blows that landed Romero in the post hospital and Goodpasture in the guard house. A general court-martial acknowledged Goodpasture’s ‘just cause and provocation’ for the assault and fined him only $5 — about one-third of a month’s pay, but still far less than other sentences that the court might have imposed — as a reminder that a noncommissioned officer (NCO) should keep a tighter rein on his temper.

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Expressions of prejudice, of course, were not confined to Texas. From Fort Shaw, Montana Territory, a 25th Infantry soldier complained in 1888 that ‘it is a shame the way the Officers carry on at this post they treat enlisted men worse than slaves because they are colored … the Commanding Officer … has made all sorts of remarks in our presence about our color and our previous servitude as slaves and that is where we should be to day … as soon as we are here long enough to save a little money they will three fourths of them desert the Service. no humane will stand the treatment they receive here while Canada is so nere. but you know the Colored Soldier does not like to desert. for god sake and ours too please do some thing for us … .’

‘Colored’ was the term black soldiers used most often during the post–Civil War era when they referred to themselves in writing. ‘Buffalo soldiers’ caught on with white journalists after it was first recorded in a letter to The Nation in 1873. Plains Indians, the writer explained, coined it to describe 10th Cavalry troopers at Fort Sill. By 1879, an editor in New Mexico Territory had extended the term to the 9th Cavalry, and in 1894 the Army and Navy Journal, a privately owned but semiofficial weekly paper, included the infantry. (Frederic Remington had already given the term national circulation in 1889 with his article ‘A Scout with the Buffalo Soldiers.’) But black soldiers themselves never seem to have used it in their letters to black newspapers, in court-martial testimony or in pension applications. Among them, ‘buffalo’ was an insult, as when one soldier remarked that an officer ‘had the men out on drill the other day, and he cursed one of the men, and they stood it like black buffalo sons of bitches.’ Another private called a sergeant a ‘God damned black, cowardly, buffalo son of a bitch.’ Such language was the stuff of court-martial offenses, and trial transcripts recorded the men’s words. Although many black Regulars had great racial as well as professional pride, they did not express it by a nickname. ‘Buffalo soldiers’ seems to have been a term that appealed to outsiders but insiders did not use.

Although their number remained small, a much higher proportion of black soldiers than of whites re-enlisted after their first term of service. Several hundred even stayed for more than two enlistments, for some found greater rewards in the Army than they had in civilian life. As late as 1880, the 25th Infantry’s Company G had four privates who had served in all-black Civil War regiments, from Kentucky, Massachusetts, North Carolina and Ohio. By the 1890s the four black regiments contained a higher proportion of veteran soldiers than the Army at large.

With long service and an NCO’s stripes came responsibility for small independent commands that operated beyond the range of supervision. Through the years, official reports mentioned dozens of black soldiers by name, often for leading small detachments in the field. In the summer of 1872, Sergeant Pierre Rock led 11 9th Cavalry troopers on a 200-mile scout along the Rio Grande. Sergeant John Denny of the same regiment led eight men on a five-week scout in the Magdalena Mountains during the winter of 1877. Two years later, Denny chased some deserters from Fort Bayard, New Mexico Territory, to the town of Hillsborough (later Hillsboro), a trip that took him and his party of seven men 150 miles.

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