Combe also realized the town's own residents threatened it too. They could be just as uncontrollable as the soldiers. Brownsville's turn away from a frontier mind-set was too fresh to become a settled way of life. Last night's threat to attack the fort showed that. Harming the soldiers or even trying to harm them might trigger new shootings and lawlessness. Combe thwarted violence the night before by assuring townspeople that if they remained within the law, they would get justice.38 How long would they sit tight? As mayor, Combe had to protect Brownsville from the soldiers, the soldiers from the town, and the town from its own people. The only way to do this was to get the soldiers out of Brownsville, and that would mean an appeal to the War Department, and maybe even to President Roosevelt, from a committee of the best citizens in Brownsville, men above reproach. It would have to conduct a reasonably convincing investigation. Since it would not be a court of law, testimony and evidence need not be the kind admissible at a trial. If it came from enough people and reasonably showed it was more likely than not the shooters were soldiers, it would do the trick.
Combe left Fort Brown that morning with this plan and a determination to carry it through.
HE HAD TO CLEAR his desk of all other distractions, including his medical practice. He told his brother and partner, Dr. Joe Combe, he would have to handle that himself. “I am going to occupy myself entirely with this matter.”39 His professional responsibilities no longer an intrusion, Mayor Combe walked through the town, talking to “influential and prominent citizens” until the hour he had set for the meeting. A large crowd of possibly five hundred, including troublemakers neither invited nor wanted and who had heard what was happening, showed up. They wanted to rush the fort and clean the soldiers out.40 Combe asked people to continue to act as good citizens and not take the law into their own hands because it would lead to “the ruination of Brownsville.” Meanwhile, he would take the matter up “to the highest authority in the land.”
When things quieted down, it was time to select the members of what thereafter would be called the Citizens’ Committee. Combe picked William Kelly as its chairman. Kelly was a native New Yorker who began his service to the Union in the Civil War with a New York volunteer regiment. Rising from the enlisted ranks, he was commissioned an officer in the Eighth United States Colored Troops. (More than forty years later, he liked to be addressed as Captain.) Coming to Brownsville with the army as the war was closing, he stayed there when he was discharged. A conservative and successful businessman, in 1891 Kelly formed the First National Bank of Brownsville and since then had served as its president. He knew everyone in Brownsville, the high and the low—and he knew which was which.41 His son was making a career in the army and was then an instructor in modern languages at West Point. In an earlier tour of duty, the son served with Buffalo Soldiers in the Ninth Cavalry. Kelly knew Fort Brown and every unit ever posted there, from where else it was posted to who its commanding officers were. He knew the black units at Fort Brown before the Twenty-Fifth Infantry and had not a bad word to say about any of them. The Twenty-Fourth Infantry was “a magnificent organization,” the Ninth Cavalry a “magnificent body of men…thoroughly disciplined and thoroughly drilled,” and the Tenth Cavalry “as well-behaved a body of men as I ever saw anywhere.”42 Black soldiers were the equal of white soldiers and their units just as good, if, he cautioned, they were properly officered.
Combe must have thought that with Kelly he had hit a home run. Maybe it was just a triple. Kelly was not sure the Twenty-Fifth Infantry lived up to these standards. He was appalled to see its soldiers come into Brownsville out of uniform and sloppy, and he was astonished to see them pass by their officers without saluting. Discipline was lax, and he blamed this on their officers.43 Kelly considered himself a man without prejudice,44 but, a man of his time, he judged blacks not quite the equal of whites and hesitated to take their word against the word of a white man. He believed that “negroes…are the most secretive race of people on the face of the earth” and “that there exists in the four regiments of negro troops now in the Army of the United States an oath-bound society, by which they are bound to each other and together, to support each other in all cases, infractions of discipline, in crimes of any kind, and that the members of that society will not tell on each other or violate that oath under any circumstances.”45 Kelly had no doubts the shooters were the black soldiers. But then practically everyone in Brownsville thought the same thing, including Mayor Combe.
As committee chairman, Kelly selected the rest of its members. He selected “mostly northern men, who had no special animus against the negroes, as such.”46 Former Union soldiers, including some active in the local Grand Army post (equivalent to today's American Legion) were good. For another member, he picked the son of a Union officer who had died commanding Negro troops. The final Citizens’ Committee membership included a county judge, the Brownsville city attorney, another lawyer or two, the superintendent of public instruction (a position Kelly himself once held), the chief of police, the Cameron County sheriff, a city alderman, another banker, the state quarantine officer, the editor of the local newspaper that flogged the story of the “assault” on Mrs. Evans, a doctor, and, of course, Mayor Combe.47 They were ready to get down to business. “There is no time like the present,” Captain Kelly exhorted his committee. “We will go at once to see Major Penrose.”48
CAPTAIN KELLY REPEATED WHAT Major Penrose by now had heard twice from Mayor Combe. Penrose responded just as he had before and offered his counter-theory: it was an attack on the barracks by people from the town. But when confronted with the additional shells and other items found by other people in the town, he conceded he might have been wrong. “I do not understand. My men are good men. [But] I am afraid it is so. I would give my right arm if this had not occurred.”49 Satisfied Penrose now saw things their way, confident he would cooperate with them, Kelly and the committee members left the post and went back to town to take testimony.
MAJOR PENROSE COULD NO longer keep the shooting hidden from the army. Too much evidence damning his men was piling up. Before the day was over, he sent a telegram to his superiors at the Department of Texas, telling them of the “serious shooting,” the casualties, and the shells and clips in the streets that supported the allegation that his soldiers had been the perpetrators. He promised full particulars would be mailed.50
FOR AN INVESTIGATION MAYOR Combe thought should be deliberate, the Citizens’ Committee moved awfully fast. That very afternoon, with no preparation, it took the statements of thirteen witnesses. The next morning, another four told the committee what they knew. None of the testimony was under oath. None was cross-examined. None was from a soldier.
Other than when he testified himself, Combe was not present when the committee received the testimony. He was busy with unrelated responsibilities as the town's mayor. “I was in the committee room, backwards and forwards, but very seldom for any length of time.”51 In the end, the committee presented him with proof of a violent shooting committed by the dangerous men of the Twenty-Fifth Infantry, just what he wanted.
Only two of the twenty-four witnesses, Hale Odin and the teenager Herbert Elkins, testified they saw Negro shooters. Elkins may have gotten the hint when he was told before the first question to him, “We know that this outrage was committed by negro soldiers.”52 Combe had no interest in determining which soldiers in particular were involved in the shooting. That was the job of the law, not his committee. If what witnesses said was weak on some points, nevertheless they conveyed that what happened was more than a simple affray or brawl. This was a deadly assault on the town committed by more than just a few men. Its two casualties, including a death, were not the unfortunate result of a noisy quarrel gone too far but the foreseeable consequence of a well-planned attack with the violence one might expect of a military operation. That is what the testimony showed.
After only two days, Mayor Combe had his committee, its evidence, and its conclusion to send to the War Departmen
t and President Roosevelt. If the brutality of the raid did not speak for itself, in its appeal the Citizens’ Committee would emphasize it. The soldiers were violent. They were dangerous. They might do it again. Officials at the highest authority in the land had to do something about it.
TO INFLUENCE THE WAR Department, who better to ask than Texas's two US senators? One of them, Charles Allen Culberson, could say to Secretary of War William Howard Taft that back in May, “I told you so.” At that time, Senator Culberson wrote Taft, expressing his opposition to the move and including a copy of Wreford's letter to him. Three days later, Taft answered that objections already had been “very carefully considered.” The War Department believed colored troops were as well disciplined as white troops, and there was no reason to anticipate the soldiers of the Twenty-Fifth Infantry would be any different. “It has sometimes happened that communities which objected to the coming of colored soldiers have, on account of their good conduct, entirely changed their view and commended their good behavior to the War Department.”53 The posting to Fort Brown could not be rescinded.
As far as Combe and almost everyone else in Brownsville were concerned, Taft and the army could not have been more wrong back in May. If Culberson was unable to keep them out of Brownsville in May, he damn well better help get rid of them now. He was only too happy to.
When the Twenty-Fifth Infantry was posted to Fort Brown, Culberson was just beginning his second term in the Senate. A native of Alabama, he moved with his family to Texas when he was only a year old. His father became active in Texas politics and was elected to Congress. After graduating from the University of Virginia law school, young Culberson returned to Texas to practice law in Jefferson, a flyspeck of a town in the northeastern corner of the state not far from the three corners of Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas and strongly influenced by the Southern ways of the area. Eventually, Culberson moved to a bigger playing field in Dallas, was elected Texas attorney general, then governor. In January 1899 he was sent to the Senate, where he would stay until 1922.
Nothing like the stereotypical handshaking, yarn spinning, colorfully speaking Southern politician, Culberson was, if anything, aloof. Maybe this was because of his health. He suffered from Bright's disease, a disease of the kidneys, now called nephritis. A serious disease, then and now, in February 1884 it killed Theodore Roosevelt's young wife Alice only two days after she gave birth to their daughter, also to be named Alice. Just as serious to his health and his career, Culberson was an alcoholic. He was often missing from the Senate's business as he dried out at health resorts and spas. In his twenty-four years in the Senate, he missed more than half of its roll-call votes.54
Also no doubt trolling for votes in south Texas, the state's other senator, Joseph W. Bailey, was happy to join in the effort. Bailey was hardly a man to be outraged by the violence of other men. A native Mississippian, in 1883, he was accused of being the ringleader of a faction in a Democratic party there that used vicious tactics against another Democratic faction. When called to the US Senate to testify about this, Bailey stood mute on the ground he would be forced to perjure himself. He got away with it. By then, however, he was a spent force in Magnolia State politics and moved to Texas to start over. Texans overlooked his pugnacious past and in 1890 elected him to Congress. Eleven years later, the Texas legislature sent him to the Senate.55 Old habits die hard. Not a year later, he physically assaulted Senator Albert Beveridge, a Republican from Indiana. The Senate did nothing about it because, according to an editorial in the New York Times, the assault did not occur while the Senate was in session.56
On August 15, Culberson and Bailey sent a short telegram to Secretary of War Taft. “We are advised that negro soldiers at Fort Brown have been guilty of the most outrageous conduct” and want them transferred “without delay.”57
WITH THE WAR DEPARTMENT covered by the two senators, it was up to the Citizens’ Committee to press the case with President Roosevelt. Not wasting any time, after hearing the last witness on the second day, it composed its appeal to him. On Wednesday, the same day Culberson and Bailey sent their telegram to the War Department, the committee's telegram was on its way to the Summer White House in Oyster Bay, New York. Since 1902 Roosevelt gathered his family and staff and left the unbearable heat of Washington's summer for his home on Long Island's North Shore. No matter the season, Roosevelt loved the home for its “birds and trees and books, and all things beautiful, and horses and rifles and children and hard work and the joy of life.”58
Roosevelt's summer already had been interrupted several times. The government in Cuba, installed and maintained by the United States, was collapsing and a civil war looked likely. He would order Secretary of War Taft, the assistant secretary of state (and Harvard classmate) Robert Bacon, and a detachment of US Marines to go there and get things back on track. (This and other business kept the Secretary of War Taft out of the Brownsville loop for quite some time.) None of this slowed his plan to visit the under-construction Panama Canal. To Henry White, American ambassador to Italy, but for many years a fixture in one position or another at the embassy in London, Roosevelt sent a confidential letter with his thoughts about the discussions between Great Britain and Germany on how to slow down their “I'll see you and raise you one” competition to build the world's largest warships and the world's biggest navy. The next day, President Roosevelt congratulated Attorney General Charles Joseph Bonaparte, grandson of the youngest brother of Emperor Napoleon I of France, for his handling of a meat problem at the Navy Yard in Brooklyn. Roosevelt joked to Bonaparte that an editorial in the Providence Journal blamed him for a plan to decommission the Revolutionary War–era USS Constitution (“Old Ironsides”) because he so hated the Constitution that formed the American government that he disliked anything with that name.59 That same day, the telegram from Brownsville arrived at Sagamore Hill.60
The Citizens’ Committee made sure its appeal was complete and respectfully forceful. It made clear it was appointed by Brownsville authorities and cloaked with civic authority. Eleven members of the committee, including Mayor Combe and seven other public officials, signed the telegram. Four of them were directly or indirectly involved in law enforcement, and two of these were a Cameron County judge and the Brownsville city attorney, who surely knew the committee behaved nothing like a court of law. The violence so frightening to Brownsville residents was emphasized unambiguously. This was an “attack.” It involved “between 20 and 30” men, all well-armed with “rifles and an abundant supply of ammunition.” About “200 shots” were fired “directly into dwellings, offices, stores, and at police and citizens.” They killed one man and grievously wounded another. The committee identified the shooters as “Soldiers of Twenty-Fifth United States Infantry (colored)…. Threats have been made…they will repeat this outrage,” and there are not enough officers in the battalion to restrain them.61 “Women and children are terrorized.” Men are “under constant alarm and watchfulness.” “No community can stand this strain.” The telegram closed, just as Combe wanted, with the plea to President Roosevelt “to have the troops at once removed from Fort Brown and replaced by white soldiers.”
The wire went out not quite forty-eight hours after the shooting.
NEITHER THE APPEAL FROM the Citizens’ Committee nor the veiled demands from the senators worked. Two days after Roosevelt received his telegram, his personal secretary William Loeb instructed military secretary General Fred C. Ainsworth to tell Culberson, “No action can be taken on his request until a full investigation and report” have been made.62
It was Major Penrose's calm assurances that the situation in Brownsville was well in hand that foiled Combe's carefully orchestrated plan. Repeatedly Penrose told the chain of command above him that he and his officers had their soldiers under control while Combe was keeping the lid on Brownsville's residents.63 “No trouble since shooting, and anticipate none.”64 Because of these calming wires, General Ainsworth and General J. Franklin Bell, the army's chief
of staff, thought it was inadvisable to move the troops before the guilty parties were discovered and punished.65 They convinced President Roosevelt, and for the moment the Twenty-Fifth Infantry was staying put. Mayor Combe had been checked. Additional effort would be required.
President Roosevelt, General Ainsworth, and General Bell's cool reaction to the Citizens’ Committee had kept the matter orderly and within the army and its criminal-justice system. The army for the moment was doing the right thing. Politicians were held at bay. But two significant turns in the Brownsville Incident were taking place. Roosevelt was being squeezed by the Citizens’ Committee, Culberson, and Bailey. The War Department, which itself was wavering in the face of pressure from Senators Culberson and Bailey, would be forced to turn to higher authority—President Roosevelt, its commander in chief—for guidance.
Taking on Theodore Roosevelt Page 8