Ungentlemanly Acts

by Louise Barnett

  Conditions at Fort Stockton were recorded in monthly sanitary reports that covered health, diet, sanitation, and the state of the buildings. From these it appears that hovels near the fort occupied by Mexicans were a health hazard and that unspecified “inducements” were offered to these Mexicans to get free smallpox vaccinations. The soldiers had been vaccinated to good effect although some cases of smallpox were reported on outlying ranches.30

  A recurring problem was the condition of the outside lavatories, or “sinks,” as they were known in army parlance. Neither the officers’ quarters nor the enlisted men’s barracks had indoor facilities, and both sets of sinks needed applications of dry earth from time to time. In the report of October 31, 1878, Assistant Surgeon John Hall wrote at some length about the condition of the sinks, which he found highly unsatisfactory: “Some of the boxes are broken and leaky and all look unclean. The ground beneath and around the boxes is soaked with decomposed excrementitious matter, and likewise the seat and sides of the privy are in some places stained and foul.” Like his predecessors in the writing of sanitary reports, he recommended the application of dry earth on a regular basis. He also noted that two sinks for four companies was inadequate, and conjectured, wistfully, that if a minimum of one sink per company were provided, “the companies would be likely to vie with each other in cleanliness, and to take pride in keeping each privy in good condition.”31

  The only women officially recognized as part of an army post were laundresses, who received “housing, a daily ration, fuel, and the services of the post surgeon in addition to their pay for doing the company wash.” Laundresses could always find a clientele if they wished to supplement their pay by baking pies, and they often became the wives of enlisted men. Whatever their marital status, they traditionally inhabited a part of the post called Laundress Row. References to this area in sanitary reports suggest squalor. In 1875 “defects of light and ventilation in these quarters” are characterized as “beyond remedy”; six months later the buildings are described as “gradually becoming uninhabitable from rapid dilapidation of the quarters.” An 1878 report judged the complete absence of sinks a “very great defect” in need of immediate remediation—this almost ten years after the post had been rebuilt. However planners had imagined the needs of the laundresses and their children should be met, “the occupants of some of these houses are in the habit of urinating in the corners made by the chimneys on the outside of the houses, thus creating a stench.” Once again urging action, the medical officer, Dr. Benjamin Pope, concludes feelingly, “There is no more potent agent for evil than emanations from human excrement.”32

  Fort Stockton shared with a few other Texas military posts the distinction of quartering the Army’s only black soldiers, commanded by white officers.o These officers were not necessarily pleased about their postings. On the eve of the Spanish-American War, John Bigelow, Jr., by that time a captain, described himself as having labored for over twenty years “under the disadvantage of serving in a colored regiment.” Bigelow did not elaborate on the “disadvantage,” but he might have had any number of things in mind. One was an enforced sojourn in places like West Texas. Given the majority feeling that armed black men were potentially dangerous to whites, or at least unwelcome, the black regiments did not experience the rotation that most white regiments enjoyed between frontier posts and more desirable locations. Responding to the constant lobbying of the regiments to have their units brought “closer to civilization,” in 1880 the Army finally moved the two black infantry regiments to the Department of Dakota.33 (Not everyone would have regarded this move as bringing the regiments much closer to “civilization.”)

  Before the Dakota move, four companies drawn from the Tenth Cavalry and the Twenty-fifth Infantry were billeted at Fort Stockton while their other companies, along with the Ninth Cavalry and the Twenty-fourth Infantry, were distributed among other Texas posts. The four regiments represented ten percent of the Army’s effective strength. Their men received the same pay as white soldiers, $13 a month on enlistment with $1 per month increase annually and a bonus for reenlistment after five years.34

  Equal pay was a hard-won measure, granted to black soldiers during the Civil War only after bitter protests, including at least two executions of black servicemen who had refused to serve for lesser pay. As one private wrote home, “Why are we not worth as much as white soldiers? We do the same work they do, and do what they cannot. We fight as well as they do.” When a bill to equalize pay was first introduced in December of 1863, the New York World deemed it “unjust in every way to the white soldier to put him on a level with the black.” Its passage in June of 1864 concluded what historian James McPherson calls “one of the sorriest episodes of the Civil War.”35

  At the time of the Geddes trial Frederick Douglass’s optimistic prediction that wearing the uniform of the United States Army was bound to produce equal treatment for blacks was far from being realized in Texas. The departmental commander, General Ord, was known to—as Sherman characterized him—“lean against the Nigger” and be correspondingly soft on the old Confederacy. Black soldiers would get only grudging recognition from him.36

  In Indian Territory, where the regiments had first served, the men of the black regiments became known as “buffalo soldiers,” supposedly because their hair reminded the Indians of the hair of their sacred animal, the buffalo. Whatever its origin, the name was taken as a compliment: the Tenth Cavalry promptly enshrined the image of the buffalo on the regimental crest.37

  The officers who led the buffalo soldiers into battle knew that their men were not only good soldiers but less given to intemperance and desertion than their white counterparts. Nevertheless, the prejudices of time and place often held sway. The same Dr. Notson who enumerated the noxious creatures to be found in the West Texas desert also wrote, referring to himself in the third person, that “the impracticability of making intelligent soldiers out of the mass of the negroes, is growing more evident to the Post Surgeon every day, and his opinion is concurred in by their own officers when speaking in confidence.”38

  Some of the commentary that Notson refers to may simply have been the acknowledgment that illiterate men whose life experience had been slavery presented additional problems to the military—and additional work for officers. When Lieutenant Colonel James Carleton inspected the Twenty-fifth Infantry on its arrival in Texas in 1870, he recommended that a clerk be hired to do the bookkeeping and teach the soldiers to read and write:

  In this way too the negroes who serve in the army will become intelligent and be so much better fitted to take their places as the political equals of white men, which they have become, under the Constitution. This is a matter of grave importance, and in my judgment should be called to the attention of the highest authority.39

  For the fair-minded Carleton, the black soldiers’ problems were not caused by innate inferiority: they could and should be remedied.

  Given the prevailing belief of the time that the white race was superior to any other, though, most people were more sympathetic to Notson’s conclusion than to Carleton’s. It was a given of nineteenth-century “science” that, left to their own devices, blacks would make no progress. In their huge book on the subject of race, Dr. J. C. Nott and George R. Gliddon laid down a number of prescriptions, among them that “amalgamations,” then the scientific term for people of mixed race, “have deteriorated the white element in direct proportion that they are said to have improved the black.” Mere association with whites was also thought to be helpful to blacks. As Nott and Gliddon observed, “Wild horses, cattle, asses, and other brutes are greatly improved in like manner by domestication.” Lieutenant Bigelow’s orderly, a man “black as ink,” told Bigelow that officers “often appointed men to offices of trust & honor in proportion to the extent to which their blood had been mixed with the white but he did not think it just & right.”40

  Such prejudices extended to other races as well. In his medical history of Fort Stockton, wri
tten in 1870 or 1871, the post surgeon described local residents as “chiefly Mexicans,” and then went on to define Mexican as “a cross between the Spanish and Indian by which both races are deteriorated, rendering them lazy and immoral and treacherous. Though they are often grateful for kindnesses, they are vindictive for real or supposed injuries.” Mexicans, according to Nott and Gliddon, belonged to the “semicivilized races,” while American Indians were “unintellectual and uncivilizable.”41

  Fewer graduates of West Point chose to join black regiments, and thirty-six of the original hundred officers of the black regiments eventually transferred out, while only thirteen transferred in. Most officers probably took positions with these regiments not because of a genuine desire to command black soldiers, but in order to obtain a berth in the severely downsized postwar army. There would clearly be more prestige accorded officers of white regiments.42

  The wives who joined their husbands at frontier military posts might be expected to feel even less enthusiasm for the presence of large groups of armed black men who could find few women of their own race in the vicinity. Women already had reason to fear Indians: every year the Comanches followed their war trail into Mexico and returned with captive women and children; white settlers along the way were not spared. Added to this constant anxiety about Indians, a modern historian observes, “there was always lurking under the surface of the routine garrison life the fear of assault and rape—a fear of the soldiers themselves.”43

  In 1872 an incident occurred at Fort Davis in which a corporal was shot dead by an officer’s wife one night as he attempted to break in during her husband’s absence. No one could know if the soldier had simply been drunk or bent on robbery: it was assumed that his intention was rape. Colonel George Andrews, commanding officer of the Twenty-fifth Regiment, wrote up the matter as if it were a common occurrence:

  It is now seventeen months since I commenced my services with Colored Troops and during that time, attempts similar to the one related above have been made upon the officers’ quarters at Fort Duncan, Stockton, and Davis, and I think McKavett and Concho. While stationed at Fort Clark, five such attempts were reported to me.

  Andrews went on to say that married officers and enlisted men were “reluctant to leave their families for any purpose after dark and that detached service becomes a positive cruelty.”44

  The conjured image of potential rapists omnipresent in frontier posts reflects a predisposition to view black soldiers as a sexual threat to white women. In reality, the black regiments were more sinned against than sinning, constantly discriminated against and even attacked by civilians who suffered no penalty. In one notorious instance in 1870, John “Humpy” Jackson, an early settler and Indian fighter in the Fort McKavett area, discovered a “love note” written to his fourteen-year-old daughter by one of the black soldiers at the army post. The next morning he shot and killed the first soldier he saw. A fugitive for three years, during which time he killed two other black soldiers, Jackson was regarded in the community as a local hero: “No matter at what ranch house he called he would be welcomed, given the best horse available and all the food he needed.” When he was finally arrested, a grand jury refused to indict him.45

  In Texas another element contributed to the explosive mix—the hostility of the Mexican population to the black soldiers. In his annual report for 1876, General Ord cautioned that “the use of colored soldiers to cross the river after raiding Indians, is in my opinion, impolitic, not because they have shown any want of bravery, but because their employment is much more offensive to Mexican inhabitants than white soldiers.”46

  If this was true of Mexico, chronic Hare-ups would prove that it was equally true of the Mexican residents of Texas. As Colonel Cyrus Roberts reported, when he investigated an incident at Fort Ringgold, “They [local Mexicans] consider themselves … superiors [of the black troops], whereas with whites they accept their inferiority.” This hierarchy of disadvantage receives another formulation when the two groups in question are blacks and Indians. One historian believes that the presence of an Indian reservation near black troops made the white community treat the black soldiers better.47

  During the various postings of black troops to Texas later in the century the situation never improved. After an outbreak at Laredo in 1899, the head of the Department of Texas, General P. B. McKibbin, wrote that “the trouble at Laredo is due, primarily, to race prejudice between the Mexican residents and the soldiers, and the association of these soldiers with Mexican women.”48

  Conditions in the frontier army tended to be bad in all respects—housing was substandard, food was poor, the pay was low, disease and danger took large tolls. But for the buffalo soldiers, the wretchedness of these basic aspects of life was compounded by prejudice, not only from local civilians but from the Army itself: they were denied enlistment in the more elite units of artillery, engineers, ordnance, and signal corps; they were given inferior horses; and they drew—because of the policy of keeping them away from settled areas—the most isolated frontier posts. Before the Spanish-American War, not a single black enlisted man had risen from the ranks to become a commissioned officer.49

  Generally speaking, the court-martial offenses of black soldiers were treated more harshly than those of whites. But at Fort Stockton, at least, military punishment was “almost exclusively confined to hard labor under charge of the guard and stoppage of pay.” The labor was simply what the soldiers ordinarily did, and in the mind of the thoughtful Dr. Pope, could “only be called hard in a Pickwickian sense”:

  The hours of labor are short, the intervals of relaxation long; and no more is accomplished by three men than could be well done by one during the same time. Where there is no other incentive to work than a sentence of a Court Martial, or the loose supervision of a sentinel, who has an undoubted sympathy for the man with whom he may change places tomorrow, but little earnest labor can be expected.50

  The buffalo soldiers usually endured the rigors of military life without losing heart, but on one occasion, the most serious in the frontier army period, the soldiers at Fort Stockton protested. In 1873 Private John Taylor reported sick to the post surgeon, Dr. Peter A. Cleary, and was treated but not excused from duty. Taylor reported sick a second time. When he reappeared a third time, Cleary accused him of malingering and had him placed in the post guardhouse.

  Although Dr. Pope had recommended replacing the guardhouse because “its defects of heating and ventilation appear to me to be radical and not susceptible of remedy,” it stands today, one of the few remaining buildings of old Fort Stockton. As Dr. Cleary had written not long before the Taylor incident, “the cells have neither ventilation, heat, nor light, and yet such is its crowded condition that prisoners are of necessity obliged to sleep in those cells. If punishment be the object of a guardhouse, it is admirably adapted for the purpose, being little if at all inferior to the celebrated ‘black hole of Calcutta.’”51

  Taylor died the following day. Neither Cleary nor a visiting surgeon could determine a cause of death.

  Word quickly spread among the soldiers that the doctor had been responsible for Taylor’s death, and someone got up a petition accusing Cleary of negligence.p Their officers demanded that the soldiers withdraw their names from the petition or face charges, but the majority refused. Court-martial proceedings were ordered for those who had refused to withdraw their names, and on August 26, 1873, twenty-one men were tried for mutiny in one court-martial and given sentences of one to two years, to be followed by dismissal. In their final statement to the court, the accused men wrote that they believed the withdrawal of their names would have been “equivalent to an acknowledgment that the statements therein made were false.”52

  Was Cleary to blame for Taylor’s death? When he took the Army’s medical examination to qualify for serving in the frontier army, he squeaked through with a score of 795. The minimum passing score was 790; the maximum possible score, 1,070. Cleary achieved the minimum in anatomy, physiol
ogy, surgery, and the practice of medicine but failed general pathology and pathological anatomy (one category) and chemistry.53

  Although Cleary was quickly removed from Fort Stockton as a result of the upheaval, his career as an army doctor continued without pause. He was, thirty-three at the time of the Taylor incident and an assistant surgeon. In 1883 he was promoted to full surgeon with the rank of major. He retired in 1903 as a brigadier general and chief surgeon for the Department of Texas.54

  By 1879 six years had passed since the protest that had ended the military careers of twenty-one enlisted men. This time, the events that would make Fort Stockton notorious throughout the Department of Texas were taking place among the post’s officers.

  Two

  COURT-MARTIAL

  4

  THE PROSECUTION

  Two of the major figures in the Geddes court-martial came from Germany: Louis Henry Orleman and John Clous, the judge advocate. Was there a particular bond between Clous, the man responsible for presenting the Army’s case, and his plaintiff because of their common origin? Possibly, but the Army at the time was full of German immigrants.

  John Walter Clous came to the United States when he was eighteen and trained as a lawyer. His picture reveals an earnest countenance and a more carefully shaped mustache and goatee than many men of his era wore. At the time of the Geddes trial he was forty-two.

  Army personnel files often contain just an outline of a career: postings and promotions, requests for leave, and so on. For his forty-four-year service Clous’s large file reveals “aggressive ambition,” and more than a touch of the operator. An early recommendation described him accurately as “zealous and efficient in the performance of his duties—energetic, prompt, and capable in all trust confided to him, ambitious in his profession.”1 The words “zealous” and “efficient” often came to mind when superiors considered John Clous.