Prairie Imperialists. Katharine Bjork
army career—both in the West in the 1880s and 1890s and later in Cuba and the Philippines—was notable for the ethnographic work he carried out among the various peoples the U.S. Army sent him to police and superintend, to pacify and subjugate, and to recruit to aid the army in its work: Indians, Moros, and Cubans. The work had a clear military purpose and application, but it was also furthered by a dogged scholarly inclination. On the strength of his interest and proficiency in native languages and seeming affinity for “Indian ways,” seasoned frontier campaigners, including Generals Sheridan, Miles, Merritt, and Ruger, sought his advice and allowed him a degree of autonomy he relished—all while he was still a lieutenant of cavalry. When he was seconded to the Bureau of Ethnology to write a book on sign language, even Colonel John Wesley Powell deferred to his expertise in the subject. The work in military ethnography he undertook as a commander of Kiowa, Apache, and Comanche scouts in the 1880s and 1890s also provided the basis for the kind of diplomacy he pursued with other farther-flung “primitive peoples” on behalf of the United States.
As a student at West Point in the early 1870s, however, Scott showed few signs of the scholar he would become. Perhaps it was more the case that the curriculum offered a limited scope for the development of his particular scholarly potential. In Scott’s day, the West Point curriculum concentrated on engineering, law, ordnance, and gunnery. To this was added some instruction in drawing, mathematics, chemistry, and language studies (Spanish, French, and German). The predominant method of instruction was recitation. After their first year, cadets were ranked in classes according to their performance on the previous year’s exams, and attended recitations in the various subjects throughout the week.7 In the winter, after recitations were over, the cadets practiced boxing, fencing, and dancing with one another to improve their technique; in the summers they spent the time in outdoor drill and swimming in the river at night. Scott was a strong swimmer who once saved a classmate from drowning on a return swim across the Hudson.8
In his second year, Scott was caught hazing a first-year plebe and was suspended for it and ordered to join the next lower class. Although forbidden at West Point, the practice of hazing was a time-honored and well-entrenched tradition. Scott was sanctioned for ordering a new man to walk with his palms facing forward with pinky fingers on the crease of his pantaloons in compliance with the drill regulations, and then catching his wrist to enforce his oral orders in the matter. Although such hazing (and worse) was common at the academy, Scott became the only member of his class to be “sent down” for it.9
In late January of his fifth and final year, Scott wrote to his mother apologizing for having missed his customary weekly letter, noting that he had been “more pressed for time” than he had expected as a result of his examinations. The rest of the letter gave a run-down on exams and resulting rankings in various subjects. He reported poor performance in his law exam in which he had been confronted with a question on “General Orders No. 100,” which he had neglected to study, as he told his mother, because he had understood it would not be included on the exam. “Consequently, I didn’t do very well,” he wrote. The letter went on to detail his class standing in other exams: in Ordnance he had come thirty-seventh and had “lost about 9 files in Engineering.”10
One implication of his exam results, as Scott saw it, was that he was unlikely to attain a commission in a white regiment. Scott preferred a white regiment over a black, but above all he had his heart set on the cavalry. There were thirty five vacancies in white regiments, as he explained to his mother when she wrote to him in May expressing her concerns about his hopes for joining the Tenth Cavalry, one of the four African American regiments (two cavalry, two infantry) that had been organized following the Civil War. In apparent response to some strategies she had suggested—probably involving Uncle David—for securing a desirable place in a white regiment, he wrote, “The rest of your letter was just so much energy wasted. I shall come out 39 or 40 (of 48). So I must either take Nigger horse or Nig. foot & I infinitely prefer the horse.”11 While echoing the prejudice that prevailed among his classmates against serving with a black regiment, Scott tried to reassure his mother by telling her that he had spoken with several officers including Colonel Beaumont and Lieutenant Morton Stretch, one of his tactical officers, both of whom had served at posts with the black cavalry units, and that both had told him that “they [were] as good as any in the service.”12
When they were small boys growing up in Kentucky, Mary Hodge Scott had told her sons frightening stories of the slave uprisings of the previous century in Haiti and Santo Domingo. These cautionary tales communicated a widespread fear among whites that they were vulnerable to the same fate at the hands of their slaves unless they kept them in check. Mrs. Scott retained this antipathy toward blacks and was opposed to the idea of her son’s association with a colored regiment. Scott responded to her concerns by pointing out that he would not “have near as much to do with them personally as you would with a black cook.”13 In fact, the Hodge family’s servants tended to be mostly Irish, black servants in Princeton being “not quite the thing” among their social set.14
In his determination to have nothing to do personally with black troops, Scott was typical of his generation of white army officers. This attitude was reinforced by army policy and traditions at the academy. The post–Civil War army was thoroughly racially segregated and remained so until 1948. Men of African descent—both enslaved and free—had fought in all the nation’s wars, of course, but they had been accepted by the white officer corps and the country’s leaders only reluctantly and never fully integrated into the overall structure of the army. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, blacks responded to the call for volunteers in large numbers, rushing to recruiting stations. Initially, the idea of black troops was rejected by both the civilian and military leadership. It took two years of petitioning Congress, the president, and municipal governments as well as—and perhaps more significantly—the government’s realization of its need for more manpower, to reverse the idea, even in the North, that the war should be prosecuted by whites only. The change in policy was motivated not by idealism, “but rather by the dictates of a grueling war,” according to one historian.15 In the absence of black soldiers, many more white Union soldiers would die. “Since the Confederates were going to kill a great many more Union soldiers before the war was over, a good many white men would escape death if a considerable percentage of those soldiers were colored.”16
Even when the decision to incorporate black troops into the war effort was reached, special permission was required from the War Department or Congress for those states that wished to organize volunteer Negro regiments. Instead of being inducted through established channels, a special Bureau for Colored Troops was set up to organize separate United States Colored Troops. In contrast to the Revolutionary War, when blacks had been scattered throughout the ranks, very few African Americans served in mixed units in the Union army. Instead, 178,985 men—mostly infantry—served in separate regiments, and they were paid less than white soldiers.17
In spite of their marginalization, the contributions of black soldiers in the Civil War were important in furthering claims for fuller civil and political rights. In the reorganization of the army that followed the war, Negro regiments were established by Congress for the first time in the nation’s history. Initially, there were six all-black units—the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry and the Thirty-Eighth, Thirty-Ninth, Fortieth, and Forty-First Infantry. These were consolidated a year or so later into two infantry and two cavalry regiments.18 Confined to the West and segregated in the regiments in which they served following the Civil War, black soldiers whose remains were sent back east were also buried in segregated sections on the fringes of Arlington National Cemetery.19
During the 1870s, several young African Americans won appointments to West Point. Scott’s time at the military academy overlapped with three of them: James Smith, Johnson Whittacker, and Henry O. Flipper. Henry Flipper graduated the year after Scott, becoming the first African American to graduate. Upon graduation he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Tenth Cavalry “Buffalo Soldiers,” the same regiment Scott had written to his mother about joining during his final year.
The presence of black cadets at the country’s foremost military academy challenged the “fortified embattlement of officer and color caste” that West Point represented.20