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Camp Edwards, Cape Cod’s World War II City

One year before Pearl Harbor, many Americans thought the United States would never enter World War II. They might have thought otherwise had they visited Camp Edwards, where workers toiled at a blistering pace to build a city for 36,000 soldiers.

The Army brass, like many others, had been slow to realize war was coming. Or that it would have to shelter and train millions of new soldiers. Only when Hitler’s armies marched into Paris in June of 1940 did the Army put its building program into full gear. It succeeded, in part, because of one man, Brig. Gen. Charles Hartman, and one army camp – Camp Edwards, at the western end of Cape Cod.

Soldiers training at Camp Edwards om 1942.

It had taken three centuries for the Cape to develop into 15 towns with 37,295 people in them. The Army would nearly double its population in 125 days. Contractors would build 1,406 structures, including barracks, mess halls and officers quarters – along with 13 chapels and 217 recreation buildings. Workers at their busiest put up 30 buildings a day.

As one of the first of 159 military installations built for World War II, Camp Edwards was the proving ground for the construction of nearly every other army camp. New construction techniques were developed amid the scrub pine and sand. At Camp Edwards, contractors started using standardized plans, prefabricated units and assembly line construction.

After the war, large developers used the methods adopted at Camp Edwards to build new suburbs. Many G.I.s returning from war would buy a home in a new suburban development built in much the same way their old barracks had been built.

Charles Hartman

In 1941, Sen. Harry Truman led a committee investigating the military’s hasty build-up for the war. He singled out Brig. Gen. Charles Hartman, who had headed the Construction Division of the Quartermaster Corps in the crucial months before the United States entered World War II.

“You seem to have been the only man in the War Department dealing with construction matters that at least contemplated a plan for the future,” Truman said.

Brig. Gen. Charles Hartman

Hartman, a West Point graduate and Harvard MBA, was a colonel in the Quartermaster Corps when he began working on modern designs for military installations. The Army at the time had plans from World War I called the Series 600 cantonment. They included drawings for crude barracks heated with stoves, outbuildings and administrative quarters.

Hartman saw problems. Standard barracks, for example, were designed for 250 men. In a fire, many of them wouldn’t get out. The plans also depended on lengths of lumber no longer available.

Series 700 Cantonment

So he began updating the drawings, called Series 700, in 1934. He had to do it on the side with just a few men.

“But we had no money, and whatever money and men we could devote to the job had to come out of anything we could get — a sideline rather than a fixed job,” he later told Truman’s committee.

In 1938,as Hitler rose to power, money finally became available. So Hartman found a warehouse and filled it with 80 architects and draftsmen. They designed everything an army camp would need, from barracks to bakeries.

Basketball courts at Camp Edwards

They didn’t know why they were doing it. After the senseless carnage of World War I, most Americans wanted to stay out of European wars. Hartman’s boss, Gen. Owen Seaman, wouldn’t approve the plans.

“I don’t think myself or anybody else ever contemplated we would have the army that we have now … Or that we would have a war,” Seaman said in 1941.

The drawings for the 700 series cantonments remained in draft form, unapproved, unused. Hartman then left for California on another assignment.

Hitler

On Sept. 1, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland. President Roosevelt issued an order adding 27,000 men to the army and 100,000 to the National Guard. The War Department didn’t really come up with a plan to put them anywhere, other than in tents on old fairgrounds. Then , the brass figured, they could train in Europe. They didn’t reckon with Hitler.

In April 1940 German troops occupied Denmark and Norway.

In June, France fell. England prepared for an invasion. And America finally began planning for war.

German soldiers march along the Champs Elysees, June 14, 1940

On June 26, 1940, four days after France surrendered, Congress expanded the army again to 375,000 men. In August, it federalized the National Guard. Then in September it created the first peacetime draft by passing the Selective Service Act.

Housing Shortage

Hitler’s occupation of Europe caught the Army flat-footed. Within U.S. borders, the Army only had space for 300,000. Within nine months it would need to shelter and train more than a million soldiers. That number quickly increased – to 2 million — and then, by 1942, 8 million.

Draftees would start showing up in two months, but plans to put them in tents did not fly. The American people had made it clear that their boys needed to be treated well if they were going off to fight a war. Congress had bowed to that public pressure. The Selective Service Act ordered that no soldier could be drafted until the government had provided “such shelter, sanitary facilities, water supplies, heating and lighting arrangements … as may be determined … to be essential to public and personal health.”

A Series 700 barracks at Camp Edwards. 100,000 others were built.

Charles Hartman returned to head the Construction Division in March of 1940 as Seaman’s replacement. He discovered some of the Series 700 plans had been modified and some destroyed. There were no layouts for the hundreds of camps that would soon be built. So he quickly assembled a group of draftsmen to redraw plans for over 300 kinds of buildings.

Meanwhile, he anxiously waited for Congress to appropriate the funds to start building. That didn’t happen until September of 1940.

Alma Mater

In the middle of the war, an Australian newspaper described the “graduates” of Camp Edwards.

“Ack-Ack crews on Guadalcanal, “seahorses” of the Army’s Engineer Amphibian Command in North Africa, submarine-hunting pilots over the North Atlantic and even cooks in Port Ethan Allen, Vt., call Camp Edwards, New England’s largest military establishment, their ‘alma mater’,” the story read.

But in the fall of 1940, Camp Edwards was little more than a rustic National Guard facility called the Massachusetts Military Reservation. It had been chosen because it was flat, well-drained, cheap, near transportation and a population center, and it had a good water supply.

During the Great Depression, the Works Progress Administration had built 63 buildings and two 500-foot grass runways, called Otis Field.

But as Camp Edwards it would need 1,406 structures, including 438 barracks, 184 mess halls, 54 officer quarters, 28 storage buildings and 82 hospital units. They would accommodate 1,674 officers and 30,159 enlisted men, including a medical battalion and a signal battalion.

One feature of Camp Edwards and all the army camps would persist after the war: segregation. The Army built separate accommodations for two quartermaster truck companies of “colored” troops at Camp Edwards.

Building Camp Edwards

On Sept. 12, 1940, three days after federal money became available, construction began. The site hadn’t even been laid out yet, and no one had ever actually used Hartman’s Series 700 designs.

The Army hired the Charles Main architect-engineering firm of Boston and Walsh Construction of New York. Eighty-one field architects worked frantically – laying out corners and staking out footings — to keep one step ahead of the builders.

Series 700 buildings

Another 300 architect-engineers adapted 600 drawings to the site, making as few revisions as possible and then handing them over to Walsh. Then Walsh’s draughtsmen added specifications for things like footings, framing, heating and electrical. Those documents were checked and then sent to Main’s drafting department, which came up with blueprints the construction foremen could use.

The blueprints worked so well that 50 copies were made and sent to the other Army camps under construction.

Concrete Poured

Walsh began pouring concrete on Sept. 18, 1940, six days after signing the contract.

A rail spur was built from Falmouth to bring a staggering amount of building materials: 63 million board feet of lumber, 5 million square feet of fiber board and 26,000 kegs of nails.

The Army’s low wages didn’t attract enough skilled carpenters. By Sept. 28, Walsh had hired 930 carpenters – but needed as many as another 1,500. So the contractor divided up the construction crews into two primary groups. One worked on substructure and one worked on superstructure. Walsh divided those groups into 30 subgroups, each headed by a superintendent. Those subgroups were further divided into 15-man work crews, each with its own motor pool and timekeeper. Every crew did one thing – pouring foundations or framing the deck or framing the walls and so forth. Prefabricated doors and windows arrived by train.

Peacetime Army

On Nov. 15, 1940, a wire service reported more than 12,000 workers were putting Camp Edwards in shape for the new peacetime army. Thousands more would join. To manage that enormous workforce required another innovation: a central office handled payroll. Armored cars drove to the construction sites to distribute paychecks. At peak construction, armored cars delivered 18,593 paychecks.

Nearly a year before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the 68th Coastal Artillery arrived at Camp Edwards. Then on Dec. 19, 1940, the first batch of draftees arrived. In January came the Yankee Division of the Massachusetts National Guard.

Construction continued after the soldiers came. Contractors poured concrete for the runway in 1942 and built facilities for the Army Air Corps.

Amphibious Training

Camp Edwards added an Amphibian Training Center after the military drew up plans to invade North Africa in December 1942. Army contractors then built satellite camps for training amphibious assault units along the Cape’s beaches. In the summer of 1942, soldiers practiced invading Wellfleet, Cotuit, Osterville, Martha’s Vineyard and Washburn Island in Falmouth. They also tested the first seasickness pill.

American troops launching an amphibious assault on North Africa.

With the invasion of Africa came German and Italian prisoners. To house them, the Army built a camp for 2,000 POWs at the southern end of the runway. Soon members of Rommel’s Afrika Korps went to work harvesting cranberries, building Sandwich Road in Bourne and cleaning up trees blown down by the hurricane of 1944.

There was still more building to be done. The Army built a convalescent hospital at Camp Edwards for wounded soldiers. Some 2,500 nurses who had joined the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps trained there.

To train soldiers for urban combat during the invasion of Europe, the Army built a mock German village within Camp Edwards. Called Deutschedorf, three main streets were lined with Gestapo headquarters, a beer garden, a restaurant, houses and shops. Most had only three sides, with details like flowerboxes and birdhouses to add authenticity.

And still there was more. Camp Edwards built a processing center for soldiers that had gone AWOL. Then it built a processing center for soldiers returning from war. By 1944, Camp Edwards had capacity for 1,945 officers and 34,108 enlisted personnel.

Influence of Camp Edwards

In the late 1980s, the Department of Defense and the National Park Service undertook a history of the U.S. Army’s mobilization effort during World War II.

In a case study of Camp Edwards, author Keith Landreth called it one of the most well-organized and resourceful programs of the mobilization effort.

“Innovative techniques … were all developed at Camp Edwards and all served to enhance and facilitate efficiency and speed in construction,” he wrote.

Authors of the overall study concluded that the Army’s camp structures represented a building technology that would soon sweep the country.

Aerial view of Levittown, Pa., in 1959.

“In the push for speed in the mobilization construction a variety of construction techniques were developed that would soon have mass application,” they wrote.

“From a moribund depression-era construction industry rose a national effort that not only met the demands of the war, but changed forever many design and construction practices and techniques,” the authors wrote. “The effect of the mobilization program can still be seen across American, particularly in the construction of residential developments.”

Aftermath

Camp Edwards was designed to be temporary, and much of it is gone now. The Army deactivated it after World War II. It got busy again when the Korean War broke out.

Collapsed buildings at Camp Edwards

The Air Force then took it over and it evolved into Otis Air Force Base. Closed, then reopened, it is now Joint Base Cape Cod. These days it provides training for the Massachusetts Army and Air National Guard and facilities for the U.S. Coast Guard.

Charles Hartman was hospitalized in December 1940 and soon retired from the Army. He died on Feb. 14, 1962. He belongs to the Quartermaster Hall of Fame.

Images: German troops marching in Paris By Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1994-036-09A / CC-BY-SA, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5483600. Photos of Camp Edwards courtesy Library of Congress. This story updated in 2022.

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The War of 1812 and How To Win When Outnumbered: Perspective

The past is a foreign country. Once upon a time I drove up through Maine and across the border into the wilds of Canada to take part in a bicentennial War of 1812 conference at the University of New Brunswick in Saint John. The event was great fun, in part because it was surreal to hear people who mainly look and talk like you refer to you as The Other, a once and—perhaps—future foe.

Old Ironsides

It’s hard to imagine what happened back then. For example, British Loyalists who fled the United States after the Revolution stormed back across the border to sack Bangor, Maine. U.S. Army forces burned York, which is now Toronto. Britain’s Royal Navy blockaded the East Coast, shutting down crucial seaports like Boston and Newport. Redcoats landed in the Chesapeake Bay and burned the executive mansion, which we now know as the White House.

In our lifetimes the United States has always been top dog in the world. Canada has always been a close friend. And we have always enjoyed a “special relationship” with Great Britain. But it wasn’t always that way.

War of 1812 Redux

I encountered the War of 1812 again in 2015, when I had the privilege to deliver bicentennial remarks at the Charlestown Navy Yard to commemorate the last battle of USS Constitution, when our nation’s most venerated sail frigate defeated two British warships, HMS Cyane and Levant. The story of Constitution’s 1815 “dual victory” is an inspiring one. It shows that ship crews can overcome certain timeless difficulties of naval war through seamanship, gunnery, and sheer entrepreneurship. To the extent that we remember the War of 1812, we tend to remember it as a victory. That’s because the U.S. Navy won a series of one-on-one victories over the Royal Navy during the early going.

Visit Constitution today and the tour guides will tell you the vessel is Boston’s only undefeated sports team, at 33-0! In fact, Royal Navy ships took to cruising in squadrons to avoid being outgunned by 44-gun frigates like Constitution and their excellent crews.

The capture of the Cyane and Levant.

Constitution skipper Capt. Charles Stewart defeated Cyane and Levant one by one rather than blast away at them at the same time. Defeating one fraction of an enemy force, then turning to defeat the other fraction, is a timeless way to prevail when you’re outnumbered. Captain Stewart maneuvered his ship skillfully while taking advantage of a U.S. Navy technical advantage. Namely, American guns had longer range than the British navy’s. British captains liked to get close and blaze away—much as we saw Captain Jack Aubrey, a.k.a. Russell Crowe, do in Master and Commander, the wonderful naval epic that appeared in 2003. Stewart capitalized on that British preference and was able to hurt the British ships at a distance.

Top Gun

Stewart was able to maneuver Constitution to avoid being raked across the bow and stern, where wooden warships were most vulnerable. Instead he crossed ahead of and behind his opponents, raking them from ahead and astern. In one instance he ordered Constitution’s topsails taken aback—taking all way off the ship in a hurry so he could prevent Levant from crossing astern and engage from a position of advantage. The maneuver was reminiscent of Top Gun, when Maverick and Goose hit the brakes so the Soviet MiG will “fly right by” and appear in Mav’s gunsight. The contestant that does something unexpected and unorthodox gains a tactical advantage.

Being nimble and adaptive helps as well. Constitution suffered damage to her mainmast while pursuing the foe, compelling Stewart to order makeshift repairs and change up his tactics on the fly. He improvised and overcame. Both enemy ships struck their colors after a couple of hours of battle.

Theodore Roosevelt

That’s a rousing story, but the bigger picture is not so uplifting. In fact, both Theodore Roosevelt, a one-time assistant secretary of the navy and later a great navy president, and Alfred Thayer Mahan, the second president of the Naval War College in Newport, R.I., and probably the most influential naval historian ever, wrote histories of the War of 1812 precisely to debunk the popular legend that a plucky young United States had thrashed the preeminent sea power of the age. When remembering the War of 1812, no one should wave the foamy We’re Number One finger the way New England fans do in good years.

TR’s ‘Naval War of 1812’

TR wrote his history of the Naval War of 1812 while a senior at Harvard during the 1880s. It remains in print to this day. Mahan followed up with his own chronicle in 1905. For them the War of 1812 wasn’t a parable showing what America ought to do when facing a war at sea; it was a parable about what not to do. They pointed out that the U.S. Navy had success in the early going because the Royal Navy and British Army were fighting Napoleon in Europe. Britain could spare only a small fraction of its military and naval power for a sideshow here in the New World.

Battle of San Domingo, 1806 naval engagement in the Napoleonic Wars

By 1814, when the Napoleonic Wars were winding down, it could send much more of the Royal Navy’s fleet. After that the United States saw its navy and its merchant fleet—and thus most of its economy—shut down by an overpowering British blockade. American frigates like Constitution had a hard time even getting out to sea. The United States had unwisely failed to build a battle fleet in peacetime. Americans improvised a navy at the outbreak of war and talked themselves into believing they had won, on the cheap, with that makeshift navy.

No More Blockades

Not so, said Roosevelt and Mahan. They implored Congress, presidential administrations, and the American people to construct a modern battle fleet in peacetime so that no hostile power could again blockade U.S. shores in wartime. The U.S. Navy didn’t need to be a “navy second to none”—that came much later, during World War I—but it did need to be big and strong enough to be the master of the western Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Caribbean Sea.

A modest fleet of 74-gun capital ships—the aircraft carriers or battleships of their day—could control waters here in the Western Hemisphere, American home turf. The United States didn’t need to outbuild Great Britain or anyone else. Britain presided over an empire on which the sun never set, and had lots of demands on its navy. All the United States needed was enough to handle whatever the British were likely to send to the New World.

A Pick-up Navy Won’t Do

So the two historians concluded that America didn’t need to bankrupt itself maintaining a navy—but it did need to invest enough to safeguard its coastlines, and thus the maritime trade that flowed through seaports like Boston and Newport. A pick-up navy will not suffice.

Lord Palmerston

Some good news comes out of the War of 1812 to go with the bad. British prime minister Lord Palmerston once declared that nations have no permanent allies, only permanent interests. That may be true, but the former members of the British Empire—the United States, Canada, Australia, India, and Britain itself—come awfully close to being permanent friends and allies. English-speaking alliances certainly date to World War II, seventy-five years ago. They arguably date to 1917, when the United States joined the Allied Powers to beat imperial Germany in World War I.

John Quincy Adams by George Peter Alexander Healy

And these nations have been able to work together on matters of common purpose for even longer than that. Animosity lingered for awhile after the War of 1812, but not for long. For instance, President James Monroe’s 1823 message to Congress—the same document that announced the Monroe Doctrine, demanding that Europeans keep their hands off Latin American republics that had won their independence—also reported that the U.S. Navy and Royal Navy were jointly patrolling the Caribbean Sea to quash the slave trade. (The Monroe Doctrine was really the handiwork of Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, another eminent New Englander.) Monroe’s message came just eight years after the Peace of Ghent, which brought the War of 1812 to a close.

Lady Thatcher

Margaret Thatcher, one of Britain’s longest-serving prime ministers, spoke at Tufts University in Medford, Mass., in 1997. Lady Thatcher rued the “rough patch” Britain went through during the American Revolution and the War of 1812. Fortunately, the erstwhile combatants soon smoothed out that rough patch.

Margaret Thatcher visiting the Kennedy Space Center in 2001.

The past may be a foreign country, but exploring it shows that peoples need not remain captive to old enmities.

The author of this story, James Holmes, Ph.D., is the J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I. He is the author of two books, Maritime Strategy and Red Star Over the Pacific. You can read his blog, The Naval Diplomat, here. This story was updated in 2022.

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The Ladies of Gray, Maine, Bury an Unknown Confederate Soldier

The Ladies of Gray had good reason to despise the Confederacy and its people. The small Maine town sent 200 of its sons—more than a tenth of its population–to fight for the Union in the Civil War. There are 178 Civil war veterans resting in peace at the Gray Village Cemetery.

Maine sent proportionately more men to serve in the Union forces than any other state. Gray claimed to have sent more men per capita than any other town in Maine.

But, in a foreshadowing of Memorial Day ceremonies that started after the war, the Ladies of Gray showed compassion and forgiveness for the Confederate soldier who arrived in their midst.

Intersection of Greenleaf and Brown in Gray.

Ladies of Gray

Gray at the outbreak of the Civil War had about 1,700 residents and a woolen mill, the first in America powered by water. The town also had sawmills, a brickyard and prosperous farms.

The son of a prominent Gray family, Charles H. Colley, enlisted in the 10th Maine Infantry Regiment on Oct. 4, 1861.

On Aug. 9, 1862, Sgt. Colley was wounded in the knee at the Battle of Cedar Mountain in Culpeper, Va. Promoted to second lieutenant, the 29-year-old died of septicemia on September 20 in a hospital in Washington, D.C.

The Battle of Cedar Mountain by Currier & Ives.

When notified of his death, his family asked to have his body sent home to Gray. During the war, funeral directors loitered around the hospitals, offering to embalm the dead—for a price, of course. Colley’s grieving mother Sally arranged to have her son’s body embalmed and shipped by rail back to Gray.

When the plain, lead-lined casket arrived, someone—probably a family member—opened the lid. Charles Colley wasn’t in it. Instead, an unidentified Confederate soldier dressed in his gray uniform lay in the pine box.

They had no place to return the body. And so the Ladies of Gray had the unknown Confederate soldier buried in the Gray Village Cemetery. After the war, they raised enough money for a headstone on his final resting place. It reads,

“Stranger

A Soldier of the late war died 1862.”

Memorial Day

Ladies all over the country were doing something similar. People on both sides began to long for reconciliation after the agony and bloodshed of the war. The women’s groups began to act on that impulse.

The Ladies of Gray raised money for this headstone of a Stranger.

In Columbus, Miss., a women’s memorial association visited the local cemetery on April 25, 1866. They put flowers on the graves of Confederate soldiers who died at Shiloh. Nearby were the bare graves of Union soldiers who had also died at Shiloh. That disturbed the ladies of Columbus, so they put some of their flowers on those tombs.

That act of kindness, so similar to that of the Ladies of Gray, inspired Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune to publish an editorial about it. The Atlantic Monthly also published a poem called “The Blue and the Gray” by Francis Miles Finch.

Women’s groups all over the country began decorating the graves of the war dead with flowers. Today, at least 25 towns claim credit as the birthplace of Memorial Day.

The first national Memorial Day – then called Decoration Day – happened on May 30, 1868. Gen John Logan, commander in chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, issued an order “for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet churchyard in the land.”

A few days later, Washington officials, including Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, presided over a national ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery. From then until 1871, the United States celebrated May 30 as Decoration Day.

In 1971, the federal government changed Decoration Day to Memorial Day, to be held on the last Monday in May.

Charles H. Colley

Perhaps the Ladies of Gray still have some work to do. Charles H. Colley’s family asked the Army to send them the right body. They may not have looked inside that time.

The Gray Village Cemetery.

In the Gray Village Cemetery lies a soldier with the headstone, Charles H. Colley. According to the inscription, he was ‘among the first to rally in defense of his Country.’

But it t appears the Army failed. According to War Department records, Charles H. Colley is still buried in a cemetery in Alexandria, Va., that preceded Arlington.

So is there a second unknown soldier in Gray, Maine?

Image of the Stranger’s headstone By DetroitWheels74 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=77620758. Image of Gray Village Cemetery By RootsLilla – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=42261992. With thanks to Confederates in the Attic (and Maine cemeteries, too) from Maine at War by Brian Swartz. This story was updated in 2023.

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Buffalo Soldiers Come Out to Vermont

In July of 1909, 750 African-American men known as Buffalo soldiers arrived at Fort Ethan Allen in Colchester, Vt., near the small city of Burlington. Greater Burlington had a population of 25,000. Of those, only 117 people were black.

In addition, the Buffalo soldiers brought with them their wives, children and camp followers, which increased the number of African Americans to about 1,500 in the Burlington area.

Historian David Work called it ‘demographic shock.’

And despite Vermont’s reputation for racial tolerance, Burlington offered a decidedly mixed welcome to the Buffalo soldiers.

Buffalo Soldiers

Buffalo soldiers were all-black units – except for officers – formed after the Civil War. The 10th Cavalry Regiment was one of six regiments, later reduced to four.

Native Americans on the frontier gave them their name. Acccording to various sources, their curly hair reminded the Indians of the fur on top of the buffalo heads. The soldiers took the name as a compliment.

Buffalo soldiers in 1899

The 10^th trained as a combat unit and fought in the Indian wars in the West, the Philippine-American War and the Spanish-American War. During the latter they had charged up San Juan Hill with Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. Buffalo soldiers in general had a reputation for discipline and valor.

The 10^th cavalry spent 1907-1909 in the Philippines, and returned to New York City by ship. Cheering crowds of New Yorkers, both black and white, greeted the Buffalo soldiers, even giving them a ticker tape parade

But soon enough they got a taste of the treatment that white Americans doled out to the Buffalo soldiers when stationed throughout the South and West.

Brownsville Affair

The Brownsville affair of 1906 tainted all Buffalo soldiers. The 25^th Infantry Regiment, a black unit, was stationed in the segregated town of Brownsville, Texas. When a white bartender was shot and killed, the townspeople blamed the soldiers. Though their commanding officer swore they’d been inside the barracks all night, white residents planted evidence against them.

President Theodore Roosevelt ordered all 167 men of the regiment dishonorably discharged. They weren’t exonerated until 1972.

Vermont

The 10th Cavalry Regiment began to arrive in Colchester on July 28, 1909, replacing an all-white unit at the fort.

The Rutland Daily Herald editor called them a ‘menace.’ The editor of the Burlington Free Press wrote of objections to the presence of such a large body of African Americans. Several racial incidents marred their first arrivals. One bank refused to cash a pay vouchers. Some white people left restaurants when the soldiers entered, and some even insisted on segregating the trolley cars.

Other newspapers in both the north and south took note of the animosity toward the soldiers.

That sparked a backlash among other Burlington-area residents, who wanted to maintain Vermont’s reputation for tolerance. Burlington had been a hotbed of abolitionism, and Vermont had outlawed slavery during its 14 years as a republic.

The president of the streetcar company refused to segregate the cars because the famous Tenth would cause no trouble, he said. A white army officer said he expected the Tenth Cavalry to give the people of Burlington a lesson in patriotism.

In the end, the Buffalo soldiers won over the city. The Bennington Evening Banner reported the 10th proved ‘a happy surprise.’

“They haven’t shot up the town yet, they don’t mob the trolley cars and are civil and courteous to both men and women,” reported the newspaper.

Four Years

David Work described the 10th as ‘experienced, disciplined, relatively well education, professional soldiers…with tremendous unit pride.’

Eventually Vermonters recognized those qualities.

A local club held a dinner dance for the noncommissioned officers. The city also gave them a big send off when they left for New York to conduct maneuvers.

Officers Row at Fort Ethan Allen around the turn of the century.

For the soldiers, the four-year stay in Vermont was luxurious compared to the frontier or the tropics. They had an indoor riding hall, warm barracks and wholesome food. They could even attend college. It was way better than building their own barracks, eating military field rations and suffering tropical fevers—not to mention combat. They also had plenty of time to play baseball in the summer and basketball in the winter.

Their baseball team played the University of Vermont and St. Michael’s to large crowds. They lost narrowly to a professional Negro League team, the Cuban Stars.

In addition to sports, the Buffalo soldiers provided plenty of entertainment to the people of Burlington. They let the public watch their daily mounted drills at the fort. The ban played public concerts and they even raised money for the public library. Once a week they held a parade. They also staged a production of the Merchant of Venice, and in the winter held a Wild West Show in the riding hall. The soldiers even sponsored a public showing of a boxing film about Joe Gans-Battling Nelson.

10th Cavalrymen taken prisoner in Mexico in 1916..

Departure

In 1913, the Buffalo soldiers transferred to Fort Huachuca in Arizona because of rising tensions along the Mexican border.

They left behind a small African-American community in Burlington, one that would later appear in The Negro Motorist Green Book. Some settled in Winooski and actively supported the Winooski Methodist Episcopal Church.

The 10^th stayed in Arizona for 18 years. Then in 1931, the government disbanded the Buffalo soldiers’ units.

In 2009, descendants of the Tenth Cavalry Regiment commemorated the 100^th anniversary of their arrival in Vermont with a museum display, a concert and a celebration. With thanks to The Buffalo Soldiers in Vermont, 1909–1913, by David Work from the Vermont History Journal. This story was updated in 2023.

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Oliver Otis Howard, The Mainer Who Founded Howard University

Gen. Oliver Otis Howard thought he was fighting the Civil War to preserve the Union, not to free any slaves.

Howard had earned the nickname of “the Christian General” for his deep, overbearing piety. His men didn’t always appreciate his hectoring them about the Ten Commandments or the evils of booze.

His moral certainty led him to great achievements and to terrible deeds. He founded Howard University, which educated 150,000 freed slaves. But he later led a massacre of women and children belonging to the Nez Perce tribe because they wouldn’t move to a reservation.

Oliver Otis Howard by Matthew Brady

But sometimes Oliver Otis Howard couldn’t rely on his moral compass. During the Civil War, he faced a puzzling dilemma: Should he disobey orders and allow a fugitive from slavery her freedom?

Oliver Otis Howard

Born in Leeds, Maine, on Nov. 8, 1830, his mother sent him away to live with relatives after his father died when he was very young. He graduated from Bowdoin College at 19, and went on to West Point. A diligent student, he ranked fourth in a class of 46.

In 1856, he was a lonely young soldier stationed in Florida, far from his wife and baby boy. Seeking comfort, he attended a Methodist prayer meeting and experienced a spiritual awakening. He felt a “new well spring within me, a joy, a peace & a trusting spirit.” He sensed God had destined him for great things.

His military career, like the rest of his life, veered from highlight to lowlight. He won the Medal of Honor for leading a charge at the Battle of Fair Oaks, which cost him his right arm. But he suffered ignominious defeats at Chancellorship and Gettysburg. His men started calling him “Uh-Oh” Howard.

Freedmen’s Bureau

After the Civil War he led the Freedmen’s Bureau, a Reconstruction program that helped former slaves. The Bureau had hundreds of agents in the South distributing food and medicine and finding jobs and schooling for the new citizens.

Howard issued an order to divide up land from confiscated plantations and give it to the people who’d worked them as slaves. But while he vacationed in Maine, President Andrew Johnson reversed his order. In the end, anyone who’d received the promised 40 acres and a mule had to give them back.

Johnson viewed Oliver Otis Howard as a fanatic, and he tried to stymie him at every turn. Howard eventually concluded southerners were still fighting the Civil War and wouldn’t change their attitudes. So he turned his energies to education, and he established a school that bears his name today – Howard University. He served as president from 1869-1874.

Howard University

Howard explained the importance of Howard University in his 1908 autobiography. In the South, white people who opposed educating black people wouldn’t permit any room or building for use as a school. From 1865-67, mobs all over the South burned schools and churches used as schools. They flogged teachers and drove them away. A number of times, they murdered them.

Howard University started on three acres in Washington, D.C. Classes began in 1867 with five students, all daughters of the school’s white founders. Though it emphasized teacher training, Howard added a law school, a medical school and a seminary under its first president.

Howard University, 1868

Eventually, black students and faculty would outnumber whites, and Howard today produces more black doctorates than any other university. Alumni include Toni Morrison, Andrew Young, Kamala Harris and Thurgood Marshall.

Founders library at Howard University

Enemies

Oliver Otis Howard’s efforts on behalf of the former slaves earned him plenty of enemies, and they got him charged with corruption in running the Freedmen’s Bureau. After years of litigation the courts exonerated him, but he nearly went bankrupt paying his lawyers. And in 1872, Congress abolished the Freedmen’s Bureau.

For his next act, he moved west to kick Indians off their land. He commanded the Department of the Columbia from Fort Vancouver in Washington Territory. His men pursued and slaughtered Nez Perce Indians who refused to move to a reservation.

Chief Joseph led the Nez Perce resistance to Howard’s campaign to remove them from their land.

In Howard’s mind, he tried to do for the Indians what he had tried to do for freed slaves. He was giving them land on which they could lead good Christian lives, only they refused. Finally corralled into a reservation in Oklahoma, many died of disease.

Oliver Otis Howard at Governors Island in 1893.

Howard finally commanded the Atlantic Military Division at Fort Columbus on Governors Island in New York before retiring in 1894 as a major general. Then in 1896 he founded Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, Tenn., to educate “mountain whites.”

He died in 1909 in Burlington, Vt., on Oct. 26, 1909. He lies buried in Lakeview Cemetery.

Greatly Puzzled

How did Oliver Otis Howard’s moral compass swing so wildly from educating freed slaves to slaughtering Indians?

One incident early in his career illuminates his thought process. He prided himself on following orders, and had difficulty resolving the moral dilemma that created.

Just after the first Battle of Bull Run in 1861, the 30-year-old Oliver Otis Howard commanded a brigade. He and his men were garrisoned on a farm just west of Alexandria, Va.

First Battle of Bull Run

Abraham Lincoln aimed to quell the southern rebellion without touching slavery. He felt he had to, otherwise the loyal border states might also rebel. Military commanders were to return escaped slaves to their owners.

Howard was entertaining visitors from Waterville, Maine, when a picket guard brought a frightened young woman to him. He described her as “tall straight, healthful and active,” with a boy of about two years old in her arms.

He saw the woman’s terror, and reassured her. In his autobiography, he recounted the incident.

“What do you wish?” I asked. “Sir, I’m a slave woman, and this here’s my child. Let me and my child go free!”

Property?

Meanwhile, a poorly dressed, shrill, sallow white woman was ushered in. “That there woman is my slave,” she said. “I have always treated her well, and here she is. She has run off. Now, sir, you must send her back to me, for she is mine. She and the boy, they’re my property.”

I found myself under most stringent orders not to harbor any slave property. The white woman, seeing my embarrassment, became more and more excited, and soon began to use abusive language, directed partially to me, but mainly to her slave.

The woman kept pressing her child to her breast and with her large eyes filled with tears continued to look toward me, repeating: “Oh! my child, my child!”

Howard realized he had to decide the case. He turned to the white woman and said, “There’s your property, take it!” She replied, “But I can’t take it. She’s stronger than I! You must give me a guard.”

That was too much for Howard. He said, “No, no, I will not give you a guard. I will never use bayonets to drive a poor girl and child into bondage.”

Both women went away, and the young fugitive found her way to Washington, D.C., and to freedom. His guests from Maine, ardent abolitionists, chastised him for his hesitation.

What to do with enslaved people presented a quandary until another New Englander, Benjamin Butler, declared them “contraband of war.”

Read Oliver Otis Howard’s account of the incident in his autobiography here. Image of Howard University PD-US, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13705310. Founders Library By Derek E. Morton – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=74173648. This story was updated in 2023.

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William Apess Leads the Bloodless Mashpee Revolt of 1833

William Apess was the perfect person to lead the nonviolent Mashpee Revolt of 1833, an uprising against the Massachusetts government. The commonwealth had controlled the tribe’s lands, but not to the tribe’s benefit.

William Apess (from his autobiography)

Apess (who occasionally spelled his name Apes) was born in 1798 in Colrain, Mass., of Pequot descent. He had a tumultuous family life. His abusive grandmother raised him until the age of five. He was then removed from the home and placed with the Furman family as an indentured servant.

Apess worked for the head of the Furman household as a cooper, and the Furman family saw to it he had six years of schooling.

Despite his kind treatment by the Furmans, Apess’ childhood was a mixed bag. He moved on from the Furman family to live with a Connecticut judge. Later he worked as a household servant for a retired general. The Furmans were Baptists, his later homes Presbyterian, and Apess chafed at the rote repetition of prayers.

Methodism

Frustrated by his indentureship, Furman ran off and joined the army at 15. Later he worked as a laborer in upstate New York. All the while, he grew closer to Methodism. He attended camp revivals, and found inspiration in the spontaneity and fervor of the services. The Methodist meetings were open to all races, an additional appeal.

Apess also wrestled with his own demons. He had a mischievous side and liked to drink, a weakness he worked to control. With the encouragement of friends, he took up public speaking and began ‘exhorting’ at church services. He grew into a full-blown preacher, much in demand.

A Methodist revival meeting around 1839

A Son of the Forest

In 1829, now in his early 30s, Apess published his autobiography: A Son of the Forest. It paints a picture of a matured preacher, and one sensitive to injustice. He talks about the elders in the church hierarchy who placed barriers in his way. And he takes umbrage that the army never paid bonuses promised to soldiers, himself included.

He also analyzes his own upbringing. For example, he writes, he supposes the reader will say, “What savage creatures my grandparents were to treat unoffending or helpless children in this manner.”

But, he writes, that treatment had a cause: the whites.

…[B]ecause they introduced among my countrymen ardent spirits; seduced them into a love for it, and when under its baleful influence, wronged them out of their lawful possessions — that land where reposed the ashes of their sires.

Not only that, he wrote,

…[B]ut they committed violence of the most revolting and basest kind upon the persons of the female portion of the tribe, who until the arts, and vices, and debauchery of the whites were introduced among them, were happy, and peaceable, and cheerful, as they roamed over their goodly possessions.

As a result, the Mashpee scattered.

…[And] now, many of them are seen reeling about intoxicated with liquor, failing to provide for themselves or families, who before were assiduously engaged in supplying the necessities of those depending upon them.

By 1829, Apess was ripe for a confrontation. In the Mashpees reservation on Cape Cod, he found his perfect battleground.

The Mashpee Revolt

Apess had heard rumor that the Mashpees, who numbered several hundred, were in difficult straits and that the tribe was unhappy with the way the state administered its reservation. As he worked his way through Massachusetts, preaching, he began forming a plan. He would go investigate the circumstances of the Mashpees himself. Though a Pequot, he felt kinship with the Mashpees.

Upon arriving in Mashpee, he quickly learned the truth of the rumors. The state overseers allowed the Mashpees’ neighbors to steal from tribal lands. The overseers collaborated with local sea captains and others to cheat the Indians out of pay. The overseers also reached an agreement with white families who took in Indians that they would not educate the children.

And the Congregational minister assigned to the town, funded and overseen by Harvard College, neglected the Indians. Instead, he preached to the small group of white people who attended his church. Rev. Phineas Fish was taking hundreds of dollars in aid intended for the Mashpee and keeping it.

An Indian Methodist minister who could read and write, was well schooled in the ways of the government and held a jaded view of the way whites had treated American Indians was the perfect match to put fire to the Mashpee revolt.

Mashpee. Image courtesy Google Maps.

Declaration of Independence

Apess offered to assist the Mashpee if they wished, but only if they voted to accept him into their tribe to give him standing. The tribe accepted him.

Apess then helped the tribe shape its demands and drafted what amounted to a Mashpee declaration of independence. To the government, the tribe sent three resolutions:

Resolved, That we, as a tribe, will rule ourselves, and have the Constitution; for all men are born free and equal, says the Constitution of the country.

Resolved, That we will not permit any white man to come upon our plantation, to cut or carry off wood or hay, or any other article, without our permission, after the 1st of July next.

And finally:

Resolved, That we will put said resolutions in force after that date, (July next,) with the penalty of binding and throwing them from the plantation, if they will not stay away without.

Harvard, Too

To Harvard, the tribe sent three additional resolutions:

First,

That we will rule our own tribe and make choice of whom we please for our preacher.

Second,

That we will have our own meeting house, and place in the pulpit whom we please to preach to us.

And third,

That we will publish this to the world; if the above reasons and resolutions are not adhered to, and the Rev. Mr. Fish discharged.

The Old Indian Meeting House in Mashpee.

The Mashpee Revolt Takes Shape

When July rolled around, the tribe put its plans into action. A neighbor named William Sampson approached tribal lands and loaded a cart with wood when Apess approached him with six others – Joseph, Jacob and Nicholas Pocknett, Aaron Keater, Charles D. Grasse and Abraham Jackson. They informed him he could not take any wood. Then they unloaded his cart and sent him home.

News of the incident spread quickly. The tribe’s enemies characterized the Mashpee Revolt as a threat of violent uprising. The governor then sent a contingent of negotiators to Mashpee to meet with the Indians.

Apess explained their grievances. The governor’s men urged the Mashpees to have patience. They would present their case to the government. But then Apess and the six men who stopped the theft of wood were arrested and charged with riot, assault and trespass.

Apess was offended at the suggestion that he and the Mashpees would use violence against the government.

The plight of the Mashpee received a sympathetic airing in Massachusetts newspapers, and for a time it appeared real change was coming. The state did release some of its control over the Indian lands and returned self-governance to the tribe. But laws designed to protect Indian property from neighboring towns were rarely enforced.

Harvard remained steadfast in its support of Rev. Phineas Fish, and he continued preaching to the white congregation he had assembled.

Demons

As for Apess, he did a short stint in jail for his part in the protest. His sense of anger at the treatment of the Indians grew. In his account of the protest: Indian Nullification of the Unconstitutional Laws of Massachusetts, he wrote:

Many and many a red man has been butchered for a less wrong than the Mashpees complain of.

In 1836, Apess’ growing fervor for the Indian cause took center stage when he delivered a Eulogy of King Philip. In it, he praised the Indian leader, likening him to George Washington.

Apess’ personal demons, however, continued to plague him. His struggles with alcohol contributed to the breakup of his family and debts cost him his Massachusetts’ property. His frequent drunkenness cost him the support of his friends. By 1839 he had relocated to New York City, and he died there that year.

Images: Old Indian Meeting House By Swampyank at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18002569. This story about the Mashpee revolt was updated in 2022.

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