The Roughest Riders Read Free Page A

clear a space of twenty feet.” The vicious battle cost the Fifty-Fourth dearly, with a loss of 281 men in all.
    Major-General James G. Blunt, who led the First Kansas Colored Regiment in combat, described the fighting skill of the units under his command in a letter to Congress: “The Negroes (First Colored Regiment) were too much for the enemy, and let me say here that I never saw such fighting as was done by that Negro regiment. They fought like veterans, with a coolness and valor that is unsurpassed. They preserved their line perfect throughout the whole engagement, and although in the hottest of the fight, they never once faltered. Too much praise cannot be awarded them for their gallantry. The question that Negroes will fight is settled; besides, they make better soldiers in every respect than any troops I have ever had under my command.”
    They took up arms to win their own rights as free and equal citizens of the rapidly growing country, but the effort succeededonly in keeping the states together without attaining the main goal of abolishing slavery. Of the nearly 200,000 African American men who fought in one of the bloodiest wars in American history, 36,847 lost their lives. The cost to the nation was heavy, and the country remained as racially divided as it had been at the start.
    And then the War Between the States was over, and the question of what to do with the discharged soldiers—how to employ them, how to keep them economically viable—rose from the stink and wreckage as it does after every war. The question was all the more pertinent for black soldiers being mustered out of uniform, since their options were more limited. The whites in the South considered them an inferior species, and those in the North didn’t welcome the competition for available peacetime jobs.
    Future president James A. Garfield, a staunch abolitionist, was ahead of his time with regard to civil rights. Is freedom “the bare privilege of not being chained?” he asked in a speech delivered right after the war, when he was serving as a congressman. “If this is all, then freedom is a bitter mockery, a cruel delusion…. Let us not commit ourselves to the absurd and senseless dogma that the color of the skin shall be the basis of suffrage, the talisman of liberty.”
    What was the answer to the nation’s dilemma?
    Again, war came to the rescue as the country looked for new territories to conquer, more enemies to fight. Greater numbers of strong young bodies were needed on the frontier as the government looked westward to push its boundaries into uncharted regions. But the Native Americans, who had occupied much of that land almost since time had begun, had other ideas. This was their land, they believed. They lived, hunted, fished, and practiced their spiritual rituals there, a situation that the US government had considered problematic for decades. As the expanding nation encroached farther onto those native lands, the inevitable clashes became more and more frequent. In this, African Americans had a new role toplay, another military calling: to serve the cause of white America’s dreams of empire.

    â€œThere is no greater civilizing agency for the Negro, whether we look upon the conservative or advancing side, than the army,” wrote Theophilus Gould Steward, an ordained chaplain who founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Carolina and Georgia. Steward believed that black Americans would eventually emerge from their parlous condition in American society and take their place alongside whites, in part by proving their mettle against the gore and strife of mortal combat in service of the country.
    There is some disagreement about the origins of the term “buffalo soldiers.” Some attribute it to the Cheyenne in the 1870s, who compared black men in combat to the wild buffaloes they fought on the plains. Others believe the phrase originated with the Comanche, who