Hiram Revels Was the Black Man in Jefferson Davis’s Chair

 

Hiram Revels is sworn in as a U.S. Senator from Mississippi.

On February 25, 1870 Hiram Revels was seated as a United States Senator from Mississippi.  Two things made the event unusual.  First, Revels was Black.  Second, he was elected by the Reconstruction legislature of the state to finish the term that Jefferson Davis had vacated to take up the Presidency of the Confederacy. 

Seating him was anything but routine.  Democrats rose to argue that because the Dred Scott Decision held that no Black man could be a citizen, that there were no Black citizens prior to the adoption of the 14th Amendment in 1860.  The Constitution required a Senator be a citizen for six years and they argued that Revels had only been one for two. 

The Republican majority said that would apply only to those of pure Negro blood.  Revels, who was born a free man in North Carolina in 1827 to a mixed race father and Scottish mother was ruled a citizen and seated. 

Revels had apprenticed as a barber to his brother and was gifted his estate by his widow when he died.  He used the money to attend Union County Quaker Seminary in Indiana, Knox College in Illinois, and a Black seminary in Ohio.  He was ordained a minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and preached in several states, including Missouri where he was briefly jailed for gathering Blacks to worship, before settling into a Baltimore parish in 1845 and opening a private school. 

He became perhaps the leading free black citizen of Maryland.  When the Civil War broke out he helped raise two regiments of Black soldiers in Maryland and Missouri and served as a Chaplain.  He saw action at Vicksburg. 

              Senator Hiram Revels

In 1866 he took up a new pastorate in Natchez and put his efforts into establishing schools for Black children.  He was elected Alderman in 1868 then to the Mississippi Senate in 1869.  He was selected to give the opening prayer at the 1870 session of the legislature and so impressed the members with his eloquence and grace that he was quickly elected to fill the unfinished U.S. Senate term. 

In the Senate Revels impressed his colleagues by both his work ethic and his oratory.  He served on the Committee for Education and Labor and on the District of Columbia Committee.  Although he rose on the Senate floor to defend the black Georgia state legislators who had just been illegally ousted by White representatives, he did not advocate the continuance of a harsh or vengeful Reconstruction policy.  He argued that Confederates who swore a loyalty oath should have their citizenship rights restored. 

Revels served only a little more than a year.  He resigned in March 1871, two months before his term ended to take up the Presidency of Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College (now Alcorn State University.)  He served there with distinction with two interruptions until his retirement in 1882. 

Those two interruptions were instructive.  First, he temporarily assumed the duties of Mississippi Secretary of State in 1883.  He witnessed the corruption of the administration of Republican Governor Aldebert Ames and wrote a public letter to President Grant accusing him and his Carpetbagger administration of corrupting the Black vote for their own private profit.  Needless to say, he was fired as college president.  But when Democrats returned to power in the state in 1876 they reappointed him to his post despite the fact he remained an avowed Republican. 

Hiram  Revels, front and center,  with a graduating class and faculty at Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College.

After his college service Revel returned to the ministry and then taught theology at Shaw College (now Rust College) in Holly Springs, Mississippi.  He died in 1901. 

Despite his accomplishments and illustrious career Revel is now nearly a forgotten figure, a victim of the successful seizure in the early Twentieth Century of American history texts for public schools by Confederate sympathizers and apologists who painted Reconstruction as a bloody oppression and Black political leaders like Revel as ignorant apes and puppets of evil Carpetbaggers. 

Way Before Black Lives Matter New York’s Black Silent Parade Stood up to Racist Killings

Behind drummers the NAACP's James Weldon Johnson and W.E.B, Du Bois, center, lead the Silent Parade in New York City in 1917.  

On July 28, 1917 the Silent Parade in New York City was an orderly but mute demonstration by as many as 10,000 African-Americans in protest to the continued brutal onslaught of lynching across the Jim Crow South and border states as well as the anti-Black pogrom that killed as many as 200 and displaced thousands in East St Louis, Illinois that May. 

It may be obscure today, but it was one of the most significant events in the creation of a modern, Black led civil rights movement and the direct ancestor of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I was vaguely aware of the Silent Parade and have mentioned it in passing in a couple of posts, including a history of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and a bio of W. E. B. Du Bois, but I was not clear on the timeline and particulars.  Now I am delighted to share what I learned.

Racial tensions in America had been ratcheting up for decades particularly after the complete abandonment of Reconstruction Era reforms in the South and the disenfranchisement of Southern blacks in the Jim Crow Era.  Hardening racial attitudes were spreading to Northern cities and states as well.   The rising wave of lynching was just one of the forms of violent intimidation used to keep Blacks in their subservient places.  Although the old Ku Klux Klan had disappeared and its reincarnation not taken root, night riding, vigilantism, and pop up mobs were all on the rise.  Kidnappings, beatings, rapes, arsons, and deportations were common. 

Even more troubling, was the rise in race riots, most of them in Northern or borders states, especially as the Great Migration began to get underway as oppressed Southern Blacks relocated to North seeking factory work in booming war industries.   In those days race riots meant one thing—a bloodthirsty rampage of Whites against the Black residents of their communities.  Although in isolated incidents some Blacks had fought back in self-defense there had never been a riot in which Blacks targeted White communities.

The 1917 East St. Louis Race Riot spurred African Americans to new action

The riot which erupted in East St. Louis on May 28, 1917 was just the most recent and one of the bloodiest.  Whites angered at Blacks taking jobs at local factories staged a mass protest meeting followed by a march by at least 3,000 into the downtown district where they spread out attacking any Blacks they encountered, burning homes, and looting businesses.  It took the Illinois National Guard to quash the violence, though tensions remained high.

Some efforts at investigating the causes of the disturbance were made and some officials gave lip service to community reconciliation.  But it was too little, too late.

On July 2, a carload of white men drove through a Black neighborhood and fired several shots into a group of men standing outside in the oppressive summer heat—exactly what we would call a drive by shooting today.  As the car sped away crowds gathered and milled about. An hour later, two Police detectives and a reporter were among four men in a car that cruised the same area.  The detectives may have displayed weapons.  Suspecting it was the same car involved in the first shooting or another on the same mission, someone opened fire on their car, killing one officer instantly and mortally wounding the other. 

Thousands of white spectators gathered to view the detectives’ bloodstained automobile then rampaged through the black section of town. They cut the water hoses of the Fire Department, burned blocks of the city, and shot residents as they tried to escape the flames.  Police and National Guardsmen called to quell the violence instead either stood aside and let it run its course or in many instances actively joined the rioters. 

After the rioters simply exhausted themselves and almost 6000 Black survivors were turned into homeless refugees the liberal St. Louis Post Dispatch editorially concluded:

All the impartial witnesses agree that the police were either indifferent or encouraged the barbarities, and that the major part of the National Guard was indifferent or inactive. No organized effort was made to protect the Negroes or disperse the murdering groups. The lack of frenzy and of a large infuriated mob made the task easy. Ten determined officers could have prevented most of the outrages. One hundred men acting with authority and vigor might have prevented any outrage.

The breathtaking scope of the violence and a staggering death toll galvanized Black outrage across the country.  Various key players sprang into action.

Journalist and anti-lynching crusader Ida B Wells came to East St. Louis to investigate and report for the Chicago Daily Defender.

Anti-lynching activist and Chicago Daily Defender journalist Ida B. Wells rushed to the stricken city to investigate.  She concluded that 50-150 had been killed in days of rioting and its aftermath.  Investigators for the NAACP placed the dead in the range of 100-200. A latter Congressional Investigation Committee—influenced by several Southern members said the death toll could not be determined but gave credence to local official reports of 8 White dead and 38 Blacks.  Some modern scholars have estimated that as many as 400 may have died immediately or of wounds within weeks.  Most accounts now settle on a rough guess of 200.

Well’s accounts were spread across the county by the issues of the Defender distributed nationally by Pullman Porters.  Local Black press picked up the story. 

Black nationalist Marucs Garvey used the East St. Louis race riots to promote his vision of an independent Black nation as a refuge from rampant White racism and violence.  Many were receptive to the message.

Black separatist and Nationalist Marcus Garvey declared that the riot was “one of the bloodiest outrages against mankind” and a “wholesale massacre of our people….This is no time for fine words, but a time to lift one’s voice against the savagery of a people who claim to be the dispensers of democracy.”  He also argued for self-defense and ultimately the establishment of an independent nation, probably in the Caribbean as a refuge for the African diaspora in America.  This combination of militancy and a sort of Black Zionism had a lot of appeal to many who lost all hope of fair treatment in the United States.  Whites were torn between stark terror of a militant Black in a uniform at the head of a mass movement and a vague hope that Garvey could become an ally in removing Blacks entirely from the country.

For the NAACP the East St. Louis riots presented both a test and an opportunity.  The only national civil rights organization was only eight years old and not well established.  Largely the creation of White liberals it still was still dominated by them.  All of the national officers and board members were white except for Du Bois, the Black intellectual and editor of The Crisis and probably the most significant national Black leader since Frederick Douglass.  The white leadership was well meaning but an impediment to making the new organization an authentic voice for Black aspirations. 

Most of the organization’s chapters were in the Northeast and split between white liberals and the small Black educated elite.  It had little representation in the South where the overwhelming majority of Blacks still lived, or among poor and working class Northern Blacks.  The organization had first earned national attention for its protests and picketing of showings of D. W. Griffith’s Ku Klux Klan paean Birth of a Nation in 1915. 

It lately had become increasingly vocal in protest to the policies of President Woodrow Wilson.  During his three-way race for the Presidency against William Howard Taft, and Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 Wilson had made vaguer promises of enacting anti-lynching legislation and in favor of some civil rights protections.  Most Blacks who could vote were still loyal Republicans in gratitude for the end of slavery and the stab at Reconstruction.  But in some Northern cities Blacks were being successfully courted by local Democratic machines.  Wilson made promises in hopes for a sliver of the Black vote.  But he was the son of a Virginia mother who was an unreconstructed Confederate.  Upon election not only did he forget his promises about lynch protections, but he also scrapped what few shreds of Reconstruction era policies remained and introduced of segregation into all areas possible of federal government policy, workplaces, and hiring.

In his early reaction to the East St. Louis riots, Du Bois castigated Wilson for inaction on lynching and demanded action against spreading race riots.  Wilson did not even bother to respond. 

Portraits by Laura Wheeler Waring.

Du Bois knew that more dramatic action was required to both rally Blacks nationally and build the NAACP.  He found a new ally in the second Black elected to a leadership position in the organization, Second Vice President James Weldon Johnson.  Johnson was a perfect example of the Black elite who Du Bois believed would raise the race. He was a lawyer, Republican Politian, diplomat under Theodore Roosevelt, and a poet.  He had written Lift Every Voice and Sing which the Fisk University Singer would popularize as the “Black National Anthem.”  He would also soon become a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance.

It was Johnson who first proposed a silent protest march at an Executive Committee meeting of the NAACP Harlem branch shortly after the East St. Louis riot.  Du Bois heartily supported the plan.  Johnson himself was the prime organizer, seeing to all of the myriads of details needed to mobilize an action like no other before it.  He took care to reach out and include all classes of Black citizens utilizing the Churches, Black Women’s Clubs, trade union members, social and benevolent clubs and laborers.  He knew that to be effective the march had to be absolutely peaceful and dignified.  As he recruited marchers, he trained them in discipline.  Any hint of violence or disorder would not only discredit the action, but likely bring down a catastrophic police response.

As a result of that meticulous planning and organization thousands of African American citizens rallied at 59th Street beginning at noon on July 28.  By the one pm starting time, they were organized into perfectly organized ranks, long rows of marchers stretched across the street and spaced rank after rank in order that would have been the envy of any military parade.   They fell in behind an American flag and a line of dignitaries, clergymen, and leaders with Du Bois and Johnson font and center.

The parade swung smartly south on 5th Avenue the broad main thoroughfare leading to the heart of heart of Manhattan’s fashionable districts.  That was the same route taken by the 1915 Women’s Suffrage Parade organized by Carrie Chapman Catt and the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and event that helped inspire this march and upon which it was partly modeled.

Women in the march wore white for the innocence of violence victims but the clothes were also an echo of Suffrage marchers.

Behind the leaders were rank upon rank of women and children decked out in white representing the purity and innocence of the victims of the riots.  It was also a tip of the hat to the Suffragists who had marched in white and was a symbolic linking of both struggles for the dignity of full citizenship rights.  Behind them came the men in their best black or somber colored suits.  The black was mourning for the victims.  The attitude was reserved dignity belying stereotypes of ragged idlers, ignorant laborers, and violent predators.  All marched in total and perfect silence.

Some carried professionally painted placards and banners with messages like:

Your hands are full of blood.

Thou Shalt Not Kill

Mothers, do lynchers go to heaven?

We have fought for the liberty of white Americans in six wars; our reward was East St. Louis.

Police turned out in force, lining the parade route with batons in hand or exposed from under their long coats.  They had been told to expect violence from the marchers and had orders to disperse them at the first sign of trouble.  Behind them large crowds thronged the sidewalks.  Supporters and virulent opponents of the Parade were both out but probably outnumbered by the curious and bewildered.  Amid some cheers cruses and occasional objects were hurled at the marchers as they passed by stoically.

The men of the Parade in black and dignified somber business apparel. 

The silence was finally broken with cheers by supporters when the parade ended at Madison Square.  There was no rally or fancy oration.  Du Boise, Johnson, and some of the clergy were interviewed quietly by the press.

Reactions in that press varied from outright hostility to mockery in many cases.  But some were impressed by the solemn dignity of the event.  The New York Times wrote, “one of the most quiet and orderly demonstrations ever witnessed.”

Was anything accomplished?  Not immediately.  The Wilson administration never acknowledged the protest and continued to vigorously pursue it segregationist policies even as it deployed Black troops to France and relied on Black workers in the humming defense industries and in agricultural production.  Both lynchings and race riots continued, and the pace accelerated after the war as troops returned home and competed for jobs in a post-war slump.  1919 would be a banner year for race riots in cities like Chicago.  The revived Ku Klux Klan became an open power not only in the Old South but in Northern States like Indiana where it nearly took over state government.

On the other hand, Black communities across the country took enormous pride in the event and many were inspired to action.  The civil rights approach of the NAACP gained support over the militant separatism of Marcus Garvey.  As an organization it grew and prospered and added chapters, including those in the South.   It would be the primary civil rights organization until a new movement arose after World War II.         

 

Black Lives Matter marches like this one are a legacy of the Silent March.  

Chad Williams, Associate Professor of African and Afro-American Studies at Brandeis University and the author of Torchbearers of Democracy wrote of the long term significance in a Miami Herald op-ed on the 100th anniversary of the Parade in 2017:

The “Silent Protest Parade” marked the beginning of a new epoch in the long black freedom struggle. While adhering to a certain politics of respectability, a strategy employed by African-Americans that focused on countering racist stereotypes through dignified appearance and behavior, the protest, within its context, constituted a radical claiming of the public sphere and a powerful affirmation of black humanity. It declared that a “New Negro” had arrived and launched a black public protest tradition that would be seen in the parades of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, the civil rights demonstrations of the 1960s and the Black Lives Matter marches of today.

How Buffalo Soldiers Did Teddy Roosevelt’s Heavy Lifting at San Juan Hill

This Landmark book for young adults and a Classic Comic Book both fired my boyhood hero worship of Theodore Roosevelt.  The cover illustration turned out to be inaccurate.  Roosevelt was wearing his blue field shirt not his khaki officer's tunic and completed the charge on foot after he lost his horse.  But it did show one Black trooper in the lower right of the picture--more credit than Buffalo Soldiers usually got.

When I was a kid, Theodore Roosevelt was my hero.  I know, incredibly dorky.  But Teddy had been a fat, bookish kid with glasses, sort of like me, who grew up to have an exciting life.  For a couple of years or so in my pre-teens I took to pinning the brim of my cowboy hat to the crown on one side with a U.S. Army insignia swiped from my Dad’s World War II uniform. I led an entirely imaginary “Junior Rough Rider” outfit in elaborate games of defending Cheyenne from foreign menace. I assure you that I could not get any of the other kids in the neighborhood to join me in this odd ball fantasy.

In school, much to the confusion and irritation of my teachers, I insisted on dating all my papers 1905, the first year of Roosevelt’s second term as President.  Much of Roosevelt’s appeal to me was his famous Charge up San Juan Hill.  In later years I discovered that while T.R. did, indeed perform ably and bravely that day and that his Rough Riders fought well, it was not the whole story. 

On July 1, 1898 the heaviest land combat of the Spanish American War took place in the Battle for San Juan Heights during the American drive to take the city of Santiago, Cuba.

With the outbreak of the War Roosevelt, a hyperkinetic New York politician who was serving ably as Assistant Secretary of the Navy—a post in which he had played a key role in building the Great White Fleet which made the U.S. Navy among the most modern in the world—yearned for military action on the ground. 

                Col. Theodore Roosevelt 1st Volunteer Cavalry after his brevet from Lt. Col.

He was not encouraged by President William McKinley in his first attempt to volunteer to raise a cavalry regiment for the conflict.  He convinced his close friend Col. Leonard Wood, one of the most respected officers in the Regular Army and a medical doctor serving as an advisor to the President, to offer to lead a volunteer unit with Roosevelt as his second in command and in charge of recruitment.  McKinley, needing to raise a large army quickly, reluctantly agreed. 

Roosevelt famously recruited a unit that mixed cowboys who he was familiar with from his days as a South Dakota rancher, Harvard pals, and polo playing New York socialites. 

Legendary Arizona lawman Bucky O'Neill  was captain of a troop of Rough Riders raised in the West and including cowboys and veteran Indian fighters.

Among the Volunteers were a legendary western lawman, Bucky O’Neill, captain of a troop raised in Arizona and at least one of the criminals he had once locked up serving under an assumed name.  Like O’Neill, a former militia officer, many men were veterans of the Indian Wars and provided leadership as junior officers and non-commissioned officers rare in Volunteer units.  There were also swells like Hamilton Fish, grandson of the New York Governor and Senator of the same name. 

Roosevelt used his considerable influence, and some of his own wealth, to make sure that the men were armed with the same modern Krag-Jorgensen carbines used by the Regular cavalry and generally had the most up to date equipment and the finest horse stock available.  The unit was trained to the highest standards and the men, mostly expert horsemen, were soon considered the equal of Regular troops. 

Designated the First Volunteer Cavalry (1st U.S.V.C), the unit arrived by train with their horses, mules, and baggage at Tampa, Florida for disembarkation on May 29.  They found a tangle of confusion and a shortage of ships.  After days of dithering while troops fell ill with heat stroke and tropical infections, Major General William Shafter, a 300 lb. veteran regular army officer who turned out to be an indifferent bordering on incompetent commander of the V Corps for the campaign against Santiago, under pressure from Washington to move quickly ordered the Volunteers to board available ships without their horses, mules, and most of their equipment. 

300 pound Regular Army Major General William Shafter was the commander of V Corps in the drive to capture Santiago.  He was an indifferent to incompetent senior officer.

There was only room for eight of twelve companies.  With Yellow Fever and Malaria already rampant, a fourth of the men mustered and trained were unavailable by the time the ships landed in east of Santiago on June 21 and 22 the men were also demoralized by the loss of their horses and equipment. 

Once on shore they became part of the cavalry division commanded by Major General of Volunteers Joseph Wheeler, a storied Confederate cavalry commander and longtime Democratic Representative from Alabama.  McKinley had accepted Wheeler’s offer to serve and placed him in high command in the hopes that common wartime service would heal lingering sectional divisions.  And in fact, that was one of the results.  Blue uniformed Federal troops were cheered as they moved through the South to disembarkation points instead of stoned as some Yankees had feared. 

Wheeler’s division also included the 9th and 10th Cavalry Regiments, Buffalo Soldier Black troops and tough as nails veteran Indian fighters from Ft. Leavenworth.   Along with the Rough Riders and other Regular Army cavalry units, they had arrived without horses and baggage. 

Wheeler was only a barely reconstructed Rebel.  He hated Yankees and disdained the Colored troops under his command.  But he was an aggressive officer.  Two after days of landing Shafer had Wheeler dispatch a dismounted cavalry reconnaissance of enemy lines in support of Cuban irregulars to find where the enemy might be dug in.  He was under orders to hold the bulk of his troops to cover continuing landing operations.  Instead, Wheeler, acting on his own authority moved his men aggressively forward with the Rough Riders and 10th Cavalry in the lead and provoked a pitched battle with the Spanish rearguard at Las Guasimas. 

The troops were weakened by heat and disease and issued only four days of rations and what ammunition they could carry.  They had no baggage, logistical support, and had only two small field guns.  Only officers were mounted.  None of the men were trained as infantry or accustomed to long marches, especially in the stifling heat.  For two hours the Spanish infantry, which enjoyed artillery support, mauled and stymied the American advance until the Spanish commander Major General Antero Rubín ordered an orderly retreat to more defensible lines. 

During the battle a confused and excited Wheeler was heard rallying his troops with exhortations to “Get those damned Yankees!”  War correspondents covering the battle reported a glorious victory, on the ground it was recognized as the near disaster it was. 

An Unreconstructed former Confederate, Major General of Volunteers Joseph Wheeler (left) was in command of the  cavalry in the Santiago campaign.  Seen here with  Lenard Wood who was brevetted to Brigadier General of the 2nd Brigade, and Col. Roosevelt of  the Rough Riders.

The Spanish fell back on a well defended line of trenches and block houses including commanding positions on two hills of the San Juan Heights.  After waiting for the rest of V Corps to land, Shafter ordered a general offensive against the Santiago defensive line on June 1.  Wheeler had fallen ill with malaria and was replaced by his subordinate Brigadier General Samuel S. Sumner and Wood was brevetted to Brigadier to take command of Sumner’s 2nd Brigade.  Roosevelt in turn was brevetted full Colonel in command of the Rough Riders. 

Shafter had three divisions.  He ordered the infantry of the 1st and 2nd Divisions, which included two other Black regiments, the 23rd and 24th Infantry (Colored), to the north to take the fortified stronghold at El Caney.  This was to take no more than two hours then the divisions were expected to move up to support an attack by the dismounted cavalry on the heights. 

But the 2nd Division under General Henry W. Lawton was held off by stiff Spanish resistance at El Caney for more than twelve hours.  Brigades of the 1st Division came under withering fire when they emerged from a tree line at the base of the heights.  The commander of the 3rd Brigade was mortally wounded the second he stepped from the tree line and two more officers assuming command were quickly wounded and had to be evacuated.  The whole division was pinned down under intense fire in what became known as Hell’s Pocket while they waited on Lawton to come up. 

The cavalry on the right of the line came up and also took heavy fire.  With his men pinned in shallow trenches Capt. O’Neill of the Rough Riders exposed himself to enemy fire to calm his troops and was shot through the throat shortly after assuring a worried subordinate that “a Spanish bullet hasn’t been made that can kill me.” 

Distressed, Roosevelt determined that their position was untenable, and he must either withdraw or attack.  He took a vague order to support the pinned down infantry on his left as an excuse to attack.  Ahead of him was the smaller of two hills commanding the heights, dubbed Kettle Hill because a cauldron for boiling sugar cane was found near the base.  Roosevelt formed his regiment under fire and moved out.  He was the only officer mounted because he feared he might succumb to an asthma attack in the heat trying to climb the hill. 

Tough veteran Buffalo Soldier cavalrymen in Cuba.

Seeing the Rough Riders moving unilaterally, other units of Woods’ 2nd Brigade, including elements of the 10th and the white Volunteers of the 3rd Cavalry joined in the assault at the urging of 1st Lt. Jules G. Ord of the 10th.  Further left the Black troops of the 23rd and 24th Infantry from the 2nd Division began moving without orders when they observed the advance. 

Men started dropping of heat prostration on the climb.  Others were riddled by heavy fire.  Roosevelt lost his horse and sustained a light wound on the wrist but pressed forward.  The dismounted cavalry, units now thoroughly mixed, pressed the frontal attack with some of the 10th joining the Black infantry regiments on the left slope. 

After sustaining heavy casualties, the troops, Roosevelt near the van, took the summit sending the defenders to the protection of the fortifications and block house atop San Juan Hill itself.  The first colors on the summit were the 3rd and the 10th Cavalry with the Rough Rider banner soon following.  In fact, troops of all units plus elements of the Black infantry took Kettle Hill, although Roosevelt and the Rough Riders would receive almost all of the credit in press accounts. 

Meanwhile the men on top of Kettle hill were taking heavy fire from San Juan.  General Wheeler, rising from his sick bed at the sound of battle, arrived on the scene to take operational command since Shafter was ill at his headquarters well behind the lines. He ordered the whole 1st Division under the command of Brigadier General Jacob Ford Kent forward and then re-took personal command of the cavalry. 

Buffalo Soldiers advance on the Heights.  By the end of the battle Black units, Rough Riders, and other white cavalry units were thoroughly mixed and fighting side-by-side.

Kent’s Colored Infantry and elements of the 10th Cavalry were already advancing up the slope.  Other units closed in support.  Meanwhile the Cavalry at the top of Kettle Hill began an advance down the saddle between it and San Juan Hill and up the second.  Young Ord was killed breasting the summit of the Hill his Black troops on his heels.  The troops pressed on, taking the shell pocked block house in furious hand to hand combat. 

Roosevelt led a last charge of the cavalry up to the top of the hill, sweeping it of Spanish and uniting with the exhausted black troops. 

Shortly after the battle, Roosevelt posed with his Rough Riders atop San Juan Hill.  The Buffalo Soldiers who had fought with them were notably not included.

Meanwhile other units of the cavalry’s 1st Brigade secured a smaller knoll on the Spanish right flank.  The heights had been cleared, but fearing a counterattack, Wheeler ordered the exhausted men to throw up breastworks facing the city of Santiago, a mile or so in the distance. 

Roosevelt’s men did repulse one weak counterattack.  But back at his headquarters in the rear Shafter feared a general counterattack and ordered a retreat to the original positions in the trenches as the bottoms of the hills.  Unable to convince his superior to countermand the order, Wheeler on the scene simply ignored it and continued fortifying his position over night. 

Lawton’s Division, badly roughed up at El Caney, finally arrived around noon on July 2.  The position was now secure, and artillery was brought up to the heights to threaten the city and a squadron of Spanish cruisers in the harbor.  The cruisers were forced to flee the guns and ran into a waiting superior American Navy taskforce which destroyed them. 

After a siege by combined American and Cuban nationalist forces, the Spanish surrendered Santiago on July 17.  That completed major land operations in Cuba.  

Troops who survived the shot, shell, and heat stroke of the Battle for San Juan Heights were ravaged by yellow fever and malaria.  General Shafter petitioned Washington for a rapid withdrawal of V Corps calling it an “army of convalescents.”  Concerned that the President would ignore the bumbling Shafter, a group of senior officers prevailed upon the politically well-connected Roosevelt to send a similar appeal on their behalf. 

American evacuation began on August 7.  Troops of the 9th Infantry (Colored) were left behind as an occupation force under the theory that their race and Southern origin would protect them from illness.  It didn’t.  By the time they, too, finally went home almost a tenth of their number came down with yellow fever. 

Roosevelt returned a national hero, the Rough Riders celebrated as folk heroes.  On the strength of his celebrity Roosevelt won the spot as McKinley’s running mate in 1900 and ascended to the Presidency upon his assassination.  

The Buffalo Soldiers, cavalry and infantry alike, who had fought so well received virtually no notice.  Even their white officers, including the heroic Lt. Ord, the son of an active duty General, were denied decorations.  Roosevelt got his Medal of Honor, arguably well deserved.  But so did Schafer who was ineffective as a commander and never came under hostile fire. 

And, oh yes, the U.S. won the war, obtained an empire, and was recognized as a first rate world power for the first time.

 

Lewis Latimer—Like the Light of the Sun

    

                                Lewis Latimer, light bulb pioneer in 1882.

Lewis Howard Latimer was born in Boston on December 4, 1848.  How that came to be is an epic story in its own right.

His father, George W. Latimer, the son of a White man and enslaved mother, and his wife Rebecca fled from slavery in Virginia by ship.  Traveling north via Baltimore and Philadelphia with prices on their heads and pursued by slave catchers, the young couple arrived in Boston on October 8, 1842.  By mischance Latimer was spotted by a Virginian who recognized him as the slave clerk in James Gray’s Norfolk shop.  He was immediately arrested under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 to be held until his master could claim him.

The case aroused uproar among the growing number of abolitionists in the city.  In fact, this became the first time they were roused to public action to protect and free an escaped slave—a landmark in the evolution of the movement.  One attempt was made to storm the jail to free the prisoner.  Later, when an agent for Gary arrived in town, hundreds surrounded the jail to prevent him from being removed.  Historically significant lawsuits were launched in Latimer’s defense.  Tensions rose between the abolitionists and pro-slavery forces in the city including warring pamphlets and publications.  The Latimer and North Star Journal was a newspaper issued several times a week edited by Henry Ingersoll Bowditch, William F. Channing, and Frederick Cabot.  Public meetings were held, including one at Faneuil Hall where attendees not only vowed resistance to slave-catching but also voted for disunion if Federal enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act continued.

                        Lewis's father George, fugitive slave in 1842,

A Latimer Committee circulated two petitions, the Great Massachusetts Petition and the Great Petition to Congress, about the case.  The former demanded a law banning the involvement of state officials or public property in the detention or arrest of suspected fugitives and was delivered to the State Assembly containing 64,526 signatures and weighing 150 pounds.    

Representative John Quincy Adams laid the Federal petition before Congress where it was immediately tabled and condemned setting off years of conflict between the former President and the Southerners who controlled the House of Representatives.

Eventually, in 1843 Massachusetts adopted the Personal Liberty Act, or Latimer Law based on the demands of the petitions.  The new Federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, among other things, voided the Massachusetts law and similar statutes adopted by other Northern states and compelled local authorities to assist slave catchers.

Meanwhile, the Latimer Committee raised $400 to finally purchase his freedom from Gray.  The Committee would give rise to the organization of the New England Freedom Association and increased collective action in the Black community of Massachusetts.

George Latimer upon gaining his freedom became an active abolitionist himself.  He prospered as a paper hanger and together with his wife raised four children, the youngest of the Lewis.  In gratitude for the support of the abolitionists who helped secure his freedom the family joined and remained active members of a Unitarian congregation from which many supporters had come. 

Although the United States Navy became rigidly segregated in the 20th Century, during the Civil War Black sailors like this young recruit served along side Whites on integrated ships.

Lewis, like the other Latimer children, received a good education and literally grew up in the abolitionist movement.  Naturally, when the Civil War broke out, he was eager to serve, but frustrated by his youth.  Finally on September 16, 1863, just days after his 15th birthday, he lied about his age—not that authorities were all that concerned—and enlisted in the Navy.  He served as a Landsman, then the lowest enlisted rank performing common labor aboard the USS Massasoit, a side wheel steam gunboat.  He was on board for anti-raider patrol along the New England Coast and then blockade and picket duty off of Virginia ports and on the James River.  In January of 1865 the Massasoit engaged in a dual with shore batteries at Howlett’s House.  Latimer was honorably discharged in July, 1865.

Returning to Boston the 17 year old, perhaps via contacts of his father in the abolitionist movement, was able to secure employment as an office boy with the patent law firm of Crosby Halstead & Gould for $3.00 per week.  While sweeping floors, emptying trash cans, and running errands, Latimer carefully observed the office’s draftsmen preparing patent applications.  He bought his own drafting tools and began practicing at home.  Within a few years he was promoted to draftsman and by 1872 was head draftsman pulling down a respectable $20 a week.  That was still, however, less than the White men he supervised were paid.

On the strength of such prosperity Latimer was able to marry Mary Wilson Lewis of Providence, Rhode Island the next year.  The couple would have two daughters, Emma Jeanette in 1883 and Louise Rebecca in 1890.

                                            The sketch from Latimer's first patent for a railway toilet system.  It would not be his last.

Working as a draftsman sparked Latimer’s own interest in invention.  In 1874 he and Charles W. Brown co-patented the Water Closet for Railroad Cars, an improved toilet system for passenger cars.

It was a remarkable achievement, and the young man was getting noticed for his skills.  One who took note was a teacher of the deaf, Alexander Graham Bell.  In 1876 Bell had built and used in his laboratory a telephone device.  He knew that others were doing similar work and a race to be first to file a patent was on.  Bell contacted Latimer and the two of them worked together furiously at night after spending their days at their regular employment, to prepare the application which was filed just four hours before Bell’s competition filed.  Latimer testified in the complicated legal challenges to Bell’s patent from his competitors.

After 11 years with Crosby Halstead & Gould, Latimer was ready to strike out on his own.  In 1879 he re-settled his family, including his extended clan of siblings to Bridgeport, Connecticut, then a leading industrial center known for its technological innovation and where the Mayor was showman, liberal reformer, and Universalist P.T. Barnum.  Latimer was hired as assistant manager and draftsman by Hiram Maxim, a rival of Thomas A. Edison for his U.S. Electric Lighting Company.

Although Edison had invented and demonstrated his incandescent light bulb it was still not practical for extended use because the paper filament he used would burn out within hours.  If you watched the bio-flick Edison, The Man with Spencer Tracy you may think that the great man got the idea to char bamboo fiber to create a carbon filament from gazing at his fraying fishing rod.  That would be a mistake.

In 1881 Latimer working for the Maxim company, won the patent for the Process of Manufacturing Carbons that made the light bulb practical.  Edison was irked but recognized Latimer’s talent.  In 1884 he hired Latimer away for his Edison Electric Light Company in New York City as a draftsman and an expert witness in patent litigation on electric lights.  With Edison, he became a key member of the team working on development of electric lighting.  He made further improvements to the filament and invented or made significant contributions to other essential improvements—the threaded socket; the oven, chemicals, and glassblowing equipment for the glass globe; and a new switch.  In the field he was trusted by Edison to oversee installation of public lighting systems in New York, Philadelphia, Montreal, and London.

Latimer vastly improved Thomas Edison's incandescent light.  He improved the method and tools to make carbon filaments and the switch seen here.   Most importantly was his development of the screw base which meant bulbs could easily and universally be replaced without having to be hard wired into circuits..

Of course, Edison took credit for these innovations.  But he valued Latimer and paid him well, including stock in what became General Electric.  In 1918 he was the only African American selected as one of the 28 charter members of Edison’s Pioneers.

Latimer continued to tinker on his own and filed more patents including one for a locking coat and hat rack to combat the chronic theft of garments from restaurants, barber shops, and other establishments.  He also patented an apparatus for cooling and disinfecting, an early forerunner of air conditioning.

By the turn of the 20th Century, he was if not a truly wealthy man, he was a very comfortable one.  Along with other leading Black intellectuals at the time, he insisted on full equality of opportunity for his race.  He built a large, elegant house in developing Flushing, Queens, an all-White neighborhood.  In 1908 he became a founding member of what is now the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Queens.

                                    Latimer inscribed this photo to his wife in 1919 at age 70.

He was a man of wide ranging interests.  He played violin and flute, occasionally hosting house concerts with his daughters, He wrote and published a book of poetry and wrote and produced a play.  In his 1890 book Incandescent Electric Lighting: A Practical Description of the Edison System Latimer waxed poetic about the achievement, “Like the light of the sun, it beautifies all things on which it shines, and is no less welcome in the palace than in the humblest home.”

Latimer died on December 11, 1928 at the age of 80 mourned in the small circle of his fellow electrical pioneers, in his community, and in his congregation.  The general public scarcely knew of his existence.

The Lewis Latimer home and museum in Flushing, New York City.

His granddaughter, Winifred Latimer Norman, a member of Fourth Universalist Society in New York, became the custodian of his legacy and worked tirelessly to bring his accomplishments to light.  She saw her childhood home moved to a Flushing park where it stands today as a museum maintained by the National Park Service.  Also, in his old neighborhood an apartment complex and a public school are named for him.  At his old congregation, his portrait hangs in place of honor as a founder.  The granddaughter died on February 6, 2014 at the age of 100.