Men of Color to Arms!: Black Soldiers, Indian Wars, and the Quest for Equality (review)

A central paradox of U.S. history is why enslaved African Americans fought for a nation that exploited them so shamelessly. And in the post– Civil War era, why would “men of color” become Buffalo Soldiers, taking up arms against similarly exploited indigenes, as opposed to fighting alongside them against their common foe—a federal government headquartered in Washington, D.C., that made promises it had no intention of keeping?

That these questions have to be posed bespeaks a poverty in reigning historical inquiry rather than an adequate reflection of the record. Thus, it is well-known that more blacks fought alongside the redcoats in the aftermath of 1776 than beside the rebels. During the War of 1812, thousands of enslaved African Americans defected to the British side, many returning in red coats to wreak havoc. The wars in Florida featured blacks and indigenes fighting shoulder to shoulder against those who had hoisted the Stars and Stripes; this solidarity was in place even before the U.S. takeover— for example, during the ill-fated Patriot War of 1811 and the heyday of the “Negro Fort” shortly thereafter.

Even so, historiography on the post–Civil War era has crafted a historical consensus that downplays these realities in favor of a story that stresses black fealty to the United States—even when blacks were subjected to a hellish bedevilment. Citing one historian’s misleading conclusion, Elizabeth Leonard found “little evidence of a ‘rainbow coalition’ in our past through which peoples of color cooperated in interracial camaraderie” (121). As contemporary civil rights leader Rev. Al Sharpton once put it, “We believed in this nation, even when it did not believe in us.” The image of a “rainbow coalition” of men in arms in defense of the nation may be useful for reassuring the majority of the “loyalty” of the despised minority, but it hardly captures the often messy (and seditious) complexities of the past.

In this well-written book, Leonard seeks, intermittently, to engage these difficult questions. Early on, she poses the question that too often has been ignored: did the enlistment of blacks in the U.S. armed services provide a “sure path to equal citizenship with white men” (xii)? Whereas the evidence she accumulates answers with a resounding no, Leonard does not explore the dangerous and subversive implications of this colloquy.

Beginning with the U.S. Civil War, when black soldiers saved the slaveholders’ republic from itself, Leonard swiftly transitions to the inexorable corollary of this titanic struggle: the massive expropriation and scattering of indigenes in the postwar Indian Wars. In one of the saddest chapters in Pan-African history, black soldiers, who according to Leonard totaled about 25,000 during this period, played key roles in a truly unjust dispossession. It becomes even sadder when we realize that the defeat of indigenes was hardly inevitable, for as Leonard puts it, “In 1865 on the Great Plains, the Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa and Comanche still had the capability to resist westward settlement. In the Rocky Mountains, the Nez Perce, Ute and Bannock did as well. The Paiute and Modoc remained strong in the Northwest, and in the Southwest the Apache had yet to be suppressed” (78). Black soldiers were dispatched westward to battle indigenes, leaving their families and brethren in Memphis, Mobile, Colfax, and New Orleans to face renewed violence perpetrated by a still armed and recalcitrant foe. As so often happens, a victory for the republic inevitably involved a massive defeat for the African American.

This book features illustrative and telling illustrations that extend beyond the triad of “black-white-red.” For example, much of Leonard’s narrative involves detailing the travails of individual soldiers—such as West Point graduate Henry O. Flipper, who served Washington with distinction on the battlefields of what became the U.S. West and then, because of his fluency in Spanish, became an expert witness in...