Buffalo Soldier, Deserter, Criminal: The Remarkably Complicated Life of Charles Ringo

Charles Ringo. Kankakee Daily Gazette, May 25, 1899.

courtesy of the author

This case study chronicles the remarkably complicated life of Charles Ringo who served nearly two enlistments as a Buffalo Soldier before deserting and embarking on a life of petty crime. It details his military service, his nomadic occupational life, his marriage, his acquittal of two sets of murders--one of his stepsons in West Virginia, the other of a white married couple in Illinois, and the assistance of white authorities who intervened to save and protect Ringo from the predations of angry mobs and racist courts. It situates Ringo’s exploits within the oppositional/alternative nature of African American working-class life, the failure of the American ideal, and its links to black criminality during the Jim Crow era. It contends that like far too many black men today, Ringo’s life choices and those of countless other black men and women during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, were largely shaped and defined by proscriptions, barriers, misfortunes, and providence beyond his control. Thus, his decision to desert and eventually live on the edges of society as an itinerant laborer, part-time gambler, and criminal illustrates his desperate quest to survive in a society that was not yet prepared or willing to offer substantive opportunities to African American men and thereby created a slippery and inevitable slope between black respectability and black criminality.¹

Born in 1865, Ringo spent his formative years in the Appalachian foothills of Nicholas County, Kentucky, home to Daniel Boone’s last home in the state. Situated between the Appalachian plateau and outer Bluegrass regions, Nicholas County had long been the home of a resident slave population. In 1860, the county’s slave population of 1,614 (comprising 14.4 percent of the county’s general population) resided among the county’s 9,416 white residents and 154 free blacks. On the eve of the Civil War, the county’s white population had grown by three times from 1800 to 1860, while its slave population increased five times. This population included Ringo’s forebears. Thus, whether members of Ringo’s family were sold or not, their status as property must have shaped their actions and responses, as well as that of every other Nicholas County slave.²

Map of the State of Kentucky (1832) with Ellisville marked.

filson historical society

Camp Nelson, Kentucky was one of the largest training camps for U.S. Colored Troops during the Civil War.

university of kentucky archives

Charles Ringo grew up in a new world free of the institution of slavery. The process initiated by the recruitment of black men into the Union army played a critical role in the destruction of the institution. In 1864, over the objections of white Kentuckians, the Lincoln administration approved the enlistment of slaves for military service. Slaves who enlisted became freemen and within a year the federal government had consented to emancipate their dependents as well. Black agency proved not only critical to Union victory but to the demise of slavery in the state. As one historian notes, “With nearly 60 percent of all eligible black males serving in the Union army, slavery had all but ceased to exist in the Bluegrass State well before it was officially ended by the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment.” Of the 23,000 black Kentuckians who enlisted in the U. S. Army to fight for the Union, and the 10,000 recruits that trained at Camp Nelson, Kentucky, (the third largest recruiting and training depot for African Americans in the nation), nearly 75 U. S. Colored Troops listed Nicholas County as their birthplace, Charles Ringo’s birthplace.³

At the end of the war, tens of thousands of black soldiers faced an uncertain future. Persuaded by the intelligence, valor, and sacrifice of these men, and seeking able bodies to assist their western campaigns to defeat, dispossess, and if necessary, eradicate...