Civil War General and Indian Fighter James M. Williams: Leader of the 1st Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry and the 8th U.S. Cavalry by Robert W. Lull (review)

Retired Army officer Robert W. Lull has penned the first biography of controversial Civil War and Indian fighter General James M. Williams. Born in 1833 in northern New York, Williams moved with his family westward to Wisconsin in 1844. The youngest son of a large family, Williams soon realized that he had little future on the family farm. Therefore, he began studying law, and in 1856 he and his brother Sam moved to Leavensworth, Kansas, opening a book and stationery shop. The two brothers were soon drawn into the slavery issue, opposing Missouri-based pro-slavery partisans. The author acknowledges that it is “highly probable” that Williams, a follower of future U.S. Senator James Henry Lane, participated in attacks on pro-slavery supporters in Kansas, although no formal records exist. By the start of the Civil War, recently elected U.S. Senator Lane procured a commission as a Union brigadier general and, despite not formally accepting his commission and thereby voiding his position within the Senate, began to raise units for the North, including the Kansas Third Regiment with newly appointed Captain James M. Williams. Fighting on the Kansas-Missouri border between Lane’s Jay-hawkers and pro-slavery bands featuring the likes of William Quantrill was horrific; the sackings of Osceola and Lawrence, Kansas, respectively, show the devastation of the conflict. Resigning from Lane’s Brigade in May 1862, Williams became a Union recruiter, specifically targeting blacks for Union service and even officer commissions. By the time the U.S. War Department objected to black recruitment and especially to the commissioning of black officers, it was too late. With Williams commanding, the 1st Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry had already taken to the field. Rising to the rank of brevet brigadier general, Williams frequently led his black troops to victory, although the 1st Kansas suffered defeat and subsequent atrocities at the hands of the Confederates at Poison Springs, Arkansas, in April 1864.

With the end of the war, Williams sought and received a commission in the much smaller postwar army, becoming a captain of the 8th Cavalry in October 1866. Serving in the Arizona and New Mexico territories, Williams’s command pursued hostile Indians with the same vigor that he had pursued pro-slavery advocates in Kansas before the war. By 1873, because of conflicts with several of his superior officers, which resulted in him being court-martialed and suffering from the effects of five battle wounds received during his military service, Williams resigned and entered private life as a pioneer businessman and rancher at Trinidad, Colorado. In 1890 the U.S. Senate Committee on Military Affairs reviewed Williams’s service record and concluded that he had been the victim of “legalized injustice” (222), essentially overturning his court-martial and temporarily restoring him to duty so he could he could be awarded a pension. James M. Williams died in Washington, D.C., on February 15, 1907, likely from complications of a wound suffered while fighting Indians in Arizona.

Like many figures in American history, James Williams’s life was controversial. He was a Kansas Jayhawker, he recruited blacks for Union service before it was acceptable to do so, and he even commissioned black officers. Significantly, his black troops were the first to best white Confederates in battle during the war, and he mercilessly pursued and killed Indians in the post-Civil War American West. Lull’s text will be of primary interest to military historians and especially to those who follow the lives of pre-Civil War opponents of slavery.