for Bullard, like others of his generation who grappled with the question, was complex and contradictory. Wildness promised renewal and empowerment for the civilized man who embraced it; it also threatened to corrupt him.8
Bullard’s explanation of the behavior that led to the standoff in the Sierra Madre is telling: “I was new,” he wrote of the incident, “and in those days these Indian togs caught all new men’s fancy. On the least lead the most civilized of us quickly reverts to the primitive.” Bullard’s account speaks to his embrace of different mores and the general freedom for new men such as himself to shed some of the constraints of civilized comportment in the frontier posts to which they were assigned. It also underscores Bullard’s belief in the tenuousness of the white man’s claim to be civilized and the inevitable tendency to “revert to the primitive.” For Bullard, the tension between the civilized and the primitive was one he felt he had contended with all his life. For him, the distinction was racial.
Born in 1861 on a cotton plantation in eastern Alabama, Bullard was socialized early into the power and immutability of racial hierarchy. He remained acutely aware of racial difference throughout his life. His diaries and autobiographical writings constitute a ledger in which he weighed the costs and advantages of his association with those he regarded as his racial inferiors. His writings also include frequent observations and hypotheses about the relationship between race and the capacity to attain civilization among the peoples he encountered and read about during a military career that encompassed the Indian Wars in the Southwest, spy missions in Cuba and Mexico, and a stint as military governor in the Philippines.
Bullard’s childhood was shaped by intimate but racially circumscribed relations with his family’s former slaves and other freedmen and women on and around the family’s farm in Lee County, Alabama. Bullard blamed his early childhood “association with Negroes big and little” for having “marked” him in negative and enduring ways. “I grew up with them, both short on morals, purpose, manners and education. It told on me. Skipping the morals, I was fifteen before I felt the moving of any ambition; twenty before I began to correct my plantation manners to which reversions are still not uncommon; thirty before my African methods of speech began to yield to grammar; forty before ‘aint’ gave way to ‘is not’ and ‘are not’, and to this day ‘r’s’ and ‘ings’ are a difficulty.”9 Bullard feared that racial inferiority was inscribed in his speech as well as in his character. Its effects were expressed through his behavior; it was part of his very way of being. His embodiment of such defects was something he struggled against for much of his life, always fearing a “reversion” to “plantation manners.” Bullard’s association of inferiority with ways of speaking also reflects his awareness of the stigma attached to southern culture—white as well as black—in the aftermath of the Confederacy’s defeat, which was construed by the victorious North as proof of the inherent backwardness and decadence of southern society. As the first cadet to “carry the name of Robert E. Lee back to West Point,” Bullard was sensitive to the claim of the regnant Yankee culture to define the norms of civilized behavior to the detriment of an Alabama-bred boy like him, whose childhood heroes had been two sisters’ husbands who served on the staffs of Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis.10 At the same time, Bullard believed that the humiliation his family had felt after the war provided him with insights into the psychology of resistance to the American occupation of the Philippines and Cuba.
Later in life, when he had achieved success in his army career, and the bitter memories he associated with growing up under Reconstruction had faded, Bullard was able to reflect with amusement on the ironies of his elevation through the ranks of the “Grand Army of the Republic,” or GAR, as the Union army became known. Bullard’s humor on the subject, like the reabsorption of the white southerners into the federal army and the attenuation of Reconstruction, was accomplished at the expense of African Americans.
Three decades after he became the first southerner with the name Robert Lee to matriculate at West Point since the Civil War, Bullard paid a visit to Lee County (which, like Bullard, had changed its name following the war). There, a chance encounter with one of his father’s former slaves provided the material for a story that served as a commentary on the ironies of history and on the complexities of Bullard’s loyalties as both soldier and southerner.
As Bullard later recounted the tale, he was visiting his family in Opelika when he met a former slave of his family named Frank Bullard. The two Bullards—one white and one black—encountered one another “within two miles of where both he and I were born.” When Robert Bullard told Frank who he was, the older man looked puzzled, as “he evidently struggled with old memory to locate himself and me together,” Bullard remembered. At a GAR meeting years later, Bullard slipped into dialect to tell the rest of the joke:
Then, after a moment or two, [Frank] said, “Oh, yes, yes, I remember. You’s ‘Babe’. Dey tol’ me you went away long time ago into the yankee army what come down thr’ough heah when freedom come fer de niggers. Are you with de yankee Army now?” I told him I was and that they treated me very well. I could see that Frank, still kinky but white-haired, old and worn, was still struggling with his memory about the time ‘the yankee army came down thr’ough heah’ and the how of my being with that army. “Well, ‘Babe’,” he said, “when dey come down thru’ heah, dey met me on de ‘big road’ drivin yo’ Pa’s fo’-mule team an’ they onhitched my lead mule that I had trained to lead the team on a ‘jerk line’, the best lead mule I ever see’d. Dey told dey was goin’ to bring him back. They didn’t; they never did bring back that mule. I wish you would ‘quire ‘round ‘mong them yankee soldiers fo’ dat mule.”11
For Bullard—and for the white audiences he regaled with this story in later years—the humor lay in the portrait of the former slave seemingly locked in an antebellum past—the loyal retainer indignant over the confiscation of his master’s mule. “For Frank,” Bullard told appreciative northern audiences, “the passage of time did not count in his memory.” The punch line of Bullard’s joke was that “Frank’s heart and mind were set on getting that mule back.”
Bullard told this story to a national meeting of the GAR, where he claimed it was received with “much laughter among the old fellows.” When Bullard joked that he was doing what Frank had asked, inquiring after the mule, “some two dozen hands went up in acknowledgement that they had carried off Frank’s mule.” This was followed, Bullard wrote, “with a sort of honorary membership for me (and almost for Frank) and my decoration with the badge of the GAR.” Bullard described himself as “rebel born and rebel bred.” Yet he eventually found success—and even acclaim—as an officer in the “Yankee Army.” In the younger man’s telling, Frank Bullard, the devoted black retainer, was depicted as stuck in the past, unable to fathom or adapt to the changes wrought by the Civil War.
As he began his army service in the Southwest, Bullard fit his perceptions of Indians into familiar and axiomatic ideas about race and the hierarchies of civilization. His fears about the danger of “reverting to the primitive” in Indian Country had their roots in the stigma of racial taint he felt from his upbringing in Alabama. For Bullard, only two things offset the disadvantages he felt he had suffered as a result of his childhood association with blacks on and around his family’s plantation. The first was the understanding he felt he had gained of racial difference itself, to which he credited his first significant career advance, which came as the commander of a black volunteer regiment in the Spanish American War. He expressed this belief in his autobiography: “My compensation for these, their stamp and marks upon me, has been an appreciation of the difference between negros and white men, just, I believe; for, guided by it, I was at thirty-seven to make my first military reputation commanding negroes.”12
Besides the specific expertise that Bullard claimed in “commanding negroes,” he also claimed analogous knowledge and insight into the character of Filipinos, Cubans, and later Mexicans, again all based on an analysis of the ways they supposedly differed from Anglo-Saxons. As his career took him from the border
