the idea, even in the North, that the war should be prosecuted by whites only. The change in policy was motivated not by idealism, “but rather by the dictates of a grueling war,” according to one historian.15 In the absence of black soldiers, many more white Union soldiers would die. “Since the Confederates were going to kill a great many more Union soldiers before the war was over, a good many white men would escape death if a considerable percentage of those soldiers were colored.”16
Even when the decision to incorporate black troops into the war effort was reached, special permission was required from the War Department or Congress for those states that wished to organize volunteer Negro regiments. Instead of being inducted through established channels, a special Bureau for Colored Troops was set up to organize separate United States Colored Troops. In contrast to the Revolutionary War, when blacks had been scattered throughout the ranks, very few African Americans served in mixed units in the Union army. Instead, 178,985 men—mostly infantry—served in separate regiments, and they were paid less than white soldiers.17
In spite of their marginalization, the contributions of black soldiers in the Civil War were important in furthering claims for fuller civil and political rights. In the reorganization of the army that followed the war, Negro regiments were established by Congress for the first time in the nation’s history. Initially, there were six all-black units—the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry and the Thirty-Eighth, Thirty-Ninth, Fortieth, and Forty-First Infantry. These were consolidated a year or so later into two infantry and two cavalry regiments.18 Confined to the West and segregated in the regiments in which they served following the Civil War, black soldiers whose remains were sent back east were also buried in segregated sections on the fringes of Arlington National Cemetery.19
During the 1870s, several young African Americans won appointments to West Point. Scott’s time at the military academy overlapped with three of them: James Smith, Johnson Whittacker, and Henry O. Flipper. Henry Flipper graduated the year after Scott, becoming the first African American to graduate. Upon graduation he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Tenth Cavalry “Buffalo Soldiers,” the same regiment Scott had written to his mother about joining during his final year.
The presence of black cadets at the country’s foremost military academy challenged the “fortified embattlement of officer and color caste” that West Point represented.20 One of the more sensitive issues posed by the training of black officers at West Point was the likelihood it created for their possible command of and promotion over white officers. According to army doctrine of the time, which remained in force for another half century, blacks should not command white troops. Even the opportunities for blacks to command all-black regiments were limited and controversial. The orthodoxy was that Negroes had neither the initiative nor the savvy to make effective commanders and that they would perform well as soldiers only if commanded by whites. While conceding that “the colored race are a valuable military asset,” James Parker, a white officer who fought in various Indian campaigns on the U.S.-Mexico border and was often garrisoned with black troops, expressed the common opinion that such “regiments must be officered by whites else they are of no account.”21
Whites resented the very idea of submitting to the authority of blacks, whom they considered their racial inferiors. The wife of a white lieutenant expressed a common prejudice when she wrote letters to relatives from Camp Supply in 1873 in which she decried the spectacle of black sergeants at the post with authority over white privates. In her opinion, such an inversion of the natural order constituted a “good cause for desertion.”22 Unwritten policy thus imposed a ceiling on the promotion of African American officers above the rank of captain.23 When the rare officer of color attained a higher rank, as in the case of Charles Young—who graduated from West Point in 1889 and achieved the rank of colonel during the Pershing Punitive Expedition in Mexico—an assignment was found that might evade such potentially awkward situations. In Young’s case, he was assigned first to develop the military science program at Wilberforce University, and later appointed military attaché to Haiti and Liberia.
The professional implications for command and promotion of black officers at West Point was one thing. The thought of social fraternization across racial lines was quite another. If there were black officers, they would reasonably be expected to socialize with others of their rank at the places they were stationed. “The presence of Black officers also raised the possibility of an integrated officers’ mess.” Especially at the frontier posts where officers and their wives were already hard-pressed to uphold the social conventions appropriate to their status as officers and gentlemen (and ladies), the idea of living and socializing together was opposed by the white officer corps.24
Major General John Schofield, superintendent of West Point during the time Scott and Flipper were there, expressed his doubts about the ability of Negroes to succeed at the academy, basing his views on the widespread notion that they were backward and not fit to compete with whites. He acknowledged that qualified black nominees could not be denied admission to the national school, but he was doubtful about their prospects for success and did not see it as part of the institution’s mission to work for that success. In his report for 1870, the superintendent wrote: “To send to West Point for four years competition a young man who was born in slavery is to assume that half a generation has been sufficient to raise a colored man to the social, moral, and intellectual level which the average white man has reached in several hundred years. As well might the common farm horse be entered in a four mile race against the best blood inherited from a line of English racers.”25 Schofield’s racism was consistent with the prevailing ethnological thinking of the day, which held that the world’s peoples passed through stages of evolution, from savagery to barbarism, and finally, civilization, before attaining the highest stage of development, epitomized by the Anglo-Saxons (the “English racers”), who were naturally assumed to occupy the top echelon.26
There is no record of any interaction between Hugh Lenox Scott and any of the black cadets who attended West Point with him. Nor did Scott mention any of his black classmates in his letters home, although he did refer derisively in one letter to his mother to the “moke fever” in Congress, by which he meant the supposed political preference for establishing and preserving black army units even as others might be reduced in an expected peace-time reduction of troops. While he was critical of legislative support for the all-black regiments, Scott was attuned—as were Robert Lee Bullard and John J. Pershing after him—to the politics of race in the military and to the possible advantages he might work from it. Part of his calculation about getting a commission in a black regiment, unpopular as it was among his fellow West Pointers, was his belief that it could provide a better chance of promotion and professional advancement for him than joining a white regiment. He made the same calculation about service with Indian scouts soon after arriving in Dakota Territory. In his closing words of justification for his decision to pursue a commission in a Buffalo Soldier regiment such as the Tenth, Scott confided to his mother, “most of the men here will hoot me [for it], but I don’t care so long as I see it is to my advantage.”27 John J. Pershing—whose nickname Black Jack derived from his service with the Tenth Cavalry—shared a similar analysis with his Nebraska friend Assistant Secretary of War George D. Meiklejohn in 1898. Contemplating the best avenues for advancement from the vantage point of eastern Cuba following the war with Spain, Pershing concluded that they lay with command of one of the immune regiments he believed would be organized as an “imperial guard” for America’s new tropical colonies following the war.28
Besides its presumed better prospects for promotion, the Tenth Cavalry had another attraction in its favor, as far as Scott was concerned. Its regimental headquarters were in Texas, and Texas, he had heard, was a “sportsman’s paradise.” There, he could “shoot all year around instead of being cooped up all winter in a little log hut snowed under in Wyoming Territory or else out on a scout 150 miles from home thermometer 15 degrees below zero—I hear accounts of it now and then that sets my teeth on edge.”29 Scott was an avid hunter. From an early age—rather to the consternation of his bookish family—he
