IN 1906, FORT BROWN was the oldest federal garrison on the Rio Grande. In his memoirs, Ulysses S. Grant told of how, during the Mexican War, Major Jacob Brown and his troops built what would be Fort Brown to protect themselves from Mexican guns on the other side of the river.44 The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the war and confirmed that all land north of the Rio Grande, including Brownsville and Fort Brown, was American. During the Civil War, Confederates seized the fort, and when the war ended in 1865, Union General Philip Sheridan raised the American flag above what was left of it. Slaves in Texas never learned of President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation until Sheridan had Union General Gordon Granger tell them about it on June 19, 1865: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.”45 “Juneteenth” is now celebrated every year throughout America.
BEFORE THE TRANSFER TO Texas was made, some of the Twenty-Fifth Infantry's officers worried about Texas. Colonel Ralph W. Hoyt, the regiment's commanding officer, requested that the orders be rescinded and that the regiment not be posted anywhere in Texas.46 The War Department was unmoved. Three or four times before, the army had stationed Negro troops at Fort Brown, and now they were coming again.47
Some Texans also worried about the black soldiers. Brownsville businessman Samuel P. Wreford wrote to his US senator, Charles A. Culberson, objecting to the move. Added to whatever racial attitude he may have had, he was concerned that the presence of so many black soldiers would have a bad effect on the business community's efforts to recapture an earlier prosperity that had drifted away. It would be a very “unfortunate move.”48 Wreford was not the only one in Brownsville anticipating trouble or perhaps thinking of making it. Fort Brown's surgeon, Dr. Benjamin J. Edger, would later write to Senator Joseph Foraker that he “inter-mingled [sic] in social and professional ways with inhabitants of Brownsville,” and “there was no one who said the colored troops would be welcome, and all were loud in denunciations of colored soldiers. My Mexican patients…were afraid of them.”49 Several prominent citizens, including Mayor Frederick J. Combe, had shared their concerns with Edger. The feelings of Brownsville's residents notwithstanding, Fort Brown would be the new home for the Negro soldiers of Companies B, C, and D, First Battalion, Twenty-Fifth Infantry, United States Army.
FROM FORT BROWN, ON Saturday, July 28, 1906, Major Charles W. Penrose, commanding officer of the First Battalion, Twenty-Fifth Infantry, wired the military secretary in Washington that his battalion “arrived at this post at 3.05 o'clock p. m. this date.” Later he would recall that his men “were not welcomed the way other soldiers would have been. When we marched through the town going from the [train station] to the post people were standing along the streets, but there were no smiling faces or anything of that kind, as you might imagine when you are coming to a new post…. They did not seem to be happy over it.”50
Trouble came quickly. Within days, Private James Newton of Company C was beaten with a pistol when he and another soldier did “not get off the sidewalk” for “a party of white ladies standing there.” Three days later, Private Clifford I. Adair, also from Company C, was returning from Mexico with a writing pen he bought while there on a pass. An American customs official named Fred Tate, for no reason other than “You damned niggers are too smart around here,” relieved him of it.51 Only four days after that, there was yet another incident at the customs office. Private Oscar W. Reid, again of Company C, was pushed into the Rio Grande by another customs official for refusing to quiet down when returning from Matamoros. Reid, who had been drinking, admitted he may have gotten what he deserved.52 Yet no one believed a white soldier from the departed Twenty-Sixth Infantry would have gotten the same treatment.
Worse for the soldiers, Reid's casual acceptance of his dunking to the contrary, the possible resentment by them over these incidents provided the motive for the shooting that became the Brownsville Incident.
“Does anybody know anything about this firing?”
Mayor Frederick Combe, early in the
morning of August 14, 1906, Brownsville
WHEN THE SHOOTING BEGAN, the battalion's commanding officer, Major Charles Penrose, was in bed but not asleep. Two shots—he was sure they were fired by pistols—got his attention. Then came a volley of six or seven more. Then another three “that stood out prominently, more so than the others,” and which Penrose came to believe were those fired as an alarm by the sentry Private Joseph Howard.1 Other than Howard's, all of these and another series of irregular shots that followed seemed to be coming from the town outside the post.2 Pulling his uniform over his pajamas and shoving his bare feet into unlaced boots, he started for the door. Just as he got there, he heard Private Hairston's knock and his excited warning, “Major, they are shooting us up; they are shooting us up.” Penrose ordered Hairston to sound “Call to Arms” and dashed across the parade ground to the enlisted men's barracks, where he found confusion among his soldiers and dead silence on the other side of the garrison wall.3 The gunfire had ceased.
Captain Edgar Macklin, commanding officer of Company C, was Fort Brown's officer of the day. He was assumed to be somewhere attending to these duties, and his company was milling about outside their barracks without him. Some of them were not in uniform and were wandering around in their underwear. None had his weapon. Acting First Sergeant Samuel Harley, the man in charge of the weapons, claimed not to hear the bugle's call to arms, and without an order from an officer to release the rifles to the men, he kept them securely locked in their racks. An angry Major Penrose told the men to get their rifles, even if they had to smash open the racks to do it.4
Company B was a little better off: at least its men had their weapons. Its commanding officer, Lieutenant George Lawrason, also was absent. Its experienced First Sergeant Mingo Sanders, with more than twenty-five years in the army, took roll to see if any of his soldiers was missing. He was bringing order to his company, but it needed its commanding officer, and Penrose told a noncommissioned officer on the scene to find Lieutenant Lawrason.
Returning to Company C, Penrose saw it now had its rifles, but he was horrified to see the men loading them with ammunition. He ordered the soldiers to remove all bullets from their weapons and warned he would shoot any man who reloaded his rifle without a direct order from an officer. Because Macklin's company still had no officer to lead it, Penrose ordered Lieutenant Harry Grier, the battalion's quartermaster and acting adjutant, to assume command.5
Company D was not in the least confused or disorderly. Its commanding officer, Captain Samuel Lyon, had formed it quickly, and now he and his soldiers quietly awaited further orders. It was the best outfit in the battalion. In an army drill competition two or three years earlier, it won first place as the best drilled, most highly disciplined, and most efficient company-size unit in the army.6
From his own sense that the shots he heard were fired in the town and the soldiers’ belief that the townspeople were shooting at the fort, Penrose concluded the post had to be defended.7 He ordered his three companies of infantry to form a continuous line facing the town at the waist-high brick wall separating town and fort. With the shooting ended and his soldiers alert and in defensive positions, Penrose felt Fort Brown was secure from any further attack and turned his attention to his missing officer of the day and two soldiers from Company B who were also not accounted for. Worried about their safety, Penrose ordered Lyon and his company into Brownsville to search for them.
WHEN MAYOR COMBE REACHED Crixell's saloon, he heard a “chorus of remarks” from the men there. “The negroes are shooting on the town.”8 Police Chief Connor came up to him and said four policemen were missing. Combe worried they were victims of the shooting and possibly dead. He left Crixell's and started walking in the direction of Fort Brown, about two and a half blocks away. After half a block he saw in the dark street a large shape that turned out to be Dominguez's dead horse.9 Disregarding shouted warnings to stay off the street,
he crossed over to the Miller Hotel. He was going to find out what happened, and he was going to start there.
Standing inside the hotel's doorway, he called out to anyone who could hear him, “Does anybody know anything about this firing?” At that moment, a man in pajamas, whom Combe recognized as the cashier at the Merchants National Bank, came racing down the stairs and, without stopping to answer, if indeed he had even heard the question, ran past the startled mayor, out the door, and disappeared. “He was getting out of that hotbed as fast as he could.”10
Combe stepped back onto Elizabeth Street and into bedlam. “People were running in, running in from all parts of town, armed with whatever they could find.” They kept calling out, “The soldiers have shot up the town.” Hotheads were collecting in the square, ginning up each other's anger and frustration, and Combe worried they would do something foolish, maybe even retaliate against the soldiers by assaulting Fort Brown. Pointing out that the soldiers in the fort were “efficient troops” and “splendidly armed,” the mayor took the swagger out of the mob so that—reluctantly—it dispersed.11 A potentially deadly confrontation between town and troops was, for the moment, avoided.
Learning nothing at Crixell's saloon or at the Miller Hotel, Combe continued on to the fort to see if anyone there knew anything. At just that moment, marching toward him on Elizabeth Street were Captain Lyon and Company D looking for the missing soldiers.12 After exchanging their diametrically different versions of whether it was soldiers or townspeople who did the shooting, together they started off to the fort and Major Penrose, where Combe came right to the point. “Major, this is a terrible outrage. Your men have shot up the town, wounded the lieutenant of police, killed his horse, and generally shot up the town.”13 Penrose disagreed. He thought it was citizens who did the shooting and fired on Fort Brown. Where they agreed was that soldiers should be kept out of the town and civilians away from the fort. And they would meet again later that morning.
While they were talking, the missing Captain Macklin showed up. Excusing himself for being late, Macklin told Penrose he had been asleep the entire time in his quarters. The astonished Penrose ordered him to take command of his company at the brick wall separating town and fort.
The shooting was over. The town was tense but quiet. The fort was secure, but its soldiers were on edge. And as the smell of gunfire hung in the still, Texas air, the investigations began into what happened.
THE FIRST INVESTIGATOR WAS Mayor Combe himself. Walking back home from the fort, he got as far as the Miller Hotel when someone said he was needed at John Tillman's Ruby Saloon. There he saw the body of its bartender Frank Natus lying on the ground. Peeling away the dead man's clothes, Combe saw entry and exit wounds caused by what he believed was a “high-power bullet.”14 Moving on to the drugstore, where police lieutenant Dominguez was taken, he found a very badly wounded man. “His hand was pretty well torn up; the phalanges were hanging over…and it was badly shattered.”15 Combe and his brother, Dr. Joe Combe, realized that amputation was needed, but it could wait for later in the morning. The mayor asked Dominguez who did the shooting.
“The Negroes.”
“Did you see that they were soldiers?”
“Yes, sir.”16
Since Dominguez was shot as he was riding past the Miller Hotel, Combe decided to go back there before returning home. Walking past the front of the hotel, he turned east along Thirteenth Street to where Dominguez said the shooters had been when they shot him, “the mouth of the alley, when I stepped on something that gave a metallic sound.” Combe bent down in the dark to feel with his hand what it was and discovered a cartridge. He felt around again and found more. Then a clip, which held cartridges before they were fired, then six or seven empty cartridge shells. He examined these under the light and immediately realized they all were from the army's new high-power Springfield rifle. “As far as I was personally concerned, this had been done by the soldiers.”17 Brownsville had its first hard evidence, and it was against the men of the Twenty-Fifth Infantry.18
AFTER A NIGHT OF no sleep, Mayor Combe returned early to Fort Brown, but not for his meeting with Major Penrose.19 The post's attending surgeon was away from the fort and Combe was taking his place. He arrived for the 7:00 a.m. sick call, but there was not much there for him to do, and after a short time he drove back into town. Showing Penrose the shells and cartridges he had found in the darkness after the shooting could wait until they met later that morning. There was a “great deal of excitement” in the town, and Combe wanted to get a sense of what others were thinking.20 The first man he met was John B. Armstrong, who preferred to be addressed as “Major,” his rank from the army. Armstrong was, as Combe later made sure to point out to the Senate Military Affairs Committee and its majority-Republican membership, a “prominent Republican.” Testing an idea, Combe asked Armstrong if it might be good to form a committee of “thinking people” to investigate what went on overnight. He knew of at least two men talking in a way that tended to provoke people, one of whom was the commission agent Sam Wreford, whose furiously indignant letter to Senator Charles Culberson back in May protesting the transfer of black soldiers to Brownsville made clear what he thought of such men. This committee might reassure the town something was being done.21 Armstrong liked Combe's idea. Encouraged by this endorsement, Combe asked others, and all agreed it was a good way to learn what happened and, not incidentally, to calm people down. For men less amenable to this even-tempered approach, Combe “laid the law down” and threatened to arrest and jail to keep such talk off the streets.22 Meanwhile, he called a meeting later that morning to form the committee he discussed. It was an essential element in the plan coalescing in his mind, and he needed to start pronto. Beforehand, however, he had his meeting with Major Penrose.
ARRIVING AT THE FORT at 9:00 a.m., Mayor Combe was waved through the gate by sentries alerted he was coming to see the commanding officer.
With Penrose was Commissioner Rentfro Creager. He had asked Creager to come to discuss how he might go about his investigation but quickly realized the man's mind was made up—the soldiers had done it—and he could not advise him in an unbiased way.23
Creager spent summer evenings at Point Isabel, a resort on the Texas Gulf Coast about twenty miles from Brownsville. He returned each morning on the train and hailed a hack to his law office, stopping on the way at the post office to collect his mail. He knew nothing of the shooting the night before until the Mexican hack driver broke the news to him. According to the driver, the black soldiers had “broken out of the post” and killed three people.24 A crowd at the post office also told him the shooters were soldiers.25 When Creager got to his law office, there was the call from Major Penrose requesting that he come to Fort Brown to meet with him.26
Combe could see that Penrose and Creager were discussing the shooting, and since that was why he was there, he joined right in.27 He slapped the cartridge, clip, and shells he picked off the street down onto Penrose's desk and asked, “What do you think of that for evidence?” Before Penrose could answer, the mayor continued, “Your men did this.”28 After carefully examining the ammunition, Penrose reluctantly acknowledged this “was almost conclusive evidence, but who did it and how they did it we do not know.” “Well, I am convinced,” Combe snorted, and he went back to town to get ready for the citizens’ meeting, leaving behind a battalion commanding officer now worried about his soldiers’ guilt.
NOT QUITE SURE OF the other man's intentions or plans, neither Mayor Combe nor Major Penrose was completely candid at this meeting. Each hid from the other a second group of shells he knew of.
Penrose had gotten his from Macklin. When Macklin finally turned up and assumed command of Company C, Penrose decided that only it was needed to guard the fort's perimeter, and the other two companies were told to stand down. Macklin spent the rest of the night at the fort's main gate opposite Elizabeth Street, occasionally leaving to inspect his line of sentinels. When the “streak of dawn came,” und
er Major Penrose's order he went outside the gate to look for spent ammunition.29 He began by pacing inside the waist-high wall. He found nothing.30 Then he walked along Garrison Road from the main gate to Cowen Alley, where he saw on the ground on the town side of Garrison Road, about thirty feet away from the wall, five cartridge clips and seven shells from fired ammunition. He saw they were for the army's Springfield rifle, issued to the Twenty-Fifth Infantry back at Fort Niobrara.31 The seven empty shells were “all in a bunch,” in a circle not more than twelve to fifteen inches in diameter. This puzzled him. Had the bullets been fired from a rifle, the shells would be scattered in a haphazard manner, and such a tight pattern would have been impossible.32
He glanced up and noticed civilians nearby bending down every now and then to pick something up. Quickly gathering up the shells and the clips at his feet, he carried them back into the fort to show Major Penrose. “I am afraid our men have done this shooting,” Penrose said.33 He told Macklin to hold onto what he had found. Macklin took them to his quarters and threw them in a drawer. In time, the desk and the shells disappeared.34
Combe also kept quiet about other shells and ammunition found that morning. On his way to Fort Brown for sick call, he swung by the Miller Hotel. It was about 5:30 a.m., not quite sunup, and he walked over to where he had found the shells in the street a few hours earlier. Other men were up and about, and they told him that at that same spot “quite a number of people” also had picked up shells. The mayor ordered Police Chief Connor to find these people and take possession of what they had.35 Someone told him of the shooting at the Starck house on Washington Street, and he went over there. Sure enough, there were shells in the gutter in front of the house. Combe pocketed these as well.36
PENROSE'S SKEPTICISM WHEN THE mayor showed him the first group of shells may be why Combe said nothing about his newly discovered shells. Perhaps Combe realized they might not have convinced Penrose of his soldiers’ guilt either. He was not aware Penrose was changing his mind after seeing the shells Macklin found on Garrison Road. Probably Combe no longer cared what Penrose thought. What was important to him was protecting Brownsville. In his mind there was no question some of the soldiers had rioted and at least one of them was a murderer, but it was not his job to determine who did the shooting and prosecute them. He was Brownsville's mayor, and his responsibility was to protect his city and the people who lived in it. The soldiers might go on a rampage again. No assurance from their officers that they could be kept safely within the confines of the post and out of the town was good enough for him. Only hours earlier, when he bumped into Captain Lyon and Company D looking for missing soldiers, he saw how difficult it was for Lyon to control his men. They nervously broke ranks, and when Lyon ordered them to get back in formation, they ignored him. It took a curse and a harshly shouted second command to bring them to order.37 Their discipline might crumble entirely, and who knew what might happen to Brownsville if it did.
Taking on Theodore Roosevelt Page 7
