The Citizens’ Committee had accomplished Mayor Combe's purpose. But in showing the soldiers were dangerous, Combe and his committee established their collective guilt. This presumption of guilt colored every investigation thereafter. Their battalion commander, the commanding general of the Department of Texas, his inspector general, the army's chief of staff, the acting secretary of war, and in the end President Roosevelt thought the anguish expressed by the residents of Brownsville might be justified.
MAYOR COMBE FORMED A committee ostensibly to investigate a crime and find evidence showing who did it. The committee was to make a prima facie case against the soldiers that would be enough to get them out of Brownsville. How could President Roosevelt ignore advice that he had to protect the town and its citizens? The protection of Brownsville became more important than the protection of the soldiers’ rights.
Crucial to the history of the Brownsville Incident is understanding that Combe and his committee changed the focus of almost every subsequent investigation. Any crime investigation has to have two parts: finding out who did it and developing the evidence to prove it. After the Citizens’ Committee, subsequent investigations skipped over the first and went right to the second. Quickly it became apparent that the only way to prove it was soldiers was to get other soldiers to say so. The army was never able to do that, and the government soon determined it did not have to.
And so Combe and his committee manipulated Theodore Roosevelt into taking charge of the Brownville Incident.
“Now tell who did the shooting
And how it all begun”;
But not one word escaped their lips—
That noble band stood mum.
Well, if you will shield the guilty
Your fame as soldiers is erased;
You are discharged, every man of you,
Dishonored and disgraced.
Ah, but who can say dishonor,
In this land of toil and strife,
When men stand by their comrades
For the protection of their life.
Poem appearing in the
Colored American Magazine, January 1907, pp. 62–63,
quoted in Lewis N. Wynne,
“Brownsville: The Reaction of the Negro Press,”
Phylon, 1972
WATCHING FROM THE PORCH of the Miller Hotel, Mayor Combe was relieved to see the battalion form up at Fort Brown's main gate and prepare to leave Brownsville. His jaw dropped when he saw the soldiers about-face and march back into the fort. Major Penrose had just received the telegram from General Ainsworth ordering a delay until the army resolved the problem of Ranger McDonald and the soldiers in the guardhouse. “Your message this date received as battalion was forming to march to train,” Penrose wired back.1 When the snarl was straightened out, the new plan was to leave around midnight. Now it was Mayor Combe who wanted a delay. Violence from townspeople was more likely in the dark, and Penrose agreed to wait for daybreak. Mayor Combe used this time to bulk up the police presence with handpicked deputies stationed at regular intervals along Elizabeth Street between the fort and the train depot. No disruption would be tolerated. The police would arrest any man demonstrating against the soldiers and shoot anyone firing a weapon.2
A story later that day in the Brownsville Daily Herald, cited by Brownsville historian John Weaver, described the scene: “Not a word was spoken by the men as they left and only the briefest commands given by the officers as they marched through town.”3 As soon as the soldiers boarded the waiting train and left, Brownsville stopped holding its breath, and very soon the streets came alive with women and children no longer afraid to leave their homes.4
There would be no replacement for the Twenty-Fifth Infantry; Fort Brown would be deactivated and shuttered. Interest in the Citizens’ Committee and its investigation soon dwindled and the committee itself would fade away. Texas Ranger McDonald left town to bring his kind of peace and justice to other parts of Texas, and Brownsville was as happy to see the end of him as it was of the soldiers. Judge Welch returned to his regular judicial duties, but only briefly. A few weeks later he was murdered, and, just as with the investigations into the Brownsville shooting, his killers would never be identified.5
EVEN BEFORE THE BATTALION left Brownsville, the army started its own inquiries. At sunrise after the shooting, Major Penrose ordered the men's rifles inspected and sent Captain Macklin to walk the brick wall separating the fort and the town to look for spent ammunition. Later that day, when for the first time he notified his superiors of the raid, he told them, “Am doing everything in my power to find guilty parties if they be in this command” (author's emphasis).6 For the next five months, the army investigated and reinvestigated, and over the following four years, there would be at least twenty investigations, seven by the army.7 Each sought to redress the inadequacies of those preceding it, each made its own mistakes, and all failed to learn who the shooters were.
MAJOR PENROSE HAD TROUBLE getting started. He had no idea how to go about it. His thought to seek help from Commissioner Rentfro Creager got him nowhere when he realized the man was too prejudiced against the Negro soldiers to be of any use. Meanwhile, the demands from higher-ups to know what happened pressured him to respond too quickly. His hopelessly hurried one-day inquiry relied on Citizens’ Committee testimony.8 Because it was neither under oath nor cross-examined, it had little probative value. It allowed Penrose to describe the raid in greater detail, but it was one-sided. Its conclusion was untested.
Penrose's telegram of August 14 alerting the army to the shooting and his report of August 15 made two statements with important consequences. The raid “was carefully planned beforehand [and the shooting] was done by…men of this command, abetted by others in post.”9 That made it premeditated. For the moment, the army and the War Department's only interest was finding out which soldiers were conspirators. Penrose could not tell them. His report ended with an optimistic prediction: “through [the soldiers themselves], rather than my own efforts, the perpetrators of this wanton crime will be apprehended.”10
Curiously, he said nothing about Macklin finding shells, just as he also hid this from Mayor Combe. In time, the Macklin shells vanished along with the desk Captain Macklin so casually tossed them into.11 The mystery of who shot them and why Penrose never mentioned them remains.
MAJOR PENROSE'S INVESTIGATION, COMPLETED in double time, was unsatisfactory and his report's findings poorly thought out. He was not the right man for the job. He was not a detective and he was not a lawyer. He was not part of the army's office of the inspector general. On his own, he had no authority to investigate the civilians (the opposite problem for Texas Ranger McDonald, who was told he had no right to investigate soldiers), and without this, the army should not have expected his investigation to be complete. There should have been formal coordination of his and civil authorities’ investigations, not the informality of his offer to cooperate with the Citizens’ Committee, itself something of a rump band, most of whose members were selected for reasons other than backgrounds in investigative training.
Another investigation was needed.
MAJOR AUGUSTUS BLOCKSOM, ASSISTANT inspector general for the army's Southwest Division, was in his office at the division's headquarters in Oklahoma City, when he received his orders to “go down there and investigate this trouble.”12 A graduate of the US Military Academy at West Point, Blocksom had seen a lot of fighting during his almost-thirty years in the army. He was a cavalry officer in the Indian Wars in the American West, helped put down the Boxer Rebellion in China, and received the Purple Heart for wounds charging up San Juan Heights in Cuba.13 Now fifty-two years old, Major Blocksom's inspector-general duties brought him in from the field to inspect troops, find out the condition of their discipline, and investigate infractions of military duty. These were matters he was “quite familiar” with.14 If he had experience in off-post criminal behavior and working with civilian police agencies and prosecutors, he never mentioned it.
Once the soldiers were on their way to Oklahoma, Blocksom got down to business. He started his investigation by speaking to citizens and witnesses, learning the thoughts of the members of the Citizens’ Committee, and interviewing the Twenty-Fifth Infantry's commissioned and noncommissioned officers and army hospital corpsmen. As he absorbed what people told him, his conclusions did not change at all. The shooters were soldiers. He supported Penrose's conclusion that the raid was premeditated; therefore any questionable act by a soldier could be interpreted as part of the plan. Thus when the first shots were fired from inside the fort as an alarm, this was further evidence of the plan.19 Did the sergeant of the guard sound the “Call to Arms” on his own? This was a signal to the shooters and part of the plan.
Blocksom said he was determined to conduct an investigation as thoroughly as he could. But he took no notice of facts that simply got in the way of his conclusion. For example, Major Penrose thought the first two shots were fired from pistols, and others heard pistol fire too.20 This was significant because pistols were common among Brownsville civilians,21 but the soldiers’ pistols were in their shipping cases and under lock and key.22 Blocksom's report, like Penrose's, ignored possible pistol fire and the logical inference that it probably would not be from the soldiers.
He secured no new written testimony (or any written statements for that matter), either sworn or unsworn. If someone made a comment exonerating the soldiers, he considered it false and tossed it aside, as with Private Joseph Howard, who denied seeing who was shooting. Blocksom thought he was lying.23 His entire perception of the soldiers and what they said began with skepticism and ended with doubt. He scoffed at First Sergeant Mingo Sanders's assertion that his record in the army was perfect, without bothering to look at it.24 Had he done so, he would have found more than twenty-five years of military service with no record of any court-martial or reprimand.25
He failed to critically question the officers. Astonishingly, his quizzing of Penrose and Macklin was so incomplete, he never found out about the shells Macklin picked off the ground.26 He never asked about them; Penrose and Macklin never told him about them. (This would be the third time Penrose failed to mention it.) He gave no weight to the opinion of the only officer who thought the soldiers innocent, Captain Samuel Lyon of Company D. Instead, he accepted at face value what the residents told him. The “evidence of many witnesses…is conclusive” (author's emphasis).27 He never tested, for example, whether witnesses could tell a shooter's race in the dark. The soldiers’ defenders looked into this and learned they probably could not.28 When Blocksom heard this, he later conceded this would bear on the witnesses’ credibility.29
He did not consider that revenge worked both ways. He thought the soldiers wanted to get even with the town for the harassment it gave them; was it not just as likely angry townspeople wanted to get even with them for the alleged assault on Mrs. Evans? Blocksom acknowledged people were “excited” after the Evans “assault.” Excited? They were so enraged the next day that Mayor Combe told Penrose that if soldiers came into the town he could not be responsible for their safety.
He insufficiently grasped what the harassment and humiliation meant to the soldiers, some of them proud combat veterans, and what they were forced to live with in Brownsville, especially after postings in the Jim Crow–free Northwest. (General McCaskey, the man who ordered Blocksom to Brownsville, was aware of it.) He explained away some of the nasty treatment of the soldiers by whites as “in the manner of the South.”30 Tate may have been “too drastic” when he battered Private James Newton on the head with a revolver, but Newton was “rude and probably insulting” when he refused to walk around the ladies. Customs Inspector A. Y. Baker probably did use too much force when he pushed Private Oscar Reid (misspelled as “Reed” by Blocksom) into the water; then again, Reid may have been “drunk and disorderly.”
The result of a one-sided investigation was an inevitable conclusion. His report could have begun and ended with its first line, “Sir, I have the honor to report investigation of trouble caused by soldiers of the Twenty-Fifth Infantry” (author's emphasis). Race was the reason there was a shooting. And, he made clear, race was the reason for his failure to find out who did it.
IN HIS TESTIMONY BEFORE the Senate Military Affairs Committee, Major Blocksom tried to explain how race kept him from accomplishing what he was sent to Brownsville to do. Awkwardly expressing himself, Blocksom blamed the soldiers and said their actions were “external to the ordinary affairs of discipline.”31 Regardless of race, “I know when a man commits a crime in a company that the men all know it. They are bound to find it out.” He was “morally certain” of it.32 Add the racial component to the Brownsville raid, and “the soldiers stuck together and so intended to do so through thick and thin, so far as they could.”33 “Many of the old soldiers who had nothing to do with the raid must know something tangible as to the identity of the criminals.”34 If pressure was applied to these men, some of them would identify the raiders to save their own careers. If they did not, “they should be made to suffer with others more guilty, as far as the law will permit.” If they did not know who the raiders and conspirators were, they should find out or be thrown out of the army along with them.35
Blocksom ended his report with a revealing statement, nowhere justified by what he learned in Brownsville. New ideas of the times prodded Negro soldiers into reacting in new and unsettling ways to provocations formerly quietly endured. “It must be confessed the colored soldier is much more aggressive in his attitude on the social equality question than he used to be.”36
WITH THE ARMY'S INVESTIGATIONS down a blind alley, it still had to make a decision regarding what to do with soldiers who might be singled out as shooters and conspirators. At one point, it seemed to consider trials by Texas authorities. The idea made sense. The raid was off the base and in the town itself, the victims were civilians, and Texas had a criminal court system. But would a south Texas court protect black soldiers? In a letter to Secretary of War Taft dated the day after the Black Battalion arrived at Fort Reno, General Ainsworth wrote, “We propose to continue the investigation with a view to discovering the guilty parties if possible, so that they as well as any others that may be demanded may be turned over to the civil authorities when the President is satisfied that this can be done with reasonable assurance that the men turned over will receive protection and a fair trial” (author's emphasis).37 Four days later, both Blocksom and Assistant Attorney General A. C. Hamilton, sent to Brownsville by the Justice Department specifically to find out if a fair trial there was possible, in separate reports to their respective superiors said it was not.38
The question became moot. Texas might not have a reason to try the men. Technically, the moment Judge Welch withdrew the arrest warrants, the confined soldiers were, as General Ainsworth advised William Loeb, the president's secretary, on September 3, “free from any charges so far as the civil authorities are concerned.” However, the Cameron County grand jury had not met to consider the affray; it soon would, and it was possible it might indict the soldiers. Both Blocksom and Hamilton thought this was doubtful, and using identical language both men said so in their letters of September 2.
They were right. Three weeks later, the grand jury adjourned without returning verdicts against any of the soldiers. That same day, Judge Welch advised the army the men were “entitled to release.”39 Trial by Texas was out.
TRIAL BY ARMY COURT-MARTIAL was the obvious alternative. Three days before Ainsworth's letter to Loeb, Loeb wrote Ainsworth about a request from a Negro lawyer in Jacksonville, Florida, J. Douglas Wetmore, for an interview with President Roosevelt concerning Brownsville. Loeb had put Wetmore off by telling him, “So far as the President is advised the men will be tried before a military court.” Now Loeb was having second thoughts. “I was correct in this statement, was I not?” he asked Ainsworth.40 He was. General Ainsworth already had the army, with Roosevelt's knowledge and consent, charge the confined soldiers under the military's Articles of War.41 If Texas decided to bring the men to trial and Roosevelt had no objections, he could determine the Texas courts could protect the men and their rights and allow civilian trials. If, as Ainsworth suspected, Roosevelt wanted to keep control in his own hands, he could, with the two warning letters from Hamilton (which Ainsworth thoughtfully included in his response to Loeb), find Texas justice lacking and order courts-martial for these military charges. The decision was Roosevelt's to make.
SOON AFTER BLOCKSOM'S REPORT, General McCaskey at the Department of Texas told Ainsworth nothing had been learned since the men arrived at Fort Reno.42 Eight days later, Ainsworth, still empty-handed, advised Loeb he would let him know when there were any results.43 That same day, President Roosevelt, working on his annual message to Congress, was irritated he had nothing conclusive to include about Brownsville and was growing increasingly frustrated. Even the Secret Service, whose use in the Brownsville investigation he had authorized, had come up empty.44 His mind went back to Major Blocksom's report and its prediction the crime would not be solved because no soldier would tell on another. He looked again at its recommendation that the threat of discharge be used to force the soldiers to tell what they knew. A month after the shooting, all else having failed, this seemed to him the only way to get the names of the shooters and those who cooperated with them. The next day, September 13, 1906, a month to the day after the shooting, his secretary Loeb wired Ainsworth, “the President…is much concerned over [Blocksom's report]…. If the guilty parties cannot be discovered the President approves of the recommendation that the whole three companies implicated in this atrocious outrage should be dismissed and the men forever debarred from reenlisting in the Army or Navy of the United States.” Roosevelt's concern had turned to anger.
Taking on Theodore Roosevelt Page 10
