An American and Nothing Else: The Great War and the Battle for National Belonging
The Paradox of Black Military Service
Unknown photographer. “American Series: Soldier’s Cemetery, Arlington, Va. Graves of Unknown U.S. Col’d Soldiers.” [ca. 1880]. Section 27, depicted here, contains the oldest plots of Arlington National Cemetery—established in 1864 to bury Union dead while the Civil War raged on and the death tolls mounted. The area contains the remains of approximately 1,500 United States Colored Troops (USCT), buried here as “unknown soldiers.”
Unknown photographer. “American Series: Soldier’s Cemetery, Arlington, Va. Graves of Unknown U.S. Col’d Soldiers.” [ca. 1880]. Randolph Linsly Simpson African-American Collection, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.
Dating back to Crispus Attucks, widely considered to be the first person killed in the Boston Massacre, thus the first to die in the Revolutionary War, Black Americans have fought and died in every major military conflict in U.S. history. Many Black soldiers served with the promise of full citizenship in mind in exchange for service to their country, while others enlisted for the romance of warfare—the siren song of adventure, glory, and shared purpose. While the experiences of Black soldiers and veterans in life and death attest to claims of freedom, equality, masculinity, and racial pride, the mechanisms of Jim Crow ensured that these claims would not endure in the eyes of the state and most of its white citizenry.
The United States carried out numerous military engagements in the decades leading up to the First World War, a string of aggressive imperialist conflicts from borderlands warfare and the U.S. intervention in the Mexican Revolution to the Spanish-Cuban-American War, the Philippine–American War, the annexation of Hawaii, and the invasion and occupation of Cuba, Panama, Honduras, Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. While some Black men clamored to enlist in these conflicts, eager to prove their might, manhood, and their patriotism, others remained indifferent or outright resistant to the idea of fighting for a nation that denied them their dignity, rights, and their basic humanity.
Application of Henry Moss, Private, H Co., 16th Regiment, U.S.C.T. (1865– 66) for admission to the Ohio Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Home in Sandusky.
The applicant Henry Moss was born in Kentucky or Indiana around 1825. He enlisted in March of 1865 and served one year with the 16th U.S. Colored Infantry. After the war, Moss returned to his family in Ohio and worked as a laborer. In 1896, without property or living relatives, Moss submitted this application to the Ohio Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Home and was admitted. Moss died there in 1903 and was buried in the estate cemetery.
Unknown photographer. Soldiers drinking and playing cards on a barracks porch, [ca. 1912]. Randolph Linsly Simpson African-American Collection, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.
Unknown photographer. Soldiers drinking and playing cards on a barracks porch, [ca. 1912]. Soldiers in the 10th Cavalry at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, one of the oldest segregated all-Black regiments, pose in parody of a racist caricature series in popular circulation at the time. The 10th Cavalry, formed at Fort Leavenworth in 1866, mainly fought in conflicts of westward expansion against American Indians, garnering the famous “Buffalo Soldiers” moniker. The 10th later fought in the Spanish-Cuban-American War and the Philippine-American War at the turn of the century.
Photographic postcards by unknown photographers. [ca. 1910–1917]. Randolph Linsly Simpson African-American Collection, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.
Taken between 1910 and 1917, these photographic postcards depict soldiers predominantly from the 10th Cavalry in the pre-World War I years when they were based out of Fort Ethan Allen, Vermont. Soldiers reveled in this comfortable peacetime re-assignment, far removed from frontier living and field rations.