Abstract:
In the summer of 2015, I completed excavations at the ruins of an enlisted men’s barracks at the post of Fort Davis, Texas. The post was formed to defend traffic on the Overland Trail in 1854. Abandoned by Federal troops during the Civil War, the post was rebuilt in 1867. From that year until 1880, the post was continuously and solely staffed with black enlisted men serving under the command of white commissioned officers. While the obligation to protect commerce and travellers remained, the men were also responsible for building road and communications infrastructure, and enforcing reconstruction laws. Black soldiers were not just building infrastructure, with every enlistment, they were also part of the men actively building what it was to be freedmen and citizens. Black and White media closely watched and documented their successes as failures as gauges to evaluate the national experiment of emancipation. Archaeology provides important insights into how day-to-day conduct in the black regiments engaged in these discourses, but it is also necessary to consider the rich documentary record produced by the military. Fort Davis is currently preserved as a National Historic Park Site, and has an extensive on-site archive that includes copies of many of the National Archive Record Groups associated with post communications and governance. While extremely rich and helpful, this archive is focused administratively on the “post” as a structure. To look more intimately at the lives of Regiments, companies and individual persons who served at the post requires consultation of other military record groups. During the summer of 2017, I used Stahl funds to work in the National Archives in Washington DC to review documents related to the lives of the black regulars who served in the segregated cavalry and infantry units at Fort Davis, Texas, between 1867-1880.
During the ten-day research visit I was able to collect the transcripts of several hundred court martials affecting soldiers at the post, search for pension records, and look through communications within the Department of North Carolina for cases concerning men who were later posted at Fort Davis. Court martials not only provide descriptions of the day to day activities of post life, through the words of black soldiers, but also provide insight into structures of power, intimate relations and arenas of conflict within the post. Pension records are more scattered and irregularly preserved, but when available, provide more historical details about the families left behind by soldiers, and the lives of soldiers following the end of their service. Together with the archaeology and not previously interrogated archival records, new understandings of the experiences of the black regulars on the frontier are being constructed.
