During the Spanish-American War, the First Tennessee Volunteer Infantry was one of fourteen state volunteer regiments mobilized and trained in San Francisco before deployment to the Philippines. Historians have written several detailed accounts of the First Tennessee’s visit to San Francisco, but the controversies that the regiment generated during its western travels have yet to be closely examined. In the most dramatic incident, nearly half of the regiment stormed out of the Presidio army base into a local neighborhood, in an attempt to lynch a Black San Franciscan named Daniel Thomas. Although the Southern regiment’s scandals sparked a brief period of tension in San Francisco, the city’s memories of these events quickly faded into the national narrative of sectional reconciliation. This essay reexamines the significance of the First Tennessee’s visit to San Francisco through the lens of the Thomas family’s experiences, considering these events within the broader historical arcs of American sectional reunion and overseas imperialism.
It does seem as though the people had showered upon us more than the usual courtesies, and I know now that there is no longer any North, or South, or East, or West. The reception accorded my regiment at every point amply demonstrates that sectional lines are forever obliterated.—Colonel William C. Smith, First Tennessee Volunteer Infantry
But, while we magnify the agony and glory of the Civil War, the reunion of the South with the North reminds us all that a portion of our birthright so dearly purchased with blood and treasure is still withheld from us, and that the complete measure of our rights is stubbornly resisted and cruelly denied.—Theophilus B. Morton, San Francisco Afro-American League
As the First Tennessee Volunteer Infantry paraded down San Francisco’s Market Street in June 1898, a band played “Dixie” and locals displayed what a reporter called the “wildest enthusiasm that has greeted any body of troops yet.”1 Out of the fourteen state volunteer regiments that passed through San Francisco on their way to Spanish-American War service in the Philippines, the First Tennessee was the sole unit drawn from the southern states. Leading the regiment was a former Confederate soldier, Colonel William C. Smith, who told local reporters that the tremendous fanfare demonstrated “that sectional lines are forever obliterated.”2 For over three decades, lingering divisions between North and South had weighed heavily upon national politics, but the Spanish-American War of 1898 presented an opportunity for the American public to rally together in a common cause. That afternoon, thoughts of the nation’s true divisions were muffled by triumphal music and the soaring rhetoric of the city’s politicians. Ultimately, even the shocking events that ensued later that summer could neither halt the process of sectional reconciliation nor dim the memory of when San Francisco met Tennessee.
Historians of late nineteenth-century American politics and culture view the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the subsequent Philippine-American War of 1899–1902 as a culminating moment in the long process of post–Civil War reconciliation between North and South.3 President William McKinley triumphantly proclaimed: “From camp and campaign there comes magic healing, which has closed ancient wounds.”4 During these two overseas wars, bonds of camaraderie grew between Americans from all states. As military historian William Strobridge wrote, the First Tennessee proved that the “old days of reconstruction were gone in the American Army” and “demonstrated a united country to a world watching the United States expansionist movement.”5 Although the United States succeeded in presenting a united front abroad, the First Tennessee demonstrated a divided country on the home front, fractured by a deepening color line. Sectional reconciliation had progressed by the time of the First Tennessee’s visit to San Francisco, but racial justice remained nowhere in sight.
Over the course of the First Tennessee’s five-month stay in San Francisco, the volunteers became mired in a series of scandals, two of which reverberated in newspapers throughout the nation. In the first, nearly half of the regiment attempted to lynch a young Black San Franciscan, Daniel Thomas, in his family’s home. In the second, a single drunken member of the regiment shot and killed a local shopkeeper, a young white man named Henry Hildebrand. Throughout the First Tennessee’s stay in San Francisco, the regiment was criticized by local civil rights organizations and the general public for its members’ treatment of the city’s Black residents. To some degree, Californians viewed the Tennessee regiment as representative of the South at large, often labeling them the “Southern regiment.” One Sacramento Daily Union headline read: “Tennesseans in Bad Repute: Intense Feeling against the Southern Volunteers.”6 After the near-lynching of Thomas, the infuriated San Francisco Call announced that “Fiery Southerners Bring Their Race War to the Golden Gate.”7 These responses posed a grave challenge not only to the reputation of the First Tennessee, but also to the West Coast’s reputation more broadly as an area receptive to both sectional reconciliation and (undeservedly) racial tolerance.
Unsurprisingly, the original regimental history of the First Tennessee, a commemorative booklet produced in that state in 1899 by lawyer-poet Will Hale, fuses sectional reconciliation with white-supremacist ideology. Hale’s history begins: “The Anglo-Saxon stands, and for centuries has stood, foremost for liberty, for the equality of men before the law, and for the fullest freedom of thought and intellectual advancement. As a result, the march of the race has never been in retreat, but ever onward.”8 The writer goes on to declare that the Spanish-American War “obliterated the imaginary line between North and South; sons of the Lost Cause and of the Union were actuated by the same high patriotism.”9 Hale’s statement fits squarely into a pattern described by historian David Blight, who suggested that the reconciliation of the white North and South at the end of the nineteenth century was pursued through the abandonment of Congressional Reconstruction, including its stated goals of racial equality, and the embrace of a white racial identity.10
Hale’s writing notwithstanding, the First Tennessee’s controversial record in San Francisco supports Caroline Janney’s conclusion that sectional reconciliation was not complete at the time of the Spanish-American War.11 Although sectional reconciliation was highly popular in public rhetoric, speeches about the obliteration of sectional lines did not denote a total disappearance of hard feelings. As Janney demonstrates, “reunion” was an observable fact—after the Civil War, southern states rejoined the Union—but sectional “reconciliation,” being a matter of emotions, was a longer process.
Histories of American Civil War memory are often composed in terms of North-South and Black-white. However, a small but growing body of scholarship on the Civil War and Reconstruction in the American West expands these boundaries.12 As Stacey Smith notes, the Far West, often imagined as a land of opportunity and individualism, “endured battles over human freedom and human difference that paralleled those of the North and the South.”13 Matthew Hulbert has illustrated how “irregular recollections,” including guerrilla warfare in Kansas and Missouri, are often overlooked by historians of the Civil War.14 Kevin Waite has even suggested that Confederate military invasions in Arizona and New Mexico are best understood as the culmination of the Far West vision that American slaveholders pursued through political means for decades.15
During the Reconstruction era (1865–1877), the multiracial Far West underwent a period of unique political transformation. D. Michael Bottoms, Joshua Paddison, and other historians of Reconstruction in the West have shown how the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments affected the lives of white and Black Californians even though, compared to the American South, the late nineteenth-century Black population of the West was small.16 In the West, Asian Americans, Mexican Americans, and Native Americans also experienced the effects of Reconstruction.17 Even in San Francisco—which had the highest Black population of any western city—Blacks represented only 0.5 percent of the city’s population, as compared to 37 percent in Nashville, Tennessee.18 Although there were ten times as many Asian Americans as African Americans residing in the city, Chinese and Japanese residents were barred from living in many white communities and forced to attend segregated schools until the late 1920s.19 While anti-Chinese violence was widespread, interracial violence involving Black residents was relatively rare in San Francisco.
Historians have begun to examine the West’s unique experience of the Civil War and its legacy during the Reconstruction era. However, little has been written on popular memory of the war after that period. Viewing the sectional reconciliation of North and South from a western perspective does not dramatically upend the current scholarly dialogue, but it enriches our understanding of the reconciliation process. In a recent article for this journal, Kevin Waite fills in part of this gap by examining the scattering of Confederate statues constructed across California in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.20 “Lost Cause” mythology was not without its adherents in the Far West, but the region was also home to various other interpretations of the Civil War and its legacy. This study of the First Tennessee is the first to directly examine Civil War memory in the Far West in the 1890s, a pivotal decade in Americans’ experience of sectional reconciliation. Although California was peripheral to the battlefields of the Civil War, 1898 San Francisco was an important battlefield for the war’s memory. In this city, the powerful narrative of sectional reconciliation collided with a burgeoning national movement for racial justice, but the narrative of reconciliation nevertheless emerged unshaken.
Reception of the First Tennessee
During the Spanish-American War, President McKinley, a Republican, appointed such former Confederates as generals Joseph Wheeler and Fitzhugh Lee to high positions in the U.S. armed forces, in the spirit of sectional reconciliation and as an appeal to white southerners.21 The head of the First Tennessee, Colonel William C. Smith, was an architect best remembered today for the neoclassical Nashville Parthenon, a Nashville landmark that was constructed for the Tennessee Centennial Exposition of 1897. His public profile, as both a celebrated architect and a former Confederate soldier, was likely an important factor in the McKinley administration’s selection of Colonel Smith to lead the First Tennessee. A contemporary account described him as being “known throughout the South as one of the men…who was for reconciliation and the burial of hard feeling.”22
Writer Allan McDonald, who at the turn of the twentieth century collaborated with the officers of the First Tennessee to publish a detailed history of the regiment, wrote that the First Tennessee was “regarded by the people of the South as their distinctive representative on the battle-fields.”23 At the time of the regiment’s arrival in San Francisco, the First Tennessee lived at Camp Merritt with troops from Minnesota, Kansas, Iowa, Idaho, and Wyoming, among others.24 California welcomed the young southern delegates with open arms. A local reporter who visited the regiment at San Francisco’s Camp Merritt, in San Francisco’s Richmond neighborhood, described the men in glowing terms as chivalrous gentlemen who possessed “that great unacknowledged difference between the Southern man and his contemporaries of other lands the world over.”25 Grateful for this warm reception, the Tennesseans soon took a liking to the West and its people. “Nashville can’t beat Frisco on pretty girls,” Private Richard Steele wrote to his family, “because they are all pretty and as sweet as these plums that grow out here.”26
For the men of the First Tennessee, the demographic and cultural differences between the West and the South were a source of fascination. The volunteers cherished visits to Chinatown, which one soldier described in a letter to his family as the “most important place” in San Francisco, and the officers hired a Chinese cook for their camp.27 However, as life at Camp Merritt settled into boredom and routine, the troops began to grumble about the racial integration they observed in San Francisco’s saloons and restaurants. The men of the First Tennessee were unaccustomed, as one soldier said, “to seeing the negroes treated upon the equal footing that they have here, and some of them possibly, when drunk, resented it.”28 As the regiment’s stay in San Francisco wore on, the men’s feelings of resentment and restlessness were compounded by the poor conditions they endured at Camp Merritt. In total, thirteen volunteers died in San Francisco, out of a total of thirteen hundred, their lives taken by pneumonia, dysentery, and spinal meningitis.29 At local saloons, the regiment’s grumbling often escalated into drunken altercations between Tennesseans and Black San Franciscans.
Black San Franciscans promptly reported insults and assaults by First Tennesseans to the local police. In one instance, a group of Tennessee volunteers attacked a man who “lit his cigar at a ‘white man’s’ cigar stand.”30 When the police chief complained about such assaults to the military, Colonel Smith viewed the criticism as an affront to his state’s good name. Seeking to preserve the reputation of his regiment, the colonel published an open letter suggesting that his critics sought to slander the regiment simply because of its southern origin. Furthermore, the colonel insisted, race played no part in such incidents. Back in Nashville, he explained, there were “many negroes, between whom and the soldiers of the Tennessee the most kindly feeling exists.”31
Tennesseans stationed at Camp Merritt, however, did little to ameliorate any negative impressions that westerners might have held of them. Some alleviated their boredom by sharing tall tales with visitors, captivating listeners by leaning into their accents and playing to the worst backwoods stereotypes, such as being “terrible moonshiners” back home or, the most negative stereotype of all, bragging that they had “single-handed, lynched scores of negroes.”32 Lieutenant Winston Pilcher overheard these egregious remarks, but apparently did not consider the matter serious enough to warrant disciplinary measures. Instead, he casually related these anecdotes to the Nashville Banner as evidence that San Franciscans “think we are a picturesque lot of semi-barbarians, and the boys are strengthening the impression.”33
In early August, the First Tennessee regiment was relocated from Camp Merritt to a scenic grassy valley at the U.S. Army’s Presidio military base. Grateful to leave behind the sand and wind of Camp Merritt, the men “shouted for joy when they beheld their new quarters,” a section of the Presidio still known as “Tennessee Hollow.”34 Unfortunately for the young soldiers, this wave of optimism ended with news of the capture of Manila on August 13. Following the signing of a peace protocol, the Spanish-American War came to a sudden halt. After waiting for many months in nervous and eager anticipation, the Tennessee volunteers realized with crushing disappointment that they would not have their taste of war. Local newspapers asserted that the troops stationed in San Francisco would most likely not be sent to Manila.35 They were, as one of the regiment’s chroniclers noted, “outraged at being debarred from the chance to court danger and win glory.”36 Restless and dispirited, a handful of soldiers left camp and headed off to neighborhood saloons.
The Thomas Family’s San Francisco
The neighborhood closest to the Presidio was Cow Hollow, a former dairy pasture that was located outside of San Francisco’s business district. European immigrants—particularly Irish, Germans, French, and Italians—were the predominant ethnic groups in the newly developing neighborhood, as they were in the city in general. Cow Hollow was also home to some Black families, including that of Zero and Winnie Thomas, who had migrated separately to San Francisco from the South in the 1870s. Born in Virginia in 1833, Zero Thomas settled in San Francisco, where he worked as a U.S. Army cook at the Presidio, in the early 1870s.37 Winnie Corbin, a friend from Alexandria, had come west as a family nurse. The couple married in San Francisco in 1876 and bought a home in Cow Hollow, where they ultimately reared six children.38 Their first child, Daniel, was born in 1878. Over the years, the Thomas family raised chickens and grew vegetables in their backyard. They developed friendly relationships with their neighbors, as well as with the soldiers who lived in the nearby Presidio, where Zero Thomas had worked for almost a decade between 1872 and 1881.39 Beginning in 1881, Thomas spent about a decade working as a cook for the U.S. Geological Survey, traveling across Northern California.40 By 1898, Zero Thomas, then sixty-five years old, was working as a janitor in the Appraisers Building in downtown San Francisco.41
Although Black residents of the late nineteenth-century West were few in number, they were not isolated. As Quintard Taylor has shown, Black communities formed in the West wherever enough African Americans could settle “to fashion a supportive world far from the major centers of black population.”42 In San Francisco, Albert Broussard demonstrates that Black residents secured many civil rights, although these rights were not protected at the federal level. They could attend integrated schools and “live anywhere they could afford to live” in the city.43 Nonetheless, the West was no paradise of racial equality. Many of San Francisco’s major sectors of employment refused to hire Black workers, and beneath the city’s reputation for tolerance ran an undercurrent of antipathy toward Black residents.44 As recent work by Lynn Hudson reveals, racial segregation persisted in cities across the Golden State until well into the twentieth century.45
In communities throughout California, the state’s multiracial demographic gave rise to shifting and complex racial hierarchies. D. Michael Bottoms characterizes this dynamic by writing that “white Californians [held] their black neighbors at a middle distance,” generally perceiving Black residents more positively than Chinese or Native Americans.46 This pattern reflects the experiences of the Tapes, a middle-class Chinese family who resided in Cow Hollow in the late nineteenth century. Joseph Tape was a well-connected businessman who made a profitable career as an immigration and imports broker. He and Mary Tape married the year before Zero and Winnie Thomas, welcoming their first child, Mamie, in 1876.47 If the Tapes and Thomases were not personally associated, they were connected through their mutual acquaintance John E. Gardner, Chinese Inspector for the U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at the University of the Pacific. Gardner knew Zero Thomas well, having once written him a professional letter of reference.48
Given their mutual connections and physical proximity, the Thomas family would almost certainly have been aware of the controversy that ensued when the Tapes’ eight-year-old daughter was denied admission to a local public school in 1884 on the basis of her Chinese ancestry. After Frank Tape sued the San Francisco Board of Education, the state courts ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed a public education to ethnically Chinese children. This apparent victory, however, was followed by San Francisco’s immediate creation of a segregated public school in Chinatown, at a considerable distance from Cow Hollow. Mary Tape resisted the unfairness of this segregationist arrangement, protesting in a letter published in the Daily Alta California: “It seems no matter how a Chinese may live and dress so long as you know they [are] Chinese. Then they are hated as one.”49 Ultimately, however, the Tapes became resigned to sending their children to the Chinese School. Fortunately for the Thomas family, San Francisco public schools were integrated at this time for Black students. The Thomas children—Daniel, Zero Jr., Mabel, Minnie, Robert, and Henry—excelled in their classes at Winfield Scott Elementary, a local Cow Hollow public school named for the renowned Mexican-American War general and military adviser to President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War.50
The Thomas family was closely involved with the struggle for racial justice in California through the San Francisco Afro-American League, a political organization founded by a family friend, Theophilus Morton, in 1891.51 Morton was a prominent figure in California politics throughout the 1890s and early 1900s, described by a contemporary account as the “most forceful speaker and profound thinker of the race on the Pacific Coast.”52 He hosted T. Thomas Fortune, Booker T. Washington, and other distinguished guests during their visits to San Francisco.53 In cooperation with California State Assemblyman Henry C. Dibble, Morton helped to craft the state’s pioneering “Dibble Civil Rights Act” of 1897, which repudiated the national turn toward the codification of segregation—as reflected in the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson ruling of 1896—by mandating full and equal treatment in places of public accommodation and amusement within the state. Morton also helped found the Afro-American Co-operative Association, a financial mutual aid society of which Zero Thomas was a founding shareholder.54
In 1895, Morton invited the renowned activist Ida B. Wells to San Francisco to speak on the national crisis of lynching. Wells, who had become personally invested in the cause after losing two friends to a lynch mob in Memphis, Tennessee, was recognized as the nation’s leading voice in this campaign.55 In San Francisco churches packed with listeners, Wells passionately asked: “Can you remain silent and inactive when such things are done in our own community and country?…The remedy lies with you, my friends.”56 Her speeches were well received in San Francisco, and many of the organizations she visited passed resolutions in support of her work, calling on political leaders to take action. The members of the Congregational Club of San Francisco, for example, declared that they “request our representatives to favor legislation to repress these crimes, and to afford justice to the long-oppressed colored people in accordance with law.”57
Given the intensity of racial violence and prejudice on the American home front, the U.S. declaration of war against Spain prompted a crisis of conscience among racial justice activists. Ida B. Wells, for instance, saw hypocrisy in the popular enthusiasm surrounding the Spanish-American War. The American public was ever eager to denounce the “barbarism of Spanish oppression,” she reflected, even while they were conspicuously silent when it came to “barbarism at home.”58 Yet the Thomas family’s friend Theophilus Morton encouraged Black men to enlist: in a newspaper editorial, Morton said that Black military service would build “better than we know for the future grandeur of the race and greatness of our country.”59 Morton had been too young to formally enlist in the army during the Civil War, but, in 1864, after the thirteen-year-old escaped from slavery in Virginia, he helped Union troops defend Washington, D.C. His experiences convinced Morton that Black military service would earn the respect of white Americans. As historian Barbara Gannon has illustrated, shared suffering among Black and white Civil War veterans could create bonds of lasting interracial camaraderie.60 Henry Dibble provides one example: the white state assemblyman with whom Morton collaborated on California’s pioneering 1897 civil rights law was a Civil War veteran who lost a leg at Port Hudson, Louisiana, the first battle in which Black regiments saw combat.61
Despite his support for enlistment, Morton was not entirely confident of the benefits that service in the Spanish-American War would bring Black soldiers. Black veterans, he wrote, would not be guaranteed the “certain hope of political elevation which patriotism secures to other citizens.”62 Events proved Morton right: ten thousand Black soldiers served in the Spanish-American War in segregated Regular Army and volunteer regiments; very few served as officers. Between 1894 and 1901, the Regular Army counted only one active-duty Black officer, West Point graduate Captain Charles Young.63 The so-called Buffalo Soldiers earned acclaim for their record in the Indian Wars in the West but took issue with the civilian resentment and rigid segregation they encountered as they traveled eastward.
Southern newspapers frequently published sensationalized stories of altercations between Black soldiers and white civilians. In the city of Tampa, Florida—which hosted military encampments for soldiers en route to Cuba—historian Willard Gatewood notes that each fight involving Black soldiers found “front-page coverage” in local newspapers.64 Seeking to avoid such controversies, Captain Charles Young trod carefully when he led his regiment through South Carolina in November 1898. Young published a special order noting that “considerable uneasiness of the people of this section is caused by the presence of soldiers here, especially northern soldiers.” He instructed company commanders to ensure that “every man…understands the necessity of dispelling this opinion by treating all whom they meet with respect and courtesy.”65 Through Young’s leadership, the regiment avoided violent confrontation with the civilian population of South Carolina, one of every officer’s greatest fears. Unfortunately, on the morning of August 15, 1898, officers of the First Tennessee realized this fear, when the regiment’s path through San Francisco collided with that of Daniel Thomas, Zero and Winnie’s son.
The Attack on Daniel Thomas
Daniel Thomas was a crab fisherman, rowing out onto San Francisco Bay in his small boat every morning before dawn and selling his catch to local restaurants and saloons. After completing a 7:30 A.M. sale in a Cow Hollow saloon, Thomas was accosted by two drunken First Tennessee soldiers, Will Davis and Charles Anderson. They asked Thomas for ten cents and some tobacco, which Thomas refused. As the soldiers grew belligerent, Thomas insisted: “Just because you have on blue clothes, don’t you think you can run over the black folks of San Francisco.”66 The soldiers punched Thomas and he punched back. After fighting off Davis and Anderson, he rushed to his home two blocks away. His father was at work downtown, but his mother was home with her five younger children. Recalled Winnie:
My boy came running into the house all out of breath. He hurriedly told me that he had a fight with a couple of soldiers and that he hit them. He said they asked for 10 cents, and he told them he had no money. One of them wanted to pass on, but the other showed fight. I heard the soldiers coming at this time, and told my son to hide while I kept them off. They stood outside the back yard for a time and I talked to them. I heard some one say, “The Tennessee men will be here soon and then we will get him.”67
One soldier ran back into the Presidio, shouting that a Black man had killed one of their comrades. According to a neighbor’s later estimate, hundreds of Tennessee volunteers awoke to these shouts.68 Still dispirited over the recent conclusion of the Spanish-American War, they responded as though to a long-awaited battle charge, rushing into Cow Hollow as a wild mob.
Winnie Thomas hastily hid her son in the attic and stood at the door of her house, attempting to reason with the crowd. She told them that “if her son had done them any injury, they should have recourse to the law and not force an entrance to her house.”69 Unfortunately, her appeal to reason failed. The soldiers threw stones, smashing the windows, and began crawling in from all sides. Zero Jr., Daniel’s sixteen-year-old brother, tried to keep the mob back with an ax, but he was struck by a hail of stones.70 First Tennesseans ripped down the Thomases’ fence, tore shingles from their roof, and broke down the front door. Once inside, they wrecked furniture and stole the family’s possessions.71
Civilians who watched the attack were helpless against the soldiers’ destructive rampage. Mrs. C. Nelson, a white neighbor and Thomas family friend, was horrified by the violence. She estimated that the crowd grew to seven or eight hundred, including spectators from Iowa and Kansas regiments, many of whom howled “Kill him,” “Lynch him,” and “Hang him.” The Tennessee regiment’s officers made no attempt to intervene, Nelson reported; she even overheard two of them “laughing at the work of the men.”72 Nelson pleaded with the soldiers on the Thomas family’s behalf, asking that they “remember that there was a mother with six little children within.”73 Finally the First Tennessee’s Major Benjamin Cheatham arrived at the scene. He too failed to control the mob. Reaching for his weapon in desperation, Cheatham belatedly realized he had left it behind at the camp. At this critical moment, Lieutenant Winston Pilcher lent Cheatham his own revolver. Major Cheatham leapt onto a chair in the Thomas family’s living room, shouting threats to shoot the rioters. The regiment’s officers cleared troops from the Thomas home with great difficulty, ordering them to leave the neighborhood and return to the Presidio.74
Responses to the First Tennessee Controversy
The assault on the Thomas family was immediately condemned by the Presidio command. That lynching should surface within the United States military, said Major General Henry C. Merriam, was a “deplorable occurrence” and “a thing never before known in the history of the United States army.”75 Merriam promised a thorough investigation, to be led by Brigadier General Marcus P. Miller, and “the bringing to the strictest account all the guilty parties who can be discovered.”76 He viewed this incident as a deviation from an otherwise harmonious period of sectional reconciliation. “This unfortunate occurrence,” he wrote, “coming in the midst of good feeling and general good discipline of the troops furnished by the Southern States, is exceedingly painful to me.”77 Local reporters suggested that the First Tennessee was under such scrutiny by the Presidio’s highest-ranking officers that it might have lost its last shot at being sent overseas.78
The First Tennessee’s Colonel Smith issued a public statement declaring that the “unfortunate occurrence” at the Thomas home “is sincerely regretted by all of [the regiment’s] officers as well as by the rank and file of the command.”79 Even as he expressed his regret, however, Smith remained on the defensive. In his public statement, he implausibly suggested that the mob’s attack was the fault of merely “a few irresponsible men” who did not reflect the regiment overall. Furthermore, he claimed that the crowd of several hundred soldiers who swarmed the Thomas family’s house had been motivated more by “curiosity than anything else, it was not in the mad spirit of a mob.”80 His second-in-command, Lieutenant Colonel Gracey Childers, went a step further by making the unfounded assertion that the men’s actions were not really their own fault, but a consequence of Black San Franciscans treating them disrespectfully during their stay. “The negroes,” claimed Childers, “are themselves greatly to blame for the violence bestowed upon one of their number yesterday.”81
The rioters cast doubt on Daniel Thomas’s character, suggesting that he had instigated the incident. Thomas, they claimed, had asked the soldiers to buy alcohol and tobacco for him, and Thomas punched them with brass knuckles when they refused to comply.82 Cow Hollow neighbors who witnessed the attack refuted these accusations. Mrs. Nelson, mentioned above, told military authorities: “I know the family well. Dan is a good boy, hard-working and faithful to his family, to whom he gives his earnings. The father, mother, and all are quiet and inoffensive.”83 Several neighbors attended the court martial that followed the attack on the Thomas family, where they attested to their positive impression of Daniel Thomas and his family.84
Daniel Thomas’s strongest advocate was Theophilus Morton. On the evening of the attack, Morton took Daniel Thomas into his own home, where he received medical attention and rested for the next several days. That evening, the San Francisco Afro-American League, of which Morton was president, hastily convened a mass meeting. It passed a resolution describing that morning’s events as “heinous barbarism perpetrated upon the house and family of Zero Thomas by the vicious mob stationed at the Presidio known as the Tennessee regiment.”85 This “uncivilized and cowardly act,” the resolution asserted, was representative of many abuses committed in San Francisco by the “Southern element in this army corps.” The League called upon the general public to help ensure that “the perpetrators of those heinous crimes [be] punished and brought to the attention of the proper authorities at Washington.”86 For the next two months, Morton led a public campaign to ensure that compensation was paid to the Thomas family, determined that “the men from Tennessee will be shown before they get through with this outrage that the negro in California is protected as well as a white man.”87
The southern identity of the First Tennessee was a delicate question for military leaders, because still-painful memories of the Civil War threatened to divide the army from within. The San Francisco public figures who weighed in on these events, from Colonel William Smith and Theophilus Morton to generals Henry Merriam and Marcus Miller, were members of the generation that had been profoundly shaped by that conflict. During the years that Miller was active in Union campaigns in Maryland and Virginia, Smith was a sergeant in the 12th Virginia Infantry of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. Indeed, Smith and Miller were both present at Appomattox for Robert E. Lee’s surrender. General Merriam had earned a Medal of Honor for his leadership of a Black infantry regiment during the Civil War and had extensive experience commanding Black troops throughout his career. Merriam’s biographer Jack Ballard writes that, although he left little record of his personal thoughts about Black soldiers, Merriam repeatedly “defended black troops against what he thought were unjust claims.”88 Walking a careful line as commander of the Presidio, Merriam attempted to hold the First Tennessee volunteers accountable while, at the same time, struggling to maintain the image of a unified military, no longer divided by sectionalism. Merriam diplomatically asserted that an investigation into the attack on Daniel Thomas was required “in defense of Southern honor and character, as well as in defense of the character and discipline of the army.”89 Merriam’s careful language reveals that preserving the narrative of sectional reconciliation was just as important to Presidio commanders as was upholding justice and preserving the good reputation of the U.S. Army.
Military officials appointed a board of survey to assess damages to the Thomas family’s property and health, and arrested four soldiers: Privates Will Davis and Charles Anderson, who had started the fight with Daniel Thomas; Private Clark, who had roused the camp with untruthful cries that a Black man had killed one of their own; and Private Andrew Scruggs, who struck Thomas a severe blow to the head.90 No other arrests resulted, as officers of the First Tennessee refused to reveal the names of others who had participated.91 By early September, these four volunteers had been tried by court martial and three had been acquitted, due to insufficient evidence that they had taken part in the riot. Out of the several hundred soldiers who attacked the Cow Hollow home, only Scruggs was punished for his actions: he was dishonorably discharged from the First Tennessee and sentenced to three months of hard labor on Alcatraz Island.92
On September 12, 1898, a substantial percentage of Black San Francisco attended a mass meeting at Third Baptist Church to refocus the city’s attention on the Thomas debacle, as well as the First Tennessee’s general mistreatment of Black civilians.93 The meeting passed a resolution describing the court martial as “a farce from beginning to end, a travesty on justice and a disgrace to military jurisprudence.”94 The resolution criticized the officers of the First Tennessee for failing to prevent or take responsibility for the criminal actions of their men, instead serving as “accessories to the crimes and indignities committed by Tennesseans upon the colored residents of this city.”95 In language that emphasized the unresolved passions of sectionalism, the gathering charged Colonel Smith—“that miserable Confederate soldier”—with an utter failure of leadership. Copies of the resolution were sent to President McKinley and Secretary of War Russell Alger. McKinley, the last Civil War veteran to serve as president, made no public response to the resolution, perhaps to avoid fanning sectionalist embers.
Later that month, the Board of Survey released its findings on the damages due the Thomas family for the August 15 attack. The board set property damages and medical expenses at $231, far less than the $5,000 demanded by the San Francisco Afro-American League on the family’s behalf. A member of the anonymous board submitted a report suggesting that a further $1,200 be added to the sum, “for the anguish of mind caused by physical pain, fright, and shame,” but officials rejected this proposal.96 General Miller gave $231 to Zero Thomas on September 28.97
The court martial and financial settlement were disappointing to the Thomas family, Theophilus Morton, the League, and Black San Franciscans generally. Yet the family received a measure of compensation, along with an official acknowledgment of the First Tennessee’s wrongdoing. Undeniably, San Francisco’s Black community extracted a greater degree of accountability from the First Tennessee than the volunteers would have faced at home for comparable acts of anti-Black violence.
Tennessee Soldiers’ Patronage Not Wanted
As the Thomas case was coming to a close and as the regiment enjoyed a payday leave in San Francisco, a second tragedy unfolded. On the morning of September 13, an intoxicated volunteer named Walter Rosser bought a revolver in Chinatown, then brandished it recklessly throughout the rest of the day. At a produce market, Rosser pointed the gun at a Black shopper, but, when the man refused to respond to his provocation, put the weapon away.98 A few moments later, however, when the inebriated man leaned against a market-stand counter, the shopkeeper, a white man named Henry Hildebrand, warned Rosser not to damage the merchandise. Rosser apparently took offense; he fatally shot Hildebrand. His second shot went wild, missing a butcher working nearby.99
News of Hildebrand’s death spread quickly. As one reporter put it, San Francisco roared into a “high pitch” of indignation against the First Tennessee.100 A sign displayed on the door of one shopkeeper reflected the city’s outrage: “Tennessee Regiment Soldiers’ Patronage Not Solicited Nor Wanted Here. Please Do Not Offer It.”101
Clearly, Rosser demonstrated impaired judgment at the market, but subsequent investigations failed to uncover any motives deeper than inebriation and irritation behind his violent actions. Nativism might have been involved, as the victim was the son of a German-born father and the American-born daughter of German immigrants, but Rosser’s comments to reporters reflected no anti-immigrant attitudes. Intriguingly, even though the man he had killed was white, Rosser’s greatest concern was how local Blacks might respond to the killing. When journalists interviewed Rosser in his jail cell shortly after his arrest, his first question was “Are the negroes uprising?”102
From Tennessee Hollow in the Presidio, Colonel Smith distanced his regiment from Rosser, whom he described as “one vicious and turbulent character, who has given us no end of trouble.”103 Colonel Smith arranged for Rosser’s discharge from the military and turned the volunteer over to the city’s civil authorities for prosecution.104 Local Police Judge Edund Mogan, however, suggested that Rosser was not the regiment’s only problem soldier. There were “a great number of ruffians” in the regiment, the judge said, with “a special aversion against colored citizens.”105 Reflecting the city’s increasingly negative attitude toward the regiment, Judge Mogan issued an unexpected ruling against a Black man who drew a revolver on a group of Tennessee volunteers: after learning that the volunteers had assaulted him in a saloon, the judge dismissed the complaint. Indeed, Mogan encouraged others to follow the man’s example by exercising “their right to protect themselves against ruffians in uniform.”106
Meanwhile, San Franciscans were learning more about the disgraced young volunteer, Walter Rosser. He was a medical doctor, a recent graduate of Vanderbilt medical school, and the only son of a prominent Alabama family. His elderly father, Walter Rosser Sr., traveled to San Francisco from Stevenson, Alabama, to support his son during the trial. Authorities ultimately acquitted Rosser, holding that he had been drugged earlier that day and thus was not responsible for his actions in the market. Rosser returned to Alabama with his father and resumed his medical career.107
This result made many San Franciscans livid: a wealthy white First Tennessean was allowed to go free after irrefutably causing another man’s death, and a white mob had nearly lynched Daniel Thomas on the basis of nothing more than false claims shouted into the morning air. Reverend Tilghman Brown of Starr-King African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church declared that, if Walter Rosser “could slay an innocent victim, be tenderly guarded, repeatedly tried and acquitted,” then a Black man “ought to have some chance for his life,” rather than instantly “forfeiting it on any charge however gross.”108
Members of the First Tennessee were sympathetic to Hildebrand’s widow, child, and family, offering their condolences and sharing their disappointment with the verdict of the San Francisco court. Some soldiers told the family that, back in Tennessee, Walter Rosser would have been lynched for his crime, receiving “short shrift and a long rope.”109 Hildebrand’s heartbroken sister replied that she had simply wanted justice, not another murder. By late 1898, the people of San Francisco had no friendly words left for the First Tennessee. The San Francisco Examiner summed up the city’s feelings of exasperation: “The constant record of the men of the Tennessee regiment since they have been stationed in San Francisco is bad, so far as there is any record. It is, we are sorry to say, a record of lawlessness.”110
San Francisco Moves On
Only dramatic intervention by Washington, D.C., salvaged the First Tennessee’s public image. This came in the form of special orders from the War Department that amounted to what the San Francisco Chronicle described as a wholesale “purging…of its undesirable members” in response to the “disturbances in which members of the regiment were concerned.”111 A total of roughly 160 First Tennesseans took discharges, although most were discharged for poor health. Nonetheless, the discharges helped to convince San Franciscans that authorities were holding the regiment accountable for its actions.112
Finally, in late October 1898, the First Tennessee received orders to proceed to Manila. They laid over in Hawaii, recently seized by the United States, where their regiment’s reputation for lawlessness preceded them. Private Ernest McDaniel noted in his diary that “the people here thought we were a mob of cut-throats and demons and some of the business men actually closed their doors when they heard the Tennesseans were coming ashore.”113 Colonel Smith assured the Honolulu press that the negative reports about the First Tennessee were exaggerated. Contrary to the findings of the military board of survey, Smith insisted that volunteers from Kansas, Iowa, and New York had also attacked the Thomas family—and thus all the regiments were equally at fault.114
Proceeding from Hawaii to the Philippines, the First Tennessee remained for almost a year. Their role in the Philippine-American War (1899–1902) was assisting the Eighth Army Corps in capturing the regions of Cebu and Iloilo. By November 1899, when the First Tennessee returned to the United States, its image had been fully rehabilitated. A fine spirit of sectional reconciliation greeted their return to San Francisco. In a glowing address to the regiment, San Francisco Mayor James Phelan declared that the reunited Union had become “greater and stronger for the sacrifices you have made.”115 The regiment reached Nashville that December, where they were warmly greeted by the governor of Tennessee and an assembly of Confederate and Union veterans.116 In the years that followed, memories of the First Tennessee’s visit to San Francisco were employed by numerous politicians as a symbol of the friendship between San Francisco and Nashville, as well as the West and the South more generally.
Sectional Reconciliation and Imperialism
One of the most striking references to the First Tennessee’s visit to San Francisco was made by a California member of the U.S. House of Representatives in an impassioned debate held two weeks before the United States’ official declaration of victory in the Philippine-American War in 1902. Julius Kahn, a German immigrant who lived only a few blocks from the Thomas family, received support during his campaign from many Black San Franciscans. Theophilus Morton and Zero Thomas had publicly endorsed his candidacy at several Afro-American League rallies, where reporters said Kahn was greeted with “a perfect storm of cheers and applause.”117 Congressman Kahn was a fierce supporter of Chinese exclusion, but his speeches to the Afro-American League centered on racial equality and the promises of the Republican Party.
By the turn of the century, however, the Republican Party’s commitment to racial equality was compromised by a growing pursuit of American imperialism.118 The Democratic Party, whose base of support lay in the American South, was strongly opposed to expansionism and to the proposal that the United States keep the Philippines as a colony after the war. In the 1902 debate referenced above, Democrats charged that the American military had been brutal in its treatment of Filipino civilians during the war and asserted that allowing the military to rule the Philippines would lead to despotism. Kahn countered by recounting the story of a drunken Tennessee soldier’s “wanton, cruel murder” of an “inoffensive young German” in his own district a few years prior.119 The congressman declared that “the single act of that single soldier in San Francisco can never dim the luster of the heroic conduct of that noble company nor mar the glory of its patriotic deeds.”120 It would be wrong to judge the U.S. Army’s record in the Philippines by the actions of some soldiers, Kahn argued, just as it would be wrong to judge the First Tennessee by Walter Rosser’s killing of Henry Hildebrand. Kahn made no mention of the several hundred soldiers who had participated in the attack on the Thomas family.121
As he continued with this argument, Kahn strayed far from the principles of racial equality that he had promised to defend when he was endorsed by the Afro-American League. He pointed out that his southern colleagues had, in previous debates, asserted that certain lynchings in the South were understandable reactions to acts of violent crime. If they could be so charitable in their view of lynchings, Kahn said, they ought to have some understanding for American soldiers in the Philippines provoked to commit extralegal violence by “a people who themselves eschew the arts of civilized warfare.”122 By turning his southern colleagues’ own words against them, the California congressman legitimized the brutality used against Filipino civilians through a comparison to racialized violence on the home front. Within the flexible discourse of sectional reconciliation, politicians found a defense for barbarism both at home and abroad.
While the memory of western and southern volunteer regiments fighting side by side in the Philippines furthered the cause of sectional reconciliation at home, the shared experiences of Black and white regiments did little to advance racial justice in the United States.123 Therefore, it was remarkable that the First Tennessee’s Lieutenant Winston Pilcher was assigned in 1903 to the command of Captain Charles Young, mentioned above as the only Black officer in the Regular Army. Captain Young knew Theophilus Morton and may even have met the Thomas family during previous assignments at the Presidio. During Lieutenant Pilcher’s year with Captain Young and the segregated Ninth Cavalry, the regiment was assigned to patrol and protect California’s Sequoia National Park, where the local press marveled that Captain Young commanded his white officers so effectively that “nothing of the Southern man’s antipathy for the colored race is manifested, and they have only praise for their superior officer.”124 As Young’s biographer Brian Shellum observes, the regiment made rapid progress in the park’s development while cultivating a strong relationship with the surrounding white community.
When Captain Young returned from his assignment in the redwoods in 1903, he spoke at Stanford University about racism in America. “I fear that the higher interests of my people are going nether ward—and yours with them,” he said gravely, “for when one part of the body is diseased the whole body is not well.”125 At the start of the new century, Jim Crow was entrenched and expanding throughout the United States. Segregation was increasingly codified into law and anti-Black violence in the South was growing ever more prevalent. In the West, as elsewhere, federal statutes prohibited Chinese immigration and denied citizenship rights to Asian immigrants. Without the protection of equal treatment under the law, racial justice was a nonstarter. The project of reconciliation between white northerners and southerners, however, continued gaining momentum. Although sectional tensions had flared in San Francisco during the First Tennessee’s stay there, those tensions had subsided by the regiment’s return from the Philippines. The widespread outrage that surrounded the southern regiment’s attack on Daniel Thomas in the summer of 1898 proved short lived, even in the neighborhood where a lynching had nearly taken place.
Life moved on for the Thomas family. Daniel Thomas remained in Cow Hollow for the rest of his life. At a church festival, he met his future wife Gertrude Harper, an outgoing student at the San Francisco Art School, and they were married in 1903.126 After leaving crab fishing, Daniel Thomas started a soft drink venture and later worked as a shipping clerk.127 Gertrude and Daniel raised four sons and two daughters who, like their father, attended Winfield Scott Elementary School. In a 1993 family history, Daniel Thomas’s niece, Winifred Clara Smith, recalled that the “only difficulty he encountered was from a saloon customer, a soldier from the Presidio (from a Tennessee regiment).” She told the story: “Of course there was an altercation—with my uncle the winner—whereupon the instigator returned with some of his prejudiced buddies and traced and followed my uncle to the family home, but couldn’t find him (my grandmother had hid him in the garret). The interlopers did as much property damage as they could until a regiment from the Presidio intervened (they had been summoned by a white neighbor).”128
Smith recounted the actions of these “prejudiced buddies” from the First Tennessee as an outlier event in the story of her uncle’s life and career, an anomaly in her family’s otherwise positive memories of San Francisco. Despite the inconsistencies between Smith’s narration of the story and newspaper accounts of the time, her account reveals how the incident was incorporated into the family’s history. By noting the assistance of a white neighbor (whom we recognize as Mrs. Nelson), Smith emphasized her family’s positive interracial friendships within their community, a recollection in sharp contrast to the experiences of segregation many experienced under Jim Crow. There is much yet to be written about Daniel Thomas’s life and career; in a full telling, his family’s encounter with the First Tennessee Volunteer Infantry in the summer of 1898 would be only one brief moment in time.
“San Francisco Falls for Tennessee’s Troops,” San Francisco Call, June 18, 1898.
“Brave Battalions from Tennessee,” San Francisco Call, June 17, 1898.
Robert J. Cook, “The Quarrel Forgotten? Toward a Clearer Understanding of Sectional Reconciliation,” Journal of the Civil War Era 6, no. 3 (2016), 428.
“The Georgians’ Peace Jubilee,” Wilmington Morning Star, December 16, 1898.
William F. Strobridge, “Rendezvous in San Francisco,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 33, no. 2 (1974), 209.
“Tennesseans in Bad Repute: Intense Feeling against the Southern Volunteers,” Sacramento Daily Union, September 15, 1898.
“Soldiers Try to Lynch a Lone Negro,” San Francisco Call, August 16, 1898.
Will T. Hale, The First Tennessee Regiment, United States Volunteers (Nashville, TN: Marshall & Bruce, 1899), 5.
David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 4.
Caroline E. Janney, Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 3.
Stacey L. Smith, “Beyond North and South: Putting the West in the Civil War and Reconstruction,” Journal of the Civil War Era 6, no. 4 (2016), 574.
Stacey L. Smith, Freedom’s Frontier (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 234.
Matthew C. Hulbert, The Ghosts of Guerrilla Memory: How Civil War Bushwhackers Became Gunslingers in the American West (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016), 8.
Kevin Waite, West of Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021).
During the Spanish-American War, there were nearly as many First Tennessee soldiers stationed in San Francisco as there were Black residents. In June 1898, there were 1,341 enlisted men and officers of the First Tennessee in San Francisco. In total, among all regiments, there were 17,062 soldiers in San Francisco, over ten times the city’s Black population. “Troops in San Francisco,” San Francisco Call, June 25, 1898.
Joshua Paddison, American Heathens: Religion, Race, and Reconstruction in California (Berkeley and San Marino: University of California Press and the Huntington Library, 2012), 6.
California State Board of Agriculture, “White and Colored Population by Counties, 1900,” in Report of the California State Board of Agriculture (Sacramento: California State Printing Office, 1917), 36, table 8; United States Marine Hospital Service, Public Health Reports (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1901), 2039. There were 1,654 Black residents of San Francisco in 1900, as compared to over 41,000 in Nashville.
Judy Yung, Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 127.
Kevin Waite, “The ‘Lost Cause’ Goes West: Confederate Culture and Civil War Memory in California,” California History 97, no. 1 (2020): 33–49.
Janney, Remembering the Civil War, 224.
“The Tennessee Colonel’s Fate,” Honolulu Advertiser, February 22, 1899.
Allan L. McDonald, The Historical Record of the First Tennessee Infantry, U.S.V. in the Spanish War and Filipino Insurrection (souvenir publication, ca. 1900), 2. Special thanks to the library staff of the U.S. Army War College for helping me access this source.
“Brigades Reorganized,” San Francisco Call, June 13, 1898.
“Typical Dixie Camp Group,” Colusa Daily Sun, June 30, 1898.
Richard Steele to “Auntie,” July 4, 1898, Tennessee State Library and Archives, Shields Family Papers, box 7, “Steele, Richard—Trip to Philippines, 1898–1899.”
Richard Steele to “Auntie,” June 20, 1898, Tennessee State Library and Archives, Shields Family Papers, box 7, “Steele, Richard—Trip to Philippines, 1898–1899.”
“Rosser in His Cell,” Scottsboro Citizen, October 6, 1898.
It is a tragic testimony to the poor conditions of camp life that the same number of Tennessee volunteers died during five months of military training in San Francisco as would later die during an entire next year of fighting in the Philippines. In the Philippines—between November 1898 and October 1899—only one volunteer was killed in combat, two died in accidents, and ten died by disease. “Hardships in Hospitals of Camp Merritt,” San Francisco Call, August 1, 1898; Hale, First Tennessee Regiment, 49.
“General Miller to Investigate,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 19, 1898.
“In Behalf of Tennessee,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 25, 1898.
“The Boys at Camp Merritt,” Nashville Banner, July 11, 1898.
“Camp at the Presidio,” San Francisco Call, August 9, 1898; Peter Fimrite, “On the edge of SF’s Presidio, restoring a watershed will benefit nature and humans,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 4, 2019, https://www.sfchronicle.com.
“No More Troops for Philippines,” San Francisco Call, August 14, 1898.
McDonald, Historical Record of the First Tennessee Infantry, 8.
In an oral history interview, one of Zero Thomas’s granddaughters, Alma Thomas Brooks, recalled that Zero was Jamaican, while another granddaughter, Winifred Clara Smith, recalled that he was Haitian. However, primary sources indicate that Zero Thomas was born in Virginia. He may have been born enslaved, or he may have been born into the well-established, free Black community of Alexandria, Virginia. “‘We ’Uns Here,” Honolulu Advertiser, November 8, 1898; 1900 United States Census, San Francisco, California, image s.v.; “Thomas, Zero L.,” Ancestry.com; Alma Thomas Brooks, “Interview with Mrs. Alma Thomas Brooks,” interview by Jesse J. Warr, October 17, 1978 (San Francisco: Afro-Americans in San Francisco Prior to World War II, 1979), tape 2, 11; Winifred Clara Smith, “Family Chronicle,” New Bayview (San Francisco) 18, no. 11 (June 4, 1993).
Zero and Winnie Thomas purchased their home on Greenwich Street in 1881. They bought an additional lot from the North San Francisco Homestead and Railroad Association in 1888. “The Board of Survey,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 26, 1898; “Real Estate Transactions,” Daily Alta California, March 29, 1888.
Saloons sprang up throughout Cow Hollow to welcome soldiers’ patronage, but the ready availability of alcohol in the neighborhood created challenges for some residents. At the age of ten, Daniel Thomas observed that a neighbor, Mr. Sheehan, had been taken “down to the house of innebriates [sic] and they think he has gone out of his mind.” Sheehan died shortly thereafter. Daniel Thomas to Zero Thomas, October 30, 1890, Golden Gate National Recreation Area, Park Archives, Zero Thomas Collection, GOGA 35356; Daniel Thomas to Zero Thomas, June 2, 1891, Golden Gate National Recreation Area, Park Archives, Zero Thomas Collection, GOGA 35356; “Tennessee Troops Attempt a Lynching,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 16, 1898.
Susan Ewing Haley, Finding Aid, Zero Thomas Collection, GOGA 35356.
“Soldiers Try to Lynch a Lone Negro.”
Quintard Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528–1990 (New York: Norton, 1998), 22.
Albert L. Broussard, Black San Francisco: The Struggle for Racial Equality in the West (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1993), 20.
Lynn M. Hudson, West of Jim Crow: The Fight Against California’s Color Line (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2020), 4.
D. Michael Bottoms, An Aristocracy of Color: Race and Reconstruction in California and the West, 1850–1890 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013), 170.
Mae Ngai, The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 30.
John Endicott Gardner to Zero Thomas, September 22, 1906, Golden Gate National Recreation Area, Park Archives, Zero Thomas Collection, GOGA 35356.
“Board of Education,” Daily Alta California, April 16, 1885.
Winnie Thomas to Zero Thomas, October 5, 1890, Golden Gate National Recreation Area, Park Archives, Zero Thomas Collection, GOGA 35356. When their youngest son Robert graduated from Winfield Scott in 1909, he earned a Bridge Medal for his academic performance, presented at his graduation by Major Edwin A. Sherman. “Veteran Speaks to Class,” San Francisco Call, June 20, 1908.
“All Patriotic and Republican,” San Francisco Call, July 5, 1896.
“T. B. Morton,” in Harr Wagner (ed.), Notable Speeches by Notable Speakers of the Greater West (San Francisco: Whitaker & Ray, 1902), 323. Theophilus Morton’s younger brother, Dr. Walter A. Morton, was the only Black member of the Bates College class of 1886. He earned his MD at Dartmouth Medical School in 1889, and was a practicing physician in Brooklyn, New York, until his death in 1895. Dr. Morton’s wife, Dr. Verina Harris-Morton (later Dr. Verina Morton Jones), was also a physician. She was the first woman licensed to practice medicine in Mississippi and one of the first Black women physicians in the nation, was active in the women’s suffrage movement, and served as a member of the NAACP’s board of directors. “Dr. W. A. Morton,” Bates Student 23, no. 9 (1895), 246; Susan K. Rishworth, “Verina Morton Jones, MD,” Journal of the National Medical Association 104, no. 3 (2012): 224–228.
“To Welcome Thomas Fortune,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 7, 1902; “Hundreds Are Turned Away from Church,” Oakland Tribune, January 12, 1903. Morton died in 1907, two years before the founding of the NAACP. “Death of Two of California’s Most Prominent Men,” New York Age, May 16, 1907.
Zero Thomas was closely engaged in the political scene as well, serving, for instance, as a member of an organizing committee for President Theodore Roosevelt’s first campaign rally in California in 1904. “Republican Legions Open Presidential Battle with Cheers for Roosevelt and Fairbanks,” San Francisco Call, September 4, 1904.
Two years prior, in 1893, Wells began spreading her message on a speaking tour of England, which did not catch the attention of the American press. In July 1894, Theophilus Morton’s brother, Dr. Walter Morton, hosted Wells and T. Thomas Fortune for dinner at his home in New York. They discussed “the next best step to take in their crusade against Southern outrages.” Later that year, Wells embarked on a second, highly publicized visit to England and Scotland, before touring within the United States. “Personal,” Standard Union, July 27, 1894.
“Miss Wells on Southern Mobs,” San Francisco Call, March 4, 1895.
“Miss Ida Wells and Her Woes,” San Francisco Call, March 5, 1895.
Ida B. Wells to President William McKinley, undated, in Quarterly of the National Archives and Records Administration 40, no. 3 (2008): 23. In this letter to McKinley, Wells urged the commander in chief to focus on domestic issues of racial injustice, rather than giving in to the public’s restless hunger for international intervention.
“A Call for Afro-American Volunteers,” San Francisco Call, July 3, 1898. Given the Thomas family’s connection to the military and their physical proximity to the Presidio, they may have shared an opinion similar to Morton’s. After the war, Zero and Winnie Thomas’s youngest daughter, Minnie Thomas, married a Virginia soldier named George Raymond, who settled in San Francisco after serving in the Philippines. Lillian Raymond, “Interview with Lillian Raymond,” interview by Jesse J. Warr on May 31, 1978 (San Francisco: Afro-Americans in San Francisco Prior to World War II, 1979), tape 1, 3.
Barbara A. Gannon, The Won Cause: Black and White Comradeship in the Grand Army of the Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 141.
Charles J. McClain, “California Carpetbagger: The Career of Henry Dibble,” Quinnipiac Law Review 28, no. 4 (2010).
“Call for Afro-American Volunteers.”
Brian G. Shellum, Black Officer in a Buffalo Soldier Regiment (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), 50.
Willard B. Gatewood, Black Americans and the White Man’s Burden, 1898–1902 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975), 48.
Willard B. Gatewood, “Ohio’s Negro Battalion in the Spanish-American War,” Northwest Ohio Quarterly 45 (Spring 1973): 62.
“Soldiers Try to Lynch a Lone Negro.”
“Tennessee Troops Attempt a Lynching.”
“Board of Survey.”
“Soldiers of Tennessee Mob a Negro,” San Francisco Examiner, August 16, 1898.
“Soldiers Try to Lynch a Lone Negro.”
“Tennessee Troops Attempt a Lynching.”
“Soldiers Try to Lynch a Lone Negro.”
“Tennessee Regiment’s Riot,” San Francisco Call, August 17, 1898.
“Tennessee Troops Attempt a Lynching.”
“Tennessee Regiment’s Riot.”
“Will Hold Their Pay,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 17, 1898.
“General Miller to Investigate.”
“Tennessee Troops Attempt a Lynching.”
“Board of Survey.”
“The Afro-American League Asks Justice,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 16, 1898.
“Will Hold Their Pay.”
Jack S. Ballard, Commander and Builder of Western Forts: The Life and Times of Major General Henry C. Merriam, 1862–1901 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2012), 201.
“Tennessee Regiment’s Riot.”
Newspaper reports did not note the first name of Private Clark.
“Miller Gets His Orders,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 23, 1898.
“The Sentence of Private Scruggs,” San Francisco Examiner, September 12, 1898.
The meeting’s attendance was in the range of three to seven hundred, representing between a quarter and a half of the city’s Black population. It was jointly organized by the Afro-American League and the Assembly Club. “Indignant Colored Folk,” San Francisco Call, September 10, 1898; “Warm Words to Tennessee Men,” San Francisco Examiner, September 14, 1898.
“Soldiers Scored,” San Francisco Call, September 13, 1898.
“Rioters Not Identified,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 19, 1898.
“Have No Wish to See Manila,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 29, 1898.
“A Tennessee Soldier,” Los Angeles Herald, September 14, 1898.
“Rosser Is Held for the Murder,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 17, 1898.
“Tennesseans in Bad Repute.”
“Murderer Rosser Weeps in His Cell at the City Prison,” San Francisco Examiner, September 15, 1898.
“Claims It Was Like a Horrid Dream,” San Francisco Call, September 14, 1898.
“Slain by a Drunken Soldier: Murdered in Cold Blood,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 14, 1898.
“Tennesseans Toasted: Judge Mogan Says They Are Bullies and Rowdies,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 17, 1898.
“Judge Mogan Promises Colored Citizens Protection,” San Francisco Examiner, September 17, 1898.
The next year, Rosser shot a man in a betting argument and was again acquitted. He then traveled to South Africa to take part in the Anglo-Boer War, before returning to the United States to hold prominent positions at several hospitals. In the First World War, he enlisted as a volunteer and was promoted to the rank of major and then to lieutenant colonel. “Rosser Is Believed to Be Insane,” Times-Democrat, December 11, 1899; “Maj. Walter W. Rosser,” Chattanooga Daily Times, August 17, 1924.
“Discussed the Status of the Negro Citizen,” San Francisco Examiner, December 19, 1898.
“They Plead for Justice,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 19, 1898.
“The Tennessee Soldiers,” San Francisco Examiner, September 16, 1898.
“To Weed Out Tennesseans,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 13, 1898.
“Tennessee Terrors,” Los Angeles Times, October 28, 1898.
Diary of Ernest McDaniel, November 8, 1898, Tennessee State Library and Archives, Ernest McDaniel Papers, box 5, 10.
The military board had reported that while other regiments had been present at the scene, the majority of the mob was composed of members of the First Tennessee: “There is no evidence to show that injury to the property of the Thomas family was authorized by any other than the Tennesseans, and it is the belief of the board that most of the members of the other commands that joined themselves to the Tennesseans were attracted as spectators.” “‘We ’Uns Here,” Honolulu Advertiser, November 8, 1898; “Tennesseans to Blame,” Chattanooga Daily Times, September 20, 1898.
“Banquet to the First Tennessee,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 19, 1899.
“Tennesseans at Home,” Los Angeles Herald, November 30, 1899.
“Afro-American Rally: Congressman Kahn Is Repeatedly Cheered for Happy Hits,” San Francisco Call, October 30, 1900; “Afro-Americans Hold Meeting,” San Francisco Call, October 17, 1902.
Stuart Creighton Miller illustrates the impact of imperialism on the Republican Party’s commitment to racial equality in his book Benevolent Assimilation: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899–1903 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982).
Congressman Julius Kahn, speaking on the topic of Philippine Government, on June 20, 1902, 57th Congress, 1st Session, Congressional Record 35, Part 7: 7123.
“Not only did the Spanish-American War mend regional fissures caused by the American Civil War, black veterans returning from Cuban battlefields often faced intense resentment and violence.” Michele Mitchell, Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 64
Inyo Independent, June 12, 1903.
“The Assembly,” Stanford Alumnus, December 16, 1903.
Harper was a Methodist of Jamaican, German, and Native American heritage. Their daughter Alma was the first Black student to attend Galileo High School. Brooks, “Interview with Mrs. Alma Thomas Brooks.”
Ibid. The Thomas family’s other children worked in a variety of occupations. Zero Jr. became a pharmacist, Henry an elevator operator, Robert a postal clerk, and Mabel a custodian; Minnie took care of the home while her husband, a veteran of the Spanish-American War, worked as a gardener and chef. Raymond, “Interview with Lillian Raymond,” tape 1, 25; Crocker-Langley San Francisco Directory for the Year 1913 (San Francisco: H.S. Crocker, 1913), 984.
Smith, “Family Chronicle.”