Peter Caulder: A Free Black Soldier and Pioneer in Antebellum Arkansas

Peter Caulder: A Free Black Soldier and Pioneer in Antebellum ArkansasAuthor(s): Billy D. HigginsSource: The Arkansas Historical Quarterly, Vol. 58, No. 1 (Spring, 1999), pp. 80-99Published by: Arkansas Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40026275 .

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Peter Caulder: A Free Black

Soldier and Pioneer in

Antebellum Arkansas

BILLY D. HIGGINS

ON JUNE 18, 1812, PRESIDENT JAMES MADISON signed into law the war bill that Congress had narrowly passed the day before. Madison, exasperated by unfriendly British actions at sea during the Napoleonic Wars, thus led his country into war against a powerful adversary. The established army numbered less than twelve thousand men, but immediately eager volunteers flocked to recruiting booths. Recruits who signed on for five-year regular army terms formed the core of the military, but campaigners counted on state militia units to provide much of the punch - if the timing of battles was right. Militiamen enlisted for three months at a time, after which most went home, even if a major engagement loomed just ahead.1 Patriotic citizens too busy or too wealthy to serve for three months could round up

Billy D. Higgins is a history instructor at Westark College. The author would like to acknowledge the contributions to this article made by Juliet Galonska, park historian of the Fort Smith National Historical Site, and Carolyn Filippelli, reference librarian at Westark College, who researched army documents held by the National Archives in Washington, D. C, and shared their vital findings with the author, and to thank his wife, Peggy Higgins, who graciously accompanied him to courthouses, cemeteries, lakeshores, and farmland as well as to the archives of four states.

!Two fine accounts of the War of 1812 are Donald R. Hickey, The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), and John R. Elting, Amateurs, To Arms: A Military History of the War of 1812 (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 1991). A bibliography of value for the War of 1812 is found in John C. Fredriksen, Free Trade and Sailors' Rights: A Bibliography of the War of 1812 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985).

THE ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY VOL. LVIII, NO. 1, SPRING 1999



A FREE BLACK SOLDIER IN ARKANSAS 8 1

substitutes to join state militia. One such substitute was South Carolinian Peter Caulder, a "free colored man," who eventually came to own one hundred-sixty acres in Arkansas Territory by virtue of his War of 1812 service.

Eleven days after the declaration of war, one Alexander Lane sent Caulder in his place to join the 5th (Keith's) South Carolina Regiment, where he became part of Capt. Elisha Bethea's company. Two other free colored men, Martin Turner and James Turner, enlisted in the same regiment as Caulder on the same day, June 29, 1812.2 Captain Bethea and his green recruits probably had no opportunity to march into battle, since, during that first summer of war, the nine land engagements that occurred between U.S. and British, Canadian, or Indian forces took place north of the Ohio River, hundreds of miles from South Carolina. By September 29, 1812, when his ninety days expired, Caulder had earned for Lane, a white man, nineteen dollars and ninety-eight cents, computed at a rate of six dollars and sixty-six cents per month.3

Two years later the threat of British victory motivated Congress to strengthen the army by offering cash and a one-hundred-sixty-acre land bounty for new recruits. An easing of the unwritten rule of an exclusively white soldiery enlarged the manpower pool and cracked open the door to regular army service for Caulder and other free black men.4 Caulder' s state militia experience evidently convinced this young, landless mulatto that

Registers of Enlistments in the U.S. Army, 1799-1914, vols. 5 and 6 (c) 1798-May 17, 1815, Entry 4541, Pvt. Peter Caulder (Coulder, Calder), National Archives Microfilm Series 233, roll 3, Record Group 94, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C. This document specifies Caulder' s race. He is referred to as a "colored man." See also, War of 1812, Index to Military Service Records for Soldiers Serving from South Carolina, M652, roll 2, RG 94, National Archives.

3 War of 1812 Compiled Service Records, National Archives Microfilm Series M602, roll 36, RG 94, National Archives. According to a note on the Company Pay Roll record, Alexander Lane was entitled to receive Caulder' s three months' pay. Martin Turner had substituted for John Manning and earned for his sponsor a like amount.

4J. C. A. Stagg, "Enlisted Men in the United States Army, 1812-1815: A Preliminary Survey," William and Mary Quarterly 43 (October 1986): 626. On page 628, Stagg writes that all "recruits described as 'colored men' enlisted in the last six months of 1814 and in early 1815, on which basis it is possible to suggest that at least 280 to 370 blacks may have been in the ranks by the end of the war." Stagg cites letters from the Adjutant General in drawing the conclusion that by 1814 the War Department unequivocally endorsed the recruitment of blacks.



82 ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

adventure and advancement awaited him in the army. He seized the opportunity, becoming one of those Americans of African descent whose service in the first quarter of the nineteenth century briefly integrated the U.S. army, including, in the case of Caulder, units along the frontier in Arkansas.

On September 2, 1814, at the Marion County Courthouse, South Carolina, Caulder joined the 3rd Rifles, one of four new fifteen-hundred- man regiments being readied to take on the British. Two weeks earlier, Caulder 's militia comrades Martin Turner and James Turner had enlisted in the same unit. The Turner and Caulder families were neighbors whose property on Catfish Creek adjoined. While Caulder's parentage is to this point unknown, the young Turner brothers may be traced back two generations to John Turner, who had a white mother of the "Irish breed" and a black father. Under South Carolina law, any child born to a white woman and a black man was considered free colored, but entitled to the same privileges as whites, including rights in ownership of property and slaves.5

Caulder's regiment, raised in the Carolinas and Virginia, came into being too late and in the wrong place to see action against British troops. Only a handful of engagements occurred after September 1814, the principal one being, of course, at New Orleans, in which free black Louisianans fought with Gen. Andrew Jackson against the British. Before that famous battle Jackson had echoed the army's new racial toleration by summoning American blacks to "rally round the standard of the Eagle," proclaiming:

Every noble hearted free man of Color, volunteering to serve during the present contest with Great Britain, and no longer, there will be paid the same bounty in money and lands, now received by the white soldiers of the United States, namely, one hundred and twenty-four dollars in money and one hundred and sixty acres of land. The non-commissioned officers and privates will also be entitled to the same month pay and daily rations, and clothes furnished to any American soldier.

5Marion County, South Carolina Deed Book K, p. 24, dated April 22, 1822, Marion County Courthouse, Marion, South Carolina.



A FREE BLACK SOLDIER IN ARKANSAS 83

General Jackson meant for equality between the races to prevail in the military and reminded all that "due regards will be paid to the feelings of freemen and soldiers. You will not, by being associated with white men in the same corps be exposed to improper comparisons, or unjust sarcasm."6

The 3rd, after completing its muster in the tidewater, moved north to Greenleaf s Point in the District of Columbia for defense of the capital. When news of the Treaty of Ghent sailed across the Atlantic, and peace with Great Britain came once again, American soldiers who had joined for the duration of the war got their discharges and set out for home. Caulder, however, had enlisted for five years, and in April 1815 the army transferred him to Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, where he drilled on the grounds and shot at the rifle range. In the forested mountains of central Pennsylvania, Caulder learned the art of tracking. The Carlisle training turned the farmhand who had volunteered into a marksman and a scout, a finished soldier prepared for duty on the frontier. By the end of 1815, the army disbanded three of the four rifle regiments and discharged most veterans from military service whether or not they wanted to separate. Eager to remain with the army, Private Caulder forewent his chance to return to civilian life and passed rigorous marksmanship and scouting tests in order to stay in the 1st Rifle Regiment.7 In January 1816 Caulder traveled to the Alabama River as part of Capt. Joseph Seldon's company, the duties of which may have included patrolling the border with Spanish Florida.

After a year with Seldon, Caulder rejoined Capt. William Bradford at Rifle Regiment headquarters in Belle Fontaine, Missouri. A plan to place soldiers on the upper Arkansas River was underway, and Caulder, who had served under Bradford at Carlisle, perhaps had been transferred at the

^'Proclamation by General Andrew Jackson, September 21, 1814," cited by William C. Nell, Services of Colored Americans in the Wars of 1776 and 1812 (Boston: Prentiss and Sawyer, 1851), 19-20.

Edwin Bearss, "Fort Smith 1817-1824," 15, undated and unpublished manuscript available at the Fort Smith National Historic Site Library. Bearss, the Fort Smith National Historic Site's start-up historian, compiled this work from a combination of primary and secondary sources. Bearss' s full commentary on marksmanship qualifications for the Rifle Regiment is as follows: "Members of this elite corps were well schooled in scouting and patrolling. They were required to fire their muskets without rests; and they perfected their marksmanship at targets . . . those who fired two shots within four inches of the center of the target at 100 yards were entitled to be called first class marksmen. Members of the Rifles wore distinctive uniforms of grey, cut in the pattern which is still retained in the dress uniform worn by the West Point cadets of today."




captain's request to take part in an adventurous mission to the wilds of Arkansas. Meriwether Lewis had negotiated a treaty with Osage Indians in 1808 for their hunting grounds in the Ozark Mountains. Thereafter, the United States government swapped these Osage-ceded lands for Cherokee territory east of the Mississippl. Cherokee from the Appalachians arrived and began to settle the rugged plateau once claimed by the Osage. Violence flared between the ax- and plow-wielding Cherokee and the Osage, who thought they had given up hunting privileges, not the land itself. Broader conflict would, of course, place plans for further Indian removals from the east in jeopardy. The War Department decided to interpose a military force to prevent bloodshed between the two tribes and directed Gen. Thomas A. Smith, commander of the 1st Rifle Regiment, to establish an army post on the Arkansas for that purpose.

Private Caulder and his old friends the Turners were among the first troopers to arrive at Arkansas Post, where Bradford procured boats to transport his men to Belle Point, a landmark at the confluence of the Poteau and Arkansas rivers selected in advance by Maj. Stephen H. Long as the site on which to build a fort. General Smith had ordered riflemen who were scattered in small detachments throughout Louisiana and Missouri to rendezvous with Captain Bradford, who would lead the garrison force. Twenty-four of the sixty-five men assigned to Bradford set out from Arkansas Post in ill health. Caulder and other fit-for-duty soldiers poled flat boats mile by mile upriver and helped the sick to get well. On Christmas Day 1 8 17 the men tugged the boats ashore at Belle Point. The first battles with disease and travel hardships had been won and the victories had instilled an esprit de corps in Bradford's company. These men were, after all, elite riflemen, some of whom were issued not only the grey woolen uniform but also forest green linen tunics that signified sharpshooters in military units throughout Europe. In traveling to the wilderness, passing but one white settlement after Dardanelle, Caulder and his fellow soldiers knew that they would have to rely upon each other for their survival. Bradford put his riflemen to work cutting trees and hewing logs to build the fort that would bear the name of the regimental commander. Some troopers hunted and others cleared ground along the river to grow corn, potatoes, and greens for the mess hall. Captain Bradford may have put James Turner, who had given farming as his pre-army occupation, to work in the kitchen garden but




detached Caulder and Martin Turner on scouting duties many miles away from the post8

The physical environment in which Caulder served was later vividly described by Thomas Nuttall, who visited Fort Smith in 1819. Nuttall observed a "garrison, consisting of two block-houses and lines of cabins or barracks for the accommodation of seventy men whom it contains, . . . agreeabley situated at the junction of the Pottoe, on a rising ground of about fifty feet elevation, and surrounded by alluvial and uplands of unusual fertility."9 Nuttall, whom Bradford treated politely throughout the naturalist's month-long visit, wandered about the countryside in the company of the post's army surgeon. Bears, bison, herds of deer, panthers, wolves, poisonous snakes, including one known as a water "mockasin," "musquetoes," and ticks were specified by the naturalist as abundant in the area around Belle Point. Nuttall mentioned that the Cherokee had displaced white settlers in the area and offered details on a bloody reprisal attack by Cherokee warriors on the Osage village at Claremore. In that raid, which was led by Cherokee war chieftain Tike-e-Toke, a massacre of Osage men, women, and children occurred.10

In 1818 few white Americans had penetrated the rugged terrain of the Ozark plateau, a country covered with hardwood forests and cut by a hundred riverlets. To protect his small force and carry out his mission, Captain Bradford dispatched Caulder and other scouts to seek out more complete knowledge of the geography and resources of his uncharted jurisdiction. Earlier Zebulon Pike had sketched a chart of the White River valley and located on it Poke Bayou (later the site of Batesville), but his proportionally flawed map left the topography of the area largely unknown

8Return for Bradford's Company, Rifle Regiment, December 31, 1817, Microfilm 40, Fort Smith National Historic Site Library, Fort Smith, Arkansas (copied from RG 94, National Archives); Edward C. Bearss and A. M. Gibson, Fort Smith: Little Gibraltar on the Arkansas (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970), 12-13. Biographical and Historical Memoirs of Northwestern Arkansas (Chicago: Goodspeed Publishing Company, 1889), 489, 689-690. A letter dated June 26, 1876, from P. O. Billingsley indicates that eighteen families living on the north side of the Arkansas at the mouth of the Big Mulberry in 1817 supplied Bradford's company at Fort Smith with buffalo meat for which they got in return flour, "which was a great treat" for the settlers.

9 Thomas Nuttall, A Journal of Travels into the Arkansas Territory During the Year 1819, ed. Savoie Lattinville (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980), 143.

10Ibid., 140, 141, 145-151, 154, 135-136.




to the military command. As a first priority, along with setting up a cantonment, Bradford sent Peter Caulder, Martin Turner, and two other privates with Cpl. Daniel Norman on a lengthy expedition to sound out the upper White River area. Norman's squad most likely portaged its canoes to the Little North Fork, the northernmost point of the huge diamond-shaped Cherokee tract located in north Arkansas. The men bivouacked in the field over the cold winter months, hunting game for food as they traveled, since Bradford had "very scarce provisions" and no war chest to finance the exploration nor even to pay the troopers at the fort their monthly salaries. The group satisfactorily carried out their duties, as Norman's promotion to sergeant attested.11

In December 1818, after the company had been at Fort Smith for a year, an army paymaster from Belle Fontaine made a welcome visit to the new fort, and the soldiers, who had not been paid since 1817, were brought up to date on wages. Bradford then noted good morale and discipline on the post returns.12 Major Bradford, a small, wry man conscientiously looked after the well-being of his command, which at full strength numbered eighty men. His concern may have even extended to obscuring Caulder's African ancestry. Once, for example, Bradford, in reporting returns for his company, gave Caulder's birthplace as Austria. Bradford's listing a European place of birth for his trooper, whom he had known for five years, could have been simply a clerical error or it could have been a device intentionally used by the post commander to deflect attention from Caulder's race.13 Whatever the case, in June 1819 Private Caulder, now twenty-four years old and apparently a well- treated and well-motivated soldier intent on a military career, reenlisted for another five-year term. At the time Bradford described the trooper as having "dark complexion, dark eyes, and dark hair" and gave Caulder's place of birth as Marion, South Carolina. Army returns of the era did not include race as part of the standard reports on men of the command.14

1 Returns for Bradford's Company, Rifle Regiment, December 31, 1817, and February 28, 1818, Microfilm 40, Fort Smith National Historic Site. In February 1818 Corporal Norman gained promotion to sergeant while he, Caulder, and the other three soldiers remained on detached duty. Their tour in the field appeared to be three months, late December 1817 through early March 1818.

12Ibid., Inspection Return for February 19, 1819. 13Ibid., Inspection Return for June 20, 1820. I4Entry for Peter Caulder, Warrant Number 24,899, Bounty Land Files, Records of the

Bureau of Land Management, can no. 1656, bundle no. 347, RG 49, National Archives.




In his second tour of duty, Pvt. Peter Caulder continued building an exemplary military record. He avoided the stockade, a common enough punishment imposed on many enlisted men for a variety of military misdeeds, and though diseases struck the men often and hard, Caulder went on sick call but once in ten years. Illnesses, principally "ague and bilious fever," period terms for malaria, sometimes decimated the ranks, and "company strength was further reduced by frequent infractions of military law - sleeping on watch, fighting, and drunkenness on post." The penalty for such misadventures was confinement or loss of rank. 15

Private Caulder, far from succumbing to the boredom of an isolated frontier post and the attendant undisciplined behavior displayed by many young soldiers, readily accepted wider responsibilities. Bradford sent his black trooper to pursue deserters, an assignment that carried with it a pay bonus, because officers required that the truant soldier forfeit his next month's pay to the man who brought him back. Certainly Caulder must have had access to a mount to travel effectively across the countryside. Nuttall describes a mounted patrol, so the post, though garrisoned by infantrymen, must have acquired a string of horses by 1818. Private Caulder, while spending time in the saddle away from the post on his own initiative, might well have had a dog as a traveling companion. After his army days he was known as a keeper of hounds. A little taller than average at five feet, eleven and one-half inches, Caulder' s physical and military bearing, enhanced by his uniform, may have helped him to fend off would-be troublemakers encountered in the backwoods of Arkansas. Of course he carried orders from his commanding officer as well as his rifle. Despite compiling a commendable record over a lengthy period, Private Caulder was never promoted. Being accepted as a black man in an integrated company of soldiers is one matter, but to be promoted to non-commissioned officer where white men would be subject to his orders was quite another, even with the assurances General Jackson made in his 1814 proclamation.

As Caulder' s duties drew him into the Ozarks, he must have encountered free black pioneers, such as his future father-in-law David Hall, who migrated from Tennessee in 1819 and settled with his wife, Sarah, along the Little North Fork of the White River. Hall, a North Carolina-born mulatto, lived in Arkansas for forty years, during which time he steadily

15Bearss and Gibson, Fort Smith: Little Gibraltar on the Arkansas, 29.



8 8 ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

increased the size of his cattle herd and made improvements to his farm, as he progressed from isolated whiskey-making pioneer to prosperous elder of a large community of free black landowners. David and Sarah Hall raised a large family that included daughter Eliza, who became Peter Caulder's wife.16

A saltpeter (nitre) deposit at Bean's Cave, near Hall's farm, may have given Caulder good reason to keep returning to the Little North Fork. In the War of 1812 and afterwards, soldiers often had to rely on locally manufactured gun powder, which could be produced by combining saltpeter with charcoal and sulphur.17 A historical example exists of an enterprising black man in Eastern Kentucky known as Free Frank, who mined saltpeter and made gunpowder to his good advantage. Perhaps David Hall did so as well. His manufacture of gunpowder and of another commodity in demand (according to Silas C. Turnbo, Hall had one of the first stills on the frontier) would certainly help explain not only why the riflemen were attracted to Hall's place, but also why Hall was accepted by his white yeoman neighbors.18

If Caulder found free black companionship along the White River, he soon came to know less of it in the army. Caulder's South Carolina neighbors and friends, the Turners, with whom he had served in militia and army units for seven years, though they had the opportunity to reenlist,

16Billy D. Higgins, "The Origins and Fate of the Marion County Free Black Community," Arkansas Historical Quarterly 54 (Winter 1995): 427^443. Surveyor notes of 1 827 show that David Hall had more acreage under cultivation than anyone else in his township.

17James J. Johnston, "Bullets for Johnny Reb: Confederate Nitre and Mining Bureau in Arkansas ," Arkansas Historical Quarterly 49 (Summer 1990), 151. Confederates operated a gunpowder plant at Bean Cave during the Civil War.

Juliet E. K. Walker, Free Frank: A Black Pioneer on the Antebellum Frontier (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983). The life of Free Frank, a South Carolina- born slave, offers interesting parallels to the experiences of David Hall Sr. in Arkansas, though Hall was apparently a free man from birth and Free Frank was a slave when born in 1777. But Frank, who had no known last name, was allowed by his master to set up a

saltpeter manufactory during the War of 1812 in the Pennyroyal frontier of Kentucky. He

purchased his wife's freedom in 1817 and his own in 1819 from profits remaining to him after hiring his time by paying his owner. This determined ex-slave founded an all-black

community of free men and women in Illinois as did Hall in Arkansas (S. C. Turnbo, "A

Long Time Ago," Document 615 in the Turnbo Manuscript Collection, Springfield-Greene County Public Library, Springfield, Missouri).




turned in their issue equipment and left the army on August 28, 1819. In their honorable discharge documents, their commanding officer, Major Bradford, described the twenty-nine-year-old Martin Turner as being five feet, nine inches in height, with dark complexion, dark eyes, and dark hair and twenty-three-year-old James Turner as five feet, ten inches in height, dark complexion, dark eyes, and dark hair.19 The two ex-soldiers remained in Fort Smith until 1822, working as "pioneers" for the garrison, drawing pay from the army in return for cutting wood and stacking hay for the post, and perhaps scouting and hunting - as Kit Carson did two decades later when he likewise served the army as a pioneer. Like Caulder, the Turner brothers connected with the free black community of north Arkansas, turning up on the 1829 Izard County tax rolls. By 1841 that community also included John Turner, who was a decade younger than Martin and James and, like them, was a native of South Carolina. John Turner, a mulatto head of household, father of five young children, and landowner, may have been attracted to the Arkansas frontier from the Palmetto State by the presence of his kinsmen. Furthermore, seven mulatto minors with the Turner surname resided with other Little North Fork mulatto families during the 1850s. The close-knit community of free blacks probably took in these Turner children, ranging in age from one to eighteen, especially if they happened to be the orphaned offspring of Caulder' s old army comrades, both of whom disappeared from the Arkansas historical record by 1833.

In 1820 John Nick and John Rogers, former army officers, operated as post sutlers in Fort Smith and sold cotton shirts, calico cloth, hammers and nails, iron locks, whiskey, tobacco, sugar, coffee, leather, and hawksbill knives among other goods. The store's credit records shed light on Caulder's life at the post.20 Peter Caulder was temperate in his habits, buying a little tobacco and a quart of whiskey every other month or so and paying off his small store debt of $4.67 in 1822. Martin Turner, by contrast, bought whiskey daily over a two-week period during the Christmas season of 1821,

19Entry for Martin Turner, August 28, 1819, Warrant Number 24,559, Bounty Land Files, RG 49, National Archives.

20A complete list of the store's stock appears in an unpaginated appendix of Bearss, "Fort Smith 1817-1824." ;




running his store debt to $18.36.21 Credit sales by the sutlers to Caulder and the Turners may have been encouraged not only by the veterans' good names, but also because they were in line for a bonanza. In 1821 Peter Caulder, Martin Turner, and James Turner each applied for his one-hundred- sixty-acre War of 1812 land bounty. An army officer at the post witnessed the unlettered mulattoes' JTs, wrote in their names around their marks, and sent their completed paperwork to Washington, D. C, for processing. Three years later, and ten years after their wartime service to the country, the Adjutant General's office forwarded warrants to Caulder and the Turners at Fort Smith that allowed these army comrades to realize the American dream of land ownership.22

When his warrant for Arkansas land arrived, Private Caulder was no longer serving under Bradford, his patron officer whom on at least one occasion he had accompanied on extended duties away from the post.23 Renewed hostilities between the Osage and Cherokee southwest of Fort Smith prompted the War Department to move the 7th Infantry Regiment from Fort Scott, Georgia, to Fort Smith. Col. Matthew Arbuckle and one hundred-eighty men arrived at Fort Smith on February 27, 1822, to relieve Major Bradford. Above the post parade ground the next day, a twenty-four star American flag waved under a cool February breeze. The newly arrived troops fell out smartly for inspection in ranks alongside Caulder and the rest

21 "Sutler's Account Book of John Nicks and John Rogers, 1821-1822," 12, 102, 271, Clara Bertha Eno Collection, Arkansas History Commission, Little Rock. John Nicks moved to Fort Gibson in 1 824 and became the postmaster there, a position that he retained until his death in 1831. Rogers held the office of postmaster in Fort Smith for thirty years. A major artery in Fort Smith bears his name.

22Entry for Caulder, Warrant Number 24,899, Entry for Martin Turner, Warrant Number 24,559, Entry for James Turner, Warrant Number 24,557, Bounty Land Files, RG 49, National Archives. James Turner's bounty land was in present day Lonoke County. The authority on War of 1812 bounty lands in Arkansas is Katheren Christensen, Arkansas Military Bounty Grants, War of 1812 (Hot Springs: Arkansas Ancestors, 1971). Christensen writes that "the patent date was always later than the date on which the warrant was issued and the date on which the register of the local land office issued a certificate that the warrant had been used to locate the land." Military bounties in Arkansas Territory totaled 1,162,800 acres, the great proportion of which was never claimed (Clarence Edwin Carter, ed., Territorial Papers of the United States: Territory of Arkansas 1819-1836, [Washington, DC: GPO, 1953-1954], xx, 110).

23Registers of Enlistments in the United States Army, May 17, 1815-June 30, 1821, Entry 1384, Pvt. Peter Caulder, U.S. Rifles, National Archives Microfilm Series M-233, roll 1 4, RG 94, National Archives.



A FREE BLACK SOLDIER IN ARKANSAS 9 1

of the garrison veterans. A parade accompanied by drum and fife music signified the transfer of Fort Smith and Bradford's company into the hands of the 7th Infantry. The ceremony closed the book on the proud company of the famed regiment sometimes known as the U.S. Rifles, and Major Bradford departed Fort Smith to join Lt. Col. Zachary Taylor's regiment at Fort Selden, Alabama. Caulder and thirty of Bradford's riflemen were reassigned to C Company of the 7th Infantry, which had the largest vacancy in ranks of the incoming regiment. Perhaps because of their reputation or their seniority at the post, the former troops of Bradford got preferred duty assignments, for which they were envied by the other infantrymen.24

After this change of guard, the first steamboat made the trip to Fort Smith, taking fifteen days to cover the upstream distance from Little Rock, down from the thirty days of the muscle-powered keel boats. The speedier mode of transportation brought more cargo and more settlers and thus increased risk of Indian-white conflict. White people compounded the danger by advancing west beyond Fort Smith, squatting on Indian lands and making farming improvements. In the meantime, several bands of eastern Cherokee migrated into the valleys of north Arkansas. If Arbuckle tapped the field experience of Caulder as Bradford had, the colonel may have sent the private to accompany Lt. Benjamin L. E. Bonneville, a West Pointer, on a detached duty mission into the Ozarks in November 1823. Upon Bonneville's arrival in Batesville, citizens told the officer that "there were at least 9,000 [Indians] above them at the forks of the White River" who, in several instances, "openly robbed the settlers" and threatened their stock. Bonneville learned that one particularly militant chief, Tike-e-Toke, was doing his best to stir up trouble. Caulder likely knew Tike-e-Toke through earlier encounters between this Cherokee war chief and Bradford's command. Whether Bonneville and Caulder actually met with Tike-e-Toke to hear speeches and smoke a peace pipe is unrecorded, even unlikely, but, nevertheless, Cherokee-white tensions in the Ozarks relaxed after December 1823 and Arbuckle, who had been considering recalling four companies from the Red River to Fort Smith in case he needed to "rush soldiers to the

24Fort Smith Returns, August 20, 1 820-December, 1846, Return of March 1821, Microfilm 118, Fort Smith National Historic Site; Bearss, "Fort Smith 1817-1824," pt. 2, chap. 1, 1-16; Inspection Returns for Seventh Infantry, January 1821-December 1831, Inspection Return for Burch's Company, February 1822, Microfilm 127, Fort Smith National Historic Site (copied from National Archives RG 94).




White," never again faced a serious problem with the Arkansas Cherokees.25 Instead, a series of conflicts in the Indian Nations arose to monopolize Arbuckle's concerns and eventually cloud Caulder's future with the 7th Infantry.

To better control new outbreaks of violence between Indian tribes, Arbuckle recommended to his superiors at the War Department that his garrison be moved farther west. Though Secretary of War John C. Calhoun had reservations about a relocation of the fort because he thought that white migration would surely follow, he, in the end, approved of a plan to build a cantonment sixty miles upriver from Fort Smith where the Verdigris River emptied into the Arkansas. On April 9, 1824, Arbuckle's regiment loaded into two keelboats and a train of wagons and departed Fort Smith headed for the new site. Lieutenant Bonneville, Private Caulder, and a cadre of thirteen other troopers stayed mustered at Fort Smith to safeguard the military post and keep an eye on events in the White River area.26

The army's abandonment of Fort Smith surely caused Caulder to make new plans for himself. When his second five-year term expired on June 4, 1824, the private accepted his discharge. His decision not to reenlist was shared by John Inglehart, also a War of 1812 veteran, who had received a land bounty in Arkansas and who had served many years with Caulder. Thus an era ended, since Caulder and Inglehart were the last members of the U. S. Rifles who had arrived at Belle Point in 1 8 17 still in military service on the Arkansas River.

Leaving Fort Smith Caulder made his way to Batesville and presented to the land-office clerk his warrant for military bounty land. He received in return a government patent on one hundred-sixty acres originally surveyed in 1817, when that particular tract was a part of Lawrence County (it is now in Sharp County).27 Reaching his property, Caulder must have expected to

25Letter from Benjamin L. E. Bonneville to Matthew Arbuckle, dated December 3, 1 823, Carter, Territorial Papers, xix, 571 .

26Brad Agnew, Fort Gibson: Terminal on the Trail of Tears (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980), 23-30. Agnew fully describes the events in Oklahoma of 1 821-1 823 that led to the military's strategic decision to relocate the Fort Smith garrison to the mouth of the Verdigris River.

27Entry for Peter Caulder, Warrant Number 24,899, Bounty Land Files, RG 49, National Archives. The patent dated March 22, 1 824, and signed by Pres. James Monroe called for one hundred-sixty acres described as Northwest Quarter, Section 29, Township 16N, Range 5W.




find arable soil, as stipulated by Congress when they determined what lands to set aside for military bounties. Instead, he saw a rocky hillside, which no doubt disappointed this soldier-turned- would-be-farmer.28 While in the vicinity Caulder may have traveled ninety miles west to visit his acquaintances, the Hall family on the Little North Fork. But, after a summer on his own and with the first hint of fall, Caulder changed his mind about civilian life and traveled back to Fort Smith where on October 3, 1824, he rejoined the army. Maj. John Rogers, the sutler, land speculator, and postmaster of Fort Smith, paid Caulder six dollars as an enlistment bonus. Caulder reported to the company commanded by Lieutenant Bonneville, who by this time knew the black soldier well and depended on him as Bradford had before.29

During most of the the next four and one-half years, Caulder and the infantrymen of the 7th concentrated on improving Fort Gibson, building a military road to Fort Smith, and providing food for the garrison. In the meantime, the abandoned fort at Belle Point yielded its timbers, metal parts, even foundation rocks to local settlers and would-be settlers who used the materials for their own purposes. Rotten cottonwood and oak timbers made the site unsafe and the army decided to tear it down.30

By 1829 the Osage and Cherokee warriors, forest dwellers, had buried the hatchet to fight together against marauding bands of Plains Indians, the

28"Compared Copy of Field Notes of Township 16 North, Range 5 West", Book #1375, Bundle #12, 1574, Commissioner of State Lands, Little Rock, Arkansas. The resurvey in 1853 by surveyor John W. Garretson included these remarks: "But no regular survey of the township could ever have been made [because] the land on this line which must have been reported fit for cultivation in order to become millitary county [bounty] land is rocky & gravelly hills entirely unfit for cultivation under all the circumstances." The surveyor's notes from 1817 had indeed carried these remarks about the same section line: "Land gently roleing fit for cultivation timber oak & hickory & elm undergroth same [some] hazle & bryars." Caulder must have realized the same thing that surveyor Garretson recognized - that the prized bounty land awarded him for his loyal and timely military service was, contrary to promise and government intention, too poor to farm.

29Entry for Peter Caulder, Enlistment Document, dated October 3, 1824, Warrant Number 24,899, Bounty Land Files, RG 49, National Archives. Caulder was sworn in by Justice of Peace C. A. Pickett. Caulder' s mark is affixed and witnessed. Eight years later Bonneville led an expedition of 101 men to explore the American west (Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah are named for him). He turned his journals over to Washington Irving, who wrote The Adventures of Captain Bonneville U.S.A., in the Rocky Mountains and the Far West (New York: Putnam and Sons, 1849).

30Bearss, "Fort Smith 1817-1824," 107-109.




Pawnee and Comanche, in the Red River valley. Arkansas's territorial governor, George Izard, concerned about Indian attacks on hunters and settlers in the southwest and anxious to protect whites, encouraged Colonel Arbuckle to sent troops to that region. Arbuckle detached Captain Bonneville's company, which included Private Caulder, for the task of patrolling the river that separated Mexico from the Indian Nations. Though Bonneville's expedition to the Red lasted only two months, Caulder may have been dismayed as he realized that his military duties were again taking him even farther away from the Ozark region that he now regarded as his home.

On May 24, 1829, after his company returned to Fort Gibson and a month before he completed his third five-year enlistment term, Caulder suddenly deserted the army. Caulder's decision to depart without authorization must have been difficult for him after fifteen years of loyal and disciplined military service. It may well have involved more than his dislike of Fort Gibson and duties in the Indian Nations.31 The timing of the desertion, just before he would have been honorably discharged, points to causes beyond Caulder's control. He may have been driven toward what had to be a galling action for him by a change of the racial mood in Arkansas Territory. Planters from Tennessee and Mississippi had begun to push into fertile cotton-producing lands west of the Mississippi River, bringing their ambitions, slaves, and a society based on racial differences. By 1829 the rising wealth of plantation owners influenced territorial politics, and within six years the people of the territory adopted, without serious argument against it, a pro-slavery state constitution.32

31Seventh Infantry Returns, January 1821 -December 1831, Microfilm 127, Return of May 1 829, Fort Smith National Historic Site. Deserting was not an uncommon event among enlisted ranks on the frontier during these decades. Indeed, some soldiers reenlisted after desertion. It was, however, the initial recorded act of disobedience on the part of Caulder and in that sense might be considered highly unusual.

32S. Charles Bolton, Territorial Ambition: Land and Society in Arkansas, 1800-1840 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1993), 99, 120. Though the Missouri Compromise made Arkansas's entry into the Union as a slave state almost certain, issues did arise over statehood and the writing of the constitution that pitted "the lowland slaveholding south and east [sections of Arkansas] . . . against the highlands in the north and west, which had relatively few slaves and a larger white population." Bolton finds that planters with more than twenty slaves, 1 percent of the population, "may have been sixteen percent of the framers of Arkansas' constitution," and concludes that this disproportionate representation indicated that "slave ownership was associated with political power."




That Colonel Arbuckle evidently put forth no effort to recover Caulder and punish him indicated a possibility of rising racial tensions within the 7th Infantry. Perhaps Arbuckle believed that desertion might be the appropriate path for what must have been one of the last black soldiers integrated into a regular army unit. Though technically a fugitive from the law, Caulder quite openly remained in Arkansas Territory, returning to his land in what had become Izard County.

After fifteen years of demanding assignments and exposure to the assortment of diseases that came to afflict the troops at both Fort Smith and Fort Gibson, the hardscrabble bounty land may have not looked so bad to the ex-soldier after all, and in his first spring as a yeoman, Caulder got to work soon enough to make some improvements on his property, located in the southwest corner of present-day Sharp County. Caulder had friends to support his transition, the 1829 population of free black people in Izard County numbering twenty-six, among them Martin Turner, who had built a cabin and cleared acreage for crops on his bounty land located a few miles to the south.33

Farming on his patented land proved a shortlived venture for Peter Caulder, though. The sheriff attached lower values to Caulder's acreage after the first year, and in 1832 he owed only twenty-three cents in county taxes, down significantly from his thirty-one-and-one-quarter cent tax bill of 1 829. Twenty-three cents was the rate normally applied to unimproved or abandoned land. By contrast, Martin Turner's 1832 county tax bill was one dollar, more than four times as high as Caulder's. Late in 1 829 or early 1 830 Caulder departed his stone-strewn bounty land, finding a new home four days journey west in Northfork Township, where the Hall family lived and where Caulder married fifteen-year-old Eliza Hall.34 The couple's first child,

"Sheriffs Census of Arkansas, 1829, Territory of Arkansas, County of Izard, March 11, 1829, microfilm, Arkansas History Commission, Little Rock. In 1829 Northfork Township included fifteen free colored people, most of them of the Hall family. Sugarloaf Township to the east counted eleven free colored people, among them the single Peter Caulder. Martin Turner and James Turner were married by 1829 and lived in Sugarloaf Township as well.

Izard County Tax Records, 1829-1866, Microfilm 66, Arkansas History Commission. Peter Caulder, Martin Turner, John Hall, and David Hall appear in the 1829 tax list. None of these names is listed in the 1830 and 1831 tax records but all reappear in the 1832 and 1 833 records. The 1833 mention is the last for Martin Turner and James Turner in existing Arkansas tax records. Existing Marion County tax records begin with 1841, and on the tax




David, named, no doubt, in honor of David Hall, Eliza's father, was born in 183 1.35

An 1840 map of Township 20 Range 15 West reconstructed from surveyor notes of 1827 and 1831 shows Sister Creek flowing into the White River. The cultivated land along the river lying in section 22 belonged to David Hall Sr. Caulder squatted on land to the west between David Hall's and John Hall's farms in section 16.

record for that year are the names Peter Caulder (spelled with the u) and John Turner as well as David Hall, James Hall, John Hall, and other mulatto property owners.

35Manuscript Census Returns, Fifth Census of the United States, Izard County, Arkansas, 1830. The 1830 census is the last Arkansas census in which Martin Turner and James Turner, who are listed as free colored people, are found.




After resettling in Marion County, Caulder simply let his bounty land go by the wayside, an unfortunate circumstance that would leave Caulder without a nest egg and in straitened circumstances for the rest of his life in Arkansas. In 1837 the state auditor placed Caulder's one-hundred-sixty acres of military-bounty land on the auction block for non-payment of taxes. Roscoe Beebe, a land speculator, acquired quit-claim title from the state not only to Caulder's property, but, through the same tax deed method, to an enormous tract of 28,980 acres, most of which had been War of 1 8 12 bounty land. In 1841 Beebe sold all of this property to one John S. Turner of New Orleans.36

By 1840 Caulder, listed in the census as a free colored head of household, owned one cow and one horse and apparently never accumulated substantially more property than this.37 Between 1848 and 1856, five members of the Marion County free black community purchased their land from the government land office at Batesville, but Caulder never filed a claim to the ground on which he farmed and built his house. Caulder's taxes, annually among the lowest in the free black community, were typically based on his possession of a horse and two cows.38 His lack of substantial property did not deter Caulder and his wife Eliza from the noble work of building a strong family, though. By 1 850 the couple had been married for twenty years and had seven children residing at their farm home, ranging in age from first-born nineteen-year-old David to one-year-old Stephen. Peter and Eliza Caulder named their oldest daughter Margaret, perhaps as a namesake of

36Lawrence County Abstract and Index of Deeds and Mortgages, 1815-1865, Book 1, 116, Lawrence County Courthouse, Walnut Ridge, Arkansas.

37Manuscript census returns, Sixth Census of the United States, Marion County Arkansas, 1840. Marion County Tax Records, 1841-1859, microfilm 12, Arkansas History Commission, Little Rock. Though the spelling of his surname in these two documents is exactly as in military records, variant spellings of Caulder appear in census and tax records. The 1850 enumerated census, an important primary source for the Marion County black community, spelled the name without a w, that is, Peter Calder. That particular spelling had been used by county tax collectors before and is listed as an alternate spelling for Caulder in the Registers of Enlistments in the U. S. Army 1798-1914, vols. 5 and 6 (c), 1798-May 17, 1815, entry number 4541, Caulder, Peter. Alternate spellings for Caulder given in the entry include Coulder and Calder. Several different spellings of the name appeared on the tax record over the years: for example, in 1843 it was Peter Colder; in 1844, Peter Callder; in 1847, Peter Calder; in 1848, Peter Caulder; in 1851 and 1859, Peter Caulder. Evidently county clerks spelled the unlettered Caulder's name as it sounded to them.

38Marion County Tax Records, 1841-1859.




neighbor John Turner's wife who was Eliza's age. Margaret Turner, like Eliza, may have been a daughter of David and Sarah Hall and, if so, would have been Eliza's twin sister.

Peter Caulder disappeared from the Marion County tax record after 1859, the year that he would have turned sixty-four, and the year that the Arkansas General Assembly passed a law that banished free black people from the state. The Little North Fork community followed Caulder into historical obscurity. One-hundred-twenty free black people had departed Marion County by the fall of 1 860 when the United States census was taken. At that time only eight free black residents, six females and two young males, were left in the county, all living with white families.39 Racial tensions preceding the Civil War would have made it difficult for these Arkansas free black people to relocate as a group even in northern states, so the community fragmented, going in several directions. Some lighter- skinned members passed as white people after moving from Arkansas. Thomas Hall, who was classified as a mulatto in the 1840 census, had already moved to Missouri and filed an affidavit proclaiming that he was of "Portagee" descent.40 David Hall Jr. and James Hall, who departed Arkansas in 1859, are listed as whites in the 1870 Bollinger County, Missouri, census. Some Little North Forkers, however, including the oldest son of Peter Caulder, could not or did not pass as whites after moving to other states. The 1870 Bollinger County, Missouri, census categorized thirty-nine-year-old David Caulder, his wife, and their six-year-old son Peter as black.41 Young Peter, born in Missouri as the Civil War raged, was the namesake and grandson of Pvt. Peter Caulder.

Peter Caulder, War of 1812 veteran born in the tidewater region of South Carolina, came to Arkansas in 1817 as a private in an elite rifle company. He proved himself reliable and well liked, earning the respect of his officers and living in camaraderie with his fellow soldiers. The black

39Manuscript Census Returns, Eighth Census of the United States, Population Schedule of Free Inhabitants, Marion County, Arkansas, 1860.

40Proof of Race Affidavit filed in the Office of the Recorder of the County of Oregon in the State of Missouri, February 13, 1850, refiled in Howell County, Missouri, May 5, 1 890, Howell County Court House, West Plains, Missouri.

41Manuscript Census Returns, Ninth Census of the United States, 1870, Bollinger County, Missouri. David Caulder is listed as age thirty-seven, male, black, farmer, born in Arkansas, and his wife Matilda as a twenty-five-year-old, black, female housekeeper bom in Missouri. Their only child was son Peter Caulder, a black male bom in 1864.




soldier served his country during the War of 1812 and for fifteen years afterwards as the United States Army maintained, without recorded objection or overreactionby white soldiers or territorial officials, an integrated infantry unit on the border of Indian Territory. Caulder appeared on inspection returns at Fort Smith and Fort Gibson for twelve years, longer than any other enlisted man at these posts. After his military service ended under mysterious circumstances, Caulder stayed in the territory. In the mountains of Marion County, along the banks of the upper White River, Caulder, son- in-law of the patriarch of a substantial free black community, farmed with his horse and hunted with his hounds, living and working in ways typical of Arkansas yeoman farmers, indeed of rural southerners in general, until the banishment law enacted by the General Assembly in 1859 forced Caulder, surely against his will, to give up his claims and move his family outside the state.

This anti-free black statute, the political rhetoric that led up to its adoption, and an editor who frequently advocated in the state's largest newspaper that free blacks in the state be reenslaved, have led to the suggestion, in the most celebrated study of free blacks in the antebellum South, that Arkansas was "a center of hostility to freemen."42 Yet Peter Caulder' s remarkably harmonious forty-two-year career in Arkansas as a soldier-farmer-family man illustrated not only his personal resourcefulness but suggests that a significant strain of tolerance, even respect for black neighbors, existed within Arkansas among the white yeomanry.

42Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), 372.



Documents

Peter Caulder: A Free Black Soldier and Pioneer in Antebellum Arkansas