#149: A Tale of Two Soldiers, Part I

Today we begin a tale of two soldiers - one a general, who, if he had his way would have had his troop comitted genocide up and down the island of Samar in the Philippines at the turn of the 20th Century - and the other, a lieutenant colonel who did what he could to prevent unecessary bloodshed.

The introduction and transition music heard on the podcast is composed and recorded by the eldest Ghosts of Arlington, Jr. While the rest of his catalogue is quite different from what he's performed for me, you can find his music on bandcamp.com under the names Caladrius and Bloodfeather.

As always, a very special thanks to the Commando Pando Cap Company for its continued help to spread the word about the podcast on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/MountainUpCapCompany Climb to Glory!

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Transcript

Episode 149: A Tale of Two Soldiers, Part I

Welcome back to Ghosts of Arlington and thank you for joining me for Episode 149: A Tale of Two Soldiers, Part I.

I believe it was WAY WAY back in Episode 7 that I talked about the decision to allow confederate soldiers to be interred at Arlington in a section set aside just for them - Section 16 - in the back near the wall that separates Fort Myer from the cemetery. Much like today, there was a lot of opposition surrounding the decision to bury traitors in the midst of many legitimate American heroes. In the end, it was decided that allowing some Confederates to be buried there would go a long way toward healing wounds from the Civil War that still existed some thirty-five years after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Courthouse. With that said, word on the street is that the reason Confederate headstones are differentiated from Union headstones (and all government issued headstones that would come after them) by coming to a point as opposed to an arch was to dissuade those unhappy with traitors in the cemetery from using those headstones as seats.

Congress authorized Confederate burials in 1900. By the early 1900s, it had become tradition to establish a new section at Arlington for the dead of a particular war , followed by a commemorative monument. In Section 22, for example, where many soldiers and sailors from the Spanish-American War are buried, the Spanish-American War Monument (built around the mast of the USS Maine) and the Rough Riders Monument memorialize that conflict. 

In 1906, with Secretary of War (and future US president) William Howard Taft's approval, the United Daughters of the Confederacy (a hereditary organization of Southern women) began raising funds to erect a memorial in the Confederate section. Through such voluntary civic organizations, women led many late-19th and early-20th Century efforts to commemorate wars and to mourn the dead - and in so doing, women gained influence in public life even before they won the right to vote.

Unveiled in 1914, the Confederate Memorial was designed by noted American sculptor Moses Jacob Ezekiel, a Confederate veteran and the first Jewish graduate of the Virginia Military Institute. The elaborately designed monument offers a nostalgic, mythologized vision of the Confederacy, including highly sanitized depictions of slavery. Standing on a 32-foot-tall pedestal, a bronze, classical female figure, crowned with olive leaves, represents the American South. She holds a laurel wreath, a plow stock and a pruning hook, with a Biblical inscription at her feet: "They have beat their swords into plough-shares and their spears into pruning hooks." The statue stands on a pedestal with four cinerary urns, one for each year of the war, and is supported by a frieze with 14 shields, one for each of the 11 Confederate states and the border states of Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri. Thirty-two life-sized figures depict mythical gods alongside Southern soldiers and civilians.

Two of these figures are portrayed as African American: an enslaved woman depicted as a quote/unquote “Mammy,” holding the infant child of a white officer, and an enslaved man following his owner to war. An inscription of the Latin phrase “Victrix causa diis placuit sed victa Caton” (“The victorious cause was pleasing to the gods, but the lost cause to Cato”) construes the South’s secession as a noble “Lost Cause.” This narrative of the Lost Cause, which romanticized the pre-Civil War South and denied the horrors of slavery, fueled white backlash against Reconstruction and the rights that the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments (1865-1870) had granted to African Americans. The image of the faithful slave, embodied in the two figures on the memorial, appeared widely in American popular culture during the 1910s through 1930s, perhaps most famously in the 1939 film “Gone with the Wind.”

According to the Arlington National Cemetery official website, "The Confederate Memorial offers an opportunity for visitors to reflect on the history and meanings of the Civil War, slavery, and the relationship between military service, citizenship and race in America. This memorial, along with the segregated United States Colored Troops graves in Section 27, invites us to understand how politics and culture have historically shaped how Americans have buried and commemorated the dead. Memorialization at a national cemetery became an important marker of citizenship — which, in the post-Reconstruction era, was granted to white Civil War veterans, Confederate or Union, but not to African American soldiers who had served their country. In such ways, the history of Arlington National Cemetery allows us to better understand the complex history of the United States."

With that said, the bronze elements of the Confederate Memorial were removed from Arlington on December 22, 2023 and are currently stored in a secure Department of Defense facility in Virginia. This was done to comply with a Congressionally-mandated requirement to remove the memorial by January 1, 2024.  

There were a lot of people who opposed the removal of this monument. Some fear it may sanitize history, some who truly espouse the Lost Caused narrative and have bought into the fiction built up around the antebellum South in the Reconstruction years, and some who still hold true to the belief system of certain races being superior to others and therefore justified in subjugating them. There should be no mistaking how I feel about Confederates - I have already called them traitors twice in this podcast episode alone. I will also take it one step further and state for the record that I believe when Fort Gordon, Georgia - named for Confederate General John B. Gordon - was renamed Fort Eisenhower, it should have actually been renamed Fort Sherman - after Union General William T. Sherman's successful Georgia campaign during the Civil War which including his famous March to the Sea and the burning of Atlanta.

But even given those feelings, I was (and remain) against the removal of this monument due to its historical context and the discussions of slavery, rebellion, and reunification it could spawn.

Now this nearly one thousand words of set up is to emphasize that what I do not say I am about to say lightly. There is at least one person - a US brigadier general no less - who I feel should be disinterred and moved to another cemetery. I also feel he should be stricken from the retirement rolls of the United States Army and lose any other honors bestowed on him. Why do I feel that way? Well, we'll get into the specifcs in a minute but the short answer is genocide.

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

Jacob Hurd Smith was born in Jackson County, Ohio on January 29, 1840. That is the extent of what I am able to find about Smith's childhood. Not even wikipedia had any additional leads for me to look into. I have no idea where he was or what he did for the first twenty-one years of his life. I do know that Smith joined the Union Army as a First Lieutenant on June 5, 1861, about two months after the start of the US Civil War and had a long and checkered army career. A career that somehow lasted forty years where he was mostly in the West fighting Indians (he is said to have been one of the officers present at the Wounded Knee massacre).

But before any of that, he served with the 2nd Kentucky Volunteer Infantry and participated in the Battle of Shiloh in early April 1862 where he was severely wounded in the hip. The wound was debilitating enough that he was promoted to captain and spent the rest of the war as a recruiting officer in Louisville. While working in Louisville, he met and later married his first wife, Emma Haverty in November 1864.

In October 1865, Smith left the military but by March 7, 1867, he had sufficiently recovered from his wounds enough to be reinstated and assigned as a captain in the 13th US Infantry. He also received a brevet promotion to major for quote "gallant conduct during the battle of Shiloh." A little over two years later, in May 1869, he received a permanent promotion to major in the Judge Advocate General Corps. Both his brevet and permanent promotions, and his spot in the JAG corps were revoked in December 1869. Why? Well, I'll tell you. Thanks for asking. In a word, wartime misconduct... wait, that was two words.

In 1869, Smith's father-in-law Daniel Haverty was being sued for fraud in connection with a bankruptcy. The creditors looked into the assets of Haverty's family, believing Haverty had hidden most of his wealth by transferring it to others. These investigations revealed a tremendous enlargement of Jacob Smith's assets during the war, from $4,000 in 1862 to $40,000 in 1865. Smith was called as a witness in the suit to explain his sudden fortune.

He claimed ignorance of any fraud on behalf of his father-in-law, and explained that the money was the result of a bounty brokerage scheme. During the war, eastern seaboard states were offering recruits enlistment bonuses (then called "bounties") of up to $700. Smith, along with a group of eastern recruiters, planned to fill eastern troop quotas using men from the Midwest, paying those recruits the regional bounty of $300 and pocketing the difference. Smith claimed he believed the plan was legal, at first. But before it could get off the ground, Smith took $92,000 the eastern recruiters had deposited for the bounties and used it to make speculative investments in side businesses involving whiskey, gold and diamonds. When the eastern recruiters demanded repayment which Smith could not provide, he noticed the recruiters refused to engage the law. From that, he concluded the plot must have been illegal. Eventually Smith's investments produced large profits. He claimed he repaid all of his creditors in full, except for a few who had died or left town.

The judge advocate position Smith was currently in had been a temporary appointment he was trying to transform into a permanent position. One of the parties in the bankruptcy case informed the Judge Advocate General of the United States Army, Brigadier General Joseph Holt, about Smith's bounty brokerage scheme. Smith wrote a letter to Holt in response which tried to cast the scheme in a sympathetic light. He wrapped himself in the flag and argued that he had been in seven engagements and had been wounded in the Battle of Shiloh. He portrayed himself as quote "one who took upon himself all the odium that the rebels and conservatives of Louisville, Kentucky, heaped upon him, by being the first officer, to my knowledge, who commenced mustering into service the colored man in Kentucky during the year 1863." Smith said that he had scoured Kentucky's prison pens, jails, and workhouses to find these men and that his only aim was to serve his God and his country properly. Smith admitted to speculating, but justified it by saying that others had made three times as much money as he had in Louisville during the war, and he had not defrauded anyone.

General Holt did not accept Smith's excuse, and submitted the papers to the Secretary of War - likely William Belknap (for various reasons I'm not going to go into, there were four secretaries of war in 1869) with the recommendation that the matter be given to the United States Senate Committee on Military Affairs, who had the authority to confirm Smith for the permanent position he sought. Smith wrote a more apologetic explanation to the Secretary, painting himself as a gullible dupe. He explained the plot in detail, and argued that his only offense was using other people's money for his own profit. He claimed that all his creditors had been repaid, and no recruits had been defrauded out of their bounty. But conveniently, Smith claimed that all other witnesses to his story had either died or left the country, and that he had destroyed or lost all of his own bank account records for that period.

Secretary of War Belknap found Smith's explanation to be unavailing and his temporary appointment as judge advocate was revoked by President Grant. In the Judge Advocate General's summation of the events, Holt excoriated Smith for how his own testimony appeared to suggest he believed it was alright to mislead and deceive military auditors. Holt concluded, "[b]y his conflicting statements and his unfortunate explanation, he is placed in a dilemma full of embarrassment."

After returning to the infantry, once-again-Captain Smith was assigned to the 19th Infantry.

This would be far from Smith's only legal problem. During the 1870s, he was called away from duty for several lawsuits about debt. One case dragged on in a Chicago court from 1869 to 1883.

Another creditor, named Henry, continued a claim against Smith for $7 for payment of a harness. That case - again over $7 (about $180 in today's money) dragged on from 1871 to 1901. Henry even sent a letter to President McKinley about Smith and his $7 debt.

On July 31, 1884, Smith was sued again in Chicago by the legal firm Pedrick and Dawson.

Smith was court martialed in 1885 in San Antonio for "conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman", for deeds in the "Mint Saloon" in Brackett, Texas. The opposing party claimed Smith had been playing a game of draw poker, lost $135, and refused to pay the debt. Smith was found guilty and was confined to Fort Clark for a year and forfeited half his pay for the same time period. The Reviewing Authority thought the court was too lenient on Smith. It also felt that Smith's courtroom tactics made a mockery of the legal procedure:

• He demanded witnesses from distant and impractical locations especially since he never actually used the witnesses in court,
• local civilian witnesses for the plaintiff were intimidated so they refused to testify against Smith,
• local civilian witnesses for the defense selectively decided which questions they would answer and which they would not.

While the draw poker case was still pending in 1885, Smith wrote a letter to the Adjutant General of the Army regarding the case, but many of the statements were lies. Because of this, Smith was tried again in 1886. He was found guilty, and would have been thrown out of the military. Smith was saved by the intercession of President Grover Cleveland, who allowed Smith to return to the military with merely a reprimand.

In 1891, Smith was charged with using enlisted men as his servants in his home.

Despite all of these legal troubles, Smith found ways to get promoted. He made major in the 2nd US Infantry in November 1896 and then lieutenant colonel shortly thereafter. He led a battalion into the battle at San Juan Hill in Cuba and took a Spanish bullet to the chest. That wound wasn't fatal or disabling; it won him a promotion to colonel and command of a regiment on its way to the Philippines, where he arrived in December 1899. 

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

In 1898 the battleship USS Maine unexpectedly exploded in Havana Harbor, killing 266 officers and men - three quarters of the ship's complement. About one hundred years after the fact it was determined that the explosion was accidental. At the time, Spain - the colonial overlords of Cuba - was blamed and war was declared. The Spanish-American War lasted approximately four months and by the time it ended, Spain ceded both Cuba and another of its colonies, the Philippines.

At first, the local Filipinos welcomed the Americans as liberators but soon realized one colonial master had just been swapped for another. Nationalists seeking an independent Philippines soon took up arms and were waging a guerilla war, like they had been against the Spaniards before the Americans drove them out. This conflict, which lasted from 1899-1903, is known by many names - The Philippine-American War, the Philippine Insurrection,  and the Tagalog Insurgency, to name a few.

In an interview with reporters shortly after arriving, Colonel Smith boastingly informed reporters in the Philippines that, because the natives were quote "worse than fighting Indians", he had already adopted appropriate tactics that he had learned in the American frontier fighting Native Americans, characterized by Smith as quote "savages". He did this without waiting for orders to do so from his boss, General Elwell Otis. This interview provoked a headline announcing that "Colonel Smith of 12th Orders All Insurgents Shot At Hand". The New York Times endorsed Smith's tactics as "long overdue." 

There is a dark humor /slash/ cynical joke in the army that says problem soldiers get kicked out, while problem officers get promoted. Throughout his career, Smith proved time and time again that he was unfit to serve in the military. He was absolutely unfit to command soldiers in combat. Regardless, time and time again he was allowed to continue to serve and time and time again promoted. And guess what? There is another promotion to come.

Starting in the late 1880s, the US Army had adopted the system of filling each brigadier general position not by qualifications, but by mere seniority. The system usually gave elderly colonels a few more months, weeks or days of active duty with a new title, followed by nearly immediate retirement at a higher pay rate. Jacob Smith was slightly younger and his promotion to general was made earlier than typical; he had three years left until retirement became mandatory by law.

Future president William Howard Taft, then the governor-general of the Philippines, decided to promote Smith to Brigadier General on June 1, 1900, citing his service during the Spanish–American War and believing that he would retire after being promoted. Smith was promoted, but he did not retire and because of that, he was around for the Samar Campaign.

On September 28, 1901, fifty-one American soldiers from Company C of the 9th U.S. Infantry Regiment who had been stationed in the town of Balangiga, the third largest town on the southern coast of Samar Island, were killed in a surprise guerrilla attack. They had been deployed to Balangiga to close its port and prevent supplies reaching Filipino forces in the interior, which at that time were under the command of General Vicente Lukbán. Lukbán had been sent there in December 1898 to govern the island on behalf of the First Philippine Republic under Emilio Aguinaldo - a republic that had fallen apart when the Americans arrived to claim their new colony.

The attack provoked shock in the US public, with newspapers equating what they called a "massacre" to George Armstrong Custer's last stand at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876. Major General Adna Chaffee, military governor of the Philippines, received orders from President Theodore Roosevelt to pacify Samar. To this end, Chaffee ordered Smith to Samar to accomplish the task.

Smith instructed Lieutenant Colonel Littleton Waller - the second officer in this Tale of Two Officers - commanding officer of a battalion of 315 U.S. Marines assigned to bolster Smith's forces in Samar, regarding the conduct of pacification:

"I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn; the more you kill and burn the better it will please me. I want all persons killed who are capable of bearing arms in actual hostilities against the United States."

Seeking clarification about this already illegal sounding order, Waller asked, "I would like to know the limit of age to respect, sir."

"Ten years", Smith said.

Again seeking clarification Waller asked, "Persons of ten years and older are those designated as being capable of bearing arms?"

"Yes." Smith confirmed his instructions a second time.

A march through the island followed. Food and trade to Samar were cut off, intended to starve the revolutionaries into submission. Smith's strategy on Samar involved widespread destruction to force the inhabitants to stop supporting the guerrillas and turn to the Americans from fear and starvation. He used his troops in sweeps of the interior in search for guerrilla bands and in attempts to capture Lukbán, but he did nothing to prevent contact between the guerrillas and the townspeople. American columns marched across the island, destroying homes and shooting people and draft animals. 

The exact number of Filipino civilians killed by US troops in the Samar campaign will never be known, but research indicated the figure to be between 2000 and 2500 men of fighting age. It is likely that many more women and children were also killed.

The abuses outraged anti-imperialist groups in the United States when they became known in March 1902. The Judge Advocate General of the Army observed that only the good sense and restraint of the majority of Smith's subordinates prevented a complete reign of terror in Samar.

As a consequence of his order, Smith became known as "Howling Wilderness Smith."  Prior to the ensuing march, Waller had pulled aside Marine Captain David Dixon Porter, one of the officers chiefly responsible for carrying it out. Waller partly revoked Smith's order and told Porter to show restraint.

"Porter, I've had instructions to kill everyone over ten years old. But we are not making war on women and children, only on men capable of bearing arms. Keep that in mind no matter what other orders you receive."

And on that happy note, I’m going to pause this story for now, but next week we will meet Tony, the second officer in this tale of two soldiers… and before you Devil Dogs out there get outraged and send in your hate mail - Tony is a Marine not a soldier, and I will refer to him as a Marine but “a tale of two soldiers” wa a much better title than anything else I could come up with!