A longtime resident of Arizona, historian and author Jane Eppinga is a member of Western Writers of America, Southern Arizona Authors, and the National Federation of Press Women and serves on the board of directors of Arizona Press Women. She received the 1995 C. L Sonnichsen Award for Best Paper entitled “Henry O. Flipper in the Court of Private Land Claims,” published in the Journal of Arizona History. Her articles have also appeared in Wild West and Persimmon Hill.

TEXAS HISTORY, BIOGRAPHY

Jane Eppinga

Henry Ossian Flipper: West Point’s First Black Graduate

Wild Horse Press, an imprint of Wild Horse Media Group

Paperback, 234 pages, with b/w images, 978-1-68179-006-0, $19.95 (also available in ebook format)

September 21, 2015 (originally published 1996)

Reviewed by Si Dunn

In 1877, 2nd Lieutenant Henry Ossian Flipper, the first African-American graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, was assigned, predictably, to the 10th U.S. Cavalry, one of two black units known as “Buffalo soldiers.”

Unpredictably, Flipper survived both the harsh racial criticisms and a devastating court martial that ended his young army career. He went on to become a versatile and noteworthy figure in late nineteenth-century American history, as author Jane Eppinga ably demonstrates in this recently updated edition of her book first published in 1996.

“Born to slavery on March, 21, 1856, at Thomasville, Georgia,” she writes, “Flipper’s achievements as a frontiersman in the American West, Mexico and Venezuela, were such that few ever achieve in a lifetime. He served as a cavalry officer, surveyor, cartographer, civil and mining engineer, Spanish translator, inventor, editor, author, and special agent for the Justice Department.”

As a young cavalry officer, Flipper served in the Oklahoma Territory and West Texas and sometimes gained levels of respect from white officers and enlisted men who served with him. But racist attitudes and post–Civil War antagonisms remained strong, even on the isolated frontier, just as they had at West Point.

Indeed, during Flipper’s time at the military academy and for years afterward, he often was the subject of major newspaper coverage, mostly negative, hostile and sometimes vicious.

Remaining publicly aloof to most of the criticisms, he led and completed a wide range of military assignments, including cavalry patrols, building a road from the Red River to Gainesville, Texas, stringing telegraph lines, and building and repairing bridges.

At Oklahoma’s Fort Sill in 1879, Flipper built a big ditch that drained stagnant water from a number of ponds, which had been breeding mosquitos and spreading malaria to the fort’s soldiers and other inhabitants. More than a hundred years later, the author notes, “the drainage system continues to control flood waters and erosion in the area.” And: “Flipper’s Ditch is registered as a national historic monument.”

Flipper got along particularly well with one white superior officer who had experienced strong anti-Irish discrimination after he immigrated to America and later fought in the Civil War. But Flipper could discriminate, too, the author emphasizes.

“Flipper and the Buffalo soldiers shared a common prejudice with the whites and the military against the Indians.”

After performing ably in a five-hour skirmish with Apache raiders, Flipper suddenly was appointed to a new administrative position at Fort Davis, Texas: post quartermaster and post commissary of subsistence. His short army career was about to unravel.

Eppinga explains: “[O]fficers with his skills were rare among the black soldiers. Abilities to read, write, and perform simple arithmetic by both blacks and whites were at a premium among the frontier military.”

She continues: “As quartermaster, Flipper was responsible for military property, wagons, animals and their forage, and the hiring of civilians….As commissary agent, he was responsible for military rations and variety of foodstuffs that were sold to officers, enlisted men and civilians who lived near the camps.

“Flipper had received no special training for these positions at West Point, and they were jobs for which he was manifestly unsuited.”

Amid murky and still-controversial circumstances, Flipper soon was charged with embezzlement and conduct unbecoming an officer. A court martial found him not guilty of embezzlement but guilty of the second charge. Fruitless appeals went all the way to the White House, and Henry Ossian Flipper was kicked out of the Army in mid-1882.

Back in Georgia, “neither the town nor his family wanted anything to do with him. They felt disgraced and all thought he was guilty,” the author states. “Flipper, despondent and humiliated, probably had no idea that he would embark upon a career which would bring him more honor and fame than if he had remained in the military.”

The final third of this well-written book chronicles his personal reinvention and ultimate vindication. Flipper possessed engineering, mapping and language skills in high demand in the Southwest. Ironically, he was hired numerous times by U.S. government officials to perform tasks ranging from translating Spanish documents for a Senate subcommittee to surveying controversial land grants and mineral claims and gathering intelligence on Pancho Villa. Yet, all attempts to clear his record failed before his death in 1940.

Posthumously, the Army changed Flipper’s discharge to honorable in 1976. And President Clinton issued a full pardon in 1999.

As a work combining history and biography, Henry Ossian Flipper: West Point’s First Black Graduate tells an important and remarkable story.

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