Black Women in History
The First (Documented) Black Woman to Serve in the U.S. Army
Cathay Williams, who posed as a man in order to enlist in 1866, leaves a legacy that’s open to interpretation.
IN THE SPRING OF 1865, Cathay Williams, like many other freed slaves, found herself without a job.
During the American Civil War, Williams had worked as a cook and washer for the anti-slavery Union side, making hundreds of meals for General Philip Sheridan’s tired troops on the battlefields and scrubbing their dirty dishes.
Her experience behind enemy lines possibly informed her undercover aspirations, and provided solid intel for her years incognito as the only documented female Buffalo Soldier, the first African-American peacetime army regiment after the Civil War (and an inspiration for Bob Marley’s song of the same name).
Around 1861, the 13th Army Corps Union soldiers in Jefferson City took Williams, other slaves, and freed persons to Little Rock, Arkansas, under Colonel William P. Benton’s command. “I did not want to go,” she said in an interview with the St. Louis Daily Times in 1876. Colonel Benton told her she’d cook for the Union soldiers, but there was one slight issue. She “had always been a house girl and did not know how to cook.” She learned quickly.
After the war’s end, she returned west to Jefferson Barracks, Missouri, but little is known about what she did, until one recorded moment. On November 15, 1866, Cathay Williams—under the inscrutable, male alias William Cathey—enlisted in the…
Read More: The First (Documented) Black Woman to Serve in the U.S. Army
