For Bullard—and for the white audiences he regaled with this story in later years—the humor lay in the portrait of the former slave seemingly locked in an antebellum past—the loyal retainer indignant over the confiscation of his master’s mule. “For Frank,” Bullard told appreciative northern audiences, “the passage of time did not count in his memory.” The punch line of Bullard’s joke was that “Frank’s heart and mind were set on getting that mule back.”
Bullard told this story to a national meeting of the GAR, where he claimed it was received with “much laughter among the old fellows.” When Bullard joked that he was doing what Frank had asked, inquiring after the mule, “some two dozen hands went up in acknowledgement that they had carried off Frank’s mule.” This was followed, Bullard wrote, “with a sort of honorary membership for me (and almost for Frank) and my decoration with the badge of the GAR.” Bullard described himself as “rebel born and rebel bred.” Yet he eventually found success—and even acclaim—as an officer in the “Yankee Army.” In the younger man’s telling, Frank Bullard, the devoted black retainer, was depicted as stuck in the past, unable to fathom or adapt to the changes wrought by the Civil War.
As he began his army service in the Southwest, Bullard fit his perceptions of Indians into familiar and axiomatic ideas about race and the hierarchies of civilization. His fears about the danger of “reverting to the primitive” in Indian Country had their roots in the stigma of racial taint he felt from his upbringing in Alabama. For Bullard, only two things offset the disadvantages he felt he had suffered as a result of his childhood association with blacks on and around his family’s plantation. The first was the understanding he felt he had gained of racial difference itself, to which he credited his first significant career advance, which came as the commander of a black volunteer regiment in the Spanish American War. He expressed this belief in his autobiography: “My compensation for these, their stamp and marks upon me, has been an appreciation of the difference between negros and white men, just, I believe; for, guided by it, I was at thirty-seven to make my first military reputation commanding negroes.”12
Besides the specific expertise that Bullard claimed in “commanding negroes,” he also claimed analogous knowledge and insight into the character of Filipinos, Cubans, and later Mexicans, again all based on an analysis of the ways they supposedly differed from Anglo-Saxons. As his career took him from the border region of the United States and Mexico to the southern Philippines and then to Cuba and finally sent him on a spy mission into Mexico following the outbreak of the revolution in 1910, Bullard continued to work out his theorems on the relationship between race and the capacity for self-government. Successive colonial postings led him to claim increasing authority on how to pacify and govern the empire’s lesser races. His observations on recalcitrant Moros and deceitful and ungrateful Cubans under U.S. occupation frequently led him to comparisons with the South of his boyhood.13
A second redeeming feature of his childhood association with blacks, which Bullard recognized, was the influence of Peter Christian, a freedman whom the young Bullard admired for his woodcraft and storytelling. Years later, Bullard recalled the impact Pete had had on him in a speech in which he reflected on the early influences on his life, particularly those that had inclined him toward a military career. “You know a small boy usually wants at various times in his life to be all sorts of things. I remember a fine young negro man, Pete Christian, that had married my nurse Sally. Pete could make more kinds of traps and snares to catch birds and rabbits and squirrels and he knew how to place them with skill and he knew all the trees of the forest and he knew before they were ever written at least half of Joel Chandler Harris’ Uncle Remus’ stories and had told them to me,” Bullard said. “There was a period in my life when I thought I would like very much to be a fine negro man like Pete.”14 Bullard’s youthful identification with Pete Christian is clear. So, too, is the way the older man became associated in Bullard’s memory with two significant enthusiasms of his life: scouting and storytelling. These central themes appear again in Bullard’s unpublished autobiography, in which he wrote at length of his admiration for Pete and of his appreciation for the things he had learned from the former slave. Again, Bullard stressed the tutelage Pete offered him in woodcraft, which Bullard would later extol as one of the foundations of scouting. He also valued the appreciation Pete awoke in him for the Uncle Remus stories:
Strong, kind, good humored, a boy in way but a man in fact, he was a fellow indeed for boys. He knew and could do so many things! From watching him I learned to be something of a cobbler, carpenter and basket-maker; from being with him, the names and habits of birds and animals; the names and something of trees; something of woodcraft, trapping, fishing and what-not; and from listening to him, an appreciation of those sweetest and most delightful of all stories, the “Uncle Remus” child’s stories of Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, Brer B’ar and the others that Joel Chandler Harris has later lovingly put among the classics. For all of these, their pleasures and their helps, I owe something to Pete Christian, Negro.15
Even obscured by the lyricism of nostalgia and boyish admiration, Bullard’s attempts to recall and explain the nature of the relationship between Pete and the white boys of his family opens a window on race relations in the era of Reconstruction. By what it omits as well as by what Bullard attempts to explain, his depiction of postemancipation social relations inadvertently reveals enduring patterns of race and power. By way of explaining Pete’s special role in the family, Bullard writes, “Pete was never really a slave. He had grown up in the house and almost as a member of the family of his master.”16 The probable explanation for Pete’s presence in the house of his master and the ambiguity about his former slave status is that Pete was the son of a white man. Bullard never mentions Pete’s parents, nor calls him “mulatto,” as biographer Allan Millett does.17 However, he notes that Pete was distinguished by “a freedom and non-servility of manner found among no negroes about him.” To explain why a grown man would keep the company of white boys such as Bullard and his brother, he continues, “Cut off by racial and social conditions from association with white men and desiring often other company than that of negroes, he turned to the white boys of our family, my brothers and me.” Then, as if to forestall any further reflection on the matter, he concludes, “Custom allowed it.”18
In later life, Bullard expressed revulsion toward interracial sexual relations, so it is perhaps unsurprising that he left out the detail of Pete’s paternity, while suggesting it by the inclusion of other details, such as his allusion to Pete’s “freedom and non-servility of manner” and his curious status as “almost … a member of the family of his master.”19 Bullard’s assumption that “the company of white boys” would appeal to Pete more than the society of adults of his own community is consistent with an unquestioning sense of white superiority and a disdain for African Americans to which Bullard subscribed until the end of his life.20
Appreciative though it is in tone, his description of Pete deploys a dominant stereotype that cast blacks (as well as Indians and other colonial peoples) as childlike, not fully adult in capacity or behavior. In a seemingly benign—even admiring—way, he depicts Pete as a “boy in way but a man in fact.” Here, Bullard unselfconsciously articulated one of the emasculating and dehumanizing tenets of white racist ideology. Reinforced by violence and lack of opportunity, such constructions stripped men such as Pete of their manhood and adult social stature and instead attempted to consign them to a lifelong status of “boy.”
The Uncle Remus tales, which delighted the youthful Bullard and inspired his later attempts at writing about the folkways of colonial peoples, appealed to whites because they reflected a view of black culture that was childish and un-threatening—less developed than the supposedly more evolved Anglo-Saxon culture—and because