John J. Pershing: Free Tuition Cadet to General of the Armies

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

John Joseph Pershing was born in rural Missouri in 1860 into a family hit hard by the post Civil War economy. He taught African American children at a local school, earned a degree in scientific didactics at a normal school, and sat the West Point entrance exam for one reason: the education was free. He became first captain, commanded the honor guard for Ulysses S. Grant's funeral train, and still considered studying law or starting an irrigation business in Oregon. Instead he served with the Sixth Cavalry against Apache and Sioux forces, then commanded Buffalo Soldiers of the 10th Cavalry and fought at Kettle and San Juan Hills in Cuba, where Theodore Roosevelt praised his calm under fire.

After the Philippines, where he learned enough of the Moro language to negotiate without an interpreter, Roosevelt promoted him to brigadier general over more than 800 senior officers, shortly after Pershing married the daughter of Senator Francis E. Warren, chairman of the Military Affairs and Appropriations committees. In 1915 a fire at the Presidio in San Francisco killed his wife and three daughters. He led the 1916 punitive expedition into Mexico after Pancho Villa, then commanded the American Expeditionary Forces in 1917 and refused British and French demands to amalgamate his troops into their units.

• The nickname Black Jack was a sanitized version of a racist slur that resentful West Point cadets used for him in 1897.
• In Mexico, trucks broke down without spare parts, airplanes crashed, and the Carranza government refused the army use of its railroads.
• Pershing handed the African American 92nd and 93rd Infantry Divisions to French command under pressure from a segregationist Wilson administration.
• He let attacks continue until the 11 a.m. armistice on November 11, 1918, and roughly 3,500 American casualties fell that final day.
• He secretly married the artist Micheline Resco at Walter Reed Hospital in 1946 and died in 1948 at 87.