# Cathay Williams *The archive holds Cathay Williams as the first known Black woman to serve in the United States Army in uniform, whose own testimony and the Black press preserved her story when the official military record did not.* > Black's Encyclopedia — the sourced record of Black American life. > Portal: History & Migration · Status: In review · Revised: July 24, 2026 · Revisions: 1 > Canonical: https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/cathay-williams-5e87 ## Questions this record answers - Who was the first Black woman to serve in the United States Army in uniform? - How did Cathay Williams come to serve as a Buffalo Soldier? - Why is Cathay Williams often missing or minimized in standard military histories? - What do her pension files and later interviews reveal about Black women’s military service after the Civil War? ## Summary Cathay Williams served in the United States Army from 1866 to 1868 under the name William Cathay, making her the first documented Black woman to serve in uniform in the regular U.S. Army. She carried a musket as a Buffalo Soldier in the 38th Infantry Regiment, and her own sworn testimony and later interviews, rather than Army celebration, are what confirm her service and the barriers she faced. ## From enslaved laborer to wartime Army worker Cathay Williams was born enslaved around 1844 in Missouri, likely near Independence or Jefferson City, in a slaveholding household tied into the state’s planter and political elite. During the Civil War, Union forces impressed her into service as an Army cook and laundress when they occupied Jefferson City, a common practice that drew enslaved women into federal labor without wages or formal enlistment. She traveled with Union units across Missouri and into Arkansas and Louisiana, working in support roles at posts such as Little Rock and Shreveport and experiencing the violence, disease, and dislocation of the war not as a distant event but as a daily workplace. This period exposed her to military life, routines, and movements, and it placed her near the administrative transition from wartime volunteer forces to the postwar regular Army that would include the new Black regiments. ## Enlistment as “William Cathay” and service in the 38th Infantry In November 1866, at St. Louis, Williams enlisted in the regular Army under the name William Cathay, presenting herself as a man in order to enter one of the new Black infantry regiments authorized by Congress. She passed a cursory medical examination that either failed to detect or chose not to investigate her sex, reflecting both the limited nature of such exams and the Army’s bureaucratic focus on filling quotas rather than scrutinizing Black recruits. Assigned to Company A of the 38th U.S. Infantry—one of the four original Black infantry regiments that would later be consolidated into the 24th and 25th Infantry—she served primarily in western posts in Kansas and New Mexico, carrying out the same duties as her male comrades: marching, standing guard, and enduring long frontier deployments. Her service ended in 1868 when chronic illness, including likely complications from smallpox and the rigors of frontier life, led an Army surgeon to declare her unfit, at which point her sex was formally noted and her service abruptly terminated. ## Life after discharge and pension struggle After leaving the Army, Williams worked in various civilian jobs in the West, including as a cook and laundress at Fort Union and later as a seamstress and possibly boardinghouse operator in Trinidad, Colorado, a frontier town with a small but notable Black presence. In the 1890s she applied for an Army disability pension based on her regular Army service, citing her illnesses and injuries and the fact that she had performed the duties of an infantry soldier for over two years. Her application triggered an investigation that confirmed her enlistment and service under the name William Cathay, but examiners ultimately denied her claim on the grounds that there was no legal provision for a woman to have enlisted in the first place, effectively using the discrimination that forced her to enlist under a male alias to justify withholding benefits. The pension file, preserved in the National Archives, includes her own sworn statements and medical examinations, providing rare first-person evidence of a Black woman’s service in the postwar Army and of the institutional refusal to recognize that service fully. ## Erasure, rediscovery, and the role of the Black press For decades after her discharge and pension denial, Williams remained largely absent from official military histories and commemorations of the Buffalo Soldiers, which focused on male heroism and often framed Black service as a stepping stone to citizenship that Black women were presumed not to have taken. Her story resurfaced publicly through an 1876 or 1878 interview in the St. Louis Daily Times and later coverage in Black newspapers, which recorded her narrative in her own voice and placed her alongside other stories of Black military service that the federal government did not highlight. Twentieth‑century military histories and popular works on the Buffalo Soldiers often overlooked these press accounts and pension records, leaving many readers with the impression that Black women did not serve in uniform until the World Wars and the Women’s Army Corps. It was archivists, independent researchers, and Black women’s historians who returned to pension files, regimental records, and the early newspaper coverage to assemble a fuller account of her life and to argue for her recognition within military and women’s history. ## Significance for Black women’s military history Cathay Williams’s service challenges any simple timeline that begins Black women’s formal military participation with twentieth‑century auxiliary corps; she demonstrates that Black women were willing and able to take up arms, and that law and custom—not capacity—barred them from acknowledged service. Her experience shows how Black women navigated those bars: by cross-dressing, by taking on male-coded roles, and by later fighting bureaucratic battles for recognition and support that white women and Black men could sometimes more readily win. For the archive, her story underscores that the absence of Black women from official muster rolls is not evidence that they were not there; it is evidence of a system that failed to imagine or record them, even when they were carrying rifles in its own regiments. Holding Cathay Williams in view requires re-reading military history not as a closed ledger of names but as a contested record that must be checked against Black testimony, press accounts, and the very pension files the state compiled while denying the claims within them. ## The archive's standing The archive holds Cathay Williams as a foundational figure in Black and women’s military history: the first documented Black woman to serve in uniform in the regular U.S. Army, a frontier soldier whose courage and persistence forced the record to contend with what it preferred not to see. Her stature rests on the work she did—marching, guarding, enduring illness and hardship alongside other Buffalo Soldiers—and on the clarity of her own testimony about that service. That the Army denied her a pension and then omitted her from its celebratory histories is not a neutral oversight but part of the same pattern that kept women out of the rolls; her presence on the frontier and in the archive is the corrective. The archive holds her as proof that Black women have always been present in the spaces where the nation claims they arrived late. ## Enslavement, impressment, and wartime labor Cathay Williams entered the world as property under Missouri’s slave regime, a status that shaped both the work she did and the way the Union Army first encountered her. When Union troops occupied Jefferson City during the Civil War, they did what occupying armies around the South routinely did: they impressed enslaved people—especially women—as cooks, laundresses, and hospital workers, folding their unpaid labor into the military machine without granting them the status or protections of enlisted soldiers. Williams was taken in this way and sent with units into Arkansas and Louisiana, working behind the lines but within the same disease-ridden camps, marching columns, and supply depots that sustained Union campaigns. This period provided her with a rough education in Army organization, weapons, and routines, and it moved her physically out of the household bondage into which she had been born and into a liminal space between slavery and paid military service. ## Decision to enlist and the conditions of postwar Army service After the war, Congress authorized Black regiments in the regular Army, creating an opportunity—on paper—for formerly enslaved men to secure wages, rations, and a measure of status by enlisting. For a Black woman like Williams, who had already spent years working for the Army under compulsion, the promise of a regular soldier’s pay and rations was alluring but formally closed: federal law and Army regulations did not envision women, and particularly Black women, in the ranks. Faced with limited civilian options and equipped with knowledge of Army life, she chose to enlist as William Cathay, a decision that required both personal resolve and a keen reading of the gaps in the Army’s enlistment and medical examination procedures. Her successful enlistment in 1866 shows both the permeability of gender enforcement in frontier recruiting stations and the insistence of Black women on claiming spaces that the law denied them. ## Service in Company A, 38th U.S. Infantry Once enlisted, Williams became Private William Cathay, subject to the same discipline, pay scale, and dangers as other enlisted men in Company A of the 38th Infantry. She drilled, carried a rifle and equipment, and participated in long marches to posts in Kansas and New Mexico, including Fort Riley and Fort Union, where Black troops were tasked with garrison duty, escorting wagon trains, and enforcing U.S. expansion into Native lands. Her health, already compromised by smallpox and the arduous conditions of war and frontier labor, deteriorated under these demands, leading to repeated hospitalizations noted in her service records. When an Army surgeon finally diagnosed her as unfit for duty in 1868, the discovery or acknowledgment of her sex coincided with her discharge, illustrating how contingent her place in the Army had always been on remaining within the category of “male” that regulations recognized. ## Pension application and institutional denial In the 1890s, living in Trinidad, Colorado, and suffering from lingering illness and disability, Williams filed a claim for an invalid pension, invoking the same statutes that allowed male veterans to receive financial support for service-connected disabilities. The pension investigation confirmed her enlistment and service and recorded medical examinations that documented impaired mobility and other health issues she linked to her time in uniform. Nevertheless, the Pension Bureau denied her claim, citing the illegality of her original enlistment and the absence of explicit statutory authorization for women soldiers, effectively using her gender—erased at enlistment, foregrounded at discharge—as a reason to bar her from the benefits to which her service would otherwise have entitled her. These files, now held at the U.S. National Archives, preserve her statements in her own words and reveal a bureaucracy that was willing to rely on her labor but unwilling to recognize her fully as a veteran. ## Memory, omission, and recovery In the years following her discharge, Williams’s story survived primarily in the oral traditions of Black communities and in a widely circulated interview published in the St. Louis Daily Times in the 1870s, which was reprinted and discussed in later Black newspapers and local histories. As later generations wrote about the Buffalo Soldiers, especially in the early and mid‑20th century, they tended to emphasize masculine ideals of frontier soldiering and to treat women as camp followers, nurses, or absent altogether, leaving little room for a figure like Williams in the canonical narrative. It was only when scholars and independent researchers began systematically reviewing pension files, regimental records, and early press accounts that Williams reappeared as a documented soldier, her existence challenging assumptions about who could be a soldier in the 19th‑century United States. Her reemergence in scholarship and public history in the late 20th and early 21st centuries owes as much to Black women’s history and gender studies as it does to military history, reflecting the fact that the archives where she can be found were long considered peripheral to the “main” story of the Army. ## Place in the archive’s understanding of service For the archive, Cathay Williams is not a curiosity but a representative figure whose life exposes the layered exclusions Black women faced in state service: first as enslaved laborers, then as unofficial Army workers, then as unrecognized soldiers, and finally as denied pensioners. Her decision to enlist, her endurance on the frontier, and her later insistence on claiming a pension demonstrate agency under constraint, not passive victimhood; she bent the categories of gender and service to claim a role the state had not written for her. Her story compels a re-reading of both Black military history and women’s history to account for those who appear only in contested files and forgotten newsprint, and it underscores the archive’s doctrine that testimony and Black press records are evidence, not footnotes. Holding her name alongside the regimental designations “38th Infantry” and “Buffalo Soldiers” restores a missing author to a story that the official record long tried to tell without her. ## Sources 1. Pension File of Cathay Williams (alias William Cathay), Records of the Department of Veterans Affairs, Record Group 15, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C. 2. “A Female Soldier,” St. Louis Daily Times, reprinted in various 19th‑century newspapers; microfilm and clipping collections at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the Missouri Historical Society. 3. Brenda L. Moore, To Serve My Country, to Serve My Race: The Story of the Only African American WACs Stationed Overseas During World War II, New York University Press, 1996, introductory discussion of earlier Black women’s military service including Cathay Williams. 4. William A. Dobak, Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862–1867, U.S. Army Center of Military History, 2011, contextual discussion of Black enlistment and women’s roles. ## Related records - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/buffalo-soldiers - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/black-women-in-the-military - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/united-states-army - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/american-civil-war - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/black-press-archives --- Cite as: Black's Encyclopedia, "Cathay Williams," revised July 24, 2026. https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/cathay-williams-5e87 Text under the Black's Record License: cite the record, keep attribution attached, cite the revision date.