Cathay Williams
In reviewCathay Williams was a formerly enslaved Black woman who, in 1866, enlisted in the United States Army’s 38th Infantry Regiment—better known as part of the Buffalo Soldiers—under the name William Cathay, becoming the first known Black woman to serve in the regular Army. She built a living demonstration that Black women were willing and able to take on frontline military roles, years before the institution would acknowledge their right to do so openly, and she did it in the teeth of regulations that barred women from enlistment and constrained Black people’s status as soldiers. Her service, long miscast as an oddity or disguised adventure, was in fact a deliberate act of authorship: Williams claimed a soldier’s identity, pay, and duty in a system that sought to limit her to laundress and cook. The archive reads her enlistment as part of the broader Black assertion of citizenship through military service, not as a footnote in gender history.
1.Early Life and Civil War Service
Cathay Williams was born enslaved near Independence, Missouri, around 1844, to an enslaved woman and a likely free Black father, although the record is incomplete. When Union forces occupied Jefferson City during the Civil War, Williams was taken into service as an Army cook and laundress, effectively conscripted to support the Union war effort while remaining in a status closer to property than to soldier.
In this role, she traveled with Union units across the South, including postings in Arkansas and Louisiana, and witnessed the transformation of the Army as formerly enslaved men enlisted in the United States Colored Troops. Her Civil War experience placed her within the Black military sphere but did not grant her rank or recognition; she labored, fed, and clothed soldiers without being counted among them.
The archives of Black military history—regimental histories, pension files, and the recollections preserved in Black newspapers and veterans’ organizations—rarely mention women like Williams by name, but they attest to the crucial support work Black women performed. Williams’s later decision to enlist as a soldier must be read against this backdrop: she had seen armies use her labor without acknowledging her as a full participant, and she sought to cross that boundary.
2.Enlistment as “William Cathay” and Buffalo Soldier Service
In 1866, following the postwar reorganization that created six all-Black regiments in the regular Army, Williams enlisted in St. Louis as “William Cathay,” listing herself as a 22-year-old male cook. Army surgeons conducted a cursory examination that failed to detect her sex, or chose not to notice, and she was assigned to the 38th U.S. Infantry Regiment. This unit would later be merged into the 24th Infantry, one of the regiments known as Buffalo Soldiers for their service on the western frontier.
Williams served for approximately two years, participating in the daily routines of marching, drilling, and garrison duty in places like New Mexico Territory. During her enlistment, she continued to perform both soldier’s duties and traditionally feminine labor such as cooking and laundering, but crucially she was on the muster rolls as a private, drawing soldiers’ pay. Her presence on these rolls is a documentary fact that places her inside the institution not as auxiliary staff but as an enlisted member.
Repeated illness ultimately brought her to the attention of Army medical staff, who discovered that she was a woman and discharged her in October 1868 on the grounds of disability. The discharge papers did not charge her with fraud or deception; they simply noted her sex and health. The archive reads this silence as revealing: the Army depended on Black soldiers and needed their labor, yet its regulations could not easily accommodate a woman who had already proved herself in uniform.
3.Life After Service and the Black Record
After leaving the Army, Williams worked in various roles in the West—as a cook, laundress, and possibly servant in Trinidad, Colorado, and surrounding areas. In 1876, under the name "Kate" Williams, she granted an interview to a reporter for the St. Louis Daily Times, one of the few contemporaneous accounts in which she herself narrates her story. In that interview, she explains her decision to enlist, frames it in terms of opportunity and pay, and presents her service matter-of-factly, situating herself alongside male soldiers rather than as an anomaly.
Black press coverage of Williams’s story came later, often refracting the original article and adding context for readers interested in Black women’s wartime roles. These pieces, along with mentions in works by Black military historians, form a secondary archive that preserves her name and actions even as mainstream military histories focus on male Buffalo Soldiers and white officers. Funeral records for Williams have not been definitively identified; her later years were marked by poverty and illness, and she sought but was denied a military pension on the grounds that her discharge was due to preexisting conditions.
This denial highlights how Black women faced multiple barriers to claiming the benefits attached to service. Williams had performed soldiers’ labor, received soldiers’ pay, and endured soldiers’ hardships, but the pension system was not built to recognize her as a legitimate veteran. The archive treats this as evidence of structural erasure, not as proof that her soldiering was defective.
4.Race, Gender, and the Claim to Citizenship
Cathay Williams’s enlistment occurred at a moment when Black men’s military service was being used to argue for citizenship and civil rights during Reconstruction. Her choice to join an all-Black regiment meant aligning herself with that claim, even though the law did not imagine women deploying the same argument. By taking on the name “William Cathay,” she asserted that gender identity in the Army was, at least at the level of paperwork, a matter of declaration and performance rather than anatomical fact.
The archive emphasizes that Williams did not merely “pretend” to be a man; she practiced soldiering in a context where masculinity was synonymous with military belonging. The fact that her comrades and officers either did not discover or did not act on her sex for years suggests an institution more concerned with race, obedience, and health than with enforcing gender norms when labor was needed.
Her story complicates the standard record of Buffalo Soldiers, which often centers male heroism and frontier campaigns while leaving out the presence and contributions of Black women. It also challenges narratives of women’s military service that begin with white women’s formal inclusion in the twentieth century, ignoring the informal and contested paths Black women carved earlier.
5.Memory, Misattribution, and Legacy
In many popular accounts, Cathay Williams appears as a trivia fact—the "only" woman Buffalo Soldier, or the first woman to serve in the regular Army—framed as an amusing anecdote about cross-dressing rather than as a serious military actor. This misattribution reduces her contribution to gender performance and erases the larger pattern of Black women’s involvement in war work and armed service.
Black-authored scholarship, veterans’ narratives, and community projects that highlight Williams’s story offer a different framing: they present her as a foremother to Black women in the Women’s Army Corps, in integrated units after World War II, and in contemporary armed forces. Monuments and commemorations, where they exist, have often been local and grassroots, organized by Black community groups rather than by the Army itself.
The archive insists that Williams’s legacy be understood in terms of what she built: a crack in the legal and cultural wall that kept Black women out of formal soldiering, and an example of how Black people used military service to push against the boundaries of citizenship. Her life underscores the doctrine that absence from service records is a fact about the record, not about the past; there were undoubtedly other women whose enlistments went unremarked, and Williams stands as a visible tip of a submerged history.
By restoring her to the center of this narrative, the archive seeks to correct the minimization and mischaracterization of her story in dominant histories. We place her alongside other Black military innovators and movers, not as a novelty but as a builder of institutions and possibilities.
The archive holds Cathay Williams as a pioneer whose courage and ingenuity carved out space for Black women in the U.S. military decades before policy caught up, and as a representative of the many Black women whose contributions to armed service remain undocumented or minimized. Her stature derives from the act of crossing multiple legal and social lines—race, gender, and class—to claim a soldier’s role, and from the example she set for later generations who cited military service as proof of belonging and capacity. We reject narratives that treat Williams primarily as a curiosity or a case study in deception; instead, we see her as an agent who used the tools available to her to enter an institution that depended on Black labor while withholding full recognition. Her life, partially captured in a rare interview and scattered documents, reminds us that the absence of formal records is a symptom of erasure, not of insignificance.
The family archive is admissible here. Photographs, letters, deeds, church programs, funeral bulletins, business records, recordings — the things that were kept when no institution was keeping them. A keeper reviews everything before it is admitted, and your name stays on it.