Ben McCulloch never wore a uniform.

Being an all-time badass frontier partisan war hero could make you a legend, but it could not make you a living. Ben McCulloch spent the decade after the Mexican War as the classic 19^th Century man on the make. He was among those who rushed to California seeking gold. He sought a steady income through federal appointments and he hoped to make his fortune through the promotion of an innovative firearm.

None of it really panned out.

Ben McCulloch was best suited by temperament, experience, talent and self-education to lead light troops in battle. Yet his fondest wish — to command a regiment of U.S. Cavalry — was ever to be denied him. Ol’ Ben came up in a yeoman tradition, where natural leaders were pushed to the fore. But America in mid-19^th Century was becoming civilized and soldiering for a living had become the domain of professionals. No matter how much respect he commanded, McCulloch was not going to get an official military command.

So he turned to other things. He headed West to California in the gold rush and quickly discovered what so many others found: fortune was elusive for the men who worked the gold fields. His friends secured him what looked to be a plum job as a tax collector, but the revenues turned out to be less than expected. Ben won election sheriff of Sacramento County, but the salary wasn’t enough to support an honest man.

And Ben didn’t really like California. Oh, he liked the country well enough. (In true hardheaded Scots-Irish style, he saw the magnificent redwoods and opined that they would make beautiful, knot-free lumber). No, what troubled Ben McCulloch about California was the attitude of the people. Too many abolitionists.

For Ben McCulloch was a pro-slavery man, an ardent Southern patriot, untroubled by and indeed a partisan of the peculiar institution. McCulloch himself owned no more than a handful of slaves and was never a part of the plantation culture. But as biographer Thomas W. Cuttrer writes:

“Whatever his personal and financial interest in slavery might have been, Ben McCulloch was a product of his culture: the son of a slaveholding family and a proud citizen of a region increasingly embattled by northern and European foes for its dedication to the peculiar institution. McCulloch was fiercely committed to slavery in the abstract and looked upon the abolitionist assault on the institution as an affront to southern honor…”

 

 

Ben McCulloch hit his late 40s with few prospects — and facing the gathering storm of Civil War. He served as a federal commissioner sent to Utah to negotiate an end to a crisis with the Mormon Church that threatened to break out into full-scale war and he worked tirelessly to promote the breechloading Morse carbine. But the position as commissioner failed to lead to a more permanent position in the federal government and the tangled patent rights of the Morse carbine prevented him from getting rich. Without means and dissatisfied with the romantic prospects he found in the environs of Washington, D.C. (he couldn’t see taking one of the society belles of his acquaintance back to Texas) Ben despaired of settling down the way his brother Henry had.

Then the storm broke and the nation was at war.

McCulloch, of course, jumped immediately into the fray. He took the surrender of the federal garrison at San Antonio, Texas, then petitioned for a command in the Confederate Army. Just as he had when he was U.S. Secretary of War, Confederate President Jefferson Davis looked askance at non-pro frontier soldiers. Knowing full well that “Jeff Davis does not intend to give me any show,” McCulloch settled for a command in the backwater theater of the trans-Mississippi west. He was responsible for the defense of Arkansas and the Indian Territory.

One of McCulloch’s opponents, Union general Franz Sigel said that the Texan general was:

“Rough and ready…not at all speculative but very practical, to the point and rich in resources to reach it… He was a good fighter, energetic in battle, and quick in discerning danger or espying the weak point of his antagonist; an excellent organizer, disciplinarian and administrator, indefatigable in recruiting and equipping troops.”

It is likely that the cauldron of the Civil War would have made of McCulloch a commander as important  as that other frontier-bred natural fighting man Nathan Bedford Forrest — but fate had something else in store. On March 7-8, 1862, Confederate forces under General Earl Van Dorn clashed with Union troops at a crossroads marked by Elkhorn Tavern. Scouting forward, armed with his beloved Morse carbine, McCulloch fell to the fire of Union sharpshooters.

The savage battle was a defeat for the Confederates and the death of McCulloch was acknowledged as a severe blow to their cause. The great scout who had evaded death so many times in Mexico, fell at the hands of his own estranged countrymen.

 

 

 

An Assessment

Ben McCulloch was undoubtedly one of the foremost frontier partisans. His fellow Texas Ranger Jack Hays, the Ohio Valley frontiersman Simon Kenton, Africa scouts Frederick Russell Burnham, P.J. Pretorius — a few could claim feats to equal his. An elite few.

Masterful field craft and a commitment to securing accurate and timely intelligence on the enemy were hallmarks of his service, along with sheer aggression in taking the fight to an often numerically superior foe. Someone once commented on Simon Kenton’s unique mixture of “cold daring and cold caution” and the words apply perfectly to McCulloch.

He was archetypal, too, in the fact that his service did not translate into the accumulation of worldly goods. Wealth seemed to be ever just beyond the fingertip reach of the frontier partisans.

McCulloch is a troubling hero for the 21^st Century mind, because the causes he served with such bravery and skill were so racially charged. His war in Mexico had the red tinge of blood feud and racial hatred. While no atrocities were laid directly at his doorstep, the men he commanded had few qualms about killing Mexicans under any and all circumstances and conquest of their lands and those of the Comanche was considered a laudable project. McCulloch was counted among the inter-war schemers who plotted filibustering expeditions to conquer parts of northern Mexico or Cuba for the slaveholding south.

And there is no getting around the fact that McCulloch was an ardent pro-slavery man. Defenders of Southern heritage these days often elide the whole slavery issue, preferring to focus on “states rights,” tariffs and cultural differences as root causes of the schism. That doesn’t hold water. Simple examination of the Confederate constitution and the secession proclamations of its constituent states reveal the centrality of slavery. McCulloch was a southern patriot and that meant he was pro-slavery.

So, this honorable, brave, skillful man, deployed his many admirable traits in the service of an institution that virtually everyone today considers abhorrent, a dark stain upon American history.

My take? Ben McCulloch was an exemplar of southern yeoman culture — in many ways the best of his breed. That breed has a lot to admire about it: fortitude, practicality, enterprise, a root-hog-or-die spirit. At the same time, it was a culture rife with intolerance and bloody-mindedness. Its rough democracy was vital to the American character, yet it wasn’t for everybody. Certainly not for Indians, Mexicans or blacks, no sir.

Everything is a double-edged sword. Every culture has its virtues and its downsides and a larger-than-life culture like the one that produced Ben McCulloch is bound to have outsized virtues and terrible vices. Honest history means taking the bad with the good and trying to understanding it all. Heritage, on the other hand, is about preserving that which is best. “You take what you need and you leave the rest.”

On those terms, I don’t need to name Ben McCulloch a hero. It is enough simply to say that he was among the greatest of the Frontier Partisans.