The William Mitchell correspondence in this collection, until 1959 available in its original paper form, was transferred to the Library of Congress in that year. Prior to transfer, a microfilm copy was made for the Wisconsin Historical Society holdings.
The William Mitchell Correspondence covers primarily the period from 1898 to 1904. Exceptions are a few letters written as a youth, a few letters between 1904 and 1922, and an exchange of correspondence in 1927 with the D.A.R. Boulder Committee concerning a monument for a Revolutionary ancestor. The collection consists of some 200 letters, in chronological order, all written by the enthusiastic young soldier, except a few written by Mrs. Lucy Mercein, a friend of the family, Colonel Halsey Dunwoody (Billy's superior officer), his wife Caroline Mitchell, and his parents.
A letter from the ten-year-old Billy, who was vacationing at Atlantic City presages a career remote from his grandfather's finance and railroad building and his father's scholarship and politics. I“ made a fort against the waves,” he wrote his mother, and from that time on apparently spent most of his time writing about and engaging in things military.
The main part of the correspondence starts on May 19, 1898 with a letter from Mrs. Lucy Mercein to Mrs. John L. Mitchell describing Billy's departure for camp in Florida. “We left him,” says Mercein, mixing pathos with humor, “gay and debonair--a typical soldier boy off to the wars.” From the very beginning the “typical soldier boy” loved the army, although he was not hesitant in criticizing the inefficiency and absolute neglect that resulted in typhoid and dysentery epidemics which took such a toll of American soldiers before army units ever reached Cuba. Soon after his arrival in Florida, he was commissioned a Second Lieutenant in the Signal Corps, and despite his inexperience, entered in to that branch of the service with his customary enthusiasm and will. “We have the finest signal company in the service without any doubt,” he wrote his mother on July 6.
The war was over by the time the nineteen-year-old lieutenant reached Cuba, but he arrived on time to witness the formal withdrawal of Spanish power and the advent of American power in the Caribbean Sea. The surrender ceremony took place on January 1, 1899, and Billy, an eye witness, describes it in a letter to his mother the next day. On the island Billy commanded a detachment engaged in putting up telegraph lines through the jungle about which he writes a great deal. Most of his attention, however, is devoted to the Yellow Fever epidemics, the natives, and the incompetence of many of the officers. The epidemics he blames on unsanitary conditions and heavy drinking which weakens the men. His attitude toward the Cubans is rather shocking coming from a product of a democratic civilization: “They [the Cubans] are no more capable of self-government than a lot of ten-year-old children. They are absolutely ignorant, filthy, untruthful, and immoral....The only way to settle this thing is to annex the whole outfit.” And his favorite phrase for incompetent army officers is, “They don't know enough to come in out of the rain.”
Life became dull in Cuba for Billy after the Nationalists had settled down, and little excitement remained other than horse racing and parties in Havana. So he soon began importuning his father to use his influence with the army officers, especially General Greely and Colonel Dunwoody, to get him transferred to the Philippines where there was excitement. He finally wore down the opposition of his parents and left Cuba in August. By early October, after a brief visit in the United States, he was on his way to the Philippines. He stopped long enough at Honolulu to write three letters in which he remarked on the fine scenery and climate and especially upon the phenomenal social situation on the islands where the natives apparently enjoyed equality with the whites. He arrived in the Philippines in early November and got himself attached to General Arthur MacArthur's staff as chief signal officer. As in Cuba, most of his work consisted of directing the construction of telegraphic communication systems. He also had time to gain fluent knowledge of the native tongue (which later served him well in the part he played in hunting “Insurrectos”), and to interest himself in the flora and fauna of the islands and the customs of the natives.
According to his letters, he played a rather important part in the capture of the two “Insurrecto” chieftains, General Aguinaldo and Captain Mendoza. As with the Cubans, Billy felt that the Filipinos were incapable of self-government and had to be subdued. “The stage is past,” he wrote his mother on June 1, 1900, where “these people can be treated with any consideration whatever. By all laws, usages, and precedents of our nation or any other, they are whipped, and to keep up this desultory warfare proves in itself what they are. I believe that the time has come for the fire and the sword.” In line with this “might is right” thinking, young Billy was also “pleased to see that England is getting the better of the Boers.”
Billy, now a seasoned soldier with two campaigns dangling from his belt, left the Philippines in June of 1900 on an extended trip around the world stopping off to visit his family in France where his father was a student at the University of Grenoble. The following summer he was back in the States suffering from the boredom of camp life and sighing for more worlds to conquer. His chance soon came for on July 31 he announced in a jubilant letter to his mother, then still in Europe, that he just had been ordered to Alaska to make a survey of the communication possibilities of the territory, a survey that would require at least 25,000 miles of travel. Billy served in Alaska for two years and apparently enjoyed every moment of it despite the climate and the isolation. In his letter of April 26, 1902, he describes briefly his recent trip--one of the most remarkable overland journeys ever made in Alaska: “I had quite a prolonged trip going clear across Alaska to within eighty miles of the Pacific. I took one man and drove my own dog team. We had fourteen dogs, seven to each team. This is the first time that this route has ever been gone over by an American officer. I also made the fastest time ever made for the round trip....The little frosting that I received hurt nothing.” Besides his work Billy found time for his favorite sport--hunting, observing the natural phenomena of the remote region, and commenting upon the antics of the “gold seekers.”
In August 1903, he returned to the states, paid a brief visit to his family now residing in Milwaukee, and by October was again with the army taking part in some Kentucky maneuvers. The maneuvers, according to Billy, caused some alarm among the older citizens who thought another Civil War was starting. In December he married Caroline Stoddard of Rochester, New York, got a half-year leave from the army, and went on a wedding trip to Mexico. Marriage and leave from the army evidently didn't interrupt the young campaigner's way of life, for his letters from south of the border reveal that his main interest in Mexico revolved around her military history and the impregnability or vulnerability of her natural defenses. He also showed some interest in the remnants of the ancient Indian civilization and contemporary social conditions. The last letter from Mexico was written on January 25, 1904, by his bride to her mother-in-law who apparently was beginning to realize that marriage to a dashing lieutenant would require some forbearance. “William arose in his zeal at six this morning to hunt again,” she wrote with a trace of resignation, “and I an going with him again this afternoon...my eagerness is not quite equal to sitting in a boat from six A.M. to seven P.M., although I thoroughly enjoy going for a half day.”
