The lonesome death of Jesse Mosley, Laredo 1916
By Robert Mendoza
The Doctor in the Arroyo
On the afternoon of July 11, 1916, a US Army patrol discovered the corpse of an African-American man in an arroyo some nine miles southeast of Laredo . The body was in a state of advanced decomposition, having been exposed to the elements for several days. Notwithstanding, there was clear evidence of foul play, for his skull was crushed in from a blow from a blunt instrument.
Justice of the Peace Slaughter accompanied the remains to the Convery Undertaking Parlors in Laredo . The body was almost immediately identified as that of Dr. Jesse Mosley, a Tampico surgeon currently serving as a major in the Carrancista army. American refugees from Tampico , who had been patients of or had socialized with Dr. Mosley, asserted that the physician, prior to his commission, had enjoyed a lucrative practice serving that port city's most prominent families.
However, readers of The Laredo Daily Times recognized Mosley as the man that Captain Tom Ross had arrested about a week earlier, on June 30, 1916.
Ross (see sidebar), a former Texas Ranger captain employed as a Special Agent for the US Bureau of Investigation (later FBI), had arrested Mosley for violating the US Neutrality Act. Mosley was specifically charged with soliciting the desertion of US soldiers on behalf of a foreign power. At the time of his detention, Mosley was also found in possession of seditious propaganda, maps, and his commission as a major in the Carrancista army.
The accused man's person and demeanor had quite favorably impressed reporters present at Mosley's arraignment. Mosley was described as “a Negro of light brown complexion, very dignified in his personal appearance.” Mosley spoke “very distinctly, and has not the accent of a Jamaica Negro, of which Mexico has many.” Mosley appeared embarrassed by his predicament and must have sorely regretted interrupting his 18-year medical practice among “the better class of Mexicans” in Tampico .
Upon completion of the coroner's inquest, Justice Slaughter swore out a murder complaint against Captain Ross, charging him with removing Mosley from his cell and killing him. Constable Marcial Zapata arrested Ross and duly escorted him to the Webb County Jail. On the following day, a preliminary hearing was held before District Judge Benavides. A crush of Ross supporters forced the proceedings to be moved to the more spacious Grand Jury room on the third floor of the courthouse.
Ross' counsel dismissed the testimony of the jail guard who witnessed Mosley's abduction and called Deputy US Marshal Allen Walker to the stand. Walker testified that Ross had telephoned him at his office in the Federal Building to inform him that Mosley was on his way over to retrieve personal papers seized at the time of his arrest. He further asserted that Mosley duly arrived alone, received his papers, and left. Justice Department agent Davis McGowen followed Walker to the stand, and testified that he also was working late that night and saw Mosley enter alone, get his possessions, and leave.
Presiding Judge Benavides neglected to ask Walker why a federal prisoner, charged with fomenting sedition and other felonious violations of the US Neutrality Act, was summarily released. He also did not ask whether Ross could have compelled Mosley to enter the Federal Building alone, waiting for him outside in a car.
Harold Mosley, a resident of Fort Worth and the victim's son, then took the stand to attest to his father's good character and professional standing. The younger Mosley claimed to be ignorant of any seditious activity on his father's part, and surmised that, at the time of his arrest, he was en route to visit his family in North Texas .
Judge Benavides concluded the hearing, finding that the testimony against Ross was flimsy and that there was practically no evidence incriminating the defendant. Ross was placed under a nominal $1,000 bond and released. A clamorous group of some 20 prominent Laredoans and area stockmen rushed forward to cover Ross' surety. The Times noted with relish, “Had the bond been a hundred times as much, there was a sufficient representation of wealth there to provide the bond in the twinkling of an eye.”
Judge Benavides then addressed the matter of the two “Mexicans” who were charged as accomplices to the murder. Felix Carillo, an employee of Ross, and Carillo's friend, Antonio Perez, were released on $200 bond.
No further action was taken against Captain Ross or his “Mexicans.” Jesse Mosley's demise became a footnote to what was, until quite recently, one of the most obscure episodes in border history: the Plan de San Diego conspiracy.
But what was Jesse Mosley's part in the Plan de San Diego and why was his obvious murder so egregiously dismissed? What could motivate a respected physician to leave his lucrative practice in Mexico and foolishly attempt to persuade black American soldiers to desert and join a cynical conspiracy of a faction of Mexican revolutionaries?
Carranza's Plan de San Diego
for US Diplomatic Recognition
As the year 1914 ended, the various Mexican revolutionary factions, united to drive the reactionary President Victoriano Huerta into exile, found themselves at each other's throats. Venustiano Carranza, leader of the Constitutionalist army, considered himself the legitimate First Chief of the revolution.
However, Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata had entered into a tenuous coalition that became known as the Conventionists; together they drove Carranza out of Mexico City and into a desperate defensive position in the port of Vera Cruz . Both the Conventionists and Constitutionalists factions were in dire need of supplies and munitions, but the US refused to grant diplomatic recognition to either of the belligerents, or to lift the embargo it had instituted against Huerta.
Carranza, whose forces maintained control the Gulf of Mexico ports and the state of Tamaulipas (bordering South Texas), devised a plan that would secure him both diplomatic recognition and the arms he needed to defeat the Conventionalists. The plan's strategy consisted of four simple steps: 1) Carranza's armed and funded “bandits” would raid Texas border communities; 2) The US State Department would demand Carranza subdue the “bandits;” 3) Carranza would reply that the “bandits” were only able to operate because Carranza lacked US recognition and sufficient arms to combat them; and 4) Carranza, having received recognition and arms, “arrests” the raiders. Carranza's scheme to achieve diplomatic recognition and munitions was disguised as a Texas mexicano irredentist uprising.
The Plan de San Diego raiders, or sediciosos, purportedly aspired to reclaim southwestern and California territory seized by the US after the Mexican War of 1848. All gringo males over the age of 16 were to be killed, and their property distributed to oppressed minorities such as Apaches, Mexicanos, Negroes, and Japanese. However, the Plan's draconian yet grandiose goals attracted few US recruits, and Carranza was forced to hire Texas mercenaries and to deploy officers and men from Tamaulipas garrisons as raiders.
The Plan de San Diego did not redeem a single acre of Southwestern land. What it did accomplish was to stir the Anglo minority's submerged racial insecurity, which surfaced in a violent backlash directed at all mexicanos. Texas Rangers, county and local law enforcement officials, and mobs of vigilantes hunted down “bad Mexs” throughout South Texas. Hundreds of innocent mexicano townsmen, cowboys, and farmworkers were gunned down. Their bullet-ridden bodies were often lined up along roadsides. Thousands of terrified mexicanos got the message. Soon, international bridges were clogged with refugees who had abandoned homes and farms to flee into Mexico. The majority never returned, and as a result, the economy of the Lower Río Grande Valley was devastated for decades.
By the end of July 1915, the raids ebbed and then ceased altogether. Carranza's emissaries in Washington informed him that, within a matter of months, diplomatic recognition of the Constitutionalists was assured. Plan de San Diego chieftains Aniceto Pizana and Luis de la Rosa were ordered to return to Mexico where they received officer's commissions in the Constitutionalist army.
As de la Rosa and Pizana presided over celebratory banquets in Matamoros and Monterrey, South Texas mexicanos still cowered in the midst of a race war. While 28 Anglo Texans were killed and tens of thousands of dollars of their property destroyed, the overwhelming brunt of victimization was borne by mexicanos, the intended beneficiaries of the Plan de San Diego.
Pancho Villa Provokes
a US-Mexico War Crisis
On March 9, 1916, Pancho Villa's forces simultaneously attacked Columbus, New Mexico and its US army garrison; 17 Americans were killed and several buildings burned to the ground. The incident galvanized public opinion across the US and especially outraged the Hearst press and politicians such as Senator Albert Bacon Hall, who had long called for intervention in Mexico.
On the following day, President Wilson dispatched General J.J. Pershing and 5,000 members of what would be known as the Punitive Expedition into Chihuahua, Mexico. On March 25, 1916, the War College drafted a plan for the occupation and pacification of Mexico: 250,000 US soldiers would occupy the northern states of Tamaulipas, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, Sonora, and Chihuahua. Concurrently, the US Navy would blockage all ports in central and southern Mexico.
While the Punitive Expedition wandered aimlessly in the harsh Chihuahuan mountains (even Villa's Carrancista enemies would not inform on his whereabouts); the Centaur of the North's lieutenants continued to raid targets of opportunity in the US. On May 5, the isolated Big Bend hamlets of Boquillas and Glenn Springs were looted, after three of their defenders were killed and several residents kidnapped. President Wilson responded with a call-up of 150,000 state militia troops for duty along the Mexican border.
Initially, Carranza had been supportive of the US army's pursuit of Villa. In October 1915, the US State Department had extended him diplomatic recognition. On November 15, President Wilson allowed Carranza's army to transit US territory in order to defeat Villa's forces at Agua Prieta, Sonora. However, as time elapsed and Pershing penetrated deeper into the Mexican interior, the Constitutionalist leader sensed a moral backlash from nationalistic Mexicans of all factions. Carranza's own generals threatened mutiny when yet another US army formation pursued the Glenn Springs-Boquillas raiders 168 miles into Mexico, captured them, and rescued their hostages. Carranza demanded the immediate withdrawal of the Punitive Expedition.
On June 21, the inevitable occurred: a squadron of the 10th Cavalry was shot to pieces by Carrancistas defending Carrizal, Chihuahua. Seven American troopers and their captain were killed outright; 24 others were taken prisoner.
US newspapers indulged in paroxysms of righteous indignation at the “cowardly ambush.” Ignoring the subtleties of the incident, headlines demanded an immediate invasion of Mexico and vengeance for the martyrs. The 10th Cavalry captain had disobeyed Pershing's order to avoid settlements and Carrancista troop formations.
Wilson sent Carranza an ultimatum demanding the immediate release of the prisoners. Although fully apprised of the actions that had provoked the Carrizal incident, the President then approved military contingency plans for an invasion, and he began drafting a declaration of war on his personal typewriter.
Meanwhile, in Vera Cruz, Carranza had already sent on the coded telegrams to re-activate the Plan de San Diego. Brinkmanship and border raiders had secured him diplomatic recognition; the combination could not fail to compel Wilson to withdraw Pershing. However, these raids, in contrast to those of 1915, targeted Río Grande communities further upstream near Laredo, and were directed by a Laredo native, the newly minted General Esteban Fierros.
Laredo, June 1916: Armed
to the Teeth and Scared to Death
For weeks, the Laredo area had been convulsed by the looming war crisis. The city had been transformed from a community of 20,000 into a congeries of armed camps. At the beginning of July 1916, there were 10,000 soldiers in town, with an additional 10,000 expected within the month. Fort McIntosh was supplemented with National Guard outliers such as Camp Missouri, Camp Maine, Camp New Hampshire, and the 9th Infantry barracks.
Laredo was host to specialist units of field and coast artillery, signal corps, engineers, search light companies, motor truck pools, hospital corps, and a quartermaster's depot. Horses were frightened and children scattered by an experimental motorcycle machine-gun company that conducted high-speed maneuvers into the Heights neighborhood. On Sundays, Holy Redeemer Church was packed beyond capacity with soldiers.
Carranza's reactivation of the Plan de San Diego had provoked the exodus of trainloads of refugees from the Río Grande Valley, who had crossed Laredo's International Bridge into Mexico. On June 10, the area around Laredo itself became the focus of the raiders' activities. The railroad trestle at Webb Station (20 miles north of town) was drenched with kerosene by a group of 30 men. The timely arrival of a posse saved the bridge, killed three raiders, and captured their officers.
Five nights later, two detachments of the US cavalry were attacked at their camp near San Ignacio (40 miles downstream from Laredo), with four cavalrymen killed and 15 wounded. The Mexican raiders (including several Japanese) suffered nine dead and four wounded.
Many Laredoans were terror-stricken in the wake of this “Moonlight Battle,” and rumors spread of sightings of Japanese crossing the river underwater with carrizo (cane) snorkels. After El Progreso (Laredo's Carrancista newspaper) published yet another anti-American tirade, a mob of local men broke into the office and editor Leo D. Walker was taken to Indian Crossing (El Paso del Indio in north Laredo) and forced to wade “home” to Mexico. The men returned to El Progreso and smashed its printing press. The Laredo Daily Times applauded the removal of “this pernicious foreigner.”
The following week, Jesus María Cerda (a major in Luis de la Rosa's Plan de San Diego brigade) was caught walking down Santa Maria Avenue in broad daylight. Justo Penn bulletined his readers that “the chaparral around area ranches is literally alive with Mexican brigands who expect to perpetuate their hellish deeds within close proximity of this city.”
The June 19 Laredo Daily Times revealed a “most diabolical attempt” to break into the Ursuline convent overlooking the Río Grande downtown. Soldiers and local police quickly arrived in pursuit of the intruders who fled into the dense canebrakes lining the riverbanks. It was not determined whether they were Japanese.
Not an Invisible Man, and Why
The foregoing events suggest that Dr. Jesse Mosley chose a most inauspicious time to accept a seditious mission from Carranza into the Laredo area. Captain Ross experienced no difficulty in locating and interrupting Mosley as he was energetically exhorting a group of black soldiers to desert. The fateful confrontation took place in a segregated, blacks-only brothel in Laredo's red-light district between downtown and Fort McIntosh.
In fact, Mosley's mission was compromised from its onset. Failure was only partially due to his inability (as a black man) to operate inconspicuously in South Texas. Mosley's movements were monitored from the moment he entered the US. The Plan de San Diego raids of the previous year had spurred local, state, and federal agencies to set up a network of informants among mexicanos on both sides of the river. The US State Department also conducted espionage operations via its consulates within Mexico, the results of which were relayed to the War Department in Washington. US Bureau of Investigation agents had shadowed Mosley across Texas, into Oklahoma, and back to Laredo.
Although not a vital factor in his detection and capture, Mosley's race more than likely ensured that he could be killed with impunity. In 1916, blacks accounted for less than 1.3 percent of the population of the 15 counties bordering Mexico. Most black residents of Laredo were employed as house servants, bootblacks, hotel bellhops, and porters aboard the International and Great Northern Railroads' Pullman cars.
Black cavalrymen (known as Buffalo Soldiers) and infantrymen historically had played prominent roles in Southwestern conflicts. However, black soldiers were almost universally feared and despised by the mexicanos of the borderlands. Many black troopers, especially combat veterans of the Spanish-American War and the Philippine Insurrection, returned the favor and regarded Mexican-Americans as “wet-back foreigners.”
In Bracketville, Laredo, El Paso, Rio Grande City, and Brownsville, mexicanos and black troops perpetuated a virtual blood feud. The worst incident became known as the Brownsville Raid of 1906, but mexicano racism directed at blacks dated back to the 1870s Cortina War. Twenty years later, the US Army's deployment of Black Seminole trackers in pursuit of Catarino Garza provoked such outrage in South Texas that political pressure forced their commander to withdraw them.
In March 1899, Laredo had been the scene of one of the most notorious black-mexicano conflicts, when troopers of the 10th cavalry, enforcing a smallpox quarantine, were attacked by a mob of several hundred Laredoans. In Racial Borders: Black Soldiers Along the Rio Grande (Texas A&M Press, 2002), James N. Leiker examines this episode in Laredo's long and dismal history of racial prejudice, as well as the many individual and collective acts of violence it inspired toward blacks.
Leiker quotes an unnamed Laredo newspaper editor, “Somehow, we can't seem to get along with Negro troops . . . we would like to have a garrison of albinos, we think all the trouble is all in the color.” He also notes that border politicians frequently demonized blacks in order to pander to their constituents' prejudice and garner votes. Laredo police officers gratuitously assaulted black soldiers suspected of making advances toward mexicanas. A grim statistic reveals that the non-military black population of Laredo dropped from 2,005 to 41 between 1900 and 1920. Those who remained avoided public gatherings or even going outdoors, since mexicanos and Anglos regarded them as an oddity, or worse.
The brothel Mosley frequented while pursuing his recruitment efforts was staffed and managed by African-American women who had flocked to the border garrison towns during the war crisis of 1916. It is not known how many of the more than 20,000 soldiers in Laredo were black (or preferred the company of black women) but we can assume that the Jim Crow brothels were quite profitable enterprises.
However, by the end of the year, black madams and their girls were indicted by the Webb County Grand Jury on a charge of constituting a public nuisance, and were given 48 hours to leave town. The Laredo Daily Times all but chortled its assent with the verdict. A December 29 story titled, “Black Nuisance Must End,” congratulated the jury for “having read the law to the daughters of Ham” and ordering “the dark shadows to vanish and never again set foot on Laredo soil.”
Given such well-documented antipathy towards African-Americans in Laredo, Captain Ross and his henchmen's almost perfunctory, certainly hasty acquittal in the murder of Jesse Mosley indicates that the community was, at best, indifferent to the mysterious doctor's fate.
A man on a doomed mission, in the wrong place at the wrong time, the murdered Jesse Mosley remains a sad footnote to the Plan de San Diego conspiracy and the troubled times of 1916 in Laredo. Mosley's motivation for casting his lot with Carranza's conspiracy is cloaked in obscurity. Was the man an idealist taken in by Carranza's glib irredentist rhetoric? When considering Mosley's American background, professional attainments, and maturity, this seems unlikely. Perhaps more plausibly, the good doctor awoke one day to find himself, his practice, and Tampico under Carrancista occupation. Conceivably, he was persuaded to accept a lucrative offer and an impossible mission that he could not refuse.
