General Custer's Red Neckties: a chronicle of a former black slave posing as a free white man in the 15th NY Cavalry

This amazing story is grounded in historical fact that follows the general outline of my great-grandfather’s life. I learn everything I had been told about my mother’s family's history was a lie, and discover hidden secrets so explosive that my own ancestors wanted to keep them buried forever. Thus began my quest for truth that had led my mother into a web of lies spun for more than one hundred sixty years. Nevertheless, finding out what is in the family closet proved spellbinding and awe-inspiring. My mother had been born in 1905, just forty years after the Civil War Appomattox Courthouse surrender and barely twenty-eight years after the Reconstruction. Her sensibilities were not what ours in the twenty-first century are. I do think she knew that her mother was Mulatto and her father Caucasian and that her beloved grandfather was also a Mulatto and a former slave. Understanding myself meant I must uncover the past my family had buried. Instead of my great-grandfather being a decorated Caucasian Civil War cavalry veteran, who had been born in upstate New York, and had purportedly married a Native American woman, my great-grandfather was in fact the illegitimate mulatto son of a black female slave and her white master, born in Charleston, South Carolina, who had escaped and fled via the underground railroad to upstate New York, credibly posing as a free white man.It is the untold story of this young man’s courage and own lonely heroic effort to help free his enslaved southern kin. Another exposed long-told lie; his wife was not a Native American woman as was recounted but rather was a black woman born in New York. Peter August Hoetjes, his great-grandson tells the story of William Cooper and brings us inside the mind of this compelling character: earthy, secret, shrewd, vulnerable, brave, and always uncannily real.