Aside from his truncated term as Confederate president, Jefferson Davis might best be known for his camel experiment: the importation of some seventy-five camels for military testing in Texas and the southwest in the late 1850s. He launched the offbeat operation while serving as secretary of war under President Franklin Pierce, an exceptionally creative period in Davis’s life. Among other efforts, Secretary Davis ordered surveys for a transcontinental railroad, organized new cavalry regiments, and purchased the camels. The Army’s camel trials, which included surveying expeditions in Texas’s Big Bend region and along the 35th parallel to California, went well until the Civil War cut them short. By 1866, the surviving animals had been sold to circuses and mining companies or simply turned loose to fend for themselves.
The camels marched into western folklore. Camel sightings persisted into the twentieth century, nourishing hopes that descendants of Davis’s camels might remain. Army camel handlers, including “Hi Jolly,” a Greek-Syrian Muslim, became local legends. Hollywood dramatized the trials in Southwestern Passage (1954) and Hawmps! (1976). As a colorful southwestern tale, or proof of Davis’s innovative leadership, the camel experiment seems like a whimsical prologue to a cataclysmic war.
But the camel story has a dark underbelly which underscores the breadth and significance of antebellum slaveholders’ tremendous political power. Through a series of twists and turns, the experiment became entangled with the illicit African slave trade. Davis did not foresee this development, but neither did he condemn it. Texas, where the Old South met the Wild West, was the crucible in which camel research melded with human trafficking.
There were actually multiple camel experiments because the Army’s public trials inspired several private spinoffs, particularly in the South. The link between public and private sector camel research was Major Henry Constantine Wayne. Born in Savannah, Georgia, Wayne was, like Davis, a West Point graduate and veteran of the U.S.-Mexican War. While serving in the Quartermaster Corps, Wayne studied the military uses of camels and was a logical choice to lead the Army’s camel purchasing expedition to the eastern Mediterranean in 1855. He also oversaw the early trials in Texas. But he made his deepest mark as a publicist. In November 1858, Wayne wrote to the influential National Intelligencer, extolling camels’ potential in private enterprises. Self-identifying as “a Southern man, from a cotton, corn, and rice growing section,” Wayne envisioned camels performing varied plantation chores; compared them favorably to horses and mules in terms of strength, cost effectiveness, and hardiness; and speculated that enslaved laborers could manage them successfully.