Bones Unearth City’s Puerto Rican History

A Civil War veteran’s severed thigh bone is headed on an overseas journey from New Haven to San Juan, where it will be enshrined as a century-old reminder of the American democracy that Puerto Ricans have fought to defend but are still barred from fully participating in.

The remains come from Lt. Augusto Rodriguez, the earliest known Puerto Rican veteran to fight for the United States military. For years, his story remained unclear, because he was buried under a different name among firemen, rather than soldiers, in Evergreen Cemetery.

A bag of his earthen remains — including the half-length femur, a silver casket handle, bits of ceramic and a shovelful of dirt — were dug up on Tuesday in the cemetery bordering Ella T. Grasso Boulevard and handed off to two university professors who’d flown in to Bradley Airport that morning.

The remains are to be displayed at the National Guard Museum and then reinterred at the National Cemetery, with a bugle call and rifle salute, Thursday afternoon in the island’s capital city.

The excavation is part of a larger historical project to identify the Puerto Ricans who’ve always had a part in upholding the American project, long before the territory’s residents gained birthright citizenship in 1917.

“Siempre estuvimos ahi,” the professors behind it say. ​“We were always there.”

“We were always fighting for the ideology of the United States, from the first Puerto Ricans here,” said Nestor Suro, the retired historian leading the project. ​“Before we were even citizens, we defended the ideas of democracy and liberty.”

Their project has taken on particular urgency for statehood advocates after Hurricane Maria devastated the island, a federal oversight board has imposed austerity measures to restructure its debt, and thousands of protestors marched to demand the governor’s resignation.

Meanwhile, Puerto Ricans living on the island are largely denied federal representation. Their presidential preference doesn’t count toward any Electoral College tally, and their resident commissioner in Congress cannot vote.

Suro said that he spent two years researching Rodriguez, verifying his existence with census records, military rolls and other archival documents to change the way Puerto Ricans think about their past.

“Puerto Rico needs to work on projects that help to break the colonial psyche. The complexity of the Puerto Rican is that they do not even know that they are colonized,” his proposal says. ​“Psychological manipulation makes us feel that we have a debt to the United States, when in reality it is the other way.

“As a historian, I am not here to judge. I am rescuing a character from our history whose contribution to that fundamental role in the history of the United States must be recognized,” it goes on. ​“Before they were a nation, when their national unity was in crisis, before they invaded us 1898, before they extended us citizenship, before we went to other front-lines to defend their ideals, we shared — hand to hand, shoulder to shoulder, blood to blood — their aspirations of freedom and their unity of nation. We deserve that, in our own right.”

Suro took his proposal to bury Rodriguez in the Puerto Rico National Cemetery to the commonwealth’s legislature, where the pro-statehood New Progressive Party holds power. They provided the necessary funding to earth-sample the gravesite.

On Monday morning, Dale Fiore, the cemetery’s general manager, had his team use a backhoe to dig up the grave. When the soil changed in density and appearance, they sifted through and found the large bone cutting and silver handle — much more than the mere dust they’d expected to find after more than a century underground.

Rodriguez came to New Haven as a child in the mid-1840s, leaving behind the island that was still a Spanish colony.

Saying their arrival is like ​“a very gray shadow” without any paper record, Suro guessed that Rodriguez might have been born out of wedlock and given a common name to hide his identity. But ​“I’m not a fortune teller,” he added.

In 1862, after President Abraham Lincoln issued a call for thousands of volunteers to join the Union Army, military captains in New Haven set up recruiting tents across the city and posted advertisements in the paper.

“Rally Boys! Rally! at your Country’s Call!” read one. ​“This glorious Union is the birthright of every one of us! Shall we not rally in its defence!”

Rodriguez took up the offer, enlisting in the 15th Connecticut Volunteer Infantry as ​“Augustus Rodereques.”

Suro suggested that he might have needed a job or that he might have felt a genuine ​“gratitude and respect” for democratic principles. His partner in the project, Ebenecer López Ruyol, a social sciences professor, said he also wanted to think Rodriguez joined out of ​“his sense of belonging.”

According to a history by Sheldon Thorpe, one of the unit’s sergeants, Rodriguez and his fellow soldiers launched from New York City, after they’d marched down 4th Avenue in a summer thunderstorm, singing ​“Glory, Hallelujah” as loudly as they could, ​“with a volume of sound far above that of the warring elements.”

Their first destination was Washington, D.C., where they guarded the city’s southwestern entrance on the swampy shores of the Potomac River, ​“scratching [themselves] to sleep,” as one captain remembered it.

After weeks of drills, they headed to Fredericksburg, Virginia. There, they caught their first glimpse of war in what would end being a bloody defeat.

As the Connecticut soldiers approached the smoking city, Confederate soldiers fired artillery shells from across the river, blowing up three of their men.

During the battle, the brigade was posted as reserves. All morning, from just a mile away, the soldiers listened to ​“death in its most horrid form”: ​“the incessant rattle of rifles, rising at times to a continued roar; the shouts of the charging columns, the spiteful crack of the light batteries, the screaming missiles in the air, and over all the terrible thunder of the heavy guns upon either heights made it a day second only to Gettysburg,” Thorpe wrote.

In the late afternoon, they advanced into the line of fire, but they were pulled back the next morning and eventually retreated.

Over the next two years, the brigade would see combat again throughout Virginia and North Carolina. Rodriguez would be promoted from sergeant to second lieutenant of Company I in March 1864.

In one of the final battles, in Kinston, N.C., in early 1865, the brigade was surrounded by Confederate soldiers and captured. But within the month, Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered; the brigade was freed after less than three weeks.

The Connecticut infantry-men raised the stars and stripes over the Kinston courthouse, and they set up a free night school in a church for recently freed slaves. By the time they left to turn home three months later, nearly 300 pupils, ranging from ages 5 to 70, were attending nightly.

The soldiers pulled into New Haven on July 4, 1865. They marched up State Street in celebration, were welcomed home by the mayor and started drinking, ​“most effectually,” Thorpe remembered.

Afterwards, Rodriguez opened a cigar shop and a saloon, and he served as a volunteer firefighter. He was buried in 1880 in a then-newly designated lot for city firemen who’d died in duty or had no other family. His grave marker says, ​“Rodirique.”

Suro said that he next wants to look into whether any Puerto Ricans fought alongside the American rebels in the Revolutionary War. But for now, he said, he’s ​“proud” of the history that Rodriguez lived.

“Today, we changed the history of Puerto Rico,” he said.