Peter August Hoetjes

General Custer's Red Neckties Peter August Hoetjes

This amazing story is grounded in historical fact that follows the general outline of my maternal great-grandfather's life. There are many gaps in what I know about his life owing to the lack of primary sources and the scarcity of written records pertaining to his birth and life. Many of the gaps and accounts have provided me with room for reasonable intervention and interpretation. 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.