Marta V. Martínez
| Guest columnist
Watch President Trump announce ‘Patriot Games’ for 2026
President Donald Trump touted the “Patriot Games” next year in a video address that also emphasized “no men playing in women’s sports.”
- Amos (Ramos) Butler was a Mexican-born man who served in a segregated Black regiment during the Civil War.
- His story highlights how 19th-century records often altered or erased the identities of immigrants and people of color.
- Butler’s likely surname, Ramos, appears to have been Anglicized to Butler in official military documents.
- Highlighting his story adds diversity to Rhode Island’s Civil War history for the nation’s 250th anniversary.
As Rhode Island joins the nation in marking its 250th anniversary, I’ve been asked a fair and important question: Why highlight Amos (Ramos) Butler? Why elevate one individual when there are so many well-documented figures already woven into our state’s history?
My answer is simple: because history is not only about what we have long remembered, but about what we failed to see.
I did not set out to find Amos Butler. I encountered him while researching Civil War records connected to Rhode Island: lists of names, enlistment dates, regiments. In those records, I found a man listed as “Amos Butler,” born in Mexico, who served in the 14th Rhode Island Heavy Artillery Regiment (Colored) during the Civil War. His name alone gave me pause. Amos is not a common Mexican name. That detail led me deeper into the archive, where questions of identity, language and recordkeeping began to surface.
What emerged was not a heroic legend or a tidy narrative, but something more historically instructive: a glimpse into how 19th-century bureaucracies recorded – or misrecorded – immigrant lives.
Amos Butler served alongside Black soldiers in a segregated regiment at a moment when the nation was redefining freedom, citizenship and belonging. His likely Spanish surname, Ramos, appears to have been Anglicized – or misunderstood – by the very system charged with preserving his service. That single alteration tells us a great deal about how people like him moved through official history: fully present and contributing, yet partially obscured.
This is not about retroactively assigning modern identities or reshaping the past to fit contemporary frameworks. It is about acknowledging what the records themselves reveal. Civil War historians know well that military documents often flatten race, erase origin, and simplify identity. Butler’s story fits squarely within that established scholarship. What makes it notable is that it unfolds here, in Rhode Island.
State histories tend to emphasize regiments, battles and leadership. Far less attention is given to the individual enlisted men whose lives complicate our assumptions about who served and why. Butler’s story adds texture to Rhode Island’s Civil War narrative by reminding us that migration, race and service were already intertwined long before the 20th century.
The 250th anniversary of the United States invites reflection, not revisionism. Major commemorations have always prompted historians to revisit archives, ask new questions, and consider whose experiences were overlooked. But commemoration is also, at its best, an act of recognition. To name and remember people of color who lived, labored and served in earlier generations is not to diminish the past – it is to honor it more fully. Their lives are not footnotes to history; they are part of its foundation.
We often say that history is written by those who leave records. But it is also shaped by how carefully we read those records – and whether we are willing to notice the irregularities, the misspellings, the lives that don’t quite fit our expectations.
Honoring Amos Butler is not about elevating one person above others. It is about acknowledging that the American story, and Rhode Island’s story within it, has always been broader and more diverse than the version many of us inherited.
At 250 years, we have an opportunity not only to look back, but to commemorate those whose presence affirms that people of color have always been here – living, serving and shaping this country in ways we are only beginning to fully recognize.
Marta V. Martínez is the executive director of Rhode Island Latino Arts. She serves on the RI250 Commission. Martínez is producing a first-person monologue of Amos (Ramos) Butler, which will be presented as part of the RI250 celebration.
