This program was made possible by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

This program was funded by a grant from the Tennessee Historical Commission and the Tennessee Works Commission.

Preserving and promoting buildings.

Sites.

Battlefields, and events in Tennessee's history from the French and Indian War through the Civil War eras.

For the benefit of future generations, the Battle of Nashville Trust and viewers like you.

I went to see my missus on my furlough and she was glad to see me.

She said, you remember when you were sick and went to the house and I had to nurse you?

I say, yes, I remember and she said, and now you're trying to fight me?

I said, no, I ain't trying to fight you.

I'm fighting to get free.

Why they did it ?

It's really a fascinating thing because the rest of the world didn't realize at that time what was happening, but black people did.

We understood that before they announced it that this was going to free slaves.

We knew this was going to have to happen, and we wanted to be a part of it.

Gives them an opportunity to not only fight and preserve their own freedom, but for millions of others held in bondage across the South.

Peyton already had freedom for himself, and I just can't imagine how convicted he must have felt to leave his own freedom to fight for the principle of freedom.

It's hard to imagine what that sort of emotional responsibility would be, but it also helps us understand why they would fight and fight so hard.

They fought for liberty.

They fought for freedom.

They fought for their families.

They fought for the future generations.

I think for him, it was also making sure that it was guaranteed that it was permanent and that regardless of where he was or his, his descendants would be that they had the freedom that he had already experienced.

If you're enslaved and your families enslaved, and you have been for generations, and you see no other way out of it, and then someone goes to and says, why don't you contribute your life, your life, to the freedom of the future?

How could you resist that?

So many of them did, and it's exactly what they did.

It seems to be a moot question whether these Negroes will fight, but let everyone stand in front of that dusty line, as I did, and note that the firm, resolute and determined look, the earnest, energetic and he will feel throughout that line led by such officers, would be dangerous to encounter.

A lot of people are surprised to hear that Tennessee had a very large role in the U.S.

Colored Troops story.

Tennessee had about 20,000, which was the second largest number of U.S.

troops in the Union Army at that time.

Of these troops in Tennessee, there would be almost 4500 casualties by the end of the war.

Tennessee is very important to the Union cause right now and for a lot of reasons.

Tennessee was halfway between the green belt of the Midwest and the Cotton Belt of the Deep South, and that was great in times of peace for Tennessee.

It was able to economically benefit.

However, everybody realized that should there a war break out between those two grand divisions of the country, that Tennessee would be the middle ground and Tennesseans certainly realized that if there was a war between the North and the South and Tennessee being in the middle, there was a lot to lose.

Tennesseans had had a tradition of trying to hold the Union together.

At the beginning of the war, the state was really divided.

A vote was taken in February of 1861 against seceding.

The firing on Fort Sumter in April of 1861 is I change things because Lincoln will then call for volunteers to put down the rebellion, and he's going to call on each state who had not left the Union to provide troops for that.

First of all, let's talk about Governor Harris.

After the firing on Fort Sumper, I called for troops.

And Governor Harris was very, vocal about, not sending any Tennessee soldiers to invade.

He called it a sister state.

Another vote was taken in June of 1861.

And then the people of Middle Tennessee, which had been, primarily opposed to secession, had shifted and voted in favor of secession.

Tennessee was the last state to join the Confederacy as the last state to secede.

Less than a year later.

By February of 1862.

Nashville is the first Confederate state capital that falls under federal hands without a fight.

Became the central hub for all operations from the north against the South.

We will have a military governor put in place.

And that military governor is, of course, Andrew Johnson.

Andrew Johnson had been popularly elected a governor in the 1850s.

But when Tennessee did secede, Andrew Johnson famously took a stand and refused to give up his seat in the U.S.

Senate, despite the fact that Tennessee had left the Union.

This got the attention of Abraham Lincoln, and in a time when there was a crisis with the South leaving the Union and this Southern Union, unionists step forward.

Lincoln had an ally.

And because it also benefited from rivers that connected those two regions the Tennessee, the Cumberland and the Mississippi rivers.

Tennessee was a prime economically viable state.

The amount of steamboats that were plying that river trade in 1860 was 1000, according to the 1860 census, because of all the commerce on the river system of Middle America.

The boats were unloading every day, and there were blocks and blocks and blocks of warehouses in Nashville.

And whenever you have a port city, you have black sailors, you have black stevedores, you have black teamsters who are unloading, loading all that cargo, who are speaking to the sailors passing through.

So there's this network of information that comes.

And so here in Nashville, everybody who was working on a plantation, they regularly received shipments.

They regularly received supplies from people who had been speaking to the port workers.

And the port workers knew everything.

So here in Nashville, everyone was well up on the news.

And that include a lot of enslaved people who worked in the cities.

Their enslaver would allow them to work independently and send money back.

There were over 14,000 enslaved people living and working in Nashville in 1860.

And so we had many enslaved people who were essentially in Nashville without an enslaver living locally.

So they lived semi free.

And then a lot of them, of course, emancipated themselves.

And then we also had free blacks who remained in the area, not very many, because Tennessee had done its best to outlaw freed blacks.

Because having free blacks around enslaved people, of course, incited more people to want that freedom for themselves.

There was a law passed by the United States Congress called the Second Confiscation Act.

On 17th of July, Congress authorizes the president to, quote, employ persons of African descent to help defeat the rebellion.

In many areas, including here in Nashville, the Union Army will employ their own.

And that's a very loose description of the term.

The Confiscation Act meant that essentially any property that belonged to any enslaver who was for the Confederacy could be taken by the Union military and diverted in some way to help the military cause.

Now, because enslaved people at the time were not considered human beings on their own, they were considered the property of others.

They counted as well.

So many formerly enslaved people found themselves moving from one enslaver to the next.

This idea that the Civil War should result in the freedom of all black people was something that was deeply radical and was held mostly by black people at first.

Some of them were promised a wage.

Some weren't.

Some of them came from enslavers who lived locally, who rented them out essentially, but were never given payment for that either.

They would go to the military installations.

They would sort of present themselves.

They were coming in, you know, by the thousands.

And then there were also some free blacks who were living here in Nashville, who who offered their work and were contractors.

And they had contracts.

They did get paid.

It becomes imperative for the newly appointed military governor, Andrew Johnson, as well as the other military officials here in Nashville, to really strengthen and fortify this city.

It was really the most strategic point in order to secure the Western theater and in order to ensure that final blow to the Confederacy.

The thing you have to remember is that Nashville, Tennessee, was the most fortified city of the country outside of Washington, D.C., and so they will start to build the defenses of the city of Nashville, including places like Fort Negley and Fort Morton and Fort Casino.

They had to have a plan ready to have people to actually do the work.

So they went into businesses, churches, homes, and forced African-Americans to work in those camps at Fort Negley.

There was actually an enslaved woman called Frances Batson who reports on this.

And she said that when the soldiers came to collect the men to do the work at Fort Negley, the children would run from them screaming, the blue vans are coming, the blue vans are coming.

Because they associated the blue uniform with the men who took their fathers, their brothers, away and didn't bring them back.

Right.

And so there was a lot of that happening.

But at the same time, while that was happening, Fort Negley was being built, that giant flag was waving from the tallest hill in the city of Nashville, the capital of Tennessee.

And that flag represented a lot of things to very many people who were enslaved or who had run from enslavement.

They will take other jobs within the Union Army as cooks and as laundresses as teamsters, especially.

On January 1st, 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect.

And interestingly, the sort of the freedom piece of it did not apply to Tennessee because Tennessee was already back under the control of the Union.

Embedded in the Emancipation Proclamation was language that provided for black men to be able to serve in the United States Army and the United States Navy.

And that was the first sort of legal authority to create what later became the United States Colored Troops.

These men want to enlist.

They want to fight.

It adds an element to our reason why we're fighting the war.

That gives Lincoln carte blanche to now raise officially, regiments of black troops.

I have to tell you, I let you know I was.

I was reluctant at first.

Colored men were good enough to fight under Washington.

They are not good enough to fight under McClellan.

They were good enough to fight under Andrew Jackson.

They are not good enough to fight for General Polk.

They were good enough to win American independence.

But they are not good enough to help preserve that independence against treason and rebellion.

Most people thought, well, the thought process was that the black man would be scared and run, and they didn't know if they were even trainable to be soldiers.

But that's when Frederick Douglass had conversations with President Lincoln about that, and that they were able bodied and able to do it.

Grant gave President Lincoln enthusiastic support for black recruitment, writing on August 23rd, 1863.

I have given the subject of arming the Negro my hearty support.

This with the emancipation of the Negro is the heaviest blow yet, given the Confederacy.

Andrew Johnson brought with him all of those, preconceived notions about blacks from being a native Southerner.

And so he wasn't necessarily an abolitionist to begin with.

And then when we start to raise black troops, Johnson, doesn't really take a stand either way, but ultimately has to get on board with it because he has become a an important piece of the Lincoln administration.

Right now, I'm trying to get Johnson to raise more black troops.

It becomes more and more accepted to use and utilize and encourage.

Because one of the things that even the most reluctant union officer would have to admit was that by allowing and accepting those runaway slaves into your lines, you are providing the enemy with a disadvantage because you're taking away his labor force.

In the spring of 1863, General Lorenzo Thomas was appointed commissioner for the Organization of Colored Troops for the Union Army.

In Tennessee.

There were recruitment posts set up in all the small towns around Nashville, and officers who were detailed to recruit people to leave their enslavers and come to Nashville to enlist.

I ran off from my master when I was about 15 years old and joined the Army.

I was in a field shucking corn on Murfreesboro Pike.

All at once.

I heard a band playing.

We all went and joined the Army training.

Thomas.

There were several who worked in those work camps at Fort Negley.

That after the call for the U.S.

Colored Troops came forward.

They stepped up and stepped out and joined regiments for the United States Colored Troops.

As Doctor John Rock said in 1860.

I tell you, gentlemen, we have both physical and moral courage.

I believe in the equality of my race.

I will not admit for a moment that we are inferior to you.

Many of these men ended up in positions where they were given inferior accommodation.

They were giving insufficient rations.

And we already know they weren't being paid the same as their white counterparts.

When the white soldiers were receiving $13 a month, the black soldiers were receiving $10 a month, and then their clothing was deducted from that as well.

Within United States Colored Troop regiments.

The officer corps was always composed of white men, some of which had come from other units and had taken promotions in order to command United States Colored Troops.

And it wasn't the USCTs fault.

They're not viewed by the United States government or the military as equal A citizens or B soldiers.

Most of the time when the US Colored Troops were formed, they were just marching and drilling.

They never thought that they would have the opportunity to actually fight.

They did more of the manual labor for the Union Army when they were finally allowed to do combat.

They were put in some of the most dangerous positions with less training and with worse weapons.

Of all the black regiments organized in Tennessee, perhaps the most famous is the 13th US Colored Infantry.

When the 13th United States Colored Infantry was mustered in, which meant that they had all the officers they needed and all their companies were full, and they were ready to start drilling and being organized as an active regiment in the United States Army.

They mustered in in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and a newspaper account of the time describes how the men were presented with a fine silk flag that had been created by what was called the Colored Women of Murfreesboro, and that they knelt, took their hats off.

The officers also took their caps off, and they prayed and then sang the Star Spangled Banner as they received their flags.

But when their first opportunities in war was to guard and protect railroads, the most important being the United States military, a railroad that would extend from the west side of Nashville all the way out to a supply depot on the Tennessee River at Johnsonville.

The Black Camps in New Johnsonville were written in this mosquito and tick infested shallows, where whites were up in the warehouses up along the river.

And they they built that railroad.

The railroad that we're looking at now, that goes through Nashville.

Most of that was bought by United States Colored troops as part of a supply point to get into the next war.

And they did.

Once they built it, they manned the guard post along the railroad into it and fought off Confederate invaders trying to take it over.

Some of the 13th U.S.

Colored Infantry who were at Johnsonville were upon the riverbank as sharpshooters and armed with the Enfield rifle, and to good execution.

The affair was slight, but it has gained credit for the colored troops.

Colonel Reuben Demasi.

While General Hood waged a bloody assault at Franklin, the entire 13th USCI was moved from Johnsonville to Nashville.

John Bell Hood and the Confederate Army of Tennessee decided that they were going to make a last stand, and they were going to try to take Nashville.

General Thomas was in command in Nashville, and he decided that he was going to try to end the Confederate Army of Tennessee at Nashville.

And he started calling in troops.

Among the men that he was calling in were several full regiments of United States Colored Troops during the time from the seventh to the 13th.

This regiment was occupied in throwing up rifle pits along the line and preparing for a campaign.

The men were clothed and refitted and everything necessary for a long campaign.

So Nashville is that opportunity for them to fight.

They were essential to it.

General hood is able to establish his headquarters here at Travelers Rest.

The weather goes extremely cold.

By the eighth and ninth there is sleet and ice.

Temperatures get well below freezing even into the negative and single digits at night.

Eventually, the weather breaks, becomes less foggy and warmer.

Ultimately, the big battle of Nashville would be fought on December the 15th and 16th, 1864, and in that battle, the Union troops will come out of those earthworks, relying heavily on their cavalry to outflank the Confederates.

On two successive days.

Involved in this battle would, of course, be two brigades of United States Colored Troops, eight regiments, the 12, the 13, the 14, 16,17, the 18th, the 44th, and the 100 fought at the Battle of Nashville.

And this was really the first time colored troops would be used in large numbers, and they played an important role in the two days of fighting to distract the Confederate command, to one flank, while the Union Army is actually focusing on the opposite flank.

On the morning of 16 December the 13th.

USCI entered action with 556 enlisted men and 20 commissioned officers.

Right flank of the Confederate line on the second day of the battle.

December 16th was anchored on what had been Judge John Overton's Peach Orchard.

The action around Peach Orchard was interesting because the Confederate command had said to hold fire until they are literally within 100 yards or so.

So these soldiers coming up and over the small hills, moving on to the towards the peach orchard, obviously anticipating being fired upon.

And then when it doesn't happen, I can't imagine the level of anxiety that is boiling up within each one of these soldiers.

They were well formation.

They drill, fired.

Walked ahead in perfect formation, being shot down.

But to take that hill.

And that takes a lot of courage to do that, you know.

It was also the first time any Confederate army had actually fled the battlefield in complete chaos.

They fought so viciously and so strongly that the Confederates thought this is the main attack.

And ultimately the the battle would be an overwhelming victory.

And their casualty numbers during those two days far outpace any other of the Union units involved in the battle.

I'm sure the black soldiers did not get the same medical treatment as the whites did.

because they would take all the wounded back to field hospitals before they were taken back into Nashville, and they were going to take care of the white troops first.

Those lucky enough to get medical care ended up at the overcrowded Contraband Hospital.

U.S.

General Hospital number 16.

When it comes to specifically the Battle of Nashville, right, there were 13,000 USCT that participated in the Battle of Nashville, and they essentially helped to, they helped to create the manpower that was needed to really have a decisive victory, right?

The combination of having Fort Negley and the system of fortifications that was so entrenched that forced the Confederates to make really poor decisions.

And then having these extra 13,000 manpower, to help decimate that military, it essentially made the war end much sooner than it would have, which means that many, many lives were spared because of the intervention of the USCT.

So in many ways, the USCT really helped change the tide, of the Civil War.

And then, of course, serving in the USCT really helped change the tide of this whole entire nation.

And our relationship with enslavement and race as well.

They brought it into the national discourse and they could not be ignored.

I take a lot of pride in his role in making sure that I and other people, have those freedoms.

Peter Bailey signed up for the Union Army on January 6th, 1863, in the city of Murfreesboro, Tennessee.

He was born in Lebanon, Tennessee, and he served with the 17th Regiment, all the United States Colored Troops, in the Battle of Nashville.

It gives me a great deal of pride and satisfaction to know that my family goes all the way back to the Civil War, are serving the country in the American military.

It gives me great pride that my father, a Korean War veteran, told me they fallen so I wouldn't have to.

It gives me great pride to know that through the degradation they left through, they still had the forethought to pick up a rifle and contribute to their freedoms and the freedoms of tomorrow.

♪Oh, freedom!♪ 432 00:25:14,012 --> 00:25:18,450 ♪Oh, freedom!♪ ♪Oh, freedom!♪ ♪Over me.♪ ♪And before I'd be a slave♪ ♪I'll be buried in my grave.♪ ♪And go home to my Lord.♪ ♪And be free.♪ ♪Patriotic Music♪ This program was funded by a grant from the Tennessee Historical Commission and the Tennessee Wars Commission.

Preserving and promoting buildings.

Sites, battlefields, and events in Tennessee's History from the French and Indian War through the Civil War eras.

For the benefit of future generations.

The Battle of Nashville Trust and viewers like you.

This program was made possible by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.