African American Labor

Fort Negley was completed two years before the Battle of Nashville. But how and why was the fort built? In late February 1862, the Confederate Army of Tennessee retreated from Nashville. Many white civilians fled, taking their slaves with them as the Federal Army of the Ohio moved into the city. Charged with the military governorship of Tennessee, future president Andrew Johnson worried about the safety of the many Unionists, himself included, living in the Confederate South. To this end, the federal government directed General James S. Negley and Captain Sinclair Morton to build a ring of fortifications around Nashville in the fall of 1862.

The largest fort was planned for St. Cloud Hill, overlooking Nashville’s rail yards in the Gulch and downtown area. This site was an important vantage point from which to monitor the important Nashville and Chattanooga railroad junction, which ran on the east side of the hill next to the City Cemetery. 

But who would build the fort? At the direction of military officials, Negley and Morton forcibly conscripted enslaved and free Black populations in and around the city. Julia Casey, who lived in the shadow of Fort Negley during the Civil War, said that Union soldiers kidnapped her sister and two of her brothers. She recalled this painful memory in an interview with the Slave Narrative Project, which was part of the Federal Writers Project in the 1930s.  

In another instance, Union soldiers surrounded a Black Baptist church during the Sunday service. As parishioners exited the church, the soldiers escorted the congregation to St. Cloud Hill where they were put to work. During the fort’s construction an estimated 600 to 800 laborers perished as a result of the brutal living and working conditions. Other African Americans came to the fort’s labor camps voluntarily with the hope that they would be protected and/or paid by the Union Army.  

Together, they cleared the top of the hill, chiseled massive limestones and hauled the blocks to build what is the largest inland stone fort in the United States. They were not paid regularly and many never saw wages at all. Living on the slopes of St. Cloud Hill, workers often faced food shortages, exposure to the elements, and disease. Here’s Eleanor Fleming: 

FLEMING: I can only imagine that they worked in the most horrendous of conditions, and as an epidemiologist, anytime that I read cholera, my heart skips a beat.

Gary: Yet through all of that, by the end of the war, African Americans had helped the Union Army to build twenty-three fortifications in the city.

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