Before the December 2021 anniversary of the Union victory at the Battle of Nashville, a marker was erected near the site of Granbury’s Lunette telling the story of thousands of United States Colored Troops who fought there. The marker is located south of I-40 off Polk Avenue. It is the first erected in Nashville that tells the story of the thousands of African American soldiers who fought against the Confederacy to free their families from slavery.
The story of the erection of Confederate monuments and historical markers during the Jim Crow to reinforce the memory of the Lost Cause is now well known. Less recognized is the century and a half of active resistance by Confederate “heritage” organizations to the commemoration of the Black history of the Civil War and Reconstruction. That has only begun to be redressed in the last decade. Some regions, like Franklin, Tn. have worked actively to tell the Fuller Story of the period, while in other areas historical erasure is still the rule.
I have been to Franklin battlefield and they give the old liberal claptrap. They deny that blacks fought for the confederacy and say the south fought the war to keep slavery instead of the fact that hundreds of thousand confederates fought because the north invaded the south after Lincoln said he would not. Lincoln broke so many things in the constitution he should have been arrested.
Sounds like you got an education at Franklin, Frank.
The Confederate states, as they seceded before Fort Sumter, issued statements identifying the reasons they left the Union. All of the statements cited the defense of slavery as the reason for secession.
Blacks were barred from enlisting in the Confederate army until the last weeks of the war.
Um, these were Union troops.
“If slaves will make good soldiers our whole theory of slavery is wrong…” wrote Confederate general Howell Cobb in January, 1865, urging his superiors to reject the idea proposed during the last desperate days of the war. This suggests that enslaved men had not been used as soldiers by the Confederacy up to that time. Cobb was right; Black men made excellent soldiers and their whole theory of slavery was indeed wrong.