The Nashville Scene newspaper has a profile today of local African Americans exploring the history of the United States Colored Troops through reenacting. This is a good article that you can read here. Here are some excerpts from the article:
The Battle of New Market Heights and Chaffin’s Farm, as it is now known, was a critical victory for the Union during the Siege of Petersburg. It doesn’t have the broad cachet of the better-known Civil War battles at Gettysburg or Antietam or Fredericksburg, but the victory forced Robert E. Lee to redeploy his troops, sending the siege into the grind of trench warfare for the remainder of the rebellion.
That’s what a military historian would tell you about New Market Heights. But Bill Radcliffe will tell you differently.
“It’s hallowed ground,” he says, tears welling up in his strong eyes as he looks around Fort Negley on a crisp and bright February morning. “Just like here.”
Radcliffe is a United States Colored Troops reenactor with the Nashville-based 13th Regiment of the United States Colored Troops Living History Association. He’s wearing the uniform of the USCT: dark-blue wool, the rank insignia in lighter blue on the sleeves and a matching cap. There’s one award on his uniform, indicating he’s a direct descendant of a Medal of Honor winner.
Edward Ratcliff quite literally fought for his freedom, spilling his blood for a country who said he was three-fifths of a person. Bill Radcliffe, his veins coursing with Ratcliff’s blood, is making sure no one ever forgets.
The story of the USCT was a footnote for too long in American history, the contributions of its soldiers — sometimes just weeks removed from enslavement — consigned to passing mentions in textbooks. Twenty-thousand Tennesseans joined the USCT, the second-most of any state after Virginia. Fifteen USCT soldiers, including Ratcliff, won the Medal of Honor — 14 of them at Chaffin’s Farm and New Market Heights. (Another three Black soldiers also won the award while attached to other units; eight Black Civil War sailors won it as well.) Records show that white officers recommended commissions for many of the Black soldiers after their valorous bravery at the battle. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton ignored them all.
Though President Abraham Lincoln had been authorized to enlist formerly enslaved people since 1862, it wasn’t until General Order 143 was issued by the War Department in May 1863 that the USCT came into being.
Lincoln was concerned about the Union’s tenuous hold on four border states and the political fallout and effect on public opinion that arming Black men would have.
“The Great Emancipator?” Radcliffe says, raising a suspicious eyebrow. “The Great Politician, that’s what he was.”
Lincoln’s generals, however, were facing a manpower problem. The Civil War was bloody and brutal, and as the Union began to take control of more territory, the lines were getting thinner. At first, the USCT regiments were used for tasks like guarding arms depots and rail lines, at the rear of the fighting. Eventually, Radcliffe notes, “All the white boys were dying.” And so the USCT went to the front.
…Many Americans first learned of the USCT via the 1989 film Glory, based on the true story of the all-Black 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment (which, it should be noted, was not a USCT unit). Gary Burke, another USCT reenactor, had his interest piqued by the film. After all, nothing in his textbooks had taught him about these men who took up arms for their own freedom. Insofar as history teaches students about Black Americans during the Civil War era, it’s often focused on rhetorical heroes, like Frederick Douglass or Sojourner Truth, or the Underground Railroad, even glossing over the fact that the Railroad’s most famous conductor, Harriet Tubman, served as an armed scout for the Union Army.
Nor do the texts mention that Douglass was an ardent supporter of Black men joining the military.
“An eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder, and his bullets in his pockets,” Douglass once said, “there is no power on earth … which can deny that he has earned the right of citizenship in the United States.” It’s one of Burke’s favorite quotes, and one he can recite the same way schoolchildren can recite the Pledge of Allegiance or a catechumen can recite the Apostles’ Creed.
Douglass was a great believer that true citizens could not be denied “the ballot box, the jury box and the cartridge box,” and that fighting shoulder to shoulder — at least metaphorically — with their white fellows would serve as proof that Black Americans were Americans in the full sense. “Is he not a man?” Douglass wrote in his newspaper Douglass’ Monthly. “Can he not wield a sword, fire a gun, march and countermarch, and obey others like any other?”
But, of course, it wasn’t that simple.
“The advance of Black people,” Burke says, “threatened white society.”
Burke’s great-great-grandfather Peter Bailey joined the USCT’s 17th Regiment when he was 18 years old, traveling from Lebanon to Murfreesboro to do so. He was 5-foot-4 — one of those tiny facts from history that hits home. Barely an adult in age, he must have looked like a child in his uniform.
…But he was garrisoned at Fort Negley and fought in the Battle of Nashville on Peach Orchard Hill and at Granbury’s Lunette. The latter, on Polk Avenue near Murfreesboro Road, is now honored with a historical marker — as it should have been for decades — because that’s the first place where the USCT actually fought Confederate soldiers.
Attached to Gen. James Steedman’s division, eight USCT regiments were tasked with taking the lunette. It was costly. They suffered heavy losses and failed to take the small fortification.
Ultimately, of course, the Union won the Battle of Nashville, virtually securing the Western Theater for the U.S. But the combination of that action and what was accomplished by the construction of Fort Negley makes Nashville hallowed ground….
Fort Negley was the largest inland fort built during the Civil War and was constructed in large part by former slaves who fled to the Union lines, and freed Blacks conscripted out of Nashville’s churches. After the war, white Nashville mostly ignored it. It was, after all, a Union fort. And Nashville was, after all, a catastrophic and embarrassing defeat for the Confederacy. And after all, it was a place of pride for Black Nashvillians, many of whom settled nearby after the war.
But Black Nashville never forgot — even as it was overgrown, eventually ruined and abandoned — until its restoration during the New Deal. And Bill Radcliffe never forgot.
In 1989, dressed in his period uniform, he took “a milk crate and a blanket” and sat on the balustrade on the anniversary of the Battle of Nashville in December.
“I did it out of respect,” he says. “I didn’t want it to be forgotten. I was reenacting with other men. I traveled and connected with my brothers on the East Coast, and I knew what happened here. It was my way of honoring the soldiers and civilians that built this place.”
So Radcliffe sat. He’d answer questions and tell the story of how Fort Negley came to represent the promise of freedom, the promise of full citizenship. But it was more personal. He said coming to the fort, he had a “spiritual moment.”
“I said my prayers for them. I reflected on what it was all about.”
“Most [Black] people in Nashville are descendants,” says Radcliffe. “People I go to church with are direct descendants. But people in this town tried to just sweep it under the rug.”
Or under concrete and pavement. The future of Fort Negley was threatened in 2018 as part of a high-profile redevelopment project proposed after the Nashville Sounds left neighboring Greer Stadium for what is now First Horizon Park. The project kept creeping forward over the objections of historians and a diverse group of activists, including the NAACP and the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Eventually, after archaeologists found evidence of burials, the project was shelved.
Black Nashvillians insisted throughout the process that they knew there were burials there — of soldiers who were garrisoned there, of civilians who helped build it. They’d heard the stories from their grandparents. It was a known fact in the Black community for more than a century, if only white Nashville would listen.
Radcliffe doesn’t like to talk too much about what he’s accomplished.
He was an extra in Glory, for example, but asking him about it just gets a nod. He was the model for the statue honoring the USCT soldiers buried at the Nashville National Cemetery on Gallatin Pike (it’s the only statue there), but he makes Burke tell that story.
“I guess I got my 15 minutes or so,” Radcliffe says.
“I wonder sometimes if we’re doing any good,” he muses aloud.
He says so often people want to “deny or denigrate” the service of Black Civil War soldiers.
…Burke and Radcliffe agree that the younger generations are better informed about Black history in general and about Black military history specifically, because more has been written, and information is just easier to get.
“We do worry about the next generation, but seeing it up close, it has them wondering and reading,” Radcliffe says. “Kids now are a lot more informed.”
