Battle of Nashville, December 1864: Black Soldiers at the Decisive Moment

Fort Negley sits on a limestone hill south of downtown Nashville, and from its walls you can look out over a city that Union troops occupied in eighteen sixty-two and held for the rest of the war. The fort was built in part by impressed Black labor, men who were compelled to do the construction work whether they were free or enslaved. It was one of the largest inland fortifications built during the Civil War.

In December of eighteen sixty-four, Confederate General John Bell Hood marched the Army of Tennessee north and positioned his forces on the hills surrounding the city. He had been ordered to draw Union forces out of Georgia to relieve pressure on Sherman's march. What he got instead was one of the most decisive battles of the war.

The Battle of Nashville lasted two days, December fifteenth and sixteenth. Among the Union forces were multiple regiments of the United States Colored Troops, Black men who had enlisted in an army that remained ambivalent about their service, fighting for a city and a country whose laws would not protect them as citizens. One of the most intense engagements involved the Colored Troops at Peach Orchard Hill, where they attacked fortified Confederate positions. The white Union officers who observed the action documented what they saw as extraordinary valor under fire.

Hood's army was shattered. The Confederate Army of Tennessee effectively ceased to exist as a coherent fighting force. It was among the most complete Union victories of the war.

Within a generation, the descendants of the men who fought at Nashville would see segregation reimposed on the city they had helped liberate. The parks would be segregated. The streetcars would be segregated. The lunch counters would be segregated. The students who sat down at Woolworth's in nineteen sixty were, in a direct sense, finishing what December of eighteen sixty-four had started.