Fort Negley: Built by the People It Was Supposed to Free
Tennessee
When Union forces captured Nashville in February of eighteen sixty-two, they needed to fortify the city fast. The solution they chose says a great deal about the limits of the Union cause. Military commanders conscripted more than two thousand seven hundred African American men, both enslaved people who had escaped to Union lines and free Black residents of Nashville, and set them to work building a fortress on Saint Cloud Hill. They called the escaped enslaved people contrabands, a legal fiction that let the army use their labor without formally freeing them.
The men built what became the largest inland stone fortification constructed during the entire Civil War. They quarried and hauled sixty-two thousand five hundred cubic feet of stone. They had no tents. One Union officer noted they slept in the open air on the hillside in autumn and winter. Between six hundred and eight hundred of them died during the construction. Only three hundred and ten of the more than two thousand seven hundred workers ever received pay.
The fort was named Fort Negley, after Union General James Scott Negley. It was never seriously attacked, its presence helped hold Nashville for the Union for the rest of the war, making the city a critical logistics hub. The people who built it settled nearby. They founded Bass Street, Nashville's first free Black community after Emancipation, a neighborhood of homes and churches built by the same hands that had raised the fort's walls.
That neighborhood survived for nearly a century. Then, in the nineteen fifties and sixties, Interstate Sixty-Five came through. Urban renewal cut Bass Street in half and eventually erased it. The interstate that links Nashville to the wider South runs, quite literally, through the ground where the fort's builders made their first homes.
Today Fort Negley is a public park, and Vanderbilt University's Fort Negley Descendants Project has spent years documenting the names and lives of the workers. Archaeological study of the Bass Street site is underway as part of a fifty-million-dollar park rehabilitation. The fort still stands. The labor that built it is finally being named.
