Echoes of Reconstruction: Camp Nelson—Place of Refuge, Place of Death

Emerging Civil War is pleased to welcome back Patrick Young, author of The Reconstruction Era blog.

I am a fan of the Emerging Civil War Podcast. I was particularly happy this month when I found out that Steve Phan of the National Park Service would be speaking about the new Camp Nelson National Monument in Kentucky. Chris Mackowski and Steve Phan, who is the site’s chief of interpretation, discussed Camp Nelson’s many roles during the Civil War, including its importance as a training ground for Kentucky’s United States Colored Troops. They also briefly touched on Camp Nelson’s role as a refugee camp, and the catastrophic expulsion of African American refugees from the base in November of 1864. That cruel act is the subject of my article this month.

The Emancipation Proclamation set off a great migration of black people from plantation slavery to refuge within the lines of the Union army. Tens of thousands of African Americans made their way past slave patrols and Confederate soldiers to presumed freedom. While the January 1, 1863 Proclamation made them “Forever Free,” it did not provide shelter, food, or health care for slavery’s refugees. It was left to military commanders, whose primary job was to win battlefield victories, to provide for the care of the freed slaves.1

In Kentucky, Camp Nelson was an important refugee center. It was also a crucial military supply depot. The needs of the refugees were subordinated to military necessity. In fact, to gain entrance to the camp, the male member of a family seeking freedom had to enlist in the United States army. In exchange, the man’s wife and children were provided with protection from slave catchers, they were given food and a place to live. Because Kentucky was not subject to the Emancipation Proclamation, this was one of the few ways they could be freed.  Five hundred former slaves lived in the camp by November 1864.2

On October 29, 1864 the commander of Camp Nelson notified his subordinates that “preparatory to the Regiments moving you will turn out of Camp all Negro women and children.”  On November 22, 1864 the expulsions began at the order of Brigadier General Speed S. Fry.3

The order to turn out the refugees was not unopposed by white soldiers. Captain Theron Hall, who knew some of the former slaves personally, wrote at the time that “remembering that these people had followed their husbands and fathers to Camp” and that the “fathers” had enlisted and “were then in the Army fighting for that freedom of which it was by this act [of expulsion] to deprive their families,” he decided that he could not stand by. 4

Captain Hall feared that, cast out from the protection of the fort, the women and children would be re-enslaved. He wrote that he “firmly” believed that “the wife and children of the colored soldier were entitled to protection” by the government for the freedom for which the black soldier “was imperiling his life.” Hall said that given the threat to the lives and freedom of the expelled blacks, “I felt it my duty to interfere.”5

Captain Theron Hall

The army captain called the expulsion order an “outrage.” He wrote that since the “weather at the time was intensely cold, summary expulsion…would occasion untold suffering.” When the captain arrived at camp, most of the freed slaves had already been forced out. Captain Hall wrote to colleagues and superiors to try to reverse the order. He felt that urgent action was needed because he said that the scattered freed people were “literally starving to death.”6

Hall sought out the expelled blacks and found them “sitting by the roadside and wandering about the fields.” He reported that “some have died and all are in a starving condition.” Another Union officer at Lexington Kentucky confirmed Hall’s assessment when he telegraphed that “Colored women and Children…are coming here where there is no shelter for them. They are suffering…” 7

Captain Hall’s defiance of General Fry won a reversal of the order by Fry’s superior. Major General Burbage directed Camp Nelson to readmit the former slaves and he placed Captain Hall in charge of seeing to their welfare. The displaced families began to return to Camp Nelson. This should have been the end of the story but a few days later Captain Hall telegraphed Major General Burbage that he had shown Fry his orders to take charge of protecting the refugees, but that “Fry does not seem disposed to recognize me at all.” Hall reported that in spite of Burbage’s orders to the contrary,  “The guards have positive order not to admit the colored women into Camp. They are turned back at all points along the fortifications.”8

Fortunately, one of President Lincoln’s closest military advisors, Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas, was in Lexington, Kentucky. The tireless Hall went there and was able to speak to him personally. Thomas sent a damning order to Fry the same day:

I understand that you have sent helpless women and children [out of] your lines and that you refuse to receive those who present themselves. It is ordered that you receive all who come and that you take back all you have sent out.9

General Lorenzo Thomas was a military advisor to President Lincoln. In 1863 and 1864 he visited armies in the field to insure that the Emancipation Proclamation freeing slaves was enforced and to inaugurate the recruitment of black troops.

While the crisis was still unresolved, a reporter for the New York Herald filed a story that said that Camp Nelson “has recently been the scene of a system of deliberate cruelty…frail women and delicate children have been driven from their homes by United States soldiers, and are now…literally starving…”10

The reporter described the cruelty of the expulsions; “Armed soldiers attack humble huts inhabited by poor negroes…order the inmates on pain of instant death, and complete their valorous achievements by demolishing dwellings. The men who did this were United States soldiers.” The article tallied the toll “To-day these children of misery are exposed to the pitiless storm. Four are already in their graves; one was frozen to death.”11

The personal statement of a black soldier, Joseph Miller, shows the way one family experienced this dark moment. Miller, his wife, and their four children lived at the Camp. Miller’s wife and children were given “express permission” by an officer to live in the camp while Joseph was in the army. At 8 PM on November 22 Miller’s wife was told that she and her children had to leave the camp before morning.12

Camp Nelson had barracks for white soldiers, and tents and huts, like those on the left, for black refugees.

Miller said that:

The morning was bitter cold….I was certain that it would kill my sick child to take him out in the cold. I told the man in charge of the guard that it would be the death of my boy. …He told me that it did not make any difference. He had orders… He told my wife and family that if they did not get up into the wagon…he would shoot the last one of them.

On being threatened my wife and children went into the wagon. …[H]aving had to leave much of our clothing when we left our master, my wife with her little ones was poorly clothed.13

Joseph Miller went in search of his family that night. He found them six miles away in a meeting house. He said that:

I found my wife and children shivering with cold and famished with hunger. They had not received a morsel of food during the whole day. My boy was dead.14

Miller walked six miles back to Camp Nelson so he would not be arrested as a deserter, leaving his family shivering. The next morning he walked back to them; “I dug a grave myself and buried my own child. I left my family in the Meeting house-where they still remain,” he testified on November 26.15

The United States Colored Troops barracks at Camp Nelson. Camp Nelson was a major base for Union operations in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia. During the Civil War nearly 80,000 soldiers passed through it. Eight regiments of United States Colored Troops (USCT) were organized at the camp.

Miller was not able to get back to his family. For six months he had no news from them. Then he learned that a few weeks after he left them his son Joseph Jr. and his wife had died. A week later his daughter died. His remaining son Calvin died on January 2, 1865.16

General Fry’s order scattering the refugees had cost a Union soldier his entire family at the moment that they had believed that they were finally free.

————

Sources:

  1. Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction by Jim Downs published by Oxford University Press, 2012.
    2. Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction by Jim Downs published by Oxford University Press, 2012; Camp Nelson, Kentucky: A Civil War History By Richard D. Sears published by University Press of Kentucky (2002) Introduction p. ii.
    3. Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction by Jim Downs published by Oxford University Press, 2012 p. 18; Camp Nelson, Kentucky: A Civil War History By Richard D. Sears published by University Press of Kentucky (2002) Introduction p. ii
    4. Camp Nelson, Kentucky: A Civil War History By Richard D. Sears published by University Press of Kentucky (2002) pp. 134-135 Excerpt from Captain Theron Hall’s Report November 23-26, 1864
    5.  Camp Nelson, Kentucky: A Civil War History By Richard D. Sears published by University Press of Kentucky (2002) pp. 134-135 Excerpt from Captain Theron Hall’s Report November 23-26, 1864
    6.Camp Nelson, Kentucky: A Civil War History By Richard D. Sears published by University Press of Kentucky (2002) pp.. 134-135, 137 Excerpt from Captain Theron Hall’s Report November 23-26, 1864, Telegram from J Bates Dickson to Major General S. G. Burbage November 27, 1864
    7. Camp Nelson, Kentucky: A Civil War History By Richard D. Sears published by University Press of Kentucky (2002) pp. 134-137 Captain T.E. Hall to Col. J,S, Brisbane November 27, 1864; J.B. Dickson to Major General S.G. Burbage
    8. Camp Nelson, Kentucky: A Civil War History By Richard D. Sears published by University Press of Kentucky (2002) pp. 137-138, 141-142 Telegram by Maj. Gen Burbage to Brig. Gen. Fry November 27, 1864; Telegram from Capt. Charles Keyser to Capt. T.E. Hall November 27, 1864; Telegram from Capt. J.B. Dickson to Brig. Gen. Fry November 28, 1864; Telegram Capt. J.B. Dickson to Capt. T.E. Hall November 28, 1864;  Telegram from Capt. Hall to Capt. Dickson November 29, 1864
    9. Camp Nelson, Kentucky: A Civil War History By Richard D. Sears published by University Press of Kentucky (2002) p. 141-142.
    10. Camp Nelson, Kentucky: A Civil War History By Richard D. Sears published by University Press of Kentucky (2002) p. 138-140 New York Tribune Nov. 28, 1864 “Cruel Treatment of the Wives and Children of U.S. Colored Soldiers”
    11. Camp Nelson, Kentucky: A Civil War History By Richard D. Sears published by University Press of Kentucky (2002) pp. 138-140 New York Tribune Nov. 28, 1864 “Cruel Treatment of the Wives and Children of U.S. Colored Soldiers”
    12. Camp Nelson, Kentucky: A Civil War History By Richard D. Sears published by University Press of Kentucky (2002) pp. 135-136 Affidavit of Joseph Miller November 26, 1864
    13. Camp Nelson, Kentucky: A Civil War History By Richard D. Sears published by University Press of Kentucky (2002) pp. 135-136 Affidavit of Joseph Miller November 26, 1864
    14. Camp Nelson, Kentucky: A Civil War History By Richard D. Sears published by University Press of Kentucky (2002) pp. 135-136 Affidavit of Joseph Miller November 26, 1864
    15. Camp Nelson, Kentucky: A Civil War History By Richard D. Sears published by University Press of Kentucky (2002) pp. 135-136 Affidavit of Joseph Miller November 26, 1864
    16. Camp Nelson, Kentucky: A Civil War History By Richard D. Sears published by University Press of Kentucky (2002); Camp Nelson, Kentucky: A Civil War History By Richard D. Sears published by University Press of Kentucky (2002) pp. 17-20.

 

 



4 Responses to Echoes of Reconstruction: Camp Nelson—Place of Refuge, Place of Death

  1. General Fry was a brutal racist, like Union Gen. Jeff Davis, and he would have made an SS concentration camp commandant proud. Expelling these poor people into bitter cold was brutal beyond measure.

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  3. The author says:

    “The Emancipation Proclamation set off a great migration of black people from plantation slavery to refuge within the lines of the Union army. Tens of thousands of African Americans made their way past slave patrols and Confederate soldiers to presumed freedom. While the January 1, 1863 Proclamation made them “Forever Free,” it did not provide shelter, food, or health care for slavery’s refugees.”

    Well could it be that had Lincoln not provoked and initiated a war to deny millions of Southern Americans their founding right to a government of their own consent, for the immoral reason of “preserving the Union,” as if that took precedent over human liberty, there would have been no suffering refugees displaced by such an immoral war. This is a glaring omission by the author. These refugees were for the most part not “seeking freedom” as the author implies, but were rather displaced by Lincoln’s war that held no concern for displaced slaves other than Lincoln’s own plan he expressed in the words of a common expression, “let them root hog or die.” That slavery ended as a result of a war for “Union,” a euphemism for economic exploitation and conquest of Southern Americans, lends that war no moral merit!

    Historian James Rutledge Roesch said it best:

    “Slavery was abolished in the worst way possible: as an unintended consequence of a deadly, devastating conquest by outsiders with no interest in the welfare of black or white Southerners. Virginian slaveholder Thomas Jefferson’s fear, that emancipation would be a ‘bloody process…excited and conducted’ by an enemy in wartime, rather than a change ‘brought on by the generous energy of our own minds,’ had come true.”

    Jefferson Davis was right when he stated:

    “War was not necessary to the abolition of slavery. Years before the agitation began at the North and the menacing acts to the institution, there was a growing feeling all over the South for its abolition. Slavery could have been blotted out without the sacrifice of brave men.”

    There is so much omitted in the author’s above quoted paragraph that begins the discussion of the topic. Omission is the means by which most modern historians spin the narrative. By omission here the narrative is spun that the war was a crusade to free slaves who were anxiously awaiting their shining knights in blue.

    A major omission in this piece is the fact that Lincoln had long proclaimed that emancipation was NOT a war aim. And when he did reluctantly turn to emancipate without a colonization plan firmly in place, to rid the country of what he called, “the troublesome presence of free negroes,” it was only as a “war measure.” It was a war measure because its purpose was to keep Britain and France from allying with the Confederacy in its second war for independence. The day prior to Lincoln’s penning his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation (July 12,1862), he had met with seven Union loyal border slave State representatives who certainly told him what they would two days later recount in a letter to him:

    “…. the fact, now become history, that the leaders of the Southern rebellion have offered to abolish slavery amongst them as a condition to foreign intervention in favor of their independence as a nation. If they can give up slavery to destroy the Union; We can surely ask our people to consider the question of Emancipation to save the Union.”

    It is no coincidence that Lincoln moved to proclaim emancipation, only a day after being told the CSA was negotiating emancipation with Britain and France in hopes of gaining their alliance in the war. No wonder he called it a war measure! His emancipation was an attempt to preempt Confederate emancipation and head off any chance of foreign allies joining the Confederacy.

    Lincoln’s war was not necessary to free slaves. Southerners did not want slavery, but found themselves in an inherited predicament of there being too many slaves to simply set free without a humane disaster occurring to the freed people, but also a concomitant social and economic disaster happening to all Southerners. Lincoln admitted all this:

    “I have no prejudice against the Southern people.  They are just what we would be in their situation.  If slavery did not now exist among them, they would not introduce it.  If it  did now exist among us, we should not instantly give it up.  This I believe of the masses of the North and the South. When Southern people tell us they are no more responsible for the origin of slavery than we, I acknowledge the fact.  When it is said the institution exists, and it is very difficult to get rid of it in any satisfactory way, I can understand and appreciate the saying. I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself.”

    Yet Lincoln failed to see it was the determination of he and his Northern constituency to keep blacks out of the North and West that created no place to disperse the Southern slave population where they could have land on which to survive. The South was left to manage so large a population of destitute people on its own. And was being pressured by the North for political and racist reason to end slavery without any consideration as to what inhumane outcome that would mean to the slaves.

    The South’s humanitarian concern can be seen in volumes of statements by the Southern people:

    “The best men in the South have long desired to do away with the institution of slavery, and were quite willing to see it abolished.  But, unless some humane course, based on wisdom and Christian principles, is adopted, you do them great injustice in setting them free.” Robert E. Lee

    “‘If our friends at the north would devise ways in which we could dispose of these poor people FOR THEIR GOOD, I should then no longer be a ‘servant of servants.’” A slave master quoted in A Southside View of Slavery, Dr. Nehemiah Adams. Emphasis mine.

    An Alabama Secession Commissioner summed up the Southern dilemma. The prevailing sentiment was NOT a loss of revenue in freeing slaves, but the humane concern of how to accommodate the freed people. Regarding why he was voting to secede he said:

    “Mr. President, if pecuniary loss alone were involved in the abolition of slavery, I should hesitate long before I would give the vote I now intend to give. If the destruction of slavery entailed on us poverty alone, I could bear it, for I have seen poverty and felt its sting. But poverty, Mr. President, would be one of the least of the evils that would befall us from the abolition of African slavery. There are now in the slaveholding States over four millions of slaves; dissolve the relation of master and slave, and what, I ask, would become of that race?”

    Slavery could have been ended without the terrible cost in human lives for both slave and free people had a Union wide plan of accommodation and integration of the freed slaves been adopted. But the North was having none of that. It simply wanted blacks eliminated from the entire Union. And the first step toward that was emancipation to cut blacks off from the cradle to grave welfare of the master.

    Dr. Nehemiah Adams summed it up precisely:

    “There are, probably, few who would not abstractly prefer free labor; but what shall be done with the blacks?  There has never been a time in the history of our discussions on this subject, when, the South had expressed her willingness to part with the slaves, we at the north could have agreed in what way they should have been disposed of. Who has ever proposed a plan of relief which could in a good measure unite us? What shall be done with the blacks? On the evils of slavery all are well-informed. But as to this essential question we get no light”. (A Southside View of Slavery, Dr. Nehemiah Adams, pp 90, 91)

    No war, no refugees, no subsequent Jim Crow, no lingering civil rights issues.

  4. Very sad story of Camp Nelson. Even if a military situation, it’s odd that the lives of Union soldiers’ dependents would be treated so poorly. Perhaps reflective of an underlying problem…

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