Answering the Call: Black Kentuckians and the United States Colored Troops

It’s an early spring morning, and a small group of Black men are sitting around a fire at Camp Nelson just south of Lexington, cooking breakfast on an open flame. They wear Union uniforms made of blue wool, with red piping lining the arms and collars denoting their unit as heavy artillery. As the fire burns, the men stand for roll call. They raise the Union Flag and a silken yellow flag with a Napoleon cannon stitched into it, which resembles the cannon they will soon roll to the fields.

These are the men of the 12th United States Colored Heavy Artillery.

The original 12th United States Colored Heavy Artillery Unit was formed at Camp Nelson in 1864 with 1,500 enlisted men. In 2021, the unit still exists as a reenactment organization and an active military unit designated by the state of Kentucky — though its numbers have dwindled to about 10. Across the nation, only 27 other reenactment groups are dedicated to the United States Colored Troops. The 12th United States Colored Heavy Artillery Unit (USCT) is the only one in Kentucky, and members work to tell a story most Kentuckians and Americans don’t know.

Robert Bell James, 71, of Louisville, James “Jim” Hunn, 81, of Danville, and Sherron Jackson, 68, of Frankfort, have been instrumental in the group for 20 years. Each of them became interested in the USCT around the same time. In 2000, Bell visited Washington, D.C. to see the Spirit of Freedom, a 12-foot-tall memorial to the 200,000 men who served in the USCT, created by Louisville native and sculptor Ed Hamilton. When Bell returned to Louisville and saw Camp Nelson was doing a dedication to the 5th and 6th US Colored Cavalry, he was excited to learn more. When he arrived, he was shocked at the lack of Black faces. “What struck me was, there were … I’m going to say six African-Americans there,” he says. One of them was Hunn. “Jim was in uniform, a friend of his named Benny McCray. There were two African-American vendors, a husband and wife, and my wife and myself,” Bell says.

Hunn became involved after meeting a white man named Tom Fugate who was interested in establishing a USCT unit at Camp Nelson. Jackson also became involved through Fugate, who shared a mutual interest in antique cars. After all three men met, they started writing grants, recruiting and organizing the 12th Colored Heavy Artillery as a reenactment group.

Before they started their research, the three knew little to nothing about the USCT. The lack of knowledge is common among Kentuckians. I did not learn about the USCT until I was a history major in college. In one of my classes, I learned that Kentucky provided the second most colored troops to the Union effort after Louisiana. To most students in the class, this may have not been a pivotal moment — but it made me angry.

I was a freshman in high school in Lexington, Kentucky, when Obama ran for his first term. Racial tensions were high. Some students claimed to be part of the KKK, and others spoke about wanting to assassinate Obama with a bow and arrow. In this climate, I was often one of the only Black students in my advanced classes.

One day in civics class, we were discussing the United States’ history of oppressing minorities, various ethnic groups and women, and I was vocal. In the middle of the conversation, another student interrupted and said, “You should be happy my ancestors freed you from slavery.”

The room grew quiet and my teacher changed the conversation. I felt ashamed, and I had no other information to defend myself.

In the dimmed college classroom, I felt robbed of understanding my legacy. I wanted to learn more. So, like Bell, Hunn and Jackson, I delved deeper into the story of the USCT in Kentucky.

The history of Kentucky in the Civil War is complex. It was a slave state, but as a border state was critical to the Union effort. In 1864, president Abraham Lincoln allowed Black soldiers to join the Union army, buttressing the low enlistment rates of white Kentuckians. The same had been done two years earlier in Louisiana with great success. But this move faced heavy resistance from white Kentuckians who did not want to fight alongside Black men.

In Kentucky, 40,285 enslaved and freed Black people were eligible for the draft, and it is estimated that 24,000 to 25,000 answered the call to join the United States Colored Troops, meaning 59 to 62 percent of eligible Black men enlisted. Across the country, approximately 184,000 Black men fought in the war. These estimates may still be too low, considering the number of Black Kentuckians who ran away to enlist in states such as Massachusetts, Illinois, or Indiana.

According to Western Kentucky University historian Dr. Selena Doss, most Black men who enlisted were fugitives going to recruitment offices throughout the state. Particularly in the Bluegrass region, it was more common for enslaved people to join of their own accord. A famous example of this is Elijah P. Marrs, a minister, teacher, and eventual founder of Simmons College in Louisville, who wrote a memoir about escaping from Shelby County to join the Union. He rallied 27 men to gather pistols and clubs as they marched to Louisville to enlist in the war effort, ready to fight for their freedom.

In western Kentucky, slave owners enlisted their own enslaved people in the Union army to keep up with the enlistment quotas required by the federal government, and Union troops also impressed enslaved people into the army.

Montgomery Greathouse's enlistment papers

While researching my genealogy in college, I learned that my great-great-great-grandfather James (Montgomery) Greathouse served in the 5th United States Colored Cavalry through Civil War pension records filled out by his wife Betsey Greathouse. From the pension records, I searched through the archives and found his enlistment records, which show that, in 1864, he ran away from enslavement in Nelson County, Kentucky, to Louisville and joined the 5th United States Colored Cavalry, which was stationed at Camp Nelson — the same as the 12th Heavy Artillery Unit.

After finding the record, I felt empowered to make a connection between the history I was learning in the classroom and my bloodline. I was happy to know my ancestor and others like him freed themselves.

My ancestor and other enslaved men knew the risks for freedom and were willing to join the war effort. But after enlistment, Black soldiers often faced violence from local whites who lived near Union camps. Black soldiers were often relegated to manual labor and tasks that were not asked of white recruits like building forts, roads and cooking. Even in battle, they experienced heightened levels of violence. After a Confederate victory in Saltville, Virginia, Confederate troops went through Union camps and targeted Black troops, executing 100 of the wounded soldiers and capturing others. Confederate Brigadier General Felix Huston Roberts later bragged about the battle, claiming to “kill nearly all the Negroes.” My ancestor would have been present for this battle, and likely saw many of his comrades slaughtered.

As Black men enlisted in the war, Black women, wives of the Black soldiers, children and those unable to fight also went to Union camps like Camp Nelson and became refugees. Soon, however, they learned freedom was not without mistreatment. At Camp Nelson, Brigadier General Speed S. Fry declined to feed and house the refugees entering in droves. He destroyed the shantytowns they created and forced 124 refugees out into the cold.

The war and the institution of slavery came to an end, but the mistreatment of now freed people did not. Thousands were left to fend for themselves, and Black veterans were not welcomed as heroes. In his Ohio Valley History article “‘We are Mobed and Beat,’” historian Dr. J. Michael Rhynes writes about regulator violence in the Bluegrass Region after the war, noting that “returning veterans of USCT … represented a viable alternative source of community leadership and direct threat to white supremacy when they came home to the Commonwealth.”

Black Kentuckians fled the state because of extra-judicial violence, food insecurity and a lack of job opportunities, housing and healthcare. At the beginning of the war, the Black population of Kentucky was 19.5 percent. In 1870, this number had decreased to 16.8 percent. Today, only 8.5 percent of Kentucky’s population is Black.

My ancestor, Montgomery, was unique in that he stayed in Kentucky, moving to Louisville and beginning a family, but he died suddenly in 1914. His body was found hanging by a rope in a barn. His death was noted as “strangulation by hanging,” and the headline for his death in the Courier-Journal was short: “Aged Negro a Suicide.” According to family oral tradition, his son, Tony, who found him in the barn, suffered from mental illness because of the trauma and was never able to speak about what he saw.

According to the Courier-Journal’s database of Kentucky lynchings, there were none in Jefferson County from 1877 to 1934. But my older family members have told me that there were other young Black men, some cousins, who were found hanging from trees. Their deaths were also ruled as suicides. In Kentucky, there are a lot of histories silenced by ropes swinging from barn rafters and branches.

After his death, Montgomery’s bloodline continued to fight and speak loudly, brashly and boldly. One of his descendants would become the heavyweight champion of the world: Muhammad Ali.

Stories such as those of the 12th Heavy Artillery and my ancestor are not openly celebrated by our state. Historian Dr. Daniel Vivian from the University of Kentucky feels the “era when only scholars knew Black men from Kentucky served in the Union Army in large numbers, is rapidly coming to a close.”

To regain this knowledge, we must understand how Kentuckians — in particular, white Kentuckians — choose to remember the war, and intentionally forget the USCT.

In her book, Creating a Confederate Kentucky, Anne Marshall writes about the 30 years after the Civil War, when “Kentucky developed a Confederate identity seemingly at odds with its historical pasts.” Only 35,000 Kentuckians fought in the Confederacy versus 125,000 in the Union army. But there are over 50 Confederate monuments across the state, compared to just three for the Union and only one to USCT, in a cemetery in Frankfort. Of the few Union monuments, most are dedicated to men who had racist politics. For example, a Union monument in Columbia, Kentucky, is dedicated to Colonel Frank Woolford, who criticized the federal policy of enlisting Black men.

Many of the later Confederate monuments were built by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The UDC worked throughout the South to preserve the memory of the “Lost Cause,” an ideology that romanticizes the Confederacy and slavery. The group used monuments to spread the mythos of a valiant and heroic Confederacy and to preserve white supremacy. A member of the UDC wrote in the Lexington Leader that she believed this work was important to “keeping memories of their fathers and husbands morally pure,” and to ensuring the Black population did not have “false conceptions of the lives of their fathers and grandfathers when they were slaves.” If the Black population felt empowered, it would only “inflame race prejudice among the large class of our Negro citizens.” In Kentucky, the UDC alone erected 12 monuments between 1900 and 1920.

As Kentucky history was revised to memorialize the Confederacy, the stories of the USCT were lost or received limited attention.

For 20 years, Jim Hunn, Robert Bell and Sherron Jackson have been trying to use reenacting as a tool to educate the public. But Hunn says he rarely was asked to speak to students in schools. “You know, all the time that I ever got into the school system to talk about African-Americans in the Civil War is when my grandchildren were in school,” he says. Bell confirms this is not confined to Boyle County: “I spent four years with the Kentucky Humanities Council [portraying] Rev. Newton Bush,” who served in the 5th United States Colored Cavalry during the Civil War. “In that amount of time, I bet I did not go to five schools in Jefferson County, even though I live right here. Most of my talks were in rural counties where there were few or no African-American students.”

Jackson believes there needs to be a change in our education system requiring all Kentuckians to learn of our shared heritage of the USCT. “Where you start is making sure that the curriculum requires it, and then it doesn’t matter whether the history instructor is Caucasian or African-American,” he says.

Genealogical research could provide opportunities for education about the USCT outside of the classroom. Many Black Kentuckians, or those with roots in Kentucky, may have ancestors who fought in the war. Hunn has four within his family, and Bell has a strong possibility of one. The personal connection could be a tool to educate, as it was for me.

Dan Gediman, a radio producer based in Louisville, has a podcast that tells the story of two families dealing with their ancestry and slavery in Kentucky. Gediman made the connection between genealogy and the USCT while having a conversation with Brigitt Johnson about reparations. Johnson, whom he interviewed for the project, told him her idea of reparations would include access to information about where she came from. The erasure of who we are and where we come from still reverberates as a loss for Black Americans. For most Black Americans, knowing where you come from is difficult because, before the Civil War, most Black people in this country were viewed as property, the same as cattle, and their existence was not recorded. I can only find ancestors beginning in 1870, when the census first recorded Black Americans. For those soldiers who joined the USCT in Kentucky and other states, it may have been the first time their existence was noted in the historical archives before the 1870 census.

The conversation with Johnson stuck with Gediman for years, until he connected the wealth of information in USCT records and how, as a white Kentuckian, he could provide easy and free access to them as a form of reparations. He could answer Johnson’s call.

Since the beginning of 2021, Gediman has been working to provide funding and opportunities for the Kentucky African-American Civil War Soldier’s Project. “The vision is that these would be African-American scholars, students doing the research overseen by senior African-American scholars, advised by African-American scholars from area universities who would serve as formal paid advisors to the project,” Gediman says.

The monuments the UDC and others created still stand. But across the state, they are coming down. Three monuments built by the UDC have been removed in recent years. In Lexington, the John Hunt Morgan memorial was removed in 2017, and the University of Louisville removed a Confederate monument in 2016. In 2020, the statue of Confederate president Jefferson Davis was removed from the Kentucky state rotunda in response to the racial uprising across the Commonwealth and the nation following the death of Breonna Taylor.

These removals are an important step, but they do not shine a light on the stories that were lost as a result of their construction. Others are planning to address that issue. The (Un)Known Project, by Louisville poet Hannah Drake, includes a monument on the banks of the Ohio River; footprints representing those of enslaved people seeking freedom across the water will be sandblasted into a sidewalk.

Our ancestors are asking us to tell their stories. Now is the time.

Bell, Hunn and Jackson will continue to walk across the grounds of Camp Nelson, reenacting the battles of the 12th Heavy Artillery as they have for 20 years. Meanwhile, I light candles for my ancestors, particularly, Montgomery Greathouse. I pour them brown bourbon in my Baltimore, Maryland apartment, giving them a taste of home.

We are all choosing to remember in our own way. I hope you will join us.

Jasmine Wigginton.jpg — JASMINE Wigginton

Jasmine Wigginton is a youth worker and a writer from Louisville, Kentucky, and is currently located in Baltimore, Maryland. Through her writing, she explores intergenerational trauma, her ancestors, and the inherent magic of being Black and from Kentucky.

IN THE WORLD, UnaccountedJasmine WiggintonAugust 3, 2021