Black laborers who built Fort Negley remembered

NASHVILLE — Jerry Jackson’s brief and little-known life at Fort Negley in Nashville was one characterized by intensive labor, harsh weather, lack of shelter and ample disease outbreaks.

But Jackson, along with the other 12th U.S. Colored Infantry Regiment soldiers stationed there in the 1860s, is also remembered for fortifying the largest Union Army

stronghold outside Washington, D.C., during the Civil War.

A small crowd gathered at Fort Negley Visitors Center on Saturday afternoon to commemorate Black soldiers who helped construct the fort between 1862 and 1864. Gary Burke, a Black Civil War re-enactor in Nashville and descendant of a U.S. Colored Troops soldier, co-hosted the event.

It is unclear how many Black soldiers helped construct the fort. Volunteers planted 2,771 American flags in the front lawn Saturday afternoon, representing the 2,771 laborers known to have worked on the fort between August 1862 and April 1863, said Krista Castillo, a Civil War historian who now works as the site manager of Fort Negley.

Through her research, Castillo pieced together glimpses of Jackson’s life.

Born into slavery, Jackson was sold to work on the Cumberland Iron Furnace in

Dickson County. As the Federal Army inched in, in January 1862, Jackson was sent to Clarksville to work on Fort Defiance. From there, Jackson became part of a mobile labor force building new forts across Middle Tennessee.

Formerly enslaved and still a captive of the Federal Army, Jackson became a laborer, paid $42 for six months of work, Castillo said. He worked at Fort Negley and Fort Morton for a year before moving to the Nashville Northwestern Railroad, roughly 30 miles west of Nashville.

There, Jackson fell ill. His whole body ached as his head swelled to twice its size. His eyes were so swollen he could not open them. Almost a year later, he was hospitalized with smallpox and died on March 1, 1865.

Jackson’s health could have worsened due to hostile living conditions at Fort Negley, Castillo said. Investigators appointed by then-Secretary of War Edwin Stanton estimated in 1864 that 25% of the laborers at the fort “perished from hunger, disease and exposure in just four months,” she said.

“It seems highly probable that the appalling conditions at Fort Negley sapped his strength and weakened his immune system,” she said.

AFTER FREEDOM, HARDSHIP

Jackson left behind his wife, Harriet Curfman, and two children. Curfman became free from her former owner in 1864 and entered a society “hostile” to the formerly enslaved, Castillo said.

In 1891, when her second husband died, Curfman struggled to make ends meet and found herself in desperate need of Jackson’s military pension. However, despite witness statements, investigators denied Curfman’s application due to lack of proof of their marriage.

Curfman could never reclaim the $8 monthly payment in Jackson’s pension, which equals $132 a month today.

“You are talking about people who have never been granted identities their entire lives,” Castillo said. “And all of a sudden, the federal government is demanding that you prove who you are. They didn’t have the means to do that.”

Castillo stumbled upon Jackson’s story by chance. Searching online for Fort Negley-related information early last year, she was surprised to have found digitized pension records for Jackson.

“It really was miraculous, because only 10% of U.S. Colored Troops’ pension records are digitized,” she said.

Stories like Jackson’s were largely ignored, Castillo said.

“Despite their significant participation in America’s most studied war, their stories have been relegated to the footnotes of history,” she said.

But it was exactly those soldiers who contributed greatly to the Civil War, she said. And through labor-intensive duties, they transitioned from the formerly enslaved to paid laborers, Castillo said.

“I feel like just being treated as a human was the important thing,” she said. “It was that transition from a piece of property and having absolutely no control over your life or your destiny to being considered a human with the ability to think freely and move freely.”

Castillo said she is concerned that, under a new state law that prohibits the teaching of critical race theory — which examines racial injustice within the American society and argues white people benefit from it — Jackson’s stories may never be taught in classrooms.

“We must have the wisdom to separate ourselves from the injustices perpetrated in the past and the courage to stand against outrage manufactured for the purposes of perpetuating white supremacy and denying the existence of inequality in the present,” she said.