ABSTRACT
On the first day of 1866, despite wet, dreary weather in Nashville, black Union soldiers and their regimental band led a parade of several hundred blacks through the city to celebrate the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. The soldiers marched ahead of a wagon crowded with black children and an auctioneer “beseeching the bystanders to bid high for a choice lot of young negroes”—a vivid reminder to black Southerners of how far they had come in so short a time under the protection of their soldiers. In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, such powerful scenes were common across Tennessee. It seemed reasonable for an August 1865 convention of black Tennesseans in Nashville to hope that “our brave and ever to be remembered soldiers” might become “pillars” upon which black Southerners could “climb to greatness and renown.” 1
The experience of black veterans in postwar Tennessee suggests that African Americans would not forget the legacy of their military service. An unsettled question remained for them, however: what would their legacy mean? In Tennessee, the struggle over meaning would produce violent backlash and uncertain bedfellows, but also striking opportunities for black veterans to fellowship with white Union veterans and promote their own understanding of the Civil War’s legacy. 2
In some respects, black veterans in Tennessee seemed as well situated as any black Southerners to advance their own interpretation of the war’s meaning. Pulitzer Prize winner Steven Hahn contends that “by nineteenth-century standards, participation in the military and militia most clearly defied the representation of what it meant to be a slave or abject dependent, marginalized in or excluded from the arenas of civil and political life,” and a remarkable number of black Tennesseans had served. The Union Army gained control of the state’s largest slaveholding districts relatively early in the war, and the state eventually became the site of extensive black recruitment. Ultimately over twenty thousand blacks-a number representing nearly forty percent of Tennessee’s black male population of military age-enlisted in U.S. Colored Troops (USCT) infantry, artillery, and cavalry regiments. 3
Black Tennesseans recognized and praised the role of their soldiers in transforming Southern society, but would white Tennesseans agree? Initially, the state’s white Radical Republicans calculated that keeping ex-Confederates disfranchised would be enough to maintain control of state politics without granting black voting rights, but continued pressure from black Tennesseans and a growing fear that the state would fall into “disloyal hands” eventually led to a change of heart. In February 1867, Tennessee became the first state in the South to give all black males the vote.
