New Citizen Soldiers

In the months after this fort was built, thousands of men from Middle Tennessee joined eight new federal infantry regiments. Black men in blue coats guarded the railroad that fed Fortress Rosecrans and helped garrison Nashville and Chattanooga. By the end of the Civil War, 150 black regiments, called the United States Colored Troops, made up 10 percent of the U.S. Army. Their death toll was high, and from 1863-1865, one third of U.S.C.T. volunteers died while in military service. From the first shots in 1861 up to mid-1863, Union and Confederate leaders both saw men of color mainly as a pool of labor available to support the war effort, and black men built many fortifications for North and South, including earthen walls like these. Frederick Douglass argued that once a black man wore the brass letters U-S, with an eagle on his button, a musket on his shoulder, and bullets in his pockets, no power on earth could deny that he had earned the right to citizenship in the United States. Tennessean Hubbard Pryor enlisted in November 1864 and served as a private in the 44th Regiment, United States Colored Troops.

Murfreesboro, Tennessee · United States