Right now I’m standing on the largest earthen fortress in the United States, and it’s located here in the great state of Tennessee, about thirty five miles down the road from where a thousand mile walk to Memphis begins. It’s a part of Black history that has everything to do with the Civil War. You’ve heard of Gettysburg. You’ve heard of Vicksburg. The real turning point though, it wasn’t a battle, it was a betrayal.
Two hundred thousand enslaved people betrayed their enslavers by inserting their autonomy and inserting their humanity into a war that was never designed to hold either one. That’s the sentence. That’s the whole argument. Everything after this is receipts.
Stones River wasn’t won by Rosecrans. Stones River was won by men who had everything to lose and chose their freedom anyway, in the face of every law and every social norm that criminalized their autonomy. They did it anyways. Research over MeSearch, so let me show you the paper trail.
RECEIPTS BEFORE RHETORIC: WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED ON THIS GROUND
The Battle of Stones River ran from December 31, 1862 to January 2, 1863, right outside Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Union General William S. Rosecrans and the Army of the Cumberland against Confederate General Braxton Bragg and the Army of Tennessee. Proportionally it produced some of the highest casualty rates of the entire war. Bragg withdrew. Rosecrans held the field. Middle Tennessee went under federal control, and the road toward Chattanooga, and then Atlanta, and then the sea, opened up behind it.
Then came the fort. On January 23, 1863, Brigadier General James St. Clair Morton, chief engineer for the Army of the Cumberland, broke ground on what became Fortress Rosecrans. When it was finished in June of that same year it enclosed roughly two hundred to two hundred twenty five acres behind nearly three miles of earthen wall, with eight to nine perimeter lunettes, four interior redoubts, curtain walls, abatis, moats, magazines, sawmills, warehouses, and quartermaster depots inside. Union engineers designed it to shelter an army and to hold provisions for tens of thousands of men for up to ninety days.
It was the largest earthen fortification built during the American Civil War. Not the largest in Tennessee. The largest, period.
Here’s the part that gets left out of the placard. That fortress never came under attack. Not once. Which means its entire function was logistical. Fortress Rosecrans was the supply base that made the Tullahoma campaign possible, that made the drive on Chattanooga possible, that made the Atlanta campaign possible, that made Sherman’s March to the Sea possible. The Confederacy did not lose because somebody outshot them at a crossroads. The Confederacy lost because somebody out supplied them, and the base that did the supplying was raised out of Rutherford County dirt by Black hands.
Understand what an earthen fortress actually is before you skip past it. It’s dirt. It’s the natural land around you, cut, hauled, tramped, packed, revetted with wood and wire and brick and stone, sloped at angles that eat artillery shells instead of shattering the way masonry does. Masonry forts were already obsolete by 1862 because rifled artillery cracked them open. Dirt absorbed. Dirt held. The most advanced defensive engineering of that war was earthwork engineering, and the people whose intellect the state had criminalized were the ones executing it.
Sit in that contradiction for a second. It was illegal across the slaveholding South to teach an enslaved person to read. Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, Louisiana, all of them had statutes on the books restricting Black literacy, some criminalizing the teacher, some criminalizing the assembly. The same legal order that said these people could not be trusted with the alphabet handed them the geometry of the largest fortification on the continent and said build it by Thursday.
That’s not an oversight. That’s the design. Farr and Yancy would call this an epistemology of ignorance, a knowing that is organized around a strategic not knowing. The state did not actually believe Black people lacked capacity. The state needed the capacity and needed the story about the lack of capacity at the same time, because the labor was worth more when the humanity was deniable.
THE PROCLAMATION THAT SKIPPED TENNESSEE
Now let me correct the record on something, because I would rather be accurate than comfortable, and because the accurate version makes the point harder, not softer.
The Emancipation Proclamation did not take effect weeks after Stones River. It took effect on January 1, 1863, which was the middle day of the battle. Men were dying in the cedar brakes outside Murfreesboro on the exact calendar day the document went live.
Here’s the harder truth. That document did not free one single enslaved person in Tennessee.
Lincoln’s proclamation applied only to states and parts of states in active rebellion as of January 1, 1863. Tennessee was exempted. Not by accident, not by oversight, but by request. Andrew Johnson, then military governor of Tennessee and later the seventeenth president of the United States, lobbied Lincoln to carve Tennessee out, and Lincoln did it. On January 11, 1863, Johnson wrote to Lincoln applauding the decision and saying the exception in favor of Tennessee would be worth much to them. Worth much to whom is the question the archive doesn’t answer politely.
So when I say betrayal, I need y’all to understand the full weight of it. The Black Tennesseans who walked into Union lines at Murfreesboro in January of 1863 were not walking into freedom. Legally they were still property. The federal government they were running toward had just gone out of its way to say the freedom document does not apply to you. There was no legal category waiting on them. There was no proclamation with their name on it. They moved anyway.
Slavery did not legally end in Tennessee until February 22, 1865, by state referendum, and even that came after Johnson’s October 1864 proclamation and a constitutional convention engineered under military occupation. Two full years of Black Tennesseans building forts, burying dead, feeding armies, and enlisting in a war for a freedom the paperwork had explicitly denied them.
Just admit it. The freedom came first and the law came limping after. It always does. The law is a lagging indicator of Black insistence, not a leading one, and anybody teaching it the other way around is teaching mythology with footnotes.
THE GENERAL STRIKE NOBODY CALLS A STRIKE
Du Bois already told us this in 1935 and America spent ninety years pretending not to hear it.
In Black Reconstruction in America, Du Bois argued that what happened between 1861 and 1865 was a general strike of the enslaved. Not a rescue. Not a gift. A withdrawal of labor by roughly half a million people who walked off the plantations that were feeding, clothing, and financing the Confederate war machine, and then carried that labor across the line and handed it to the other side. The Confederacy did not lose its enslaved workforce to a battlefield reversal. The Confederacy lost its enslaved workforce because the workforce quit.
Apply Du Bois right here, on this dirt. Every man hauling earth into a parapet at Fortress Rosecrans in the spring of 1863 was a man not planting cotton in Rutherford County that same spring. Every woman cooking and washing in the contraband camps was a woman not producing value inside a household economy that underwrote Confederate credit. The transfer was double entry. The South lost the labor and the North gained it, in the same motion, from the same decision, made by the same people.
Then stack it. Robinson’s Black Marxism teaches us that antiblackness was never an aberration inside American capitalism, it was the engine. So when the engine walks off, the machine seizes. That’s not a moral victory story. That’s a structural one. Two hundred thousand Black men eventually served in the United States Army and Navy, roughly one hundred seventy nine thousand in the Army and around nineteen thousand in the Navy, which is somewhere near one in ten of the entire Union force by the end. Over half of them had been enslaved.
In Tennessee alone, 20,133 Black men enlisted in the Union Army. That was more than any other state that had joined the Confederacy. Let that number sit next to the exemption from the Emancipation Proclamation and tell me again that these people were waiting on permission.
Lincoln himself, in an August 1864 letter, said flatly that abandoning Black troops would mean the Union could not win in three weeks. He wasn’t being sentimental. He was doing math.
TWO THINGS CAN BE TRUE: IMPRESSMENT AND EMANCIPATION ON THE SAME SHOVEL
I’m not about to hand you a clean hero story, because a clean hero story is just propaganda with better lighting.
Two things can be true. The people who built Fortress Rosecrans were exercising autonomy, and a whole lot of them were also impressed, conscripted, and worked under conditions that looked a whole lot like what they had just fled.
The precedent is up the road in Nashville. In the summer of 1862 the United States Army began seizing Black laborers, free and enslaved, off the streets, out of churches, and off nearby farms to build Fort Negley. Roughly twenty seven hundred to twenty eight hundred laborers went into that project. Estimates of the dead run into the hundreds, from exposure, disease, malnutrition, and the work itself. Many were never paid. The Union Army promised wages and rations and delivered inconsistently, and the promise of freedom that came attached was informal, revocable, and legally unenforceable in a state the Proclamation had skipped.
That’s the same army, the same theater, the same year, the same category of labor, thirty five miles up the pike from where I’m standing.
Apply Hartman here. In Scenes of Subjection, Hartman shows how emancipation reorganized captivity rather than ending it, how the transition from slave to freedman produced a subject who was newly burdened with obligation, contract, and debt without a corresponding transfer of power. The contraband camp is the textbook case. You are no longer property. You are also not free. You are a military asset with a ration card, housed inside a category the government invented specifically so it would not have to say the word citizen.
Apply Wilderson alongside it. The Afropessimist read isn’t that this was a bad policy outcome. The read is that Black positionality functioned as fungible, as available, as the thing that gets moved and used and expended, and that this availability didn’t require anybody’s malice. It was infrastructural. General Rosecrans did not have to hate anybody to put thousands of escaped enslaved people to work on a two hundred acre earthwork. The structure did the hating for him.
Now, Afropessimism is descriptive, not prescriptive. It tells us what the position was. It does not tell us what people did inside it. What people did inside it is the other half of this essay, and it is the half that Cemetery Community answers.
SERGEANT WILLIAM HOLLAND, COMPANY I, 111TH UNITED STATES COLORED INFANTRY
Let me put a name and a whole life on this, because abstraction is how erasure protects itself.
William Holland was born around 1834 on a farm in Todd County, Kentucky. He was enslaved as a young man in Maury County, Tennessee. He escaped. On March 1, 1864, he enlisted as a private in Company I of the 111th United States Colored Infantry.
Understand the timeline. March of 1864 is fourteen months after the Emancipation Proclamation that did not apply to him, and eleven months before Tennessee got around to abolishing slavery by referendum. This man enlisted in an army fighting a war about his status while his status was still legally unresolved in the state he was standing in.
His regiment was assigned to guard railroad blockhouses along the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad, protecting the very supply line that Fortress Rosecrans anchored. Then, on September 23 and 24, 1864, at Athens, Alabama, roughly a thousand men of the 111th, Holland included, were captured by Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Read that again slowly.
Forrest. The same Forrest who commanded at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, on April 12, 1864, five months earlier, where surrendering Black Union soldiers were killed at rates that made Remember Fort Pillow a battle cry for USCT regiments for the rest of the war. The same Forrest who, after the war, became the first Grand Wizard of a Klan founded in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866.
Holland survived the capture. What happened next tells you everything about how the Confederacy understood Black soldiers. He was not held as a prisoner of war in any meaningful sense. He was assigned as a servant to Dr. James Cowan, Forrest’s chief surgeon, for roughly three to four months. A man who had escaped enslavement, put on a federal uniform, and taken an oath to the United States government was captured and immediately returned to the condition of a body that works for somebody else without pay or consent.
Apply Spillers to that. The distinction between the body and the flesh, between the culturally recognized subject and the ungendered, unprotected, seizable material underneath, does not get better because you put a uniform on the body. The uniform was supposed to be the transfer document. The Confederacy simply refused to honor it, and the international laws of war had no meaningful mechanism to make them.
Sometime after the Confederate defeat at the Battle of Nashville on December 15 and 16, 1864, Holland escaped a second time and returned to his unit.
Think about what that requires. This is a man who escaped enslavement once, chose the war, got captured, was re enslaved in fact if not in name, and then escaped again and went back to the war. That is not a person waiting on Abraham Lincoln to sign something. That is a person who had already decided.
THE GRISLY CONTRACT: THREE THOUSAND BODIES AND A STONE WALL
After Appomattox, the 111th USCT got the assignment nobody writes ballads about.
Under Chaplain William Earnshaw, who became the first superintendent of the new national cemetery, the Black soldiers of the 111th began disinterring the Union dead scattered across Middle Tennessee and reburying them at what became Stones River National Cemetery. They started with three known mass graves on the battlefield itself and worked outward, east through Murfreesboro, out to the old Union University grounds and beyond. More than three thousand bodies. Bodies that had been in the ground since the winter of 1862 and 1863.
They also built the stone wall. They kept at both jobs until the regiment mustered out in 1866.
I want y’all to hold the full shape of that assignment. Black men who had been legally defined as property in that state were given the task of gathering, identifying where possible, and honoring the remains of the men who died in the war over whether they were property. The nation could not be bothered to do its own grieving. It contracted the grief out to the people it had spent two hundred years refusing to grieve for.
Then it built a wall around the honored dead, and when Sergeant William Holland died in 1909, at roughly seventy five years old, his grave sat outside that wall. Not because he was denied. Because he asked to be buried on his own land. In 1867 he bought a small tract adjacent to the Hazen Brigade Monument. He got his veteran’s pension in 1897, thirty one years after mustering out. He farmed that ground for over four decades. When he died the federal government honored his request and set a national cemetery headstone on private property.
The man who reburied three thousand strangers picked his own plot. After a life that began as somebody’s inventory, he chose where his body would rest and the United States government complied. That is a small thing that is not a small thing.
His grandson William Harlan, who served as a corporal in the United States Army during World War One, is buried right behind him.
CEMETERY: A TOWN BUILT ON A BATTLEFIELD
Holland wasn’t by himself. He and a bunch of other veterans and formerly enslaved families built a thriving freedmen’s community right on the battleground, and they named it after the cemetery they had filled with their own hands. They called it Cemetery.
There were actually two adjoining settlements inside what people generally called Cemetery, one known as the Cedars and one known as the Bottoms. Between them there were three churches, a school, shops, and farms. By 1910 the community counted roughly eighty people across seventeen households, and at least seventy percent of those households owned the property they lived on.
Seventy percent land ownership. In 1910. In Rutherford County, Tennessee.
For context on how extraordinary that is: by 1870 approximately one in twenty two rural Black households in Tennessee owned land. Cemetery’s people did not just clear that bar, they lapped it, and they did it on the exact ground where the war had been fought over whether they could own anything at all, including themselves.
Nearby, in 1867, leaders from the Gay Street Colored Christian Church in Nashville, principally the ministers Peter Lowery and Samuel Lowery, chartered Tennessee Manual Labor University. It was the only freedmen’s college in Tennessee founded by African Americans themselves, without northern missionary sponsorship and against local white opposition. Classes began in January 1868 with one hundred students on land under cultivation in corn, cotton, and sorghum.
The next time you hear somebody who looks like us say man, that’s the reason why we can’t handle it, because we can’t work together, I want you to think about Murfreesboro, Tennessee. A community built by the very people who had once been property, transforming a killing field into farms and homes and churches and a school. We are able to take lemons and make lemonade, lemon meringue, lemon pie, all that.
Then I need you to keep reading, because the story does not end where the placard ends.
THE SHOVEL AND THE SPELLER: WHAT THIS GROUND TEACHES ABOUT ADULT EDUCATION
Here is the implication for education, and I’m going to take my time with it, because this is my actual field and I’ve got some things to say.
Cemetery School was built in 1874 on donated land. Donated. Not appropriated by the state, not funded by a county line item, not the product of a school board’s conscience. The people gave up their own acreage so their children would have somewhere to sit. Generations of children received their first through eighth grade education in that building until 1962. The final structure, built in 1940, is now on the National Register of Historic Places and is being developed into a museum and cultural center by descendants and community partners.
Ninety years of Black education in Rutherford County that began as a gift from people who had almost nothing to give.
Now here’s the part that matters for anybody who studies adult education, which I do. What happened in the freedmen’s settlements after 1865 was the largest adult literacy movement in American history and almost nobody names it as such. Grown men and women, forty and fifty and sixty years old, who had been legally barred from the alphabet their entire lives, sat down in Sabbath schools and night schools and church basements and learned to read as adults. They did it after full days of field labor. They did it while the same hands that had hauled earth into a parapet were learning to hold a pencil. In many communities the children and the parents learned in the same room, from the same primer, at the same time.
Adult education theory loves to talk about andragogy and self directed learning and the adult learner’s need for immediate application. Apply Freire here and it clicks all the way into place: literacy was never separable from the reading of the world. These were people who understood with total clarity that reading the word and reading the political order were the same skill, because the political order had already told them, in statute, that the two were connected. That is why it was criminal. The criminalization was the confession. Every accusation is a confession, and a law against Black literacy is a law admitting that Black literacy is dangerous to the arrangement.
Then look at what happened to the funding, because this is where the argument becomes contemporary.
Tennessee State University, this state’s public land grant HBCU, established in 1912, was underfunded by approximately 2.1 billion dollars over roughly three decades according to a September 2023 joint letter from the United States Departments of Agriculture and Education to the governor of Tennessee. Not stolen in a single dramatic act. Withheld, quietly, in the annual matching funds the state was legally obligated to provide under the second Morrill Act framework and its successors. Sixteen states got that letter. Tennessee’s number was the largest.
That’s the same mechanism as 1874, just running in the other direction. In 1874 the community had to donate the land because the state would not build the school. In the twentieth and twenty first centuries the state built the school and then declined to fund it at parity for thirty years. The through line is not a feeling. The through line is a ledger.
Woodson said it in 1933 in The Mis Education of the Negro, and it applies with no adjustment: when you control what a man thinks, you do not have to worry about his actions. You do not need a law against Black literacy anymore if you can simply ensure that the schools serving Black students are structurally starved, that the curriculum omits Fortress Rosecrans and Cemetery School and the general strike, and that the graduate leaves believing the freedom was given rather than taken.
So when Tennessee legislators fight over what can be taught about race in a classroom, when districts pull books, when the state debates whether discomfort is a legitimate reason to omit a chapter, understand what the actual stake is. Not feelings. The stake is whether the next generation knows that the largest fortification of the Civil War was built by people the law said could not read, and that their descendants owned seventy percent of the land in a town they founded, and that a federal statute took it. A student who knows that is unmanageable. That is the entire point.
Education Is Elevation is not a slogan I made up to sound good. It is a description of what William Holland’s neighbors did with a donated acre in 1874.
THE PAYROLL THAT NEVER CARRIED HER NAME: INTERSECTIONAL MATERIAL IMPACTS
Now let’s do the part that most Civil War content skips entirely, and let’s do it with rigor, because intersectionality is not a garnish you sprinkle at the end.
Crenshaw’s original intervention was not a vibe, it was a court case. In DeGraffenreid v. General Motors, Black women were told they could not sue as Black women. They could sue as Black people, and General Motors hired Black men. They could sue as women, and General Motors hired white women. The category that described their actual position had no legal existence, so their injury had no remedy. Hold that framework and now look at this battlefield.
Thousands of Black women fled to Murfreesboro after Stones River. They cooked, washed, nursed, hauled, nursed the wounded through gangrene and dysentery, buried the dead the men had not yet gotten to, and kept contraband camps functioning under conditions that killed people. Almost none of that labor generated a pay record. There was no muster roll for a laundress. There was no enlistment date for a cook. Glymph’s work on this is essential, both Out of the House of Bondage and The Women’s Fight, and what she demonstrates is that the war for Black women was fought in the household, in the camp, and over the terms of their own labor, and that the archive was built in a way that does not count it.
Follow the money forward and watch what that missing paperwork does.
The USCT pay scandal is the first layer. Under the Militia Act of July 1862, Black soldiers were paid ten dollars a month with three dollars deducted for clothing, netting seven dollars, while white privates received thirteen dollars a month with no clothing deduction. Nearly half. Regiments protested, some refused pay entirely for over a year, and Congress did not equalize it until June 15, 1864, retroactive only to January 1 of that year for most categories. Holland enlisted March 1, 1864. He spent his first months in uniform underpaid by statute for being what he was.
Now layer the gender. A Union veteran’s pension flowed to his widow after his death. To claim it, a Black widow had to prove a legal marriage. Slavery had made legal marriage between enslaved people impossible, because a contract requires two parties with legal personhood and the law had granted her none. So the Pension Bureau built a special evidentiary process for Black widows, requiring depositions, witnesses, affidavits from former enslavers, and testimony about cohabitation and reputation that white widows were never asked to produce. Women were interrogated about their sexual histories by federal special examiners. Claims were denied over inconsistencies in oral testimony about events from twenty years prior.
That is the material shape of the thing. The man’s service was underpaid by race. The woman’s survivorship was contested by gender operating through race. Neither injury is visible if you only look at one axis, which is exactly Crenshaw’s point, and it is happening on this battlefield within a generation of the shooting stopping.
Then there is Frances Thompson. In May of 1866, white mobs including Memphis police killed forty six Black people, burned churches and schools, and committed documented sexual violence during the Memphis Massacre. Thompson, a Black woman, testified before a congressional committee about being raped. Her testimony is part of the record that helped shape support for the Fourteenth Amendment. Ten years later, in 1876, Thompson was arrested and prosecuted for cross dressing, publicly humiliated, sentenced to the chain gang, and died shortly after. Historians today generally read Thompson as a Black trans woman. The state used her body first as evidence and then as a target.
Apply Moya Bailey here. Misogynoir is the specific location where antiblackness and misogyny fuse into something that is not the sum of its parts, and Thompson’s arc is the clearest possible demonstration. Her credibility was useful to the nation for exactly as long as the nation needed leverage against the South. When the leverage was no longer needed, the same nation criminalized her existence. The Combahee River Collective told us in 1977 that the major systems of oppression are interlocking, and that if Black women were free it would necessarily mean the destruction of all the systems of oppression. Thompson is what interlocking looks like with a name and a court docket.
Lastly, run it through land. When the federal taking came to Cemetery, it did not arrive as an eviction notice addressed to a person. It arrived as a title question. Land that had been passed down without wills, held collectively across siblings and cousins, farmed by widows and daughters whose names never made it onto a deed, became heirs property, which is the most fragile form of ownership in American law and the mechanism through which Black families have lost an estimated majority of their agricultural land across the twentieth century. Women hold the disproportionate share of that loss because women disproportionately outlive, inherit, and hold together the households whose paperwork the system was designed to reject.
The women built the community and the ledger recorded the men, when it recorded anybody at all.
1927: WHEN THE MONUMENT ATE THE TOWN
Here is where I need every single one of y’all locked in, because this is the part that makes the whole essay a different essay.
In 1927 the United States Congress authorized the creation of Stones River National Military Park. The War Department was the responsible agency at the time, and it selected roughly three hundred twenty five acres surrounding the existing national cemetery.
African Americans owned more than half of that land.
Between 1929 and 1932 the residents of the Cedars and the Bottoms were forced to sell and were displaced. The federal government purchased approximately three hundred acres including land belonging to Cemetery Community families. Many landowners objected to the government impounding land their forefathers had worked so hard to acquire. It happened anyway.
Now put the whole sequence together, in order, and do not look away from any step.
Black people were brought to this county as property. Black people escaped, walked into Union lines, and were put to work building the largest earthen fortress in the Civil War, largely without meaningful pay and often without meaningful consent. Black men enlisted from a state the Emancipation Proclamation had deliberately exempted. Black soldiers of the 111th disinterred and reburied more than three thousand Union dead and built the wall around them. Black families then bought that ground with money earned in freedom, founded a town on it, put up three churches, donated the land for a school, and reached seventy percent home ownership by 1910.
Then the United States government created a monument to the battle those same people had helped win, and took the land to do it.
Feel me? The commemoration of the war displaced the people who won it. The memorial required the erasure. Not metaphorically. Cartographically, by deed transfer, in the county register.
This is the two roles frame and it is airtight. What the National Military Park says it is doing is honoring the sacrifice at Stones River. What the National Military Park structurally did, in 1929 through 1932, was liquidate Black landownership on the site of that sacrifice. Both things are true. The second one is the one with a paper trail at the courthouse.
Apply Bell’s permanence of racism thesis and it stops looking like a tragic irony and starts looking like a pattern with a schedule. Apply Mills and the racial contract explains the mechanism: the formal agreement is universal, the actual operation is racially calibrated, and the calibration does not need anyone to say a racist word out loud. Eminent domain is neutral on its face. Eminent domain applied to a Black freedmen’s settlement in Jim Crow Tennessee in 1929 is a wealth transfer.
Then apply Robinson one more time. If antiblackness is the engine of racial capitalism rather than a malfunction in it, then this outcome is not a failure of the National Military Park. It is the National Military Park working. The land appreciates, the story consolidates, the descendants scatter, and eighty years later a family that owned acreage in 1910 is renting in a county where the median home price has passed four hundred thousand dollars.
That’s the compounding. That’s the whole ballgame. Not slavery as a closed chapter, but slavery, then impressed labor, then discriminatory pay, then contested pensions, then displacement, then disinvestment, each one handing off to the next like a relay, which is exactly what Hartman means by the afterlife of slavery.
And here is what survived it anyway: Cemetery School still stands. Descendants like the community members organizing around it are turning it into a museum. Three churches worth of institutional memory endured just beyond the park boundary. The National Park Service, to its credit, now partners with the African American Heritage Society of Rutherford County and with descendants to interpret the community it helped remove. That is not a resolution. That is a beginning that arrived about ninety years late.
WHY THIS MATTERS ON THE ROAD TO MEMPHIS
I’m walking a thousand miles to Memphis. Nashville to Atlanta to Birmingham to Jackson to the National Civil Rights Museum, thirty days, with a goal of registering one hundred thousand voters, because the Supreme Court in Louisiana v. Callais gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and somebody has to put a body on the road about it.
Murfreesboro is right there at the start of that route. Which means I walk past Fortress Rosecrans in the first days.
The rhyme is not subtle. In 1863 Black Tennesseans built the physical infrastructure of a Union victory while the federal government explicitly excluded them from the freedom document. In 2026 Black Southerners are the electoral infrastructure of American democracy while the federal judiciary strips the statutory protection that made their participation enforceable. Same posture. Build the thing, get excluded from the thing, keep building anyway.
Section 2 was the operational heart of the Voting Rights Act. Section 5 preclearance already got hollowed out in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013. Section 2 was what was left, and it was the tool that produced majority Black districts across the South, which is to say the tool that produced Black congressional representation in the region where most Black Americans actually live.
Crazy how the Southern Black Left has been telling everybody this for sixty years and got treated like the unserious wing of the movement. Ella Baker organized in these states. Fannie Lou Hamer built Freedom Farm in Sunflower County, Mississippi, on the theory that political rights without a land base and a food base are a rented freedom. SNCC field secretaries did voter registration in counties where doing so got you shot. Every one of them understood that the vote is downstream of material power, and that material power in the South means land, and that Black land in the South has been under continuous attrition since 1910.
Cemetery Community is the case study. They had the land. They lost the land to a monument. The monument commemorates their own victory.
So when I ask whether your narrative of freedom is made in opposition to Black people or with Black people in mind, I’m not asking a rhetorical question. I’m asking you to audit the actual curriculum you received. Did anybody teach you that the largest fortification of the Civil War was raised by people whose literacy was a crime? Did anybody teach you that Tennessee was carved out of the Emancipation Proclamation at the request of a man who became president? Did anybody teach you that a Black town on a battlefield reached seventy percent home ownership and then the federal government bought it out from under them to build a park?
If the answer is no, then the narrative you received was made in opposition. Not by accident. By curriculum.
FIVE KEY TAKEAWAYS
One. The turning point was a labor decision, not a military one. Du Bois called it a general strike for a reason. Roughly half a million enslaved people withdrew their labor from the Confederate economy and transferred it to the Union, and two hundred thousand Black men eventually served in the United States Army and Navy. Fortress Rosecrans, the largest earthen fortification of the war, never fired a shot in anger. Its entire value was logistical, and it was built by the people the Confederacy could least afford to lose.
Two. Tennessee was exempted from the Emancipation Proclamation at Andrew Johnson’s request, and 20,133 Black Tennesseans enlisted anyway. More than from any other Confederate state. Slavery did not legally end in Tennessee until a state referendum on February 22, 1865. The freedom preceded the paperwork, which means the paperwork was never the cause.
Three. Impressment and emancipation happened on the same shovel. Fort Negley in Nashville shows the pattern clearly: Black laborers seized off the street, hundreds dead, wages promised and frequently not paid. Two things can be true. Autonomy was exercised and it was exercised inside a structure that was still extracting. Hartman’s afterlife of slavery is not a metaphor here, it is a payroll record.
Four. The intersectional injury is the one with no paperwork at all. Black soldiers were underpaid by statute until June 15, 1864. Black widows were forced to prove marriages that slavery had made legally impossible, and were interrogated about their sexual histories by federal examiners to do it. Black women’s camp labor generated no muster roll. Frances Thompson’s testimony built the Fourteenth Amendment’s case and the same state prosecuted her a decade later for who she was. Crenshaw, Bailey, Spillers, and Glymph are not optional readings for this history. They are the only way to see half of it.
Five. The monument displaced the people it commemorates. Congress authorized Stones River National Military Park in 1927. African Americans owned more than half the selected land. Residents of the Cedars and the Bottoms were forced out between 1929 and 1932. A community that had reached seventy percent home ownership by 1910 was liquidated by a memorial to a battle its founders helped win. That is the clearest statement of the racial contract this ground has to offer, and it is written in deeds, not opinions.
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The people of Cemetery donated their own land in 1874 so their children would have a school, because the state would not build one, and fifty five years later that same government took the ground out from under them. I am asking you to fund the version of this that nobody can take the deed to.
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RELATED READINGS AND BIBLIOGRAPHY
Foundational Historiography
Du Bois, W.E.B. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860 to 1880. Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935. The general strike thesis. The single most important reframing of this period and still the one most often assigned in excerpt rather than in full.
Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863 to 1877. Harper and Row, 1988. The standard synthesis. Read alongside Du Bois, not instead of him.
Hahn, Steven. A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration. Harvard University Press, 2003. Essential for understanding rural Black politics, land, and community formation, which is exactly the Cemetery story.
Blight, David W. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Harvard University Press, 2001. On how national reconciliation was purchased with Black erasure. Directly relevant to the 1927 park.
Black Military Service and Emancipation
Berlin, Ira, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, eds. Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861 to 1867. Series II: The Black Military Experience. Cambridge University Press, 1982. Primary documents on pay, impressment, treatment, and the pension process. This is where the receipts live.
Glatthaar, Joseph T. Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Officers. Free Press, 1990.
Manning, Chandra. What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War. Knopf, 2007.
Manning, Chandra. Troubled Refuge: Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War. Knopf, 2016. On contraband camps specifically, which is the Fort Negley and Murfreesboro context.
Black Women, Gender, and the Archive
Glymph, Thavolia. Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household. Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Glymph, Thavolia. The Women’s Fight: The Civil War’s Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation. University of North Carolina Press, 2020. The indispensable corrective on Black women’s wartime labor and refugee camp experience.
Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self Making in Nineteenth Century America. Oxford University Press, 1997.
Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. Source of the afterlife of slavery formulation.
Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987). The body and flesh distinction that makes Holland’s captivity legible.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989, no. 1. Includes the DeGraffenreid v. General Motors analysis.
Bailey, Moya. Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance. NYU Press, 2021.
Combahee River Collective. “A Black Feminist Statement.” 1977.
Rosen, Hannah. Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South. University of North Carolina Press, 2009. The definitive treatment of the Memphis Massacre testimony, including Frances Thompson.
Theory
Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Zed Press, 1983.
Wilderson, Frank B. III. Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Duke University Press, 2010.
Mills, Charles W. The Racial Contract. Cornell University Press, 1997.
Bell, Derrick. Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism. Basic Books, 1992.
Woodson, Carter G. The Mis Education of the Negro. Associated Publishers, 1933.
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Herder and Herder, 1970.
Tennessee, Murfreesboro, and Cemetery Community
Conard, Rebecca. Historic Cemetery Community, Stones River National Battlefield, Rutherford County, Tennessee. National Park Service ethnographic overview. The primary scholarly documentation of the settlement, its land ownership, and its removal.
Lovett, Bobby L. The African American History of Nashville, Tennessee, 1780 to 1930. University of Arkansas Press, 1999. Includes Fort Negley and Tennessee Manual Labor University.
Lovett, Bobby L. The Civil War and Reconstruction in Tennessee. Useful for the Johnson exemption and the 1865 referendum.
Ash, Stephen V. Middle Tennessee Society Transformed, 1860 to 1870. Louisiana State University Press, 1988.
Cimprich, John. Slavery’s End in Tennessee, 1861 to 1865. University of Alabama Press, 1985. The authoritative account of why the Proclamation skipped Tennessee and what happened instead.
Tennessee Encyclopedia. Entries on Fortress Rosecrans, Tennessee Manual Labor University, and the United States Colored Troops in Tennessee.
National Park Service, Stones River National Battlefield. Interpretive materials on the Cemetery Community, Sergeant William Holland, and the 111th USCT.
Contemporary Policy Context
United States Departments of Agriculture and Education. Joint letters to sixteen governors regarding land grant HBCU funding disparities, September 2023. Tennessee State University shortfall figure of approximately $2.1 billion.
Louisiana v. Callais. On the current status of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529 (2013). On the gutting of Section 5 preclearance.
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