Enslaved and Free Laborers of the US Army in Civil War Nashville: Supplemental Materials and Claims-Making, 1862-1879

The Battle of Nashville was the pivotal conflict of the Civil War. The Union troops required an extraordinary amount of labor to build a system of fortifications, trenches, redoubts and other wartime infrastructure to successfully capture and defend the city. With a mix of enslaved and free laborers, some of whom were impressed and others who volunteered their time and expertise, Nashville became the most fortified city in the war. Previously, the number of laborers necessary to complete such a monumental task was estimated at just under 3,000. The team used two different types of documents to add to this number: One, we extracted information about additional unlisted laborers from military correspondence regarding their claims and the claims of their widows, wives, and descendants. Two, we merged multiple lists created by various Federal officers that kept track of the Black laborers with whom they worked at various sites in and around the city in the Spatial Historian program. Through comparing these lists with the original labor rolls generated by General Morton, the team was able add an additional ~2,000 people to the toll, for a total of ~5,000 laborers who worked on Nashville’s defenses during the Civil War. This article expands on the process of extracting community-sourced data and linking it to previous datasets in order to create the most complete and recent count of enslaved and free Black laborers whose labor and craftsmanship in Nashville’s defenses helped bring the Civil War to its end.