The stone is the first thing, and the stone is the last thing. Stand at the parapet of Fort Negley on a clear afternoon and the limestone under your hand is not decorative. It is a block quarried from the hill you are standing on, rough-faced, heavy in a way that resists metaphor. The historian Bobby Lovett, who has spent years studying the people who moved these rocks, told WPLN that it would take at least two people to move one of them. Each boulder, he said, is too big for a grown man to put his arms around.
That is the fact to hold onto. Before Fort Negley is a military ruin, before it is a park or a preservation case or a stop on a Civil War trail, it is a record of how many hands and backs were required to raise a wall. The limestone does not tell you who those hands belonged to. The ledgers do.
The Hill and the Stone
Fort Negley sits on what was called St. Cloud Hill, south of downtown Nashville, and the fort was built from the hill itself. WPLN’s 2012 account of the fort’s construction describes walls made of large stones quarried on site. The city’s own history page calls Fort Negley the largest inland stone fortification built during the Civil War and the centerpiece of Union-occupied Nashville. When it was initially completed in December 1862, according to the historical marker maintained by Metro Nashville Parks and Recreation, it covered 180,000 square feet — more than four acres — of the hill.
The design was a star fort, a Spanish-style configuration that let defenders fire along every approach. Union officers considered it a show of strength. But the engineering is the least interesting thing about it. What matters is the gap between the design and the labor, between the drawing and the ditch.
Who Moved the Stone
Nashville fell to Union forces in February 1862. By August, when the army began building defenses around the city, enslaved people from across Middle Tennessee and neighboring states were fleeing toward Union lines, hoping that proximity to the army meant protection from re-enslavement. The Union called them contrabands, a legal category that acknowledged neither their freedom nor their humanity. And the army needed labor.
According to Angela Sutton’s peer-reviewed dataset article in the Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation (2021), Union troops raided plantations across Middle Tennessee for able-bodied workers. When enslavers hid the people they claimed, the military waited for Sunday and raided Black churches mid-sermon. WPLN’s reporting, drawing on Lovett’s research, describes cavalry surrounding a small church while services were loud and marching every able-bodied person out. The historical marker on the fort’s pedestrian loop quotes a Union soldier who remembered men being apprehended in “barber shops, kitchens and even churches.”
The workers were not only men. Lovett told WPLN that the Union impressed Black women too, and that children as young as thirteen were put to work alongside adults as old as fifty-five. The marker states that eventually 2,768 men were officially enrolled as laborers at Fort Negley. Sutton’s transcription of the Army Corps of Engineers ledger lists 2,869 entries, each line recording a laborer’s name and the name of the person who claimed to own them.
That ledger is the most direct evidence we have of who built the fort. It is also a document of expropriation: a list of people the army treated as property even as it put them to work in the name of the Union.
The Work and the Toll
The labor was not unskilled. Sutton’s article notes that the workers included masons and bricklayers who worked closely with the engineers, teamsters and blacksmiths who moved vast quantities of material into place. Those without prior experience in those trades were classified as unskilled, though as Sutton observes, their prior work while enslaved left them anything but unskilled in labor.
The conditions were lethal. Workers slept on the ground with no tents and little provisions, according to WPLN. There were no outhouses, and the site was contaminated with human waste. The water came from a creek that ran beside the city cemetery. They worked from sunup to sundown, from mid-August through early December 1862, digging, dragging, lifting, blasting, and cutting under armed guards.
The death toll is disputed in its precision but not in its scale. WPLN reports that roughly three thousand were pressed into service and about a quarter died from disease, injury, or exposure. The historical marker states that between 600 and 800 of Captain James S. Morton’s laborers died. Sutton’s article estimates 600 to 800 dead from diphtheria, malnutrition, and exposure — around a quarter of the workforce — and notes that the fortifications were completed in record time.
What the record does not support is the idea that the fort was a site of major combat. WPLN states plainly that the fort was never the site of any real fighting, not even during the Battle of Nashville in December 1864. The walls were raised, and the walls held nothing. The dead were the point.
The Question of Pay
Compensation was slow in coming, and many workers never received any, according to WPLN. The historical marker states that of those who remained after the construction was complete, only 310 received pay. Sutton’s article quotes Major General Stearns, writing in the Boston Liberator in May 1864, who described men working twelve to fifteen months without pay and explained the reason: the War Department could not decide whether the slave or his owner should receive the money.
That is not an administrative footnote. It is the central fact of the fort’s economy. The legal dispute over whether the worker or the enslaver should be paid reveals whose labor the state recognized. The army had promised ten dollars a month, according to Stearns. It rarely paid. The men who built the walls of Fort Negley were treated as a resource to be seized, used, and then disputed over like a debt.
Captain Morton, the engineer in charge, argued for paying the workers directly. Sutton notes that he advocated for payment of all builders, whether they had been enslaved at the time, self-emancipating, or legally free. He lost that argument, or at least the workers did.
The Hill After
When construction ended in December 1862, the workers were released. Some enlisted in the Union Army once it began accepting Black troops. Many stayed in Nashville. WPLN reports that quite a few lived in squalid, under-supplied contraband camps that they eventually transformed into thriving neighborhoods: Edgehill, Edgefield, Jefferson Street. The hill was not just a fort. It was a foundation.
That transformation is the part of the story the city has been slowest to tell. The fort was preserved, eventually, as a military site. The neighborhoods that grew from the labor camp were not preserved in the same way. They were redlined, cut by highways, and subjected to the ordinary violence of urban renewal. The hill the city stopped looking at is not the fort itself, which has a visitors center and a master plan and a trail. It is the connection between the fort and the people who built it, the line from the limestone to the neighborhoods that the laborers made.
It is easier to preserve a wall than to preserve a claim about what the wall cost. The wall is inert. The claim requires someone to keep looking.
Reading the Stone
What would it mean to read Fort Negley’s limestone as a labor record rather than a military one? It would mean standing at the parapet and seeing not a star fort but a ledger in stone. Each boulder too big for one person to lift is a unit of coerced labor. Each course of stone is a day of work performed by someone whose name we may or may not know, whose pay was promised and withheld, whose children may have worked beside them.
The historical marker on the pedestrian loop does some of this work. It names the impressment, the church raids, the deaths, the nonpayment. But a marker is a plaque, and a plaque is easy to walk past. The stone is harder to walk past if you know what it is.
The city’s own history page describes Fort Negley as representing the effects of war, the decisive defeat of Western Theater Confederates at the Battle of Nashville, and the legacy of the Depression-era Works Progress Administration. That is a careful sentence. It mentions the WPA, which rebuilt parts of the fort in the 1930s, but it does not mention the contraband camp or the impressed laborers. The labor that raised the walls is not in the first paragraph of the city’s account. It is in the marker, and in the scholarship, and in the ledger.
What the Ledger Asks
Sutton’s dataset is publicly available through the Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation, and it is the closest thing we have to a roll call of the people who built the fort. It lists names, enslavers, and remarks. It is not a complete record. It is a transcription of a military ledger, which means it records people the way the army recorded them, as labor to be accounted for. But it is a place to start.
The question the ledger asks is not whether the fort should be preserved. It should. The question is what preservation means when the thing being preserved was built by people who were not paid, not sheltered, and not counted as full persons by the government that impressed them. The fort is a ruin now, or a reconstruction of a ruin, and the hill is a park. The stone is still there. The ledger is still there. The neighborhoods are still there, though changed.
What would it take to look at the hill and see all of it at once — the fort, the camp, the dead, the unpaid, the neighborhoods that grew from the camp — without letting any one of those things stand in for the others? That is not a question the stone can answer. It is a question the stone keeps asking.
FAQ
Was Fort Negley built by enslaved people?
Yes, in part. The Union impressed both enslaved and free Black laborers to build the fortifications around Nashville, including Fort Negley. According to Angela Sutton’s dataset article, the laborers included enslaved people who had fled to Union lines, enslaved people impressed from plantations and churches, and a smaller number of free Black people, some coerced and some seeking wages. The historical marker states that 2,768 men were officially enrolled as laborers at Fort Negley.
How many workers died building Fort Negley?
Estimates vary. WPLN reports that about a quarter of the roughly three thousand workers died from disease, injury, or exposure. The historical marker states that between 600 and 800 of Captain Morton’s laborers died. Sutton’s article gives the same range, 600 to 800, or around a quarter of the workforce.
Were the workers paid?
Most were not. WPLN reports that compensation was slow and many never received any pay. The historical marker states that of those who remained after construction, only 310 received pay. Sutton quotes Major General Stearns in the Boston Liberator in 1864 describing men working twelve to fifteen months without pay because the War Department could not decide whether the worker or the enslaver should be paid.
Was there a battle at Fort Negley?
No major combat took place at the fort. WPLN states that the fort was never the site of any real fighting, not even during the Battle of Nashville in December 1864. The fort’s significance is as a fortified position and as a site of coerced labor, not as a battlefield.
Where can I find the names of the laborers?
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers ledger was transcribed by Natalie Goodwin and published by Angela Sutton in the Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation in 2021. The article is available online and includes a dataset of 2,869 entries, each recording a laborer’s name and the name of the person who claimed to own them. The original microfilm is held at the Tennessee State Library and Archives.