By Dr. Marshall Myers
Something happened at Camp Nelson in Jessamine County, the training ground of most “colored” soldiers in 1864. The incident cast a stain on the entire Union effort in the Civil War.
On Jan. 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation that freed all the slaves in the Confederacy but exempted all the slaves in the border states of Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri and West Virginia. Slaves in those states were not freed.
While issued as a “war measure” to deprive the South of the slaves’ labor on bridges and other military installations, Lincoln perhaps naively thought that his generosity by not freeing the slaves in the Border States would lure the Southern states into the Union. Of course, it didn’t.
In April 1864, Lincoln made the decision to allow all men meeting age and health standards from the border states to be freed from slavery as long as they joined the colored troops of the Union Army. Most men who were slaves jumped at the chance at first, but then, they started thinking. Those thoughts dictated what they later would do. Those men who wanted to join the colored troops in Kentucky went for their training to Camp Nelson, a facility near Nicholasville. Kentucky provided more colored troops than any other state except Louisiana, which already was under federal authority.
The exemption of men from the border states gaining their freedom did not extend to women and children, who remained with their owners as slaves.
Such an arrangement didn’t sit well with the men when they thought about it, and it didn’t sit well, especially, with the women and children. Men thought the situation gave slave owners permission to abuse and take advantage of the women. Women thought the same. Incidents of cruelty toward women who stayed with their owners did arise while the men were off at Camp Nelson. Some of the enslaved women and children were beaten, starved and expelled, with nowhere to go.
Many women and children then fled to Camp Nelson and occupied areas near there, hoping to put up shacks and temporary structures and to make enough money to survive by taking in laundry and baking pies and cakes. It was a meager existence, certainly, but they were free from cruel masters and close to their men.
At the time, Camp Nelson was under the charge of Brig. Gen. Speed S. Fry, a white man and Boyle County native. He didn’t waste time making sure that the camp would be run his way.
First, Fry identified all the Black women and children he could and returned them to their rightful masters, assuming the masters wanted them. Shortly thereafter, on July 6, 1864, he telegraphed a commanding officer, asking for an order to rid the camp of women and children “unfit for the service [who] will be delivered to their masters.” In his book Camp Nelson, Kentucky: A Civil War History, Richard Sears writes that Fry received a telegram with the order the following day. Military authorities later claimed that the order was “bogus” and not to be obeyed. The existence of such an order, then, was in question—a question that never was definitively answered.
But Fry thought he had gotten orders. So, he asked his soldiers to harass the women and children on or near the camp. Part of the problem lay with the Union Army itself, which hadn’t developed a clear plan that indicated how the Army was to deal with these “refugees.”
The harassment of the women and children by Fry’s soldiers began in the summer and continued into the fall, with some of the soldiers threatening to tear down the temporary buildings the women and children lived in. Finally, Fry had had enough. On Nov. 26, 1864—an unusually cold and snowy day—Fry’s men under his orders began expelling nearly 400 women and children from Camp Nelson and the surrounding area. Some of them went to a mission house on the route, some went to barns, some went to mule sheds, some languished along the way, and some wandered aimlessly through the woods. All were destitute, with nowhere to go.
When Capt. Theron E. Hall of Camp Nelson heard about this incident, he protested vigorously to Fry—so much so that Fry slapped the captain with an insubordination charge along with a court-martial.
Once Gen. Stephen Burbridge, the commanding officer of the state of Kentucky, heard of Fry’s actions, he ordered Fry to “not [to] exclude any more Negro women and children from Camp Nelson.” To make the “crime” even more humiliating, Burbridge ordered Fry to “give quarters and if necessary erect buildings for them and allow them back all who have been turned out.”
The construction of those quarters would be under the direction of Hall, who had the charges against him dismissed.
Tragically, more than 100 women and children died because of the expulsion from Camp Nelson. The newspapers called Fry’s orders the works of “deliberate depravity and cool malignity.” They hammered at him, asking about the treatment of the families of colored soldiers. The story of the women and children’s expulsion at Camp Nelson was a national embarrassment, questioning the Army’s policies and treatment of ex-slaves.
Camp Nelson Heritage Park, south of Nicholasville, is open Wednesday-Sunday 9 a.m.-5 p.m. For more information, call 859.881.5716 or visit campnelson.org.