Civil War  |  Historic Site

Fort Negley

Tennessee

Fort Negley Visitors Center and Park
1100 Fort Negley Blvd
Nashville, TN 37203
United States

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This heritage site is a part of the American Battlefield Trust's Road to Freedom: Tennessee Tour Guide app, which showcases sites integral to the Black experience during the Civil War era. Download the FREE app now.

Fort Negley in Nashville Tennessee
Fort Negley in Nashville, Tennessee. Michael Byerley

Fort Negley rises south of downtown Nashville — a monument to the risks taken and sacrifices made by many, but particularly Black individuals, on the road to freedom. 

Black men, women and children fled to Nashville from bondage after the Union captured the city in February 1862. Some of these refugees and free Blacks, in exchange for inadequate care and promised wages, helped the Union encircle Nashville with fortifications. Some enslavers, promising payment, offered up enslaved people to accelerate the power of the Black workforce to more than 2,700. Between August and December 1862, many of these individuals built Fort Negley — the war’s largest inland stone fort — with hundreds dying in the process. 

This voluntary and often involuntary service continued with a largely Black workforce maintaining Nashville’s defenses, supporting Union hospitals, building and repairing the region’s railroads, or being recruited or impressed into United States Colored Troop (USCT) regiments.   

Phillip “Cheers” (or “Cheairs”) escaped enslavement at Confederate Maj. Nathaniel Cheairs’ Rippavilla plantation before helping to build Fort Negley and other forts from August 1862 through April 1863. Unlike most of his fellow laborers, he received a $49 payment for this work — the equivalent to about $1,227 today. Months later, on September 15, 1863, he enlisted as a private in the 12th USCT. He helped extend the Nashville and Northwestern Railroad and then guarded that line in Cheatham County where a farmer killed him on November 1, 1864. 

Fort Negley’s guns signaled Federal troops, including an estimated 13,000 USCT soldiers, to begin the Battle of Nashville. Before the battle ended in Union victory, these Black men fought, and some died for freedom. Men of the 17th USCT guarded the fort as the war concluded. Freedmen removed hundreds of Black and white Federal soldiers’ bodies from graves surrounding Fort Negley and reburied them in the Nashville National Cemetery between 1866-1869. 

For some survivors, the contraband camp next to Fort Negley became home. They reconstructed it into the Bass Street neighborhood — Nashville’s first post-Emancipation free Black community. Urban renewal and the interstate uprooted the Bass Street community in the 1950s. 

Fort Negley, having faced similar threats of upheaval, stands strong today as a reminder of the great cost of sacrifices paid by the Black community before, during and after the Civil War — with the aim of gaining and maintaining freedom.

Know Before You Go

The Fort Negley Visitors Center and Park welcomes you to visit and learn more about this UNESCO “Site of Memory,” or you can go deeper on-site or virtually using the Nashville Sites Fort Negley tour.

Related Battles

Davidson County, TN | December 15, 1864
Result: Union Victory
Estimated Casualties
9,061
Union
3,061
Confed.
6,000

The Battlefields Today