John McCline & Clover Bottom Farm

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John McCline was one of sixty people enslaved on the 1500-acre Clover Bottom Farm when he escaped during the Civil War and went on to gain an education and write his autobiography.

McCline lived here with his three brothers and his grandmother. His father, Jack McCline lived in an adjacent county enslaved on another plantation. His mother and sister were dead. Among other tasks, he cared for horses and cattle. He was familiar with the slave cabins (ca. 1858), carriage house (c. 1850s), and mansion preserved on the grounds.

McCline saw soldiers camped here twice during the war, Confederates in July 1862 and Federals in November 1862. On December 18, the 13th Michigan was returning from a foraging expedition when the men encountered the ten-year-old McCline and shouted to him, “Come on, Johnny, and go with us up north, and we will set you free.” McCline jumped aboard an ambulance wagon and joined them. Two weeks later he experienced the battle of Stones River. He spent the rest of the war observing its horrors, driving the regiment’s wagons eventually for wages, and enjoying the adventure “as the happiest of boys,” while also learning to read and write.

After the war, McCline lived in Michigan with several of the soldiers' families, worked in Chicago, returned to Nashville to attend Roger Williams University in 1877, and taught school in Trousdale County. Beginning in 1878 he went west first to St. Louis and ultimately to Santa Fe, where he worked for the New Mexico territorial governor. In the 1920s, McCline wrote about his experiences on the road to freedom, including detailed information about names, family relationships, and occupations of a majority of those enslaved alongside him, in a manuscript later published as Slavery in the Clover Bottoms.