Camp Nelson and Kentucky’s U.S. Colored Troops

Kentucky had stayed in the Union, so the proclamation did not free anyone held in slavery there. In February 1863 the Kentucky General Assembly resolved that the state would not accept emancipation, compensated or otherwise.

By 1864 white enlistment in Kentucky had fallen, and the Army began recruiting Black Kentuckians. For an enslaved man, enlistment brought his freedom. By early summer 1864 the remaining limits were lifted, and Camp Nelson, the Jessamine County supply depot founded in 1863 that has its own story here, became one of eight training centers for U.S. Colored Troops (USCT) in the state.

Recruiting at Camp Nelson began in early June 1864. Eight USCT regiments were organized there: the 114th, 116th, 119th and 124th Colored Infantry, the 5th and 6th Colored Cavalry, and the 12th and 13th Colored Heavy Artillery. On July 25, 1864, 322 men joined the 12th Heavy Artillery, the camp’s largest single day of USCT enlistment.

Enslaved men who set out for Camp Nelson to enlist faced violence on the way. Some were whipped or mutilated, with ears cut off, and mobs attacked recruit columns. On May 23, 1864, Danville residents threw stones and fired pistols at about 250 Boyle County recruits marching to the camp. In Adair County a man turned away from enlisting was severely whipped when he returned home, and in Taylor County some recruits were beaten and jailed.

The opposition had several roots. Many white Kentuckians had backed the Union on the expectation that slavery would survive, and Black enlistment deepened their resentment. Slavery was still legal in the state, so local officials could treat a man headed to camp as a runaway. In March 1865 the Lexington night-watch captain arrested William Jones and his wife on the road to Camp Nelson, took their savings and sent them back to their enslaver; Jones escaped again and enlisted in the 124th.

The National Park Service ranks Camp Nelson as the largest USCT recruiting center in Kentucky and the third largest in the nation. The 116th served in the siege of Petersburg and the Appomattox campaign. The 5th and 6th Cavalry rode on raids into southwestern Virginia, including fights at Saltville and Marion. The 124th, organized for volunteers with physical infirmities and for young boys, did garrison duty in Kentucky.

Families who came with the recruits had no such path to freedom. Wives and children of Kentucky soldiers were still legally enslaved, and the Army repeatedly ordered them out of camp. On November 23, 1864, on the order of camp commander Brig. Gen. Speed S. Fry, soldiers loaded more than 400 women and children onto wagons, drove them beyond the lines in a winter storm, and destroyed their huts.

Fry’s superiors quickly rescinded the order. Of those expelled, about 250 returned to Camp Nelson, and at least 102 of them died in the following weeks and months of exposure and illness. What became of the roughly 150 who did not return is not known. The expulsion drew newspaper coverage across the country and reached Congress.

The Army opened a Home for Colored Refugees at the camp in January 1865. On March 3, 1865, a joint resolution of Congress (13 Stat. 571) freed the wives and children of men serving in the USCT. Until the 13th Amendment, that measure was the only way most Black refugees in Kentucky could become legally free.

The Kentucky General Assembly rejected the 13th Amendment on February 24, 1865. It took effect nationally when three-fourths of the states ratified it on December 6, 1865, and only then did slavery end in Kentucky. By that time 23,703 Black men had enlisted in Kentucky, more than 10,000 of them in regiments organized at Camp Nelson.

Kentucky ratified the amendment symbolically in 1976. The map pin marks the Camp Nelson National Monument visitor center.