TRIGGER WARNING
"...no real way to sugarcoat what had happened at Nashville. Even if much of the city's heavy and medium industry had been evacuated south in anticipation of its fall, it was still a critical strategic target and the Confederacy's command understood the significance of the United States capturing control of the Nashville Basin in May of 1915, perhaps most critically in that it left positions along the Tennessee River to the west unsustainably vulnerable, and a retreat eastwards to a forward base around Corinth, Mississippi was ordered once it was clear Nashville was lost. In one fell swoop, the CS Army was evacuated from almost all of Tennessee west of Dickson County, and the same kind of rapid collapse in order that had been seen in Kentucky followed.
A French observer attached to Confederate command near Jackson, Tennessee remarked in later years that what made lessons from the war difficult for European general staffs to incorporate was the vast size of the theaters involved; only in Virginia, relatively concentrated between the Appalachians and the Chesapeake, did the circumstances even begin to resemble anything approximating a typical European theater of war. The Yankees could not reasonably hope to occupy all of Kentucky and the majority of Middle and West Tennessee, such a task was simply impossible, and so the heavy reliance on small scouting teams - S2s, as they came to be known - as cavalry detachments or driving around on narrow dirt roads in rudimentary automobiles was necessary for patrolling the Confederate countryside. In a scene soon to be repeated in central Virginia and Georgia, the already strained Confederate society living under rationing of supplies as simple as a helping of butter, a paucity of adult men due to the needs at the front and infirm veterans increasingly a burden on meagre resources was not equipped to handle the psychological blow of falling permanently behind enemy lines.
That was way the sudden break of Confederate positions in Tennessee in May and June 1915 started what can best be described as an anarchic civil conflict between neighbors and, most importantly, their slaves. Weapons had a curious way of finding their way into Black hands across the plantations and farmsteads of West Tennessee and the horse ranches south of Nashville as the Confederate Army vanished into thin air and Yankees approached; rumors had already arrived ahead of guns and bullets that Yankee soldiers meant formal emancipation, so the swirling firepower that the land found itself awash in meant informal emancipation until they arrived. Slaves, many of whom had never held a gun before in their lives, shot and killed their overseers and gathered in small groups to defend themselves as they hurried north towards American lines. The white citizenry, engulfed in horror at the idea of the mass slave uprising they had feared their entire lives, responded with a campaign of reactive terror; freedmen in their communities were lynched even without the accusation of a crime simply out of fear that they would join what were quickly becoming known as the "Black Bands," slaves were preemptively sent south ahead of their fleeing masters and those who could not afford to be sent on were summarily executed and left for the advancing Yankees to find.
American soldiers were not of as much help to fleeing slaves as they had hoped, either; they were often marching on fairly empty stomachs after long, brutal and bloody battles and high on victory. Anybody with a rifle was treated as an enemy combatant on several occasions in which excited slaves were gunned down in misunderstandings, and the Army had no orders on what to
do with the "emancipees" other than point them in the direction of Kentucky and tell them to get out of combat areas while they could. Refugee trains wandering north were easy pickings not only for Confederate irregulars and militias but simply hungry brigands; upon arriving in Kentucky, they were often shepherded into camps where they could be held for the time being until the Yankees decided how exactly to process them, and while most were eventually sent further along or volunteered to join American forces and such help was readily accepted, a great many - particularly women and children - starved or died of disease outbreaks in squalid huts and poor conditions as the US Army twiddled its thumbs on whether to send them further north.
The US Army's advance into Confederate territory matched with the formation of defensive Black Bands broke the white locals the most, however, and radicalization was rapid. Lurid stories of Yankee infantrymen encouraging freed slaves to gangrape white women after lynching white men from trees spread like wildfire across Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia along with southbound refugee trains; while there were hundreds if not thousands of instances of rape by American soldiers, it is generally accepted by most mainstream scholarship that Yankee infantry was considerably more restrained in occupation than their Confederate counterparts had been in Maryland and Pennsylvania and that strict orders from generals such as Pershing, Lenihan and Farnsworth to refrain from such behavior were generally taken seriously by junior officers. These kinds of rumors, then, instead represent a specific form of white panic common to Dixie, of the fears of bestial Black behavior, used to justify unthinkable cruelty and violence in a self-convinced form of self-defense. Within weeks of the fall of Nashville it was simply taken for granted that the Yankee army represented a rolling wave of looting, debauchery and the rape of the white Confederate woman by freed slaves taking out their revenge. To understand why the last year of the war came to be seen in the Confederacy in uniquely apocalyptic terms and as a civilizational struggle - compared to, say, Mexico or Brazil, which elected in the interim to find peace agreements they and the United States or Argentina could all live with and get out of the conflict - that they were losing, one must understand the Confederate mindset that was witnessing the collapse of its racial slave hierarchy in real time and its anticipation that "Continental Haiti" was afoot, and that it was this foundational horror finally coming to fruition that motivated the spectacularly chaotic atrocities that erupted behind Confederate lines and evolved into such campaigns of terror such as the Red Summer..."
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A Freedom Bought With Blood: Emancipation and the Postwar Confederacy