Black soldier rides with ‘devil Forrest’

When Federal forces began to drive across Tennessee in 1862, thousands of blacks, most of them slaves, walked off the plantations and farms and trailed after the long blue columns of Union soldiers because they offered the assurance of safety in numbers and carried the whisper of possible freedom in their haversacks.

Called “contrabands” (Union Gen. Benjamin Butler coined the term), the men served as scouts, spies, blacksmiths, teamsters and general laborers. But they could not serve as soldiers. Not until August 1862, when the War Department, in a radical shift of policy, officially announced that “all slaves admitted into military service, together with their wives and children, were forever free.”

Then, on May 23, 1863, with the butcher’s bill of Antietam, Fredericksburg, Stones Rivers and Chancellorsville requiring payment in the form of new recruits for the badly mauled Union ranks, the War Department issued General Order 143 establishing a Bureau of Colored Troops. Now Union commanders in the South could organize and muster full regiments of able-bodied black men. In Tennessee, more than 20,000 former slaves made their mark and donned Union blue. One of them was William Holland.

Sadly, the historical records of these men, most of whom could neither read nor write, do not exist. But the military pay and pension records at the National Archives in Washington offer a glimpse into the lives of thousands of United States Colored Troops (USCT) too often overlooked by history books.

Tangled web

Holland’s record reveals that his military service was, for the most part, very much like that of most “colored troops” - garrison duty; guarding rail, river and supply routes; and escorting Confederate prisoners to detention camps in the North. But for three months in 1864, Holland experienced the war in a way few, if any, other free black men, could have.

From Sept. 25 to Dec. 25, Holland reluctantly rode with the man Union Gen. William T. Sherman called a devil and worth 10,000 Union lives to capture: the Confederacy´s most notorious raider, Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest.

What tangled web of historical circumstance brought together the former field hand and the millionaire slave trader and plantation owner? What did Holland think about campaigning with cavalrymen who massacred black soldiers at Fort Pillow, Tenn., the previous April, and how did he live to tell the tale? There are answers to some of these questions, and educated guesses can be made about others. However, some answers are lost forever in the loamy soil of middle Tennessee.

Guarding the rails

Holland’s story begins, if his memory as an elderly man is accurate, on Aug. 31, 1831, in Haydensville, Todd County, Ky., the same county that gave birth to Confederate President Jefferson Davis 23 years earlier. By the time the Union Army rolled into middle Tennessee, Holland was working as a farm laborer on land owned by Benjamin Harlan near the town of Cowan, Tenn. Harlan probably had a small spread and owned just a few slaves. Holland says his proper name was Harlan, too, but that he was called Holland in the Army.

Holland’s “official” life picks up when he enlists March 1, 1864, at Pulaski, Tenn. Standing 5-foot-3-inches and weighing 140 pounds, he was mustered into the 3rd Alabama Infantry AD (African descent) at Sulphur Branch Trestle, Ala., and promoted to sergeant in Company I on April 15.

Holland’s unit was reorganized and renamed the 111th United States Colored Infantry on June 25, 1864, and was assigned to garrison duty in Pulaski until September, when it was sent into northern Alabama. Most of the regiment was garrisoned at Athens, but a detachment, including Company I, was sent to the blockhouse guarding the strategic trestle bridge on the Alabama and Tennessee Railroad at Sulphur Branch.

The railway was a critical link in the long Union communications and supply chain that ran from Louisville, Ky., across Tennessee and northern Alabama, and into the ranks of Sherman’s “bummers” ready to march from Atlanta to the sea.

A useful trick

Long and overextended supply lines were blood in the water for Forrest’s band of raiders. Riding under direct orders from Davis himself, Forrest’s column of 4,500 troopers and eight pieces of artillery set out from Tupelo, Miss., on Sept. 16, 1864, to raise havoc behind Sherman’s lines. The three-week raid would bring Forrest and Holland together.

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