Unless you’re in one, war is a formidably abstract concept. That’s just a fact. Win or lose, because of war’s necessarily horrific nature, we tend not to think about it very often. And besides, as Americans we can afford the luxury of ignorance. After all, the vast majority of our battles were fought—and, one hopes, will be fought—on other continents, in countries most of us will never visit, on streets that mean no more to us than good magazine pictures. Still, that’s no reason for the city of Nashville to misplace an entire fort.
Well, maybe “misplace” is, in this case, a little misleading—but how else to describe the all-but-secret existence, the almost ghostly life of Nashville’s Fort Negley? As far as hiding places go, Negley’s not in a particularly good spot. Tucked between Greer Stadium on one side, the Children’s Museum and the Cumberland Science Museum on another, and with the heavily trafficked intersection of interstates 40 and 65 buzzing just below, the overgrown, sprawling site sits atop a hill high enough to command a view of the entire city. It’s akin to losing a monster truck in the parking lot of a mall.
“It’s like this huge alien spaceship, and no one knows or cares that it’s there,” says Wes Shofner, former president of The Battle of Nashville Preservation Society, of the neglected fort. “And I think that’s crazy.”
He’s got a point. The remains of Fort Negley are startlingly evocative. Just out of view from the street, hidden behind a small patch of trees, the fort’s crumbling walls spread out into the then-militarily chic shape of a giant star before opening into a courtyard—large enough, in its open air, to fit Fort Nashboro—dotted with hackberry trees. (All of Nashville’s hackberry trees, it’s been said, hail from this spot, descended from the non-native ancestors that hitched rides with the hay bales that were stored here.) From a modern perspective, it is a decidedly un-American sight—most of us are simply not used to seeing the evidence of war on our own soil, however long ago the battle. Maybe that’s why, nearly 140 years later, so few Nashvillians realize that they’re living near the site of arguably the most important battle of the Civil War.
“To draw a historical parallel,” writes the eminent historian (and unforgettably named) Wiley Sword, in his book The Confederacy’s Last Hurrah, “the battles of Franklin and Nashville may well represent the Civil War equivalent of the World War II atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” Questionable hyperbole aside, what Sword is getting at is that, although the Civil War dragged on for a few more sullen months until finally sputtering to a halt in early April 1865, it was the crushing of the Confederate Army of Tennessee in and around the city of Nashville on Dec. 15 and 16 of 1864, that, for all intents and purposes, decided the fate of the country. And it is for that reason, say the preservationists and history buffs—and, lately, a couple of key politicians as well—that the city needs to rediscover and preserve its historically significant past. Well, that and the potential money the city could make.
“Statistically, heritage tourists stay longer and spend more money than any other type of tourist,” says Bob Henderson, the current president of the Battle of Nashville Preservation Society. “[Former Mayor] Bredesen brought it up in a speech a couple of weeks ago, and Mayor Purcell agrees, Civil War tourism could be a great source of revenue for the city.”
Of course, Henderson concedes, there’s a long way to go. For one thing, over 95 percent of the battle area is now privately owned—running through your backyard, for instance, if you live in the Belmont-Hillsboro area or in Green Hills, among other neighborhoods—making true preservation almost impossible. But there is also the fact that no one really knows anything about the battle.
“I bet if you were to just start asking people on the street, most people would say they’d never even heard of the Battle of Nashville,” says Forrest Shoaf, a managing director at the investment banking firm Avondale Partners and an amateur Battle of Nashville historian since his days at West Point. “And,” Shoaf continues, “I’ll tell you why. It’s very simple. We lost.”
But while Shoaf and other historians can go into serious detail—book-length detail, some of them—to back up this reasoning, its straightforward truth is undeniable. Nashville, which had once been considered as a choice to be the capital of the Confederacy, had been occupied by Union forces for nearly three years by the time the Battle of Nashville was fought, and by all accounts, living in an occupied city does not make for fond memories. (Here’s a little known fact: Because a whopping 40 percent of Union soldiers in town had some form of venereal disease, Nashville became, as a last-resort way of controlling the outbreaks, the first city in the United States to legalize prostitution.)
George Gause, who works for the Metro Historical Commission, puts it this way: “Nashville was pretty much raped by the Union forces. There are reports that say that there was not a single tree [left] in downtown Nashville. And by the time it became acceptable to start thinking about the Civil War again in the 1920s and ’30s, country music started to take over, and they just forgot about the battle.”
“Today, the problem is forgetfulness,” Shofner agrees. “While the Old South had to work at forgetting Nashville, the New South simply forgot. And it took.”
But if there’s a woeful absence of general knowledge about the battle that took place literally beneath our feet, dedicated preservationists and historians like Henderson, Shofner, Shoaf and Gause more than make up for our lack of dedicated study and drive. And it’s starting to pay off. Mayor Purcell has allocated approximately $1 million, as part of his capital budget, for a plan to improve the Fort Negley site. (Another $1 million may come next year.) The first phase, Henderson says, will involve some restoration of the fort itself and the development of a trail system to get it open to the public. The second phase will consist of constructing a visitor’s center, though precisely where it will be sited hasn’t been determined.
“That’s always been a dream of ours,” Henderson says of the visitor’s center. “We’ve always wanted to have a focal point, a jumping off point to the rest of the city and to the rest of Tennessee.”
In the meantime, with a little help from groups like the Metro Historical Commission (862-7970) and the Battle of Nashville Preservation Society (www.bonps.org), guided tours are the best way to explore the city’s Civil War past. “We’re haunted by it,” Shofner says. “And we should be.”
