The Free and the Unfree

The Free and the Unfree. . During much of the 19th century, those who lived in the city came from all walks of life. Nashville's population was comprised of a combination of independent business owners, slaveholders, poor whites, Irish an german immigrants, free Blacks, and slaves among others. They worked in such wide-ranging jobs as merchants, hack drivers, warehouse hands, house slaves, soldiers, bankers, actors, politicians, horse jockeys, and brick masons. Like the city, the cemetery reflected that diversity., Tennessee was a slave state prior to the Civil War. The practice of interring slaveholders and their bondsmen in a common burial ground was not unusual in private or family-owned cemeteries in the South. The Nashville City Cemetery was a public space, a place owned and operated by local government and included more than slaveholders. Yet burials here followed the same segregated pattern as private cemeteries, even after the war. With a few notable exceptions, most Blacks were interred in several contiguous sections known as the "Negro Lot," almost all south of Central Avenue., Surviving records indicate a few African Americans were buried in other sections of the cemetery. For example, Reverend Calvin Pickett, a trustee at Central Tennessee College, a Freedman's Bureau school established Meharry Medical College (1876), died in May 1898. he is buried in Section 8, near the cemetery's main entrance, along with his wife, Mary, one twenty-five-year-old daughter, and three infant children., One of the earliest recorded African American burials is that of Jeffrey Lockelier, a "free man of colour," and nicknamed Major Jeffrey. Lockelier served with distinction in the Creek and Seminole Wars, and the Wr of 18 12. he returned to Middle Tennessee after the war where he met and married a woman named Sabina, a slave owned by Thomas Sumner in Williamson County. Lockelier purchased his wife's freedom in July 1817 and the court granted her manumission. Before Lockelier died in 1830 at age forty-two, he was visited on his death bed by newly-elected President Andrew Jackson, who was on a trip to Nashville from Washington. He is buried in Section 28.3., Samuella "Ella" Sheppard Moore was born a slave in Nashville in 1851. her father, Simon, was able to purchase his own freedom. He also bought Ella's freedom for $350, and she remained in Nashville. He was unable to do the same for Ella's mother, Sarah, who was sold to an owner in Mississippi. in 1856, when racial riots surrounding the presidential elections broke out in the city, Sheppard and her father fled to Cincinnati. There she studied music and became an accomplished pianist., Left penniless by the death of her father after the war, Sheppard returned to middle Tennessee in 1865, at age fourteen, and entered Fisk University six years later. To pay her tuition she tutored piano students around town before earning a job at Fisk as the school's first African American staff member. With the school in need of financial support she served a pianist for the original Jubilee Singers. Their European and American concert performances beginning in 1871 were successful in raising funds to build Jubilee Hall and expanding the campus to accommodate more students., In 1882, Sheppard married George W. Moore, also a Fisk graduate and minister in the American Missionary Association. With her husband, she began lecturing on "Negro advancement" throughout the South. through her travels she was also able to locate her mother and half-sister in Mississippi. Sheppard removed them to Nashville, where she paid her sister's tuition to Fisk. Ella Moore died on June 9, 1914 and is buried next to her husband in , George Washington Moore, husband of Ella Sheppard, was born in Nashville in 1864 and graduated from Fisk in 1881. Two years later he became pastor at Lincoln Memorial Church and Professor of biblical history and Literature at Howard University in Washington, D.C. As a minister and teacher, he led a successful crusade against saloons in "Hell's Bottom," improving the living conditions of the neighborhood around the church. For more than two decades he served the American Missionary Association as the organization's Southern field superintendent. He died in 1920 and is buried next to his wife in Section 28.9., "Monkey" Simon was born in Africa but brought as a slave to South Carolinaat a young age with his parents. As his nickname attests, he was diminutive in size, just 4 feet 6 inches, and weighted around 100 pounds. His small stature certainly added to his agility as one of the South's premier horse jockeys. In Nashville he rode for Dr. John Sappington, noted as one of the city's first physicians. Many of his races took place at Clover Bottom, a plantation east of Nashville. There he raced against many horses, some of which were owned by Andrew Jackson. His services as a jockey made him well-known and a valuable commodity among the horse racing elite. He died in Nashville's 1833 cholera epidemic. his gravesite in the City Cemetery is unknown because records of burials prior to 1846 were lost., Mabel Lewis Imes was one of the original Fisk Jubilee Singers. Born in 1857, possibly in New Orleans, she was the daughter of a slave and a slaveholder in Louisiana. At age two she was sent to live in Massachusetts with wealthy relatives. Abused, Lewis ran away at ten. She was finally taken in off the streets and sent to school where her singing voice matured. In 1872, Lewis left Massachusetts for Nashville and entered Fisk where she joined the Jubilee Singers at the age of fifteen. She performed with the Singers on their tours of the United States and Great Britain., In explaining the hard life suffered as African American while touring on the road after the Civil War, she once said, "Shall I tell you about the different times when we were turned out of hotels because God took more pains with the making of our people than of others? Is it because He stopped to paint us and curl our hair that we have to suffer for these extra attentions that have been bestowed upon us?", She later moved to Cleveland, Ohio, and formed youth groups that sang Negro spirituals made popular by the Jubilee Singers. Imes died August 8, 1935 and is buried in Section 30., Tennessee State Penitentiary Inmates, The Tennessee State Penitentiary opened in 1831 just a few miles west of the state capitol building. In the summer of 1833, a cholera epidemic that swept through Nashville killed 19 inmates at the new prison. The deceased were buried in the City Cemetery. That year, a quarter of deaths at the state penitentiary were related to cholera or one of several other diseases. In Nashville, half of those buried in the City Cemetery in 1833 died from cholera., All of the prisoners were buried in individual graves. They include:, Jackson C. Thomas, the first of the state inmates to die from cholera, was convicted for theft. He was serving a 3-year sentence. John Delk, with a wife and nine children in Campbell County, was convicted of stealing hogs., John Dougan was from North Carolina. Convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 10 years in prison, by the time of his death he had served 870 days. George Rogers a shoemaker, was a convicted horse thief, a serious crime at the time. Beasley Barbee, a tailor, was imprisoned for a "malicious shooting.", William McCracken, a teacher and peddler, was convicted of forgery. John Yates and Garland Lucas were wagon makers. They were imprisoned for assault with intent to kill and grand larceny., Fifty-eight -year-old Hugh Moore was a Baptist preacher. He embezzled a pension fund created for old soldiers. Miles Allen was convicted of larceny. Thompson Jones and William Baldwin were horse thieves. Gibson Cate was imprisoned for attempted murder. Redding Hall and Samuel Kerr passed counterfeit money. Hazard Kesterson and Abram Powell were serving time for petty larceny, John Morrison for manslaughter and Richard Willis, stealing whiskey., Civil War Burials, In February 1862, Nashville, the Confederate capital of Tennessee, was surrendered to the Federal Army. Union occupation lasted for the duration of the war. During that time, as many as 25 hospitals were created to care for sick, wounded, and convalescing soldiers, both Union and Confederate. Thousands died., William R. Cornelius, a local furniture and cabinet maker who was also in the undertaking business, began the war contracting with Confederate authorities to bury the Southern dead. He claimed to have interred 2,260 Southern soldiers in Nashville, including the City Cemetery. His valued assistant was Prince Greer, a slave from Texas whose Confederate owner died in the vicinity of Nashville. Mentored by Cornelius, Greer was the first recorded African American embalmer in the United States., After the city fell under Union control, Cornelius was employed by the Federal army to inter Northern soldiers. During the war, he opened offices in Murfreesboro and Chattanooga, Tennessee, as well as Stevenson, Huntsville, and Bridgeport, Alabama, and Rome, Georgia. Cornelius asserted that he buried or shipped home the remains of over 33,000 soldiers., The Federal Dead, By mid-1862, the City Cemetery grounds were quickly overwhelmed with the burial of 3,021 Federal troopers. In response, a three-acre area was carved out between the Nashville and Chattanooga and the Tennessee and Alabama railroads. Two years later, Captain John Isom and Medical Director of Hospitals, Dr. William Clendenin, selected 11 acres on the west side of Cherry Street, and south of the Nashville and Chattanooga railroad for two additional cemeteries; U.S. Burial Ground, Due West of City Cemetery; and U.S. Burial Ground, South West of City Cemetery., Between October 1867 and January 1868, the Federal government disinterred 16,485 Union soldiers from original burial sites in Tennessee and Kentucky and re-buried their remains at the newly-created Nashville National Cemetery on Gallatin Pike, north of the city. The "Burial Grounds, near Nashville,", The City Cemetery, Due West and South West, held 8,592 of those graves., The Confederate Dead, In December 1867, the local newspaper ran a column on the "neglected graves of Confederate dead" that challenged the women in the community to honor the Confederate soldiers buried at the City Cemetery. On May 10, 1868, a day of remembrance took place and over 10,000 mourners laid flowers on Confederate graves at both City Cemetery and Mt. Olivet., Less than a year later, the newly formed Ladies Memorial Association purchased a "handsome lot, in the middle of Mt. Olivet, for the final resting place of Confederates who have been buried in the vicinity of Nashville." In May of 1870, a dedication for the 1,360 Confederate soldiers took place. In the years to come, a tall obelisk, topped with a statue of a Confederate soldier, was placed in the middle of Confederate Circle. At the time of the re-burials, markers were not placed on the graves. No interment records have been located at Mt. Olivet Cemetery or in other collections that list the names of those re-interred in 1869 in Confederate Circle., The Black Civil War Experience in Nashville, Over 20,000 Black Tennesseans served in the United States Colored Troops (USCT) regiments. Several of those regiments were comprised of refugee slaves that fled to the city following Federal occupation in February 1862. The initial flux of refugees came from surrounding plantations, where men, women, and children filled vacant buildings around town. To counter the overwhelming number, the Federal army began a process of housing many of the refugees, or contraband as they came to be known, in a camp along the northern escarpment of St. Cloud Hill, that rises above the City Cemetery to the west. Labor gangs from the camp were used to construct fortifications around the city, including Ft. Negley, the largest inland masonry fortification built during the war. Between 600 and 800 of the more than 2700 laborers died erecting these field works. Burial records for those deaths were lost, but some, if not all, may have been buried at the City Cemetery., Over 6,000 USCTs were engaged during the December 1864 Battle of Nashville. The regiments took heavy losses as they attacked the Confederate right on two successive days. Battlefield deaths from the second day, according to records kept by W.R. Cornelius, the Federal undertaker, were buried on the Thompson plantation just north of Peach Orchard Hill, their objective during the assault. Those mortally wounded, and who later died in the army's "Colored" hospital, may have been buried in the City Cemetery in the days and weeks following the engagement.