Samuel Crawford fought for freedom

Samuel Crawford is buried in Mayfield’s Oak Crest Cemetery. His birth date is unknown, but he was almost certainly born in slavery. Crawford died on Jan. 3, 1895, having fought decades earlier for the United States in the Civil War. (Photo by Berry Craig)

Samuel Crawford, one of approximately 24,000 Black Kentuckians who fought for their freedom and helped save the Union, is buried in virtual anonymity in Mayfield’s Oak Crest Cemetery.

The Civil War veteran rests for eternity under a ramrod-straight military tombstone at the foot of a towering oak tree. “CO. I 4 U.S. CLD. HV. ARTY.” is chiseled on the white marble slab in the historically African American burial ground. The abbreviations mean that Crawford was in Company I of the Fourth United States Colored Heavy Artillery.

The Fourth Artillery was recruited in Columbus, a strategic Mississippi River port on the western edge of the Jackson Purchase, Kentucky’s westernmost region. 

In 1861, the Confederates turned the Hickman County town into a cannon-bristling bastion they dubbed the “Gibraltar of the West.” But by early the next year, Hickman County  was under Union occupation and remained there until the war’s end in 1865. Columbus became a haven for escaped slaves and the state’s second-largest African American recruit training center. Only Camp Nelson in Jessamine County was larger. (Some of the Columbus earthworks, trenches and a large anchor and part of a heavy chain the rebels used to block the river are preserved in Columbus-Belmont State Park.)

About 179,000 Black volunteers, most of them slaves, served in the Union forces, prompting President Abraham Lincoln to declare in 1865, “without the military help of the black freedmen, the war against the south could not have been won.”

Even so, for decades after the Civil War, almost all white historians ignored or downplayed the key role Black soldiers played in Union victory. Modern historians have done much to correct the omissions and distortions.

Yet some Confederate apologists continue to claim falsely that thousands of Black men fought in rebel gray, though Confederate government officials hotly denied any such thing. “Not only would no slaves be enlisted; no one who was not certifiably white, whether slave or free, would be permitted to become a Confederate soldier,” wrote historian Bruce Levine in the Washington Post. 

(In March, 1865, a month before Gen. Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Virginia, the Confederate government, desperate to stave off defeat, authorized Black enlistment. The plan triggered strong opposition and few Black enlistees signed up. Levine wrote that, revealingly, neither rebel President Jefferson Davis or anybody else who touted the plan “ever pointed proudly to the record of any of the Black units (or even individuals) who purveyors of the modern myth claim were already in the field.”)

Promoters of the “Black Confederate Myth” wanted “to demonstrate that if free and enslaved Black men fought in Confederate ranks, the war could not have been fought to abolish slavery,” wrote Kevin M. Levin in “Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth.”

 “Stories of armed black men marching and fighting would make it easier for the descendants of Confederate soldiers and those who celebrate Confederate heritage to embrace their Lost Cause unapologetically without running the risk of being viewed as racially insensitive or worse,” Levin writes.

The U.S. military was segregated in the Civil War. White officers commanded Black units, which were officially United States Colored Troops, USCT for short. 

Kentucky was a border state that spurned secession. But making soldiers of slaves enraged almost all white Kentuckians, including most of the strongest Unionists. The Louisville Journal, the state’s premier Union newspaper, argued that Blacks and whites “cannot exist in the same country unless the black race is in slavery.” 

In short, most Unionist Kentuckians were pro-slavery and pro-Union. (The state’s Confederate minority claimed only secession could save slavery.) 

Reflecting the sentiment of pro-Union Kentuckians, Frankfort refused to allow “Kentucky” attached to the name of any Black unit raised in the state.  

Black troops incensed Confederate soldiers who were fighting to establish an independent Southern nation rooted in slavery and white supremacy. The Confederates considered Black soldiers in the Union army rebellious slaves.

“Throughout the war, USCT regiments faced a danger that their white peers did not: re-enslavement or execution,” says the Museum of the U.S. Army’s website. “Official Confederate policy refused to recognize African Americans as lawful combatants. Any captured African American Soldiers or their white officers were subject to harsh treatment or execution.”

There were massacres of Black troops. In April, 1864, “Confederate soldiers under the command of Maj. Gen. Nathan B. Forrest executed wounded and captured USCT men after the battle of Fort Pillow, in Henning, Tennessee,” the website says.

Black soldiers also faced hostile civilians statewide, but especially in the Purchase, the state’s only Confederate-majority region.

Though the Columbus soldiers were trained as artillerymen, they were mainly used as infantry, patrolling, fighting gorillas and rebel raiders and guarding outlying roads, bridges and rail lines. At Columbus, they helped white troops guard the post, unload steamboats and load rail cars. White officers praised their conduct under fire. 

The Fourth Artillery mustered out of federal service in 1866.        

Crawford’s headstone doesn’t reveal his lifespan. His birth date is evidently unknown, but he was almost certainly born in bondage. Crawford died on Jan. 3, 1895, during the segregationist Jim Crow era when race discrimination was the law in the South and border states like Kentucky and was underpinned by violence or the threat of violence.

In Jim Crow times, separate-and-unequal status for Black Americans didn’t end when life did. Oak Rest is downhill from then white-only Maplewood Cemetery, where the main entrance gateway is a 1924 memorial to local Confederate soldiers.