In the throes of the Civil War, on March 2, 1863, a call crafted by writer and abolitionist Frederick Douglass was put out to enslaved and free African American men to fight for the Union.
“What is life without liberty? We say that we have manhood; now is the time to prove it. A nation or a people that cannot fight may be pitied, but cannot be respected. If we would be regarded as men, if we would forever silence the tongue of calumny of prejudice and hate, let us rise now and fly to arms!”
In Louisville, William Bell answered that call in November 1864 and offered his carpentry skills to construct barracks at Fort Smith in Smithland (Livingston County). He continued his carpentry work in the years following. Bell married and raised two children.
John Collier, who was enslaved at the time, took advantage of the promised freedom if he joined and contributed his blacksmith expertise to the cause. He later became a prominent minister in Kentucky, preaching at the AME church in Barbourville.
Anderson Fields, an enslaved stonemason from Danville, joined the military in the waning moments of the war but continued to serve his country until he mustered out in 1876.
Initially, these men were just names on historical records who joined the Union Army in Kentucky, but a new exhibit at Louisville’s Speed Art Museum brings them to life.
We Will Rise! Kentucky Black Artisans and the Civil War tells their stories, culled from three years of research by Scott Erbes, the curator of the exhibit.
“You’re talking about individuals who really have been forgotten in a lot of ways … and until I started working on this a few years ago, mostly anonymous,” Erbes said. “[It’s] stories of these men who were skilled artisans and then what happened to them during the war. Did they continue in their trade? Many of them did. But did the opportunity of freedom give them a chance to do something new with their lives?”
Erbes began the project after discovering in a history book footnote that recruits listed their trades when they signed up.
“I was so excited to start working on this when I discovered that there were these records in the National Archives … and that alone, to have as an archival record of artisans—particularly free and enslaved Black artisans in Kentucky in the 19th century—blew my mind,” he said.
“From that, it’s just a slow process of sitting at your computer finding their Civil War service records, which are fairly easy to find, and then looking for their pension records, which is a little more plodding ... because most of them aren’t digitized in the National Archives.”
After working with a firm in Washington to pull the documents, Erbes pored through the pension records, some of them nearly 200 pages long for just one veteran.
“For Black veterans, it was doubly hard to get their pension,” Erbes said. “Even when they did … they were often at a lower level than [those of] white veterans with the same service level. And they had to fight twice as hard to get it, too.”
Erbes said that was due to bureaucratic hurdles for these men to prove their identities to government agents. Many changed their last names since they initially were named after their enslaver.
“I mean, they would apply over and over and over,” he said. “It was very much a sort of an institutionalized racist view in the Washington, D.C., pension office about whether ‘can you trust the word of these men that they fought?’ ”
Those documents detail the lives these veterans led after the Civil War. “The details in their pension records were very specific, very personal,” Erbes said. “Like who their children were, the children they have, which children survived childhood, who they were working for, or did they start their own business after the Civil War?”
Now, everyone can know.
“To my knowledge, this is the first exhibition that I’ve encountered in Kentucky focused on this larger group of Black artisans who served in the Civil War, who are patriots,” he said.
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It’s not a regular art exhibit. The work of these artisans was more pragmatic. They were blacksmiths, shoemakers and construction workers. But Erbes didn’t let that stop him from getting their stories out there.
“Museums, which are object based, also need to account for the presence of absence,” he said. “Just because we don’t have the objects, you can still share with our visitors this history and these life stories of skilled artisans.”
Visitors to the exhibit will be engaged visually via historical photographs, reproductions of historical photographs, data visualizations, maps and word clouds, so that viewers can “leave with a memory of just one of those men in the back of their head and what [the artisans] went through and think about how that might affect the way they think about their life today,” Erbes said.
QR codes linking to additional resources will be located throughout the exhibit for further personal research.
The Speed Art Museum created a website containing the enormous volume of information Erbes gained over the past three years. It can be found at
www.speedmuseum.org/exhibitions/we-will-rise.