DAVID: Jenna Sparks waited. All of Jessamine County waited as officials considered her petition to bring down the Confederate statue. Unfortunately for fifteen-year-old Jenna, the wait was long. As the weeks and months rolled on, people turned their attention . . . as they do . . . to other things—car repairs, dentist appointments, vacations. And in some cases, to another monument. Turns out that the Confederate statue on our town’s Main Street isn’t the only Civil War monument in the county. Six miles to the south of Nicholasville, the historic site of Camp Nelson was rising from the ground. Established by a 2018 presidential proclamation as Camp Nelson National Monument, this brand-new memorial was beginning to capture the county’s imagination. If the Confederate statue is fake history, Pastor Moses Radford says, Camp Nelson is . . . RADFORD: . . . real history. It’s mind-boggling to me. As I keep telling my church over and over again . . . it’s hard for me to believe now what I was taught years ago, that America was founded on the principles of God’s word. It’s hard for me to believe that. There was some guys who had twisted minds who misused the Scriptures for their advantage. And when you look at the history down through the years, under the umbrella of Christianity, there have been a whole lot of folk been mistreated by the superior groups . . . being white Americans over the years. DAVID: He’s still upset with the sanitized version of history told by the Confederate statue. That statue doesn’t tell the true stories of violence: of rapes of enslaved women or expulsions of refugees. About how even the Union was complicit in racial oppression. After visiting Camp Nelson one crisp November evening, Pastor Moses is subdued. RADFORD: Heart-breaking that people have been treated such. Now that’s history in Jessamine County. DAVID: Camp Nelson is real because it tells these disturbing stories. But it’s also real because it’s inspiring. Enslaved people were emancipated there. It was a place of redemption. After the terrible expulsion, the nation said their names. DAVID: The past is never dead. It’s not even past. This is “Rebel on Main.” I’m your host David Swartz. Episode Five: A Rival Monument. PART ONE: BURIED PAST DAVID: Until very recently these tangled stories have been hidden in the white community. Not only hidden but buried—literally buried—by time and soil. MCBRIDE: Today the park is pretty much open grasslands, mowed grass as well as some farther-out areas where hay is grown. [fade] And it’s . . . DAVID: This is Stephen McBride, Camp Nelson’s chief archaeologist. He sure looks the part with his scruffy grayish-white beard, spectacles, sportsman’s vest, and rolled-up sleeves. We’re walking around the Camp, wind whipping around us. I think he’s underselling the scene a bit. It’s not only expansive fields. With its towering old trees, wooden fences, and regal white house, Camp Nelson is beautiful. Especially on mornings when ghostly fog hangs in the air. You can almost imagine troops emerging from the mist. MCBRIDE: When we started excavation, it was private farmland. There was the one residence, which was what the Civil War people called the White House, which was in pretty rough shape. Some tenants were living in it. And they were, I guess, farming or supervising the farming. DAVID: In other words, it looked like so many other properties in the area. There was no sign that in the mid-1860s this Union army camp had been one of the most important Civil War sites in the commonwealth. MCBRIDE: There would have been about 300 buildings here. One to two thousand civilian employees and then anywhere from 1,000 to up upwards of 8,000 soldiers here. And then horses and mules in the thousands that were stored here to be sent elsewhere and then also used here to pull wagons in other either wagons or buggies that were used in maintaining the camp. So it would have been much more of a hustling, bustling place. And actually, one of the larger urban centers in Kentucky at that time. DAVID: If classified as a city, Camp Nelson would have been the third largest in the state, trailing only Louisville and Lexington. So big, in fact, that it had its own bakery, machine shop, and hospital. Even its own prison. MCBRIDE: It wasn’t really a POW camp. It was really a jail for Union soldiers and civilians that had committed crimes. They had a jail inside a stockade where prisoners were kept. DAVID: The kind of crimes they would have committed . . . MCBRIDE: . . . were drunkenness, gambling, theft, murder, buying liquor illegally. DAVID: Like most military installations, Camp Nelson was a rough-and-tumble site with big noises and a big stench. MCBRIDE: It would have been a loud, active, probably kind of smelly place with all the horses and mules, some cattle as well that were kept for food. DAVID: For soldiers in the right part of the camp, the smells were good. MCBRIDE: There was a bakery to the south of us which baked 10,000 rations of bread every day. So that probably added to the aroma around here as well, a kind of a yeasty smell. DAVID: So the sounds that we’re hearing right now are from cars and trucks going down Route 27. And we’re hearing a leaf blower and those kinds of modern sounds. . . What was the ambient sound of 1864? MCBRIDE: Probably wagons going by, people talking. There was a government shop where they had farriers and other blacksmiths and maybe hammering occasionally. Archaeological evidence of the south end of the Camp suggests that there was a moderate amount of rifle-firing target practice down there that was up against a hillside. So some gunfire, bugles announcing changes of guard or time for dinner or what have you. DAVID: Now that’s hard to imagine. It‘s a peaceful, wide-open place. A perfect place to have a picnic and toss a frisbee. DAVID: So if you’re not an archaeologist or a local historian, you don’t know that anything happened there. MCBRIDE: Right. Right. And if you just drive down the road today, you’d see some signs. DAVID: He’s talking about a couple of road signs—you know, those old historical markers with gold trim, the ones easy to miss when you’re speeding past at 65 miles an hour. MCBRIDE: But if you didn’t stop, you wouldn’t know what that story was necessarily. DAVID: Even if you do stop and read the signs, it’s still hard to grasp this place—just how polluted and smelly and enormous and exciting Camp Nelson was. In the last year of the Civil War, 80,000 soldiers passed through its gates on their way south to crush the Confederacy. McBride explains where all the people and buildings went. MCBRIDE: Soon after the army vacated . . . DAVID: That would have been soon after the end of the war in 1865. MCBRIDE: . . . many of the buildings were put up for auction, and people purchased them and then took them down and took the lumber elsewhere. DAVID: Within a year, only one building remained: the antebellum plantation house. Most other visible evidence of Camp Nelson was gone. Also gone, in the following decades, were public memories of the Black soldiers and refugees. Their descendants remained in a tiny hamlet at the site of the old Camp. But most early histories erased them as Jim Crow solidified. And then the Black residents began to leave. By the 1990s, the historic community looked almost like a ghost town. But lately, Camp Nelson has been changing. I talked about this with Robert Gates, pastor of the Historic First Baptist Church of Camp Nelson. DAVID: As I was driving in this morning, I was noticing all these big fancy houses that have gone up. I mean, what it feels like to me is that this community is gentrifying. Am I seeing that right? GATES: You are correct. DAVID: And is it mostly white people coming in and building? GATES: Right now, over in that area that you see, it’s white. Right now, the African American population of Camp Nelson is 1-2-3-4-5-6-7. DAVID: That’s just seven homes—out of maybe twenty-five—in what used to be a completely Black area. GATES: And at that time, all of this, all this down here was African American. And because of, you know, because of the job situation, they moved away. And what happens? Every time they don’t want to live beside you. But when they see you no longer there, then they want what you got. DAVID: So white folks got the land. They also got the history. GATES: It was told to me that the only thing that they said about Camp Nelson out here on 27 was a little bitty sign, was little bitty sign. And that was it. DAVID: Rev. Gates is referring to the historical marker put up in the 1970s. It was basically a short biography of William Bull Nelson. He was a Union general—and a high-handed bully with a sharp tongue who was shot by a fellow Union general he had insulted. That’s who the camp was named after. But there was no mention at all of an African-American connection. GATES: Never told the story. And the people who was in charge been doing it for forever and ever and ever, and the light did not come on. The light did not come on. There was never a Black presence. DAVID: Aside from the Confederate statue on Main Street and the big white house at Camp Nelson, that small sign by the road was the only visible reminder that anything had happened here during the Civil War. But occasionally, reminders of the war surfaced. One metal detectorist found a set of wedding rings, one locked inside the other. It was a kind of memorial to the nearly one-hundred thousand soldiers who had once lived and loved here. He also found buttons and bullets and bayonets and canteens. In 1929 a farmer plowed up a cannon ball. But that ball did not have a partisan identity—at least not to many white residents. They knew that the Civil War had been fought in their backyard, but many did not really distinguish between Union and Confederate. Some even got them completely mixed up. McBride, the archaeologist, discovered this on one of his first digs in the 1980s. MCBRIDE: You know, we’d get people stopping by. And this one lady stopped by, a local, and asked me what we were doing. DAVID: McBride told her he was digging up Camp Nelson. MCBRIDE: She got excited and then said, you know, one of her ancestors had been there. And I said, oh that’s cool. And then I don’t remember how I let it slip out. But I said, you know, which Union regiment was he in? And she got really aggravated and said, “Well, he was in the Confederate Army.” And I said, “Well, this was a Union camp. There weren’t any Confederate troops here unless they were in prison.” [chuckle] And she got pretty irate and then stormed off and got in her car, and that was that. [laughter] DAVID: He’s laughing, but this exchange made McBride a little irate himself—as much as this mild scholar ever gets. And it drove him to action. In the 1990s he embarked on a quest to remind white people about Jessamine County’s Black history. Over the next decades, his excavations of Camp Nelson would attempt to emancipate the county . . . from the Lost Cause. PART TWO: UNEARTHING THE PAST DAVID: The Civil War wasn’t really on McBride’s radar when he was a kid. He had grown up watching National Geographic specials on his family’s black-and-white television. And his favorite episodes had to do with old stuff, the very oldest stuff. Fossil humans, to be exact. His childhood heroes were Mary and Louis Leakey, who discovered a 20-million-year-old skull in the gully of an island near Lake Victoria, Kenya. He hoped to do what they did. McBride’s dreams came mostly true. After college, he got a job working for the University of Kentucky. That brought him to archaeological digs at Camp Nelson. MCBRIDE: It was a grant. And we came down to do that and then stayed. [chuckle] One thing led to another. DAVID: And McBride never left. It turned out to be a wild ride, one that for him was just as exciting as digging for hominids in Africa. But it began in the most mundane manner possible: road construction. Hoping to encourage economic growth, Jessamine County made plans to widen a treacherous four-mile-stretch of Rt. 27. This road was becoming an important link between Lexington and southern Kentucky, and the existing two-lane road could not accommodate the growing volume of tractor trailers and commuters. And the traffic was projected to triple over the next thirty years. Jessamine County was the second-fastest growing county in the state. Everyone loved the idea of the new road—except for McBride. The problem . . . was that the new road would run right through Camp Nelson. MCBRIDE: And I was like, you know, a little bit upset about it and thinking maybe they could move the road to somewhere else, and I went and talked to someone about that, and he said no, because they had already built the four-lane bridge across the river back in the 1970s. DAVID: But McBride refused to take that no for an answer. He showed up at the Kentucky Heritage Council with archival documents, including an 1866 map that had lots and lots of buildings on it. It was called the Miller Map, and it proved the existence of an elaborate military camp. Clearly, there was more to Camp Nelson than just the lone surviving plantation house. The Heritage Council listened. They didn’t entirely stop the project, but they delayed it. And a final ruling by the Department of the Interior gave McBride one year to excavate. DAVID: In your judgment, do you think a year was enough to do what you needed to do? MCBRIDE: Of course not! [laughter] Of course not. DAVID: But a year was what he had. So he got to work. MCBRIDE: You do what’s called shovel test pits. These are small pits, either about 30 centimeters or up to 50 centimeters at a regular interval across the right of way. And you dig those with a shovel and look at the soils for stratigraphy. DAVID: Stratigraphy means layers of stuff. Think of making lasagna. You start with the sauce, then layer pasta, add some cheese, another piece of pasta, more cheese—and so on. These ingredients are soil and debris that pile on top of each other over time. By exposing those layers in shovel test pits, archaeologists are unlayering time. They’re figuring out which layers belong to which era. McBride’s analysis of stratigraphy at Camp Nelson helped him find artifacts that dated to the Civil War. MCBRIDE: And you screen, push the soil through a wire screen to capture artifacts. And then you use that information to predict the distribution of artifacts or features or cultural midden . . . DAVID: Midden is an archaeological term for a waste dump. MCBRIDE: . . . which is maybe a darker or more organic soil across the site. DAVID: With the clock ticking, McBride and his team dug more. It was made a bit easier by the kind of soil at Camp Nelson. It was a yellowish brown, silty clay subsoil that allowed human-made features to stand out more clearly. They found a lot of intriguing things. Metal shavings, military buttons, ceramics, two-pronged forks, large hog bones, bottles of sardines, bottles of liquor, and evidence of a billiards hall and a photography studio. Some of the artifacts teased them with their untold stories. No one knew what to make of the Confederate button from Louisiana found near the center of the Union camp. But it all confirmed that this was a really important place. The proposed road would plow right through a remarkably untouched patch of ground. Camp Nelson was the best-preserved supply depot and emancipation center of the Civil War. Still, it was hard to figure out exactly what they were looking at. The Miller Map—the map McBride had shown the Kentucky Heritage Council—just had shapes of buildings. They didn’t know what a lot of them actually were. MCBRIDE: Because from an archaeological perspective, you’d like to know what you’re excavating if you can. [chuckle] DAVID: So McBride traveled to the National Archives. He requested old papers filed under the quartermaster department, which was in charge of military supplies. Then under the category of Kentucky, and then under Camp Nelson. Probably no one had looked at them in the 150 years since they had been filed deep in the archival warehouses. MCBRIDE: And there are these long, narrow drawers, and they fold up all the documents into like, little sleeves that you stick in there. So they’re real narrow. And these elevation drawings were quite large sheets of paper, like map-size sheets of paper. So they were folded up like 20,000 times to get them to fit into the drawer. And you’d notice they’re these really fat things. DAVID: McBride pulled one out and very carefully unfolded it. The paper took up the entire desktop. MCBRIDE: I think I had been at the archives maybe half a day or so when I found it. DAVID: It was the interpretive key to Camp Nelson’s geography. MCBRIDE: My reaction was, you know, holy smokes, this is great. And then it was like, well, I’m done. I can go home now. [chuckle] Which I didn’t! DAVID: It was an elevation drawing of U.S. Army buildings at the site. MCBRIDE: And right in the middle of the drawing was a number. DAVID: In fact, a number on each building. And these numbers matched exactly the numbers on the 1866 Miller Map. McBride’s team had had no idea what those numbers meant. But now they did. In fact, the map now perfectly predicted the artifacts McBride was excavating from the ground. And this meant that he could find other significant archaeological sites at the Camp. In quick order he surgically dug test pits and found the hospital, machine shop, and headquarters. But what McBride found next . . . was stunning. MCBRIDE: This is quite a bit south to where we’re standing . . . DAVID: Let’s walk this way for a better view. MCBRIDE: We’re right above a little valley where a stream runs through, kind of to the southeast. There’s a spring and then the stream runs below this spring and then eventually just goes underground in a sink. But it passes through the warehouse area. DAVID: This was not a place that the Union Army cared much about—except for the storage of supplies. This swampy low area was what the high ground drained to. It collected the run-off and the trash. It wasn’t a place that seemed fit for humans. And yet it told one of the most important stories of the Civil War in Kentucky. It was the site of the Camp Nelson refugees before they were expelled. MCBRIDE: We just came across it archaeologically as looking like a domestic encampment and then started picking up artifacts that were indicative of women and children. DAVID: Lots of those artifacts involved laundry. McBride found clothing irons and buttons. So many buttons. The buttons proved what one soldier of the 124th Colored Infantry had said. In an affidavit after his wife was expelled from the Camp, he said, “They never eat a mouthful off the Government. My wife earned money by washing.” So she wasn’t a prostitute. That’s what some people had said. She wasn’t a beggar. That’s what others said. She was an entrepreneur. She washed soldiers’ clothes. Historians still don’t know her name, but she had accomplished the hard work of surviving. She had survived life in slavery. She had survived life as a refugee. And she was still alive after the expulsion. Her husband found her huddled in an old building as sleet poured in. I asked McBride if there was a moment when he realized he had found the refugee encampment. MCBRIDE: Yeah, definitely, definitely. When we looked at the beads. DAVID: McBride here is talking about glass beads—which were either used by children as toys or worn by women as fashion accessories. And there was one very special item. MCBRIDE: I also remember distinctively when we found the button, the dome button with an “X” on it. One of the students found it and brought it over and showed me. I immediately knew what was going on. [chuckle] That was kind of a cool moment. DAVID: The “X” on the button was a West African symbol for the universe. McBride theorized that it was meant to ward off evil. MCBRIDE: We also found a pierced coin—a half-dime. DAVID: A 1930s oral history interview of a formerly enslaved woman told him what such a coin meant. Back in slavery times, all her children wore pierced coins on a string around their ankles. MCBRIDE: They were protective magic, basically. She said that all my children would wear silver coin around their ankle to keep off the witch’s spell. The idea was the coin, the shiny coin, would reflect. If you put a spell that way, it would reflect back and hit you. [chuckle] DAVID: It wasn’t just the laundry supplies and the beads and the coins. They also found ceramic doll fragments, hair barrettes, and marbles. The evidence became overwhelming. MCBRIDE: There was clearly something going on here—that there were women encamped here, which is abnormal for a military camp of the Civil War era. DAVID: But McBride’s excitement was tempered by something else he found. MCBRIDE: And then we found quite an extensive evidence of burning, massive burning. We know that at the expulsion of the refugees in late November 1864 that the army burned their huts down. And we found quite a bit of evidence of that. DAVID: And do you remember the moment when you found all that ash? MCBRIDE: Yeah, yeah, because there were thousands and thousands of burned nails in this large ash deposit. And archaeologically, it looks like they tore them down. And then they would pile them up in two or three different locations and then set them on fire, because we were getting massive quantities of burned architectural items in a small area, way too much for one dwelling. So they basically made kind of like a bonfire. It was so hot other artifacts like glass melted, which takes a pretty high temperature. But we would find like three, four, five thousand nails in a small area, so it was not one hut. It’s lots of huts. DAVID: Amidst the enormous deposit of ash and the burned nails, he found a coin. MCBRIDE: Interestingly, also, the pierced coin has clearly been burned, which is kind of unusual for coins. DAVID: So the fact that it was unusual for a coin to burn, does that say something about the intensity of the fire? MCBRIDE: Right, I think it says something about the intensity of the fire. We also have a lot of burned, completely melted glass, which takes a very high temperature. But also the fact that the coin was burned may have suggested that it was, you know, kind of lost suddenly, during the expulsion. People didn’t have a whole lot of time to gather up their goods. And it perhaps was left in one of the huts. Or fell off in the rapidity of having to move fast and get loaded up under guards with rifles and bayonets that forced the refugees to get up into wagons and be moved out of camp. DAVID: And remember that children were involved. The pierced coin contained a poignant reminder of that. MCBRIDE: It has the date of 1857 on it. And from some oral history, there’s a suggestion that at least sometimes the birthdate of the wearer was the coin’s date. DAVID: So it’s more than possible that a child born in 1857 was wearing that coin around their ankle in 1864 when it was torn off and lost. This kind of archaeological evidence made the expulsion seem oh too real to McBride. It’s one thing to read about in documents. It’s another to see the thousands of burned nails, huge ash deposits, and children’s toys. MCBRIDE: And so that was a stark, you know, material, physical evidence. And a reminder, kind of a slap in the face, of this is what happened right here. DAVID: Just imagine that seven-year-old girl. She’s just escaped a plantation. Having found refuge in a Union army camp, she thinks she’s safe. But she watches military men tear down her hut, men she thought would protect her. The wood is piled high—and then sparks into a towering bonfire. And now she’s forced, at the end of a rifle, onto a wagon, which will dump her a few miles north into a freezing landscape of snow. It’s a terrible episode of history. But it tells an important truth, an important truth about Jessamine County—and an important truth about America. The expulsion happened on the right side of history—that is, the Union side. And this implicates the whole nation, not just the slave-holding South. PART THREE: COLORIZING HISTORY DAVID: From the outside, it looked like McBride was unearthing Camp Nelson for the very first time. But the Black population of Jessamine County knew all along. Some of the soldiers and refugees remained at Camp Nelson well into the twentieth century. And their descendants stayed too, some to this very day. Calvonia Radford, the wife of Pastor Moses, and other Black women in area churches, have worked really hard to curate local Black history. CALVONIA: We don’t have a lot of written history, other than what we have in the family Bible that is yellow. And you know, the leaves are beginning to start to crumble. But you’ll see fat Bibles, you know, that have all that stuff stuck in them, kind of archived informally, to hold on to things. DAVID: Things like obituaries, newspaper clippings, locks of hair, and family trees. Her family’s Bible—their archive—was given to Calvonia by her father just a couple of years ago. CALVONIA: He just said come here, you know, in the room, and he says, I want you to have this. And that was really precious to me. DAVID: During my research, Black women have taught me so much. I learned that during Reconstruction, their ancestors staged elaborate Memorial Day and Fourth of July celebrations on Camp Nelson’s grounds. They played softball, ate barbecue, and recited the Emancipation Proclamation. They spoke nostalgically about what was called the “refugee spring.” It produced drinking water for the Black settlement. There was a string band, comprised of the children of former soldiers, called the Booker Orchestra. Their most famous song, played on the fiddle, mandolin, banjo, and kazoo, was called “Camp Nelson Blues.” It’s now being rediscovered by musicologists who say that this lively song was an important forerunner of modern country music. All these cultural activities sustained the refugee population through the long, rough century of Jim Crow. Before Stephen McBride’s excavations, these stories were not reflected in roadside signs or at the local historical society. They aren’t portrayed in a monument on the courthouse lawn. Nor are they central to national narratives of emancipation, which are still dominated by Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation. But all along, Black folks have been nurturing memory about the role of enslaved people in their own emancipation. Their ancestors seized freedom as much as received it. I interviewed dozens and dozens of people. And I was amazed at the specificity and intensity of their stories—and by their gratefulness that I cared enough to ask. But not everyone seemed grateful. You met Rev. Robert Gates several episodes ago. He’s a distinguished man with a big bushy white beard and eyes that dance. We happened to meet each other over fried chicken, mac and cheese, and green beans at a Black history event at the public library. Soon he was telling me in urgent terms about Black history being erased. We hear constantly about the white pioneers who settled the Bluegrass. But they never traveled alone, he said. They had Black companions. He wasn’t sure what to call them—slaves, servants, employees, colleagues? Whatever they were, they were pioneers . . . just as much as the legendary Daniel Boone. And then Rev. Gates got almost conspiratorial, whispering a phrase I had never heard—the Traveling Church. He hesitated to even say the words. But he was very direct about his punch line. With the gravitas of a Black preacher, he declared that we need to quote “colorize history.” Captivated by his words, I asked if I could get that on tape. He smiled and said, “Nah, not right now.” I was so confused—and frustrated. If history needed colorizing, why wouldn’t he tell a historian his stories? I wanted to take his story public, but he didn’t seem to want my help. As soon as I got home, I researched the heck out of the “Travelling Church.” I found lots of old books and ultimately a terrific story. It involved a caravan of more than 500 Virginia settlers who left for Kentucky during the American Revolution. Persecuted by Anglicans in Virginia for not preaching slavery, they believed they were replicating the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt. The Traveling Church followed a treacherous trail. Fearful of Indians and accosted by severe weather, they limped toward the Kentucky bluegrass. Gates’s revelation, passed to him through oral history, was that African Americans, both free and enslaved, helped lead this interracial group. Peter Durrett, for example, had scouted the Kentucky wilderness in preparation for the journey. As one account put it, “At times there was a mighty lifting up of voices among the negroes, for ‘Uncle Peter’ was with them and he set the example.” When they finally reached the Bluegrass, they formed Black churches that later became vital links in the Underground Railroad. What a different origin story of our state! In grade school my children had only learned about Kentucky being founded by Daniel Boone, James Harrod, and other white pioneers. The Traveling Church represents a startlingly different narrative. Rev. Gates declined my interview request. But we found other ways to get to know each other. I saw him around the county. I visited his church. We exchanged emails. I fed him archival material. I sensed that he liked me. He always greeted me with a big smile. But he didn’t seem to trust me with his stories. Until finally, he agreed to an interview. DAVID: So here's my theory. I came to it after reading a book called The Women of Nelson. Do you know this book? GATES: I’m not familiar with it. DAVID: The Women of Nelson is a 1990s novel by Shirley Hayden that no one else has heard of either. Our local library doesn’t even have a copy. It’s that obscure. But it shouldn’t be. It’s an incredibly powerful and painfully raw account of the Camp Nelson expulsion. The main character Sadie sees visions of her “greatest grandmother” being expelled from the Camp. She ends up dying in the snow. The novel then moves forward in time as a white man sits on a Black woman’s porch drinking her sweet tea. Sometimes the author calls him the “college man,” sometimes Professor Dugood. He asks Sadie about the bones of women and children who perished during the war. He wants photographs. But Sadie declines. She says, “Nothing is free.” But the white professor takes her picture anyway and sets off “to dig up the entire county looking for relics.” He ends up coopting Black memories too painful for Sadie to tell. In a bitter prologue to the book, the author indicts history written on “white pages.” Just as wrenching as the book’s violent imagery, at least for me, was to read about the intrusive professor. I couldn’t help but ask myself, Am I him? Is my excavation of stories just an academic puzzle that’s unfeeling of Black people’s pain? And even if I mean well—and I think I really, truly do—am I acting like a white savior? Am I telling stories others should be telling for themselves? When I sat down with Rev. Gates, I asked him these very questions. DAVID: Is that what you were worried about? Is that why you’re hesitant to talk with me? GATES: Yes. And you’ve got to understand that you’re not the only one who has approached me. See, I know for a fact. I know for a fact the information I have is you don’t have. Because my information is research and oral tradition. And I want to keep it. DAVID: He wanted Black people to tell the story. GATES: There is not a Black book written about Camp Nelson by a Black person. Everybody’s writing about the general information about Camp Nelson and about the Civil War. But see, they don’t have the inside story like I have. I got the inside story because I done my own research. It’s not white research. It’s Black research. DAVID: And white people kept coming at him wanting his stories. GATES: I have been approached, and I have been approached, and I have been approached. And I told my wife, I said, “I’m not going to talk no more.” I said, “I’m gonna keep my information to myself. And if anybody’s going to, if you want to say personally profit from it, I want the profits to come down here to Camp Nelson. So that’s where I’m protective. DAVID: But Rev. Gates also nurtured a pragmatic streak. GATES: And so you. You. You. I’m learning you. I’m learning. I see you on Facebook and see the things that you’re doing. And I appreciate what you’re doing. I appreciate this opportunity. Because it gives me the opportunity to get the word out. And I don’t, I don’t know the ins and outs of what you call this podcasting, but I’m hoping that if it goes out there, that I can get it. And then I can send it out through the African-American community, and people can hear it. Because that’s, that's how you preserve getting information out. So that’s what I saw. I appreciate what you do. I appreciate it. [laughter] DAVID: Here, then, is just one of his stories—in his own words. GATES: Jesse Commasel Tull. Interesting story. DAVID: That’s Gates’s great-great grandfather. Like so many enslaved people, Tull’s history is shrouded in uncertainty. GATES: One record says he was born in Missouri. Sometimes it says he was born in Kansas. DAVID: It was said that he was owned by a man named F. S. Tull. GATES: When he died, he awarded a young black child to his daughter. And he took upon the name of a Tull. DAVID: That act of naming is significant for Rev. Gates. GATES: That was not only a technique of Anglo-Saxons here in America, that was what they did in ancient Christianity. In the Old Testament, it says that when the Persians came in and the Babylonians took Daniel, they stripped them of their identity. They stripped them of their name and gave him Daniel and gave the three Hebrew boys. They gave them Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. But that was not their original name because if you strip them, then you are able to control them. DAVID: But the daughter did something—something illegal in Missouri—that made the enslaved man Tull less controllable. She taught him to read. Somehow—and Gates does not know exactly how—Tull got free and made his way to Kentucky where he enlisted in the Union Army. Kentucky was a place he had heard about because his parents had previously lived there as part of the Travelling Church. GATES: And when he came to Camp Nelson, they take the person who was smart. And so they put him in charge. DAVID: It was not common for an enlisted Black man to be able to read. And so Jesse Commasel Tull rose rapidly through the ranks. GATES: And in his record, you’ll see he started as a private, he started as a sergeant, and then it says that he was demoted. And then he was a sergeant again. DAVID: This was in Company C of the 119th U.S. Colored Infantry. In this role, Tull helped to recruit, enlist, and emancipate many enslaved men. Like his descendant Rev. Robert Gates, he was a minister. He preached for the soldiers and refugee families at Camp Nelson. And then he stuck around to establish the First Baptist Church of Camp Nelson—the very church Rev. Gates and I were talking in. GATES: It makes me feel proud. And why it makes me feel proud? It makes me feel proud because in Jessamine County—see I grew up in Jessamine County—I remember my first time when I was confronted with racism. And it was in third grade. And I said to this little blond-haired girl, I said, “Would you be my girlfriend?” I never did know that I was Black. And she responded to me, “We don’t date you.” And that was my first time of knowing that I was in a white society, and that was in Wilmore Elementary. So all that time I’ve been carrying that, never speaking about it. But I’ve been carrying it. DAVID: How could Gates feel pride after his third-grade humiliation? How could Jesse Commasel Tull feel pride after his enslavement? For Gates—for Rev. Gates—it all comes back . . . to faith. GATES: You may strip us Monday through Friday. But Sunday mornin’ coming. And Sunday mornin’ is when we had our identity. That’s why in the Black church, when they come to church, they put on their finest. They come to worship God. They come to see the King. And the thing about it, you may not respect us out there in the community. But there’s a place that you cannot disrespect us, and that is in the local church. DAVID: So the word that I think encapsulates this entire conversation is one that you used when we first met. You told me, “We need to colorize history.” Tell me what that means to you in just a couple of sentences. GATES: It’s a story. And our story is not history. Our story is our lives. That’s what it is. And when it’s your story, you can speak passionate about it because you had a part to play. DAVID: It’s a great point. History is ultimately a construction. It’s not the actual past. History as it has been told, especially when whitewashed, is not Rev. Gates’s story. His stories of Camp Nelson, inherited by oral tradition, are both inspirational and hard. And he has a part to play in passing them forward. He insists on colorizing the Camp. PART FOUR: RIVAL MONUMENT DAVID: As the twentieth century turned into the twenty-first, a lot of colorful material was getting unearthed. Stephen McBride was digging. Rev. Gates was passing on his family’s oral history. And for the first time, local government got involved. Even after the road construction finished, it paid McBride to keep on digging below the ground. New historic markers that memorialized the colored soldiers went up. A stone obelisk was put up at the cemetery in memory of those who died at Camp Nelson. The county organized reenactments of Black troops at an annual event called Civil War Days. They even built an impressive little museum. Remember Judge David West, the man trying to figure out what to do with the Confederate statue? Through the 2010s, he contributed a lot to the memory of Camp Nelson. JUDGE WEST: When I’ve met with groups of people who believe we need to do something with the statue out front, I’m humbled to remind them that I was the Judge Executive that put the spotlight on Camp Nelson. When I became Judge Executive, Camp Nelson was rarely utilized. Our schools didn’t take trips there, even though we had a fantastic interpretive center. It wasn’t being used. And that was a travesty. DAVID: This was in the 2000s. JUDGE WEST: So I happened to have Congressman Barr’s ear. DAVID: Andy Barr, a Republican, is still our congressional representative. JUDGE WEST: And we took a trip down there. And most of our politicians had never been to Camp Nelson. And when I took Congressman Barr down, he could not stop reading. And I said, “Congressman Barr, this is not the site of a battle where bullets flew. But this was the site of a more important battle: the battle for equality, the battle for civil rights, born in places like Camp Nelson, Kentucky.” And he grabbed that narrative and took it to the United States Congress. DAVID: It wasn’t a natural alliance—Rev. Gates and these two conservative Republican politicians. But the reverend was frustrated by that little bitty Camp Nelson sign that only mentioned a white Union general. So he welcomed their advocacy. GATES: And the light did not come on. The light did not come on until they went to that next level, that national level. Well, when they went to that national level, it opened the floodgates. JUDGE WEST: And we have Kentucky's first national monument in Jessamine County. So I’m that guy! I wanted that story told. Man, I still get chills talking about that. DAVID: It’s remarkable. And they deserve a lot of credit. But I did have a concern. Rev. Gates and I discussed it at the Camp Nelson church. DAVID: I showed up at the announcement of the Camp Nelson National Monument. The cabinet member, Ryan Zinke, was there. Andy Barr was there. They read the proclamation from President Donald Trump. And I’ve been watching your Facebook page long enough to know that you don’t share their politics. Did you ever feel used? GATES: When Congressman Barr and I talked, it was never political. There was never a time that he asked me my political affiliation. And there was never a time that I said my political affiliation. The whole purpose was Camp Nelson National Monument—of getting that story out. And he said to me, “I’m going to put Camp Nelson on the map.” We worked side by side. He was real. We don’t know about Trump! [laughter] I can’t vouch for him. But on the other side, the Bible says that the wealth of the unrighteous is laid up for the righteous. So I feel that was an opportunity to God took the unrighteous and made it for the righteous. DAVID: Gates reciprocated by starring in a television ad for Barr’s campaign. AD—GATES: Freedom isn’t free. During the Civil War, Camp Nelson was one of the largest training centers for Black soldiers. My own great-grandfather served here. For twenty-five years, we’ve been trying to get Camp Nelson designated a national monument to honor their sacrifice for freedom. Congressman Andy Barr cared and got the job done. AD—BARR: I’m Andy Barr, and I approved this message. DAVID: For Rev. Gates—and Barr—the stakes were too high to allow the story of Camp Nelson to be stopped by politics. As you already know, Barr’s support worked. Less than a month before the election, the news broke. Here’s the report in 2018 from LEX 18 out of Lexington. LEX 18: Nicholasville’s Camp Nelson may soon have a new designation. Lee Cruse joins us live from Jessamine County with the details. CRUSE: Yeah guys, we’re at Camp Nelson. The folks here at Jessamine County have done such a fantastic job that it got noticed from the National Parks department. The county judge is with me. David West, good to see you there, David. WEST: The Department of Justice has all the papers, preparing them for the President. He can sign using the Antiquities Act, declaring this a national monument. CRUSE: Here’s the interesting thing. We’ve got Mammoth Cave, which is a national park. But Kentucky doesn’t have a national monument. WEST: We would be Kentucky’s first and only national monument. We would be a sister to the Statue of Liberty, another national monument. CRUSE: Alright David. Thank you, buddy. Appreciate it. Ladies, we’ll send it back to you. LEX 18: Very interesting. It played a big role in history. And now it will make more history. Lee, thank you very much. DAVID: And that’s exactly what happened. Here’s Congressman Andy Barr at the big announcement. BARR: Today is a great day for Jessamine County. It’s a great day for the commonwealth. It’s a great day for our country. And as Judge West and Secretary Zinke pointed out, at a time in our country where there are divisions, this is the real story of America. DAVID: On October 26, 2018, the federal government issued a proclamation establishing the Camp Nelson National Monument. In the five years of its new status—which came with a lot more money than Jessamine County could ever invest—the site has pursued a vision that makes Gwen Mitchell, a great-granddaughter of Camp Nelson, proud. MITCHELL: I remember when there was just a house and the school bus stop there and picked up kids. For them to have restored it and claimed it and recognized the history there is just awesome. DAVID: In its first public event as a national monument, Camp Nelson staged a luminaria in public lament of the expulsion. PRICE: On behalf of the staff, we welcome you to the first of many national park service events that will take place here to honor all of Camp Nelson’s complicated history. DAVID: This is Ernie Price, the first superintendent of Camp Nelson National Monument. PRICE: I want to thank everyone for coming out on this beautiful evening. November is not always this forgiving, as we know, but it’s beautiful tonight. We are particularly honored to be joined by those of you who are direct descendants of people who lived and served at Camp Nelson, and I know there are quite a few among us. Perhaps in a way, though, we are all children of Camp Nelson. DAVID: [singing] Hundreds of us walked down a mowed path to the obelisk at Graveyard #1. It was surrounded by more than 100 luminaries, one for each of the refugees who died 157 years ago during the expulsion. As they were lit, Chief Interpreter Steve Phan, himself the son of refugees from Vietnam, told the story. PHAN: Many of these men, husbands, brothers, sons, enlisted with the promise that they could take care of their families. That was a lie. Over the course of 1864, on at least eight separate occasions, the U.S. Army will expel refugees from Camp Nelson. On November 23, 1864, they will drive out 400 who will wander up the road towards Nicholasville with really nowhere to go—in starving and sick condition. The soldiers were ordered to destroy their huts and shacks to ensure they did not return. We are here today to honor these people. WOMEN: [singing] “I’m going home to live with Jesus. Since I laid my burdens down. I going home to live with Jesus since I laid my burdens down.” DAVID: It was a powerful night. I felt it. So did many others I debriefed with back up in Nicholasville. Here’s Pastor Moses. RADFORD: It was awesome. Very informative, enlightening. Very moving. Heart-breaking that people have been treated such. Now that’s history in Jessamine County. DAVID: Here’s Anna Kenion, an administrator at the Jessamine County Health Department. KENION : But for some reason it hit me, the first time we did it. But here we are out in the field being all bundled up in our blankets and our coats and our hats and gloves. Can you imagine that night when they were expelled? And that’s what brought tears to my eyes because these were real people. We’re not talking about a movie. We’re talking about real people. And we’re talking about people who had children. I can’t even begin to imagine this even for today, to walk outside without my shoes on, without a coat on and having a child on my hip and a child in my hand and having to walk just from here to downtown Nicholasville. DAVID: But Anna was encouraged too. KENION: I’m sitting here talking to you, a white man. You’re interviewing a black girl wanting to hear something she has to say. Whereas in the past, that would have never happened. I wouldn’t have had a voice. That’s progress. DAVID: Rev. Gates rejoiced from the pulpit. GATES: Look where God has brought us. God has taken a land that was dead and now has given it life by the lighthouse of the preaching of the gospel shining in the community of Camp Nelson. God has brought us a mighty long way. DAVID: In his quieter way, archaeologist Stephen McBride was grateful too as we talked on a hillside overlooking the gully where the refugees once camped. MCBRIDE: So I’ve had a connection with Camp Nelson for off and on for about 30 years, I guess. DAVID: That’s a big chunk of your life. MCBRIDE: It is. It’s almost half of it. DAVID: So as you gaze around the camp here, what does Camp Nelson mean to you? MCBRIDE: Well, you know, I feel like I’ve helped it become what it is. And that makes me feel good. I think it has a significant story to tell, and we’d like that story to get out to a broader audience. DAVID: Significantly, that story wasn’t Confederate. And it wasn’t just about keeping the Union together. It was an interpretation of the Civil War that featured emancipation. Camp Nelson, finally, was centering Black experiences. MCBRIDE: Through the archaeology, we’ve helped tell perhaps a more personal story of people that were here that couldn’t speak for themselves. DAVID: Maybe this is the answer—more history, not less. Maybe all the focus on the Confederate statue is burying the lede . . . or looking in the wrong place. In 1865, when Quartermaster Theron Hall stood up for the refugees—and then again in 2018 when it was named a national monument—Camp Nelson was a model of coming together across partisan divides. Republicans and Democrats, Black people and white people were telling complicated true stories about the past. As novelist James Baldwin said in the throes of the civil rights movement, American history is “longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.” Beautiful and terrible—Camp Nelson captures that sentence better than any place I’ve been. WOMEN: [singing] “Have you been baptized? Certainly Lord. Have you been baptized? Certainly Lord. Have you been baptized? Certainly Lord. Certainly, certainly, certainly Lord.” DAVID: As the county gathered around the obelisk to lament the expulsion, it struck me that Camp Nelson, at least in this moment, had won Jessamine County’s struggle over what kind of history to celebrate. Of the two dueling monuments, Camp Nelson is the national monument. It’s literally on the map. But I’m also mindful that the Confederate statue is still around. Six miles to the north in the middle of the county seat, it still enjoys pride of place on Main Street. And as the 2020 election heats up, that bronze figure is about to get a whole lot more contested. OUTRO: Thanks for listening to “Rebel on Main.” Special thanks to story editor Stephen Smith, audio producer Barry Blair, and Asbury University and the Louisville Institute for their generous support. Be sure to subscribe and leave a rating and a review so others can find us. For pictures of Rev. Gates, Camp Nelson, and artifacts unearthed by archaeologist Stephen McBride, head to rebelonmain.com. And if you’re traveling through central Kentucky, stop in at Camp Nelson National Monument’s museum to see the Booker fiddle and banjo. I’m David Swartz. See you next time.