White Tennessee Refugees

Wartime print of US refugees by Bufford's Print Publishing House.

Library of Congress

Displaced by War

All possible measures were adopted by the representatives of the Government to express its design to provide for such people as were refugees by necessity of their fidelity and loyalty, as far as possible to relieve the sufferings which had been thereby occasioned.
- Thomas D. Butler, Superintendent of the US Sanitary Commission at Camp Nelson

Once Camp Nelson was established and the US Army began the campaign to liberate East Tennessee in 1863, large numbers of Unionist refugees from the region fled the Confederate occupation of their homes and the ravages of war by making their way to the Federal base. Many of the East Tennesseans seeking refuge at Camp Nelson were women and children whose male family members had enlisted in the US Army, leaving them little means of protecting and taking care of themselves in a warzone. As a representative for the US Sanitary Commission (USSC), a private relief agency organized to provide civilian assistance to the military, reported, “nearly every Quartermaster’s train [coming from East Tennessee] brought more or less families from their poverty-stricken homes into the camp.”

At Camp Nelson, the white refugees received care and support from military officers and especially USSC officials. The civilians were housed in facilities scattered in and outside the camp, including the rooms and cabins of a large local plantation taken for their use, and they were regularly issued rations and fuel. For those refugees willing to travel to the North to find work, officials at Camp Nelson furnished them with transportation, supplies, money, and an escort. According to Thomas D. Butler, Superintendent of the USSC at Camp Nelson, “The larger proportion of the persons so aided were women and children, either sick, destitute, or so situated as to be utterly unable to proceed further without help.”

 

Memorial Obelisk at Graveyard No. 1 at Camp Nelson National Monument that reads: Many wives and children of East Tennessee Union enlistees accompanied them into Camp Nelson in 1863 to escape Confederate occupation.

NPS

Troubled Refuge

While the East Tennessean civilians found refuge at Camp Nelson, they still faced difficulties. Butler reported that the refugee population was continually involved in disagreements, arguments, and even physical conflicts among themselves. There were complaints that the refugees at times received insufficient assistance from the military authorities because the rations were too small and the housing was poor and dilapidated. The greatest danger to the East Tennesseans was the universal scourge of Civil War military encampments – diseases. Smallpox, measles, and other sicknesses were prevalent among the refugees. Butler concluded, “Though Sanitary relief and medical skill were unsparingly bestowed upon the sick, death made many seizures among them, as one group of about sixty graves, and others located according to family inclination, plainly indicate.” Many of the white refugees who died at Camp Nelson were buried in Graveyard #1, where they remain to the present day.

The treatment of all refugees was not the same at Camp Nelson. Compared to the formerly enslaved African Americans who sought refuge at the US Army base, the white East Tennesseans did not experience the same level of uncertainty over their fate. White refugees were consistently provided with support from military officials and were never threatened with expulsion from Camp Nelson.