Secrets of the Dead: "The Civil War's Lost Massacre" (Wide Awake Films, Kentucky Educational Television, PBS, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Secrets of the Dead episode that followed was called “The Civil War’s Lost Massacre.” The Civil War’s lost massacre took place on January 25, 1865 in Simpsonville, Kentucky. The victims were members of the 60th Company of the Fifth U.S. Colored Cavalry, and the perpetrators were a band of white “irregulars” fighting a guerrilla campaign for the Confederacy. (They were even referred to as “guerrillas” in newspapers of the time, which was itself surprising because I hadn’t realized the term “guerrilla” – which literally means “little war” in Spanish – had crossed the border that early.) Kentucky had an odd position in the Civil War because it was a so-called “border state,” one which allowed slavery but didn’t secede. It was also Abraham Lincoln’s birthplace, though he’d relocated to Indiana with his family when he was seven and settled in Illinois in his teens. Lincoln was hyper-concerned about maintaining the loyalty of the border states; the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863 was carefully worded to free only those slaves being held in the Confederate states. He was understandably worried that the border states would secede after all and give the Confederacy a military advantage. As the Civil War wound on and depleted the ranks of military-age white men on both sides (the director, William Eichner, quoted a statistic that one-tenth of all the military-age white men in the U.S. were killed during the war), the Union started doing what had previously been considered unthinkable and enlisting African-Americans. Quite a few of them answered the call, not only for the money but also the vague promise of freedom at the end of the war. Alas, the Black enlistees had to fight under white commanders, and many of their white officers were as racist as anybody else.

In late 1864 the commander of Fort Nelson in Kentucky, the enlistment center for Black troops, ordered the wives and children of Black servicemembers to leave the base. The Black servicemembers and their partners were able to get word to sympathetic activists, who in turn gave the story to the media. Word got out and news coverage so embarrassed the U.S. Army that they ultimately reversed the decision and allowed the wives and children to return. Many of the Black soldiers enlisted as cavalrymen because they’d had experience with horses working as slaves on the plantations. In January 1865 the 60th Company was ordered to mount a drive of 900 head of cattle from Fort Nelson northwest to Simpsonville. On the way they were ambushed and massacred by a band of Confederate “irregulars” – today they’d be called “unlawful combatants” – and though the Black troops outnumbered the white raiders, they lost largely because they were armed with one-shot Enfield rifles (the standard Civil War weapon on both sides). A Union cavalryman firing an Enfield would have to dismount to reload the weapon after each shot, while the Confederate raiders had six-shot revolvers that could relatively easily be reloaded on horseback. After the massacre the Black Union soldiers were quickly buried in a mass grave, and there they remained until a team of three volunteers – David Brown, Jerry Miller and Juanita White – formed in the 21st Century to launch a search for their remains. Brown and White were African-Americans and had had ancestors in the Fifth Colored Cavalry; Miller was a white history buff who’d grown up around Simpsonville but had never heard of the massacre before and wondered why he hadn’t.

The second half of the show dealt with the team’s attempts to find the gravesite, which they ultimately did with the aid of a 1930’s map of the area done by the state of Kentucky to plot a new road system for the state. The surveyors marked the site on their 1930’s map as “Civil War Burial Mound,” and through an elaborate set of new technologies including both aerial drones and surface metal detectors (in hopes of finding metal pieces, including belt buckles, gun bits and bayonets), they were able to confirm that the “Civil War Burial Mound” was indeed just that. The show was unexpectedly timely in the latter stages of a Presidential election in which a lot of the debate has been over who counts as a “real American” and in which the racism that motivated the Civil War has proved to be alive and well, ironically carried largely by the Republican Party, whose election victory in 1860 touched off the Civil War. Today’s Republicans still proclaim themselves the “Party of Lincoln,” but they have largely repudiated everything Lincoln stood for. What’s more, Republican politicians like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis are pushing for the teaching of a sanitized version of American history from a white perspective that either minimizes or totally ignores the evils of slavery. The idea that one of the nastiest and meanest battles of the Civil War had been both literally and figuratively covered up for over a century after it happened – just as most Americans hadn’t heard of the wanton destruction of the successful Black business district in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921 until a group of determined African-American activists brought it back to our attention on the 100th anniversary – should be an object lesson in the Orwellian rewriting of history in which today’s Republicans want to engage.