4th U.S. Colored Artillery conduct changing of the guard at Fort Halleck.
Collection of C. Wesley Cowan
In this image, captured by Chicago photographer John Carbutt on a stereoscopic glass-plate negative, African-American soldiers from the 4th U.S. Colored Artillery conduct a changing of the guard on the parapet of Fort Halleck overlooking Columbus, Kentucky, in July 1864.
These men, mostly runaway slaves from Tennessee and Kentucky, were part of a 1,000-man regiment that was formed in Columbus in 1863 and remained stationed there through war’s end. They fended off raids by Confederate general Nathan B. Forrest while coping with a hostile local population. In the words of Columbus historian John Kelly Ross Jr., “Even most pro-Union Kentuckians did not want African-American men to serve as soldiers.”
In 1861, the Confederates had built the fort—originally named Fort DeRussy—atop the 180-foot Iron Banks bluff overlooking the port town from the north. Testing the strength of this bastion in November 1861, Brigadier General Ulysses S. Grant engaged in his first Civil War trial by combat in the Battle of Belmont directly across the Mississippi River from Columbus in Missouri.
Grant bypassed the stronghold, and after he captured Fort Henry and Fort Donelson it was outflanked and became irrelevant. The Confederates abandoned the fort in March 1862, and the town became an important Union military supply depot. Runaway slaves soon flocked to Columbus, prompting the successful effort to recruit black soldiers. By the summer of 1864, three out of every four Union troops in western Kentucky were African American.
Today, the remains of Fort DeRussy—which Union forces renamed Fort Halleck—are within the Columbus Belmont State Park at a spot called Arrowhead Point.
Bob Zeller is president of the nonprofit Center for Civil War Photography, which is devoted to collecting, preserving, and digitizing Civil War images.
