A frustrating thing about trying to understand Nashville’s history — and thus America’s history — is that you can encounter two historical facts that sit back to back and never learn the story that connects them. Take, for instance, Civil War veteran Leander Woods and the Ku Klux Klan.
After the Civil War, the Klan began using Fort Negley, which sat in the middle of a black neighborhood and overlooked all of Nashville, as its headquarters. It was an important symbolic victory for bitter white Southerners that the racist terrorist organization occupied the Union fort.
This is an undisputed fact; local historians have long assumed the Klan kept that hill until at least 1871, when the federal government started seriously fighting the Klan. But reading through the Fort Negley archaeology survey, I came across this paragraph on page 40:
On July 24, 1868, The Tennessean … reported that a group of approximately 50 black men were found to be conducting military drills on the flat land at the bottom of St. Cloud Hill, near the Franklin Turnpike. The next day, the same group of men, who reportedly conducted a daily fatigue march at the hill, purchased a keg of gunpowder … The drilling was reportedly led by Leander Wood [sic], “whom the respectable colored men of the city denounced as the vilest and most corrupt scoundrel in Nashville.”
A black man controlling the largest stone inland fort built during the Civil War is already kind of mind-blowing. But add to that the fact that the fort had been controlled by the Klan? You’d think there’d be some public memory of how the Klan was dislodged from Fort Negley. But no. No one knows. And if the authorities didn’t do it, that leaves Leander Woods and his armed militia.
Who was this scoundrel Leander Woods? Luckily, it isn’t a very common name. Judging by records, there were fewer than 10 Leander Woodses in the United States in the 19th century. And only one of them was living in Nashville.
Leander Woods was in Company E of the 13th Regiment of the U.S. Colored Infantry. He enlisted on Sept. 18, 1863, when he was either 31 or 34 or 35 years old, depending on which records you look at. He was born in Georgia but joined up at Fort Donelson in Dover, Tenn. Woods fought at the Battle of Johnsonville, the Battle of Nashville and a skirmish at Decatur, Ala. By 1865, he was working as a teamster for the Army. He ended up in Nashville on Jan. 10, 1866, and apparently stayed here.
The facts of Woods’s life as he related them to the enlistment officers give us some big clues as to his pre-Civil War existence.