The text below is the marker proposed in October 2026 for Collierville’s Union companies (see the Afterword). The Tennessee Historical Commission allows no more than thirteen lines of forty-one characters each and requires a source for every fact; the small numbers in the text refer to the sources that follow. The site proposed is the railroad platform behind the Collierville Visitor Center, near the Battle of Collierville and Memphis and Charleston Railroad markers.
In the summer of 1863, while the Union
army held the Memphis and Charleston
Railroad, at least 103 Black men enlisted
here in the 2nd West Tennessee Infantry
(African Descent).1 Most had been
enslaved.2 Under Confederate law, capture
could mean re-enslavement.3 They were
mustered in at La Grange as Companies G
and I.4 Renamed the 61st U.S. Colored
Infantry in 1864, the regiment fought at
Wolf River Bridge, Tupelo, Memphis and
Eastport, and lost 356 men to battle and
disease.5
1. Muster-In Roll, Capt. Henry Sturges’ Co. G, 2nd West Tennessee Infantry (African Descent), mustered La Grange, June 30, 1863; Muster-In Roll, Capt. Charles S. Graff’s Co. I, same regiment, mustered La Grange, Aug. 27, 1863; Tennessee State Library and Archives, Tennessee Military Muster Rolls. The rolls record 51 men in Company G and 52 in Company I as enlisting at Collierville (Appendix XIII). Union control of the railroad: Tennessee Wars Commission, “Memphis & Charleston Railroad” marker, Collierville (Historical Marker Database, no. 149079).
2. U.S. census, 1860, Shelby County, Tennessee, 10th Civil District, population schedule, pp. 182–200 (742 free persons, one of them a free man of color), and slave schedule, pp. 36–51 (1,260 enslaved persons); NARA M653. Shelby County as a whole counted 276 free people of color and 16,953 enslaved people (Population of the United States in 1860).
3. Jefferson Davis, proclamation of Dec. 23, 1862, Official Records, ser. II, vol. 5, 795–97; Joint Resolution No. 5 on the subject of retaliation, May 1, 1863, Statutes at Large of the Confederate States of America, 1st Cong., 3d Sess., p. 167 ff.; Frank Moore, ed., The Rebellion Record, vol. 6, 578–79.
4. Muster-in rolls (note 1).
5. Frederick H. Dyer, A Compendium of the War of the Rebellion (Des Moines, 1908); National Park Service, Civil War Soldiers and Sailors Database, 61st U.S. Colored Infantry (38 killed or mortally wounded, 318 dead of disease; designated the 61st U.S. Colored Infantry, March 11, 1864).
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