NATCHEZ — Next Saturday Historic Jefferson Military College, located on U.S. 61 North just east of Natchez, will once again be occupied by United Army Civil War troops, runaway enslaved refugees and abolitionists.

One hundred forty-five years ago on July 13, 1863, the Union Army occupied Natchez and surrounding areas of Louisiana and Mississippi. Less than two weeks earlier separatists Confederate States’ armies at Vicksburg (July 4, 1863) and Port Hudson La. (July 9, 1863) had surrendered to Union forces.

A year and half earlier Union forces sieged New Orleans and Memphis. By summer 1863, aided by newly enrolled soldiers and sailors consisting of non-enslaved “persons of color” and former enslaved persons who fought valiantly at Port Hudson and decisively at Fort Butler and Milliken’s Bend, La., in the “Vicksburg Campaign, the United States gained control of the Mississippi River.

After the fall of Vicksburg and Port Hudson enslaved persons intentionally ran away from their places of enslavement up and down the Mississippi River by the thousands. This event of self-emancipation is called The Freedom Summer of 1863, when thousands of slaves ran away to Natchez, Vicksburg and others places in Mississippi and Louisiana to be free.

Up and down the Mississippi River and its many tributaries thousands of able-bodied ex-slave males deliberately became freedom fighting Union Army soldiers and sailors. Beginning late summer of 1863 Natchez was occupied by both white and U.S. Colored Troops as they were officially designated by U.S. Congress on May 22, 1863.

Throughout the Civil War and beyond U.S. Colored Troops were an integral part of the United States occupation forces based in Natchez and Vidalia. They had the charge of putting down Confederate guerilla activities, liberating “slaves” in outlying areas, building and maintaining defense forts in Natchez and Vidalia.

The Union Army housed many thousands of runaway and liberated enslaved women, children and elderly men in refugee camps on both sides of the river. Many others were put to work for wages on Union controlled plantations and various jobs in support of the military efforts and its personnel needs.

The army had to provide or cause the provision of food, clothing, housing, schools and hospitals for its soldiers and the massive overflowing numbers of “Negro” refugees. The stories about the Civil War freedom saga of the area’s black experience have never been told until now.

The general public is invited to come meet and greet dozens of black and white professional Civil War re-enactors, actors, amateurs, U.S. Colored Troops descendants and volunteers who will be in the Civil War camp at Jefferson College. Listen and learn as they tell stories and take on roles of male soldiers, sailors and cavalry, army and navy nurses, freedom school teachers, hospital patients, runaway slave children and women, northern abolitionists, refugees, Third Colored cavalry civilian scout, chaplain, Natchez’s Catholic Bishop Henry Elder, secessionists, Freedmen Bureau, Grand Army of the Republic and Women Relief Corps.

Visitors can meet Second Creek Freedom Planner Orange Mosby, Captain William H. Hunter, Natchez’s Navy Hero Wilson Brown, Midnight School Slave Teacher Milla Granderson, abolitionists Hiram R. Revels and Laura Haviland, Richard Wright’s grandfathers, Tacony Plantation’s John R. Lynch, James Lucas, Women Relief Corps and others.

You can visit Fort McPherson, midnight school for slaves, Forks of the Road Hospital and GAR Lodge, and see Civil War era tents, guns, equipment, cooking, military paraphernalia and re-enactors in authentic uniforms of soldiers and sailors who will demonstrate black powder gun firing.

The event starts at noon Saturday at Historic Jefferson College.