"...push further southwards; Irregular activity was much more difficult to sustain deep within Kentucky when the front lines had shifted from the ridges north of Nashville to the banks of the Tennessee River.
Pershing was also very leery of leaving his supply lines hugely exposed and thus viewed fortifying Kentucky as a redoubt of Yankee logistics as an absolute priority, and here his lifelong sympathy for Negro concerns and soft spot for the mission behind ONE, [1] having taught at a colored school in Missouri as a young man before going to West Point, came into play. Extending the thrust of his forces deep into Georgia would mean leaving hundreds of miles of lines exposed to sabotage and attack by Irregulars behind him - indeed, damaging bridges and railroad tracks rather than lynching suspected collaborators became a more important activity for Forrest's men by 1916 - and thus from the masses of Negro refugees who had fled north and been arrested from traveling further at the Ohio he recruited a small army of depot guards, day laborers, cooks, railroad attendants, and other jobs that required little skill or literacy but was hugely important in keeping the war machine humming as it reached deeper and further into Dixie.
This limited but tangible incorporation of thousands of unskilled but hardworking Negro laborers into the logistical network of Pershing's army occurred in tandem with a considerably more organized processing of refugees now fleeing places like Alabama, Arkansas and Mississippi. Whereas the Yankees had been overwhelmed by the flood of slaves through much of 1915 as they tried to squeeze the vice on Nashville, near the end of the year Pershing's staff had better solved processes for sorting through refugees, and even though thousands still were able to make it across the Ohio (or into Missouri through the Ozarks) and head for cities with large prewar Negro populations such as Cincinnati and Indianapolis or the beating heart of American rail and industry at Chicago, the squalid and disease-ridden camps were mostly no more, with refugees instead assigned to makeshift shantytowns on the edges of major Army camps or Kentucky towns. Limits were set on who was allowed to officially "get papers" to the United States, but for those left behind - which was the vast majority - schools appeared as quickly as small schoolhouses could be thrown together, with thousands of young women teachers, Black Yankee abolitionists, clergymen (particularly Baptists and Methodists), and even some wounded Army officers (Quentin Roosevelt being a famous example) serving as teachers, often on a volunteer basis, on behalf of ONE.
This meant that by late spring of 1916, as Pershing was pushing into Atlanta and the Confederacy was crumbling, the Commonwealth west of the Kentucky River had become considerably more colored in its demographics (indeed, many White Kentuckians fled south or east as a result) and also formed the nucleus of a functioning self-governed polity, which while poor and unstable nonetheless had a serviceable judiciary under military occupation for civilian matters, commerce, and an increasingly literate and educated Negro populace that was passionately ebullient about its newfound freedom and emancipation. Western Kentucky would never be the same, and as the end of the war approached further south, the question of what exactly Philadelphia was to do with this small corner of the Confederacy..."
- A Freedom Bought With Blood: Emancipation and the Postwar Confederacy
[1] For those who've forgotten - Organization for Negro Education, founded by Booker T. Washington before his death and thus very much a purveyor of Bookerite thinking on Black empowerment. Pershing, in case it isn't obvious, largely aligns with that style of thinking.