Fort Pillow

HISTORICAL NOTE

Sergeant Benjamin Robinson, Lieutenant Mack Leaming, Major William Bradford, and, of course, Major General Nathan Bedford Forrest are historical figures. Private Matt Ward and Corporal Jack Jenkins are fictitious. The Thirteenth Tennessee Cavalry (U.S.) was also known as Bradford's Battalion and as the Fourteenth Tennessee Cavalry (U.S.) (there was another Thirteenth Tennessee Cavalry (U.S.) that served mostly in the eastern part of the state); because contemporary sources discussing the events of April 12, 1864, call it the Thirteenth, I have used that name here. Coal Creek is now more often known as Cold Creek. Again, as the first name seems in more common use at the time of the fight at Fort Pillow, I chose it here.

Piecing together exactly what happened at Fort Pillow on that eventful day is anything but easy. There are four principal primary sources: the contemporary reports from both sides in The Official Records of the war of the Rebellion; the testimony collected by Messrs. Wade and Gooch of the U.S. Congressional Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War immediately after the engagement and published as The Fort Pillow Massacre; the Confederate rejoinder in Jordan and Pryor's 1868 book, The Campaigns of General Nathan Bedford Forest and of Forrest's Cavalry (in essence, Forrest's own military memoir); and Wyeth's 1899 biography, The Life of General Nathan Bedford Forrest, which is written from a Southern point of view and is generally sympathetic to Forrest and his men.

The problem is that reconciling events in the contemporary documents-particularly in The Fort Pillow Massacre-and those of the two accounts inclining more toward Bedford Forrest's viewpoint-is often next to impossible. Knowing whom to believe — or whether to believe anyone — gets tricky. The accounts of Forrest's backers are unabashedly racist. In them, that Negro troops are none too brave and that blacks are mentally inferior to whites are givens. They seem to imply that the insults the colored artillerymen hurled at Forrest's troopers from the earthworks of Fort Pillow justified a massacre in and of themselves.

This should leave The Fort Pillow Massacre as a more reliable source… except that it is a propaganda piece in its own right, designed to paint the Confederates in general and Bedford Forrest in particular in colors as dark as possible. Forrest's force of about 1,500 men was inflated to from 7,000 to 10,000. The account emphasizes the slaughter of soldiers white and (particularly) black after the surrender of Fort Pillow-but there was no surrender, not in any formal sense. Bradford, acting in the dead Major Booth's name, refused to give one, and the fort was taken by storm.

Trying to find out what happened to Major Bradford after the fighting ended is another case in point. Pro-Confederate sources say that he was well treated, was given dinner by Colonel McCulloch, and gave his parole not to escape so he could bury his brother, Theodorick, who was killed when Fort Pillow was stormed. Bradford broke his parole, was recaptured in civilian clothes, and was shot while being taken from Brownsville to Jackson, where Forrest was. Jordan and Pryor say (p.455, note), “On the way, he again attempted to escape, soon after which one of the men shot him… mainly due to private vengeance for well-authorized outrages committed by Bradford and his band upon the defenseless families of the men of Forrest's cavalry.

[While at Fort Pillow] [h]e was treated with the utmost consideration and civility.” Wyeth, writing a generation later (p.588, note), says, “There is nothing in the records to show that the men who murdered Major Bradford were ever brought to trial for this unwarrantable act”: he does recognize that it should not have been done. My account of Bradford's last moments is based on the testimony of trader W R. McLagan, as reported in The Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, which shows that he was shot in cold blood rather than after an escape attempt.

Meanwhile, though, what motivated Bradford to break his parole? An affidavit from two U.S. lieutenants (Fort Pillow Massacre, p.105) states, “Major William F. Bradford, commanding our forces, was fired upon after he had surrendered the garrison. [He never did so.] The rebels told him he could not surrender. He ran into the river and swam out some 50 yards, they all the time firing at him, but failing to hit him. He was hailed by an officer and told to return to the shore. He did so. But as he neared the shore the riflemen discharged their pieces at him again. Again they missed. He ran up the hillside among the enemy with a white handkerchief in his hand in token of his surrender, but still they continued to fire upon him… [W]hen they found they could not hit him, they allowed him to give himself up as a prisoner and paroled him to the limits of the camp.” Pro-Confederate sources say… nothing of any of this. If a tenth of it is true, Bradford had good reason to mistrust the Rebels' “consideration and civility.”

The same affidavit, composed only six days after the combat at Fort Pillow, also asserts, “They [the Confederates] immediately killed all the officers who were over the negro troops, excepting one who has since died from his wounds. They took out from Fort Pillow about one hundred and some odd prisoners (white,) and forty negroes. They hung and shot the negroes as they passed along toward Brownsville until they were rid of them all. Out of the six hundred troops (convalescents included) which were at the fort they have only about one hundred prisoners (all whites,) and we have about fifty wounded who are paroled.”

These claims are, in detail, demonstrably false. Forrest's official report and Jordan and Pryor list by name 226 U.S. prisoners. These include three officers set above the colored artillerymen and close to 60 enlisted men, almost all of them black, from those units: these in addition to the wounded taken up to Cairo and Mound City. Nor were Negroes hung and shot on the way to Brownsville.

Nevertheless, the Union officers' affidavit touches on something vitally important in the Civil War as a whole and in the fight at Fort Pillow: the matter of race. Anyone who doubts that slavery played the most important role in causing the war need look no further than South Carolina's Ordinance of Secession and the Confederate Constitution, which did its best to make the peculiar institution legally impregnable for all time to come.

At Fort Pillow, both white and black Union troops suffered heavy casualties at Confederate hands once Forrest's men broke in. Proportionately, though, blacks had about twice as many killed as whites. This cannot be and surely is not coincidence. To quote from the lieutenants' affidavit once more, “Major Anderson, Forrest's assistant adjutant general, stated that they did not consider colored men as soldiers, but as property, and as such, being used by our people, they had destroyed them.”

But this “property” had just spent several hours firing cannon at the Confederates and shooting rifle muskets at them. Are we to believe that Forrest's troopers disposed of them the way they might have, for instance, burned down a barn that sheltered (white) Federal soldiers? It seems unlikely, to say the least.

As Bruce Catton and others have noted, hand in hand with the belief that Negroes could not fight went another, almost directly opposite, belief: that they would fight like demons if they were ever roused. Forrest's men seem to have been reacting to this fear, and to have been trying to make sure blacks stayed intimidated by the whites who had ruled and owned them for so long. They were as outraged and alarmed by Negroes in arms as matadors would have been by bulls that could use swords of their own.

This effort at intimidation failed. “Remember Fort Pillow!” became a rallying cry for colored soldiers in blue for the last year of the war. In the Civil War, untrained black troops generally performed about as well as untrained white troops, this despite their own superiors' frequent lack of confidence in their abilities and the Confederates' strong motivation to oppose them as fiercely as possible. That such questions do not arise today is in no small measure due to the sacrifices these men, so many of them born into servitude, made.

Pro-Confederate sources deny that any massacre took place, or blame the killings that did take place on the fury and excitement accompanying the storming of the fort. The second of these may well have some validity; the first does not. It is plain that killings continued well after Fort Pillow fell. That similar things happened in other places is true, but does not erase the unprovoked slaughter of men trying to yield.

It should also be noted that while the colored artillerymen in Fort Pillow suffered more than their white counterparts, the troopers of the Thirteenth Tennessee Cavalry (U.S.) did not have an easy time of it. In Tennessee, as in Kentucky and Missouri, the Civil War was not country against country or state against state but neighbor against neighbor. Because the war was so personal, it was uncommonly ferocious. People knew who was on which side-knew and made foes pay.

Jordan and Pryor (pp. 422-23) write: “Many of Bradford's men were known to be deserters from the Confederate army, and the rest were men of the country who entertained a malignant hatred toward Confederate soldiers, their families and friends… Bradford and his subalterns had traversed the surrounding country with detachments, robbing the people… besides venting upon the wives and daughters of Southern soldiers the most opprobrious and obscene epithets, with more than one extreme outrage upon the persons of these victims of their hate and lust.”

Col. Fielding Hurst, commanding the Sixth Tennessee Cavalry (U.S.), also operated in the same area. He levied contributions on towns in western Tennessee to keep them from supporting the Confederates; in 1865, U.S. Brigadier General Edward Hatch noted that “Hurst has already taken about $100,000 out of West Tennessee in blackmail when colonel of the Sixth Cavalry (Union).” This supports Forrest's assertion of March 22, 1864, that “on or about the 12th day of February, 1864, under threats of burning the town,” Hurst extorted $5,139.25 from the citizens of Jackson, Tennessee. Forrest also accused Hurst's men (as noted in Wyeth, pp.339-40) of torturing, mutilating, and murdering captured Confederates. Whether this is true cannot be certainly known 140 years after the fact, but it was a hard war in those parts.

When the Confederates had more soldiers in the neighborhood than the Federals, did they fight a kinder, gender war? To put it as mildly as possible, that is hard to believe. They had exactly the same sort of scores to settle as their U.S. counterparts, and just as much zeal to settle them. And, at Fort Pillow, two groups of men they hated more than anyone else on earth were delivered into their hands. Bedford Forrest had warned Major Bradford he could not answer for his men if they got into Fort Pillow, and they proceeded to prove he knew what he was talking about.

Of course, Forrest issued the same warning whenever he assaulted a U.S. garrison. The most compelling piece of evidence that he meant it this time was his decision to hang back from the fighting. In almost every engagement where men he commanded went into action, he fought at the fore. True, this time he was dazed and bruised after his horse fell on him when shot, but that seems too small a reason for a man who ignored gunshot wounds to stay out of the fray. More likely he understood what would happen if his men got into the fort, understood they would get in, and stayed away while the savagery was at its worst to keep from having to try to play King Canute against the blood-dimmed tide.

We remember Fort Pillow today because it is a microcosm of what the Civil War was all about. It showed that blacks could fight, could be men like any others, and it showed how determined white Southerners were not to give them the chance. It also showed that an inexperienced major was no match for the best cavalry commander on either side, even with earthworks and a gunboat to help him.

Forrest won the battle. The Union won the war. In many ways, the South won the peace for the next hundred years. Only in the past couple of generations have we begun to confront the issue of how to make the black man truly equal to the white. We still have a long way to go. Looking back at what happened at Fort Pillow, though, tells us how far we've come.