Jim Martin
Re: Revisionism and Fort Pillow
Wed Jul 25 16:17:52 2001


If you cannot understand why thoughtful people can hold an opposing view to your own, please read the following. And please, limit your insults to the argument not to the sender.

Jim Martin

From Henry's book
"Nathan Bedford Forrest; First with the Most"

"ATROCITIES" were not an invention of the First World War propaganda organizations. American newspapers of the Civil War period, North and South, abounded in them. Southern newspapers described the savagery of the invading armies, charging that Northern soldiers, authorized and even ordered by their officers, made theft, assault and murder a part of their regular duties. Northern papers were no less lurid in their descriptions of the dishonor, infamy and ferocity of the Southern soldiers coming to a climax in a Boston paper's description of Robert E. Lee flogging a slave girl with his own hands and then rubbing brine on her bleeding wounds.
But Fort Pillow was the "atrocity" of the war. Forrest's men stormed the fort. Incompetent and blundering command of the defense brought extraordinary losses to the defenders. Bitter local animosities and racial antipathies added to the slaughter. A Congressional committee of inquiry made the "atrocity" official. Its report, of which 40,000 extra copies were printed, became a prime campaign document in the bitter election of 1864.
During the weeks and months in which Fort Pillow was being thus established in popular belief as a "massacre," neither Forrest himself nor the Confederate government made any corresponding effort to present the other side of the story to the people in either North or South. Forrest's reason for public silence, as expressed in a letter to Stephen Lee ten weeks after the affair, was that "as my official reports are in the hands of the Department at Richmond I did not, nor do 1, consider that I have any defense to make, or attempt any refutation of the charges.... I have taken pains in my official report made to Lieutenant-General Polk, to place all the facts in the possession of the Government in order that they might meet any demands made by Federal authority.
The Confederate government was silent during these critical weeks because it had not received the report. After the death of General Polk during the Atlanta campaign the report was found among his papers by his aide, Lieutenant W. D. Gale, and forwarded to Richmond. On August tenth the President suggested to Secretary of War Seddon that "It would be well to have the report and accompanying papers published in refutation of the slanders promulgated by the Government of the enemy... By that time, however, four months after the event, the "Fort Pillow Massacre" had become established, and so remains in most minds. In course of time the story was added to and embroidered by spurious "dispatches" supposed to have been sent by Forrest, and published as evidence of both his illiteracy and his ferocity.
Fort Pillow was erected originally by the Confederates in 1861, at the First Chickasaw Bluff of the Mississippi, forty miles north of Memphis in a direct line and twice that far by the meanders of the river. The original trace of the fort was a line two miles long at a distance of 600 or more yards from the river, enclosing the angle between the Mississippi on the west and Coal Creek on the north. Finding this work entirely too large for any available garrison to hold, Brigadier General Villepigue, subsequently commanding for the Confederates, built a second and much shorter line inside the original work. In the great Confederate retreat after the siege of Corinth in the early summer of 1862 the position was evacuated, and passed into Union possession. The new occupants built a third and still smaller work, only about 125 yards in length and enclosing no more than the high clay bluff in the apex of whom 295 were white and 262 colored, with an armament of six guns. In addition to the garrison of the fort itself the gunboat New Era, Captain James Marshall, was stationed offshore, to take part in the defense of the place.
To add to the tensions to be expected between Confederate soldiers and a garrison made up of Negro troops and white soldiers of the sort whom the Confederates called "renegades," "Tennessee Tories" or "homemade Yankees," the recruiting, scouting and foraging activities of the white Union regiment had been carried on with a rigor which, to the Confederate neighbors of Fort Pillow, appeared more as pillage and persecution. From the time that Forrest entered West Tennessee in March, therefore, there had come to him a series of reports from local citizens of outrages on property or persons ascribed to the Fort Pillow garrison. As early as April fourth Forrest had written to Polk that "there is a Federal force of five or six hundred at Fort Pillow, which I shall attend to in a day or so . . ." but it was not until a week later that the movement against the fort was actually started.
Orders for the movement went out on Sunday, April tenth, from Forrest's headquarters at Jackson to Bell's brigade, encamped at Eaton in Gibson County, and to McCulloch's brigade at Sharon's Ferry on the Forked Deer River, the whole force of about 1,500 men to be under the direct command of Chalmers. Bell, having seventy miles to go, marched at midnight Sunday, almost as soon as orders were received. McCulloch, with a shorter march of fifty miles to make, started Monday morning. Both brigades marched hard Monday and Monday night through drizzly rain over roads of deep mud and across weak bridges, with no more than brief halts for rest and feed, to arrive before Fort Pillow about 5:30 on the morning of Tuesday, April twelfth. Pickets were driven in with a rush and by sunup the Confederates were inside the original works built in 1861. The early-morning fight was carried forward with skill and vigor under the command of Chalmers. Lieutenant Mack J. Leaming, adjutant of the regiment of Tennessee Unionists and during most of the day post adjutant of Fort Pillow, reports that by 8:00 A.M. two companies of skirmishers which bad been thrown forward to hold the advanced rifle pits were "compelled to retire to the fort after considerable loss." With the defenders driven into the shrunken space of the fort proper, Lieutenant Leaming adds, "the firing continued without cessation, principally from behind logs, stumps, and under cover of thick underbrush and from high knolls, until about 9 A.M., when the rebels made a general assault on our works, which was successfully repulsed.
There is no mention of this general assault and repulse in the Confederate reports but it is plain that already, by midmorning, they dominated the situation. The "high knolls" mentioned by Lieutenant Leaming enabled them to fire into the fort at ranges of not more than 400 yards, while the logs and stumps left in the felling of the timber inside the original 1861 works gave shelter to the Confederate sharpshooters. "We suffered pretty severely in the loss of commissioned officers by the unerring aim of the rebel sharpshooters," Leaming reported, including the loss of the commanding officer, Major Booth, who was killed about nine o'clock, and his adjutant, killed shortly after. From that time on, indeed, the defense of the place was hopeless, for already the Confederate marksmen were in such position that they could take both faces of the fort proper in reverse and pick off the defenders even as they stood behind the heavy parapets upon which they relied.
These parapets, four feet thick at the top, rising eight feet high above a ditch which was itself six feet deep and twelve feet wide, were but one of the elements of the defense which had caused Major Booth to report that be regarded the place as "perfectly safe,"" and which were to lead his inexperienced successor in command, Major Bradford, to attempt to hold the pl again successfully repulsed with severe loss. The enemy succeeded, however, in obtaining possession of two rows of barracks running parallel to the south side of the fort [italics supplied] and distant about 150 yards. The barracks had previously been ordered to be destroyed, but after severe loss on our part in the attempt to execute the order our men were compelled to retire without accomplishing the desired end, save only to the row nearest the fort. From these barracks the enemy kept up a murderous fire on our men, despite all our efforts to dislodge him. Owning to the close proximity of these buildings to the fort, and to the fact that they were on considerably lower ground our artillery could not be sufficiently depressed to destroy them, or even render them untenable for the enemy."

The buildings referred to in Lieutenant Leaming's report were situated in a ravine, thus described in the report of the Congressional committee which investigated the "massacre":

"Extending back from the river on either side of the fort was a ravine or hollow, the one below the fort containing several stores and some dwellings, constituting what was called the town. At the mouth of that ravine and on the river-bank were some government buildings containing commissary and quartermaster's stores. The ravine above the fort was known as Cold Creek ravine.... "
"The gunboat New Era, Captain Marshall, took part in the conflict, shelling the enemy as opportunity offered ... as they were shelled out of' one ravine they would make their appearance in the other. They would thus appear and retire as the gunboat moved from one point to another. About one o'clock the fire on both sides slackened somewhat, and the gunboat moved out in the river to cool and clean its guns, having fired 282 rounds of shell, shrapnel and canister, which nearly exhausted its supply of ammunition."

At this hour of one o'clock when, as appears from Captain Marshall's testimony, the gunboat fired its last shot the Confederates had for some two hours been in possession of the ravines which, it was afterward alleged, they secured only by violation of a flag of truce sent in about 3:30 P.m.
Upon his arrival at the fort Forrest began one of his usual close-up, naked-eye reconnaissances of the position. Almost immediately a rifle ball fired from the fort struck and -mortally wounded his horse. Frantic with pain, the animal reared and fell over backward, carrying his rider with him and inflicting upon the General bruises and injuries which were painful and even serious. Undaunted, Forrest mounted another horse which, in turn, was shot and killed. Over the remonstrance of his adjutant, Captain Anderson, he mounted still a third time, declaring that he was just as liable to be shot on foot as on horseback and that he could see better from his horse. Before the painstaking reconnaissance was completed, Forrest's third mount of the day was struck, though not killed.
Fighter that he was, Forrest was not accustomed to sacrifice men needlessly. He got results but be wanted them as cheaply as possible. Throughout the time of his reconnaissance and afterward, he kept his men working forward through the underbrush and stumps toward the fort in short rushes, each advance being covered by the fire of sharpshooters converging from both sides upon the defenders behind the parapet.
By 1:00 P.m.-the time at which the gunboat ceased trying to shell the Confederates out of the ravines-the Confederate lines were already formed "on the declining ground from the fort to a ravine, which nearly encircles the fort" at a distance varying "from 50 to 150 yards of the works," according to Anderson's report. Anderson adds:

"The width or thickness of the works across the top prevented the garrison from firing down on us, as it could only be done by mounting and exposing themselves to the unerring aim of our sharpshooters, posted behind stumps and logs on all the neighboring bills. They were also unable to garrison, promising you that you shall be treated as prisoners of war" but declining, if the demand were refused, "to be responsible for the fate of the command," that being another form of the same threat which Forrest had so often and so successfully used ever since his first capture of Murfreesborough by stratagem and bluff.
And then began a correspondence carried on from the Union side entirely in the name of Major Booth, dead for more than six hours. First Major Bradford asked, in the name of Booth, for "one hour for consultation and consideration with my officers and the officers of the gunboat." Forrest, observing a steamer "apparently crowded with troops" approaching the fort, seeing "the smoke of three other boats ascending the river," and "believing the request for an hour was to gain time for reinforcements to arrive, and that the desire to consult the officers of the gunboat was a pretext," replied with a note allowing twenty minutes.
Meanwhile the troop-laden steamers-the Liberty from abo