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Source: Hacker/Sommers (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2010, 2007). This paper follows the style guidelines in The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th ed. (2010).

The Massacre at Fort Pillow:

Holding Nathan Bedford Forrest Accountable

Ned Bishop

History 214

Professor Citro

March 22, XXXX

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Although Northern newspapers of the time no doubt

exaggerated some of the Confederate atrocities at Fort Pillow,

most modern sources agree that a massacre of Union troops took

place there on April 12, 1864. It seems clear that Union soldiers,

particularly black soldiers, were killed after they had stopped

fighting or had surrendered or were being held prisoner. Less clear

is the role played by Major General Nathan Bedford Forrest in

leading his troops. Although we will never know whether Forrest

directly ordered the massacre, evidence suggests that he was

responsible for it. What happened at Fort Pillow?

Fort Pillow, Tennessee, which sat on a bluff overlooking

the Mississippi River, had been held by the Union for two

years. It was garrisoned by 580 men, 292 of them from United

States Colored Heavy and Light Artillery regiments, 285 from

the white Thirteenth Tennessee Cavalry. Nathan Bedford Forrest

commanded about 1,500 men.1

The Confederates attacked Fort Pillow on April 12, 1864,

and had virtually surrounded the fort by the time Forrest arrived

on the battlefield. At 3:30 p.m., Forrest demanded the surrender

of the Union forces, sending in a message of the sort he had

used before: “The conduct of the officers and men garrisoning

Fort Pillow has been such as to entitle them to being treated as

prisoners of war. . . . Should my demand be refused, I cannot

be responsible for the fate of your command.”2 Union Major

William Bradford, who had replaced Major Booth, killed earlier by

sharpshooters, asked for an hour to consider the demand. Forrest,

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worried that vessels in the river were bringing in more troops,

“shortened the time to twenty minutes.”3 Bradford refused to

surrender, and Forrest quickly ordered the attack.

The Confederates charged to the fort, scaled the parapet,

and fired on the forces within. Victory came quickly, with the

Union forces running toward the river or surrendering. Shelby

Foote describes the scene like this:

Some kept going, right on into the river, where a number

drowned and the swimmers became targets for marksmen

on the bluff. Others, dropping their guns in terror, ran back

toward the Confederates with their hands up, and of these

some were spared as prisoners, while others were shot down

in the act of surrender.4

In his own official report, Forrest makes no mention of the

massacre. He does make much of the fact that the Union flag was

not lowered by the Union forces, saying that if his own men had

not taken down the flag, “few, if any, would have survived unhurt

another volley.”5

However, as Jack Hurst points out and Forrest

must have known, in this twenty-minute battle, “Federals running

for their lives had little time to concern themselves with a flag.”6

The federal congressional report on Fort Pillow, which

charged the Confederates with appalling atrocities, was

strongly criticized by Southerners. Respected writer Shelby

Foote, while agreeing that the report was “largely” fabrication,

points out that the “casualty figures . . . indicated strongly

that unnecessary killing had occurred.”7 In an important

article, John Cimprich and Robert C. Mainfort Jr. argue that

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the most trustworthy evidence is that written within about ten

days of the battle, before word of the congressional hearings

circulated and Southerners realized the extent of Northern

outrage. The article reprints a group of letters and newspaper

sources written before April 22 and thus “untainted by the

political overtones the controversy later assumed.”8 Cimprich

and Mainfort conclude that these sources “support the case for

the occurrence of a massacre” but that Forrest’s role remains

“clouded” because of inconsistencies in testimony.9

Did Forrest order the massacre? We will never really know whether Forrest directly ordered

the massacre, but it seems unlikely. True, Confederate soldier

Achilles Clark, who had no reason to lie, wrote to his sisters

that “I with several others tried to stop the butchery . . . but

Gen. Forrest ordered them [Negro and white Union troops] shot

down like dogs, and the carnage continued.” 10 But it is not clear

whether Clark heard Forrest giving the orders or was just reporting

hearsay. Many Confederates had been shouting “No quarter! No

quarter!” and, as Shelby Foote points out, these shouts were

“thought by some to be at Forrest’s command.”11 A Union soldier,

Jacob Thompson, claimed to have seen Forrest order the killing,

but when asked to describe the six-foot-two general, he called

him “a little bit of a man.”12

Perhaps the most convincing evidence that Forrest did not

order the massacre is that he tried to stop it once it had begun.

Historian Albert Castel quotes several eyewitnesses on both the

Union and Confederate sides as saying that Forrest ordered his

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men to stop firing. In a letter to his wife three days after the

battle, Confederate soldier Samuel Caldwell wrote that “if General

Forrest had not run between our men & the Yanks with his pistol

and sabre drawn not a man would have been spared.”14

In a respected biography of Nathan Bedford Forrest, Hurst

suggests that the temperamental Forrest “may have ragingly

ordered a massacre and even intended to carry it out—until he

rode inside the fort and viewed the horrifying result” and ordered it

stopped.15 While this is an intriguing interpretation of events, even

Hurst would probably admit that it is merely speculation.

Can Forrest be held responsible for the massacre?

Even assuming that Forrest did not order the massacre, he

can still be held accountable for it. That is because he created an

atmosphere ripe for the possibility of atrocities and did nothing to

ensure that they wouldn’t happen. Throughout his career Forrest

repeatedly threatened “no quarter,” particularly with respect to

black soldiers, so Confederate troops had good reason to think

that in massacring the enemy they were carrying out his orders. As

Hurst writes, “About all he had to do to produce a massacre was

issue no order against one.”16 Dudley Taylor Cornish agrees:

It has been asserted again and again that Forrest did not

order a massacre. He did not need to. He had sought to terrify

the Fort Pillow garrison by a threat of no quarter, as he had

done at Union City and at Paducah in the days just before he

turned on Pillow. If his men did enter the fort shouting “Give

them no quarter; kill them; kill them; it is General Forrest’s

orders,” he should not have been surprised.17

13

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The slaughter at Fort Pillow was no doubt driven in large

part by racial hatred. Numbers alone suggest this: of 295 white

troops, 168 were taken prisoner, but of 262 black troops, only

58 were taken into custody, with the rest either dead or too

badly wounded to walk.18 A Southern reporter traveling with

Forrest makes clear that the discrimination was deliberate: “Our

troops maddened by the excitement, shot down the ret[r]eating

Yankees, and not until they had attained t[h]e water’s edge and

turned to beg for mercy, did any prisoners fall in [t]o our hands—

Thus the whites received quarter, but the negroes were shown

no mercy.”19 Union surgeon Dr. Charles Fitch, who was taken

prisoner by Forrest, testified that after he was in custody he “saw”

Confederate soldiers “kill every negro that made his appearance

dressed in Federal uniform.”20

Fort Pillow is not the only instance of a massacre or

threatened massacre of black soldiers by troops under Forrest’s

command. Biographer Brian Steel Wills points out that at

Brice’s Cross Roads in June 1864, “black soldiers suffered

inordinately” as Forrest looked the other way and Confederate

soldiers deliberately sought out those they termed “the damned

negroes.”21 Just a day after Fort Pillow, on April 13, 1864,

one of Forrest’s generals, Abraham Buford, after consulting

with Forrest, demanded that the federal garrison in Columbus,

Kentucky, surrender. The demand stated that if an attack

became necessary, “no quarter will be shown to the negro

troops whatever; the white troops will be treated as prisoners

of war.”22

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Nathan Bedford Forrest, a crude man who had made his

fortune as a slave trader, was noted for both his violence and his

hatred of blacks. In the words of historian James M. McPherson,

“Forrest possessed a killer instinct toward . . . blacks in any

capacity other than slave.”23 Forrest’s battle successes were

largely due to his brazen tactics—tactics that Hurst says would

not have occurred to the “aristocratic, well-educated Confederate

military hierarchy.”24 Some Southerners, in fact, found Forrest’s

leadership style distasteful. As one Mississippi aristocrat put it,

“Forrest may be, and no doubt is, the best cavalry officer in the

West, but I object to a tyrrannical [sic], hot-headed vulgarian’s

commanding me.”25

Because he was so crudely racist, Forrest surely understood

the rage that his troops felt toward the very idea of blacks as

soldiers. Further, he must have known that his standard threats of

“No quarter” would fuel the Confederate soldiers’ rage. Although

Forrest may have tried to prevent the massacre once it was under

way, he can still be held accountable for it. That is because he

created the conditions that led to the massacre (especially of

black troops) and with full knowledge of those conditions took no

steps to prevent what was a nearly inevitable bloodbath.

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Notes

1. John Cimprich and Robert C. Mainfort Jr., eds., “Fort Pillow Revisited: New Evidence about an Old Controversy,” Civil War History 28, no. 4 (1982): 293-94.

2. Quoted in Brian Steel Wills, A Battle from the Start: The Life of Nathan Bedford Forrest (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 182.

3. Ibid., 183.

4. Shelby Foote, The Civil War, a Narrative: Red River to Appomattox (New York: Vintage, 1986), 110.

5. Nathan Bedford Forrest, “Report of Maj. Gen. Nathan B. Forrest, C. S. Army, Commanding Cavalry, of the Capture of Fort Pillow,” Shotgun’s Home of the American Civil War, accessed March 6, 2008, http://www.civilwarhome.com/forrest.htm.

6. Jack Hurst, Nathan Bedford Forrest: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1993), 174.

7. Foote, Civil War, 111.

8. Cimprich and Mainfort, “Fort Pillow,” 295.

9. Ibid., 305.

10. Ibid., 299.

11. Foote, Civil War, 110.

12. Quoted in Wills, Battle from the Start, 187.

13. Albert Castel, “The Fort Pillow Massacre: A Fresh Examination of the Evidence,” Civil War History 4, no. 1 (1958): 44-45.

14. Cimprich and Mainfort, “Fort Pillow,” 300.

15. Hurst, Nathan Bedford Forrest, 177.

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16. Ibid.

17. Dudley Taylor Cornish, The Sable Arm: Black Troops in the Union Army, 1861-1865 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1987), 175.

18. Foote, Civil War, 111.

19. Cimprich and Mainfort, “Fort Pillow,” 304.

20. Quoted in Wills, Battle from the Start, 189.

21. Ibid., 215.

22. Quoted in Hurst, Nathan Bedford Forrest, 177.

23. Quoted in James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 402.

24. Hurst, Nathan Bedford Forrest, 74.

25. Quoted in Foote, Civil War, 106.

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Bibliography

Castel, Albert. “The Fort Pillow Massacre: A Fresh Examination of the Evidence.” Civil War History 4, no. 1 (1958): 37-50.

Cimprich, John, and Robert C. Mainfort Jr., eds. “Fort Pillow Revisited: New Evidence about an Old Controversy.” Civil War History 28, no. 4 (1982): 293-306.

Cornish, Dudley Taylor. The Sable Arm: Black Troops in the Union Army, 1861-1865. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1987.

Foote, Shelby. The Civil War, a Narrative: Red River to Appomattox. New York: Vintage, 1986.

Forrest, Nathan Bedford. “Report of Maj. Gen. Nathan B. Forrest, C. S. Army, Commanding Cavalry, of the Capture of Fort Pillow.” Shotgun’s Home of the American Civil War. Accessed March 6, 2008. http://www.civilwarhome.com/forrest.htm.

Hurst, Jack. Nathan Bedford Forrest: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 1993.

McPherson, James M. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Wills, Brian Steel. A Battle from the Start: The Life of Nathan Bedford Forrest. New York: HarperCollins, 1992.

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