River Run Red

As the Northern army penetrated the slaveholding states, however, and recruited escaped slaves first as laborers and then as soldiers, it was harder and harder for either side to cling to such abstractions. Yankees looting the slave quarters of an abandoned plantation and even nonslaveholding rebels ducking artillery fire from a black Union battery began to see that, for better or worse, the core of the conflict was the destiny of the Southern slave, the runaway, and the armed black soldier. No matter how the war might end, not only the South but the entire country would be forever changed.

Any civilian who judged the cause of the war solely on the basis of political rhetoric might never have guessed at slavery’s centrality. Hoping he might yet bring the fastidious British to the Confederacy’s aid, an increasingly isolated and desperate President Jefferson Davis kept explicit references to slavery out of most of his speeches, couching the Southern cause as a struggle for liberty, identity, chivalry, destiny.

For much of the war Lincoln too had tried to keep the question of slavery at arm’s length. It had been divisive enough in peacetime; in war it threatened to destroy all the political alliances he had carefully crafted to restore the Union, without which, after all, there could be no hope of emancipation. Determined to keep the slaveholding Border States out of the Confederacy’s thrall, Lincoln had equivocated about the destiny of African Americans, and embraced for a time the old Southern white moderates’ myopic notion of sending them all abroad. “I am naturally anti-slavery,” Lincoln had lately written. “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Nevertheless, he had “never understood that the Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment and feeling.”²

The only way to defeat the South, Lincoln had decided, was to overwhelm its armies with massively superior numbers. But enlistments were lagging, and after his imposition of the draft triggered horrendous race riots in Chicago and New York, Lincoln reluctantly adopted a course he had long regarded as too risky: to recruit and train escaped slaves to serve in the Union army. It was a matter of military necessity, especially in the West, from which Sherman was siphoning off regiment after regiment of veteran white troops for his Meridian campaign, dangerously thinning out the garrisons along the Mississippi. And if enlisting them was a matter of military necessity, so was offering freedom to any black who volunteered. Tens of thousands of Southern blacks filed up to be inducted—some volunteering, some lured by recruiters with false promises of high pay and lavish rations, others rounded up by Yankee press gangs and the commandants of the Union camps to which they had fled from bondage.

When Lincoln celebrated New Year’s, 1863, by issuing his Emancipation Proclamation, he freed only those slaves in Confederate territory, ostensibly leaving the slaves in Union-occupied or neutral states in bondage. Southerners scoffed that the proclamation was meaningless, for it could not free slaves under Confederate control and declined to free slaves under Yankee control. “Abraham Lincoln, the wily wretch,” rhymed a Mississippi wag, “Freed the slaves he couldn’t catch.” But wiser heads North and South recognized that despite its limitations, Lincoln’s proclamation had created a fissure that could never be repaired. For all Americans, the earth was shifting underfoot.³

With western Kentucky above and the state of Mississippi brooding below, West Tennessee is bounded on two sides by great rivers. The broad Mississippi snakes along its western edge, while the Tennessee veers down through Kentucky to form the region’s eastern boundary. Five capillary and nearly equidistant rivers bristle eastward from the Mississippi into West Tennessee. The Reelfoot is northernmost, then the Obion, the Forked Deer, the Hatchie, and finally the southernmost Wolf, with streams and creeks spreading from each of their trunks like the branches of fallen trees. The region is divided into three fairly distinct parts. In the east, along the Tennessee River, the land ripples and buckles into hills and ridges bristling with pines; the midlands are marked by a verdant plateau; and the western portion comprises the overawing Mississippi’s banks and bottoms.

Along the Mississippi’s bluffs, prehistoric tribes had hunted and fished, piled their funerary mounds, and then mysteriously disappeared. Then the Chickasaw of Mexico, following the lean of a sacred pole, found their way to the lower Mississippi, where their pole held fast in the valley’s yielding alluvial loam. For centuries they camped along the bluffs in dwellings of wattle and daub; fished in the great river and its tributaries; exchanged volleys of arrows and stones with the rival tribes that occasionally paddled up and down the river; and hunted elk and bear, deer and beaver in poplar forests carpeted by lilies, orchids, and rye, and entangled in a twisting calligraphy of hickory.

On a chill February day in 1682, the indefatigable René-Robert Cavelier La Salle had paused on his exploratory voyage down the Mississippi to raise a cross and erect a crude fort atop a promontory on the eastern bank that became known as the First Chickasaw Bluff. Over the next century and a half, the lower Mississippi Valley ostensibly passed from the French to the Spanish, back to the French, and at last to the fledgling American Republic as part of the Louisiana Purchase.

In 1798, a North Carolinian named Henry Rutherford and two black chain bearers had made their way to present-day West Tennessee to mark off large tracts of land for his investors. After Thomas Jefferson announced his Louisiana Purchase, Rutherford dusted off his deeds in the Hillsborough courthouse and counted the days until he and his friends could lay claim to their land.

The lower valley was regularly inundated by floods of Old Testament proportions, reconfiguring its topography so dramatically that portions of it were unrecognizable from year to year. Nor was that all. In the winter of 1811-1812, the Lower Mississippi Valley was rocked by earthquakes and aftershocks of such magnitude that the river actually flowed backward for a time, razing the forests of poplar and chestnut along its banks. Here and there the earth collapsed under the flood’s weight, dotting the land with lakes that survive to this day.

When, in the late spring of 1812, the floodwaters receded from West Tennessee, they revealed some eighty thousand acres of rich bottomland conveniently scoured of trees and underbrush and covered by a thick, rich layer of alluvial soil. The flood so devastated the Chickasaw that they could resist the whites no longer. Three years later they were ready to sign a treaty with Andrew Jackson and his real estate crony Isaac Shelby, clearing the way for North Carolinians like Henry Rutherford to immigrate. What followed was one of the most squalid landgrabs in the squalid annals of American real estate speculation.

Not only the Chickasaw were shoved aside, but the common North Carolinians as well. When the state offered the land for sale, it required that anyone who wanted title had to travel to West Tennessee first, survey his claim, and then register it in person back in Hillsborough. But the law also called for the closing of the land office seven months later, making it impossible for anyone but insiders who were already in place to purchase parcels. Within those seven months, four million acres were sold, much of it to big speculators.⁴

In 1832, Rutherford arrived with his slaves from middle Tennessee in a small flotilla of keel boats and laid claim to five hundred acres of the land he had surveyed thirty-four years before. Others followed, forming a settlement they called Fulton a couple of miles south of the First Chickasaw Bluff. By now deer, wolves, bears, and panthers had returned, and slaves had to cut down the high cane and second growth that had reclaimed the scoured bottoms from quake and flood. They floated their logs to the tub water mills that soon popped up by every creek and stream. Toiling alongside their African bondsmen, pioneers of predominantly Scotch-Irish descent raised sheep; cultivated honey; and planted fruit trees, corn, wheat, tobacco, and cotton so dense and fine that it would soon become famed the world over.⁵

In Tennessee, the seeds of secessionism, like slavery, were river-borne, taking most stubborn root among the slaveholding plantations along the Mississippi. The concentration of Tennessee slaves decreased not the farther north one went, but the farther east. In East Tennessee the ratio of slaves to whites was only one in twelve, in Central Tennessee one in three. But in West Tennessee the proportion rose to three to every five whites. Over a thousand plantations boasted more than five hundred acres, and about thirty-seven thousand slaveholders controlled the destinies of almost 276,000 slaves. But even within West Tennessee, there were considerable differences from county to county. The richest cotton-growing counties were in the low-lying southwestern quadrant, where vast plantations run by overseers and worked by slaves produced some of the finest cotton in the world. But in hill counties like McNairy, the ratio of slaves to whites fell to only one in ten.

In 1836, a county at the center of the Tennessee bank of the Mississippi River was assembled from contiguous chunks of Tipton, Dyer, and Haywood counties and named after Colonel James Lauderdale, a colonel who had fallen by Jackson’s side at the Battle of New Orleans. Until it was bypassed by the railroad, Lauderdale County’s principal settlement at Fulton had hoped to give Memphis a run for her money. But Fulton got off to a rough start. The town was cyclically beset by epidemics of what was probably yellow fever, and the approach to the landing was so treacherous that boatmen dubbed a nearby bar “Flour Island” after all the flour boats that had been wrecked upon it.⁶

As Fulton faltered, the rowdy inland settlement of Ripley became the Lauderdale County seat. With a population of about four thousand, Lauderdale formed a militia that mustered twice a year, and sent a company of men to the Mexican War, half of whom never returned. Unless you counted the occasional passing navy boat with its Stars and Stripes fluttering in the river breeze, or the grizzled old vets of the War of 1812 who sat on their porches, surveying their land grants and telling their tales of Jackson at New Orleans, there was not much of a military presence in the county. But the boys of West Tennessee breathed an atmosphere of guns and horses and Bowie knives that would soon make warriors of them all.⁷

The future Fort Pillow would encompass much of the property of one A. G. Bragg of St. Louis, whose holdings extended over some 2,500 acres. But in 1858, a portion of the site was bought by the unlikeliest of the county’s émigres: a Vermont native and New York lawyer named Edward B. Benton, who “through indomitable energy and unceasing labor” established a trading post on the First Chickasaw Bluff and lured “a number of settlers to locate with a view of building up a town.”⁸

His tract was bounded by two minor contributors to the Mississippi’s flood: the Hatchie River (hatchy being the Chickasaw word for river) and a creek sometimes misnamed Cole or Cold Creek, but originally dubbed Coal Creek because of the veins of coarse black gold that ran along its defile. The Mississippi and the Hatchie joined about three miles east of Benton’s farm, creating, with Coal Creek, a veritable peninsula.⁹

Though the Mississippi threatened to lop away a few more yards of his property every year, Benton had the giddy faith and rigor of a transplanted urbanite, and continued to establish a barrel factory on his 215-acre share of the bluff. In 1860 he sailed to Europe “for the purpose of making contracts for the delivery of oak staves,” but when war broke out and Tennessee seceded, he returned to the States, shelved his barrel-making plans, and holed up in Albany, New York, to wait for the Union army to sweep the rebels off his land.

Tennessee was the last state to join the Confederacy. In fact, it had voted against secession when the matter was first put up to a vote. But the subsequent fall of Fort Sumter and Lincoln’s call for volunteers had now turned most of the county’s whites against the Union. The secessionist movement in Tennessee owed a lot of its ardor to the machinations of its voluble, partisan governor, Isham Harris. For this second referendum on secession, Harris was taking no chances. He required that the balloting be conducted by voice vote and under the intimidating eye of his own enforcers, or “Homeguards,” as he called them: gangs of secessionist vigilantes who had gleefully raided Unionist assemblies at His Excellency’s behest, brandishing guns, torches, ropes, and whips, and chasing hundreds of Northern sympathizers into neutral Kentucky and Unionist Illinois.¹⁰

On a hot June day in 1861, the free white men of Tennessee converged on their county courthouses to vote on secession for a second time as the governor’s sullen henchmen lounged around the steps. A lot of Union men stayed home. But not fifty-year-old Fielding Hurst. One of the biggest slaveholders in the county, Hurst lived in the grandest house; served as worshipful master of the local Masonic lodge; and, with his brothers, ruled an estate so vast—sixty square miles traversing the Tennessee River—that it was locally known as “Hurst Nation.” But unlike the majority of his class, Hurst opposed secession. “One country, one language, one flag” was his credo.

Tall, wiry, with a prominent jaw and an icy gaze, Hurst was accustomed to having his way. He had not the slightest intention of allowing the governor’s ruffians to keep him from the polls. When his turn came to vote, Hurst not only declared himself for the Union but denounced Harris’s henchmen to their faces as thugs, thieves, and traitors to the nation for which his ancestors had bled and died.

This time around, those white males who dared to go to the polls would vote for secession by a large margin. But Harris’s henchmen did not wait for the final tally before clapping Fielding Hurst in irons and carting him off to Nashville, where for the next seven months the lord of Hurst Nation would lie shivering in the penitentiary, nursing a lethal grudge.

It is a wonder he was not lynched. Before the war, on the region’s northeastern edge, the good citizens of Henry County nearly strung up West Tennessee’s leading Unionist, Congressman Emerson Etheridge. Feelings ran so high that later, during the war, when a Confederate soldier revealed to his comrades that he was Etheridge’s distant relation, they tried to lynch him as well.

The flames of secession had been fanned most effectively by outside agitators from the Deep South who riled up the more hesitant and divided citizenry of the Upper South with dire predictions: that Lincoln and his allies intended not just to keep slavery out of the territories but to deprive them of their slaves, force racial equality upon the South, instigate a race war, and encourage miscegenation. As Confederate brigadier general Felix Kirk Zollicoffer warned, the object of “this unnatural war” was to “set at liberty your slaves,” and eventually “to put arms in their hands and give them political and social equality with yourselves.” He declared that “the honor of your wives and daughters, your past renown, and the fair name of your posterity forbid that you should strike for Lincoln and the abolition of slavery against those struggling for the rights and independence of your kindred race.”¹¹

In the bustling capital city of Nashville, in the center of the state of Tennessee, a larger-than-life-size bronze effigy of Andrew Jackson sat atop his rearing horse on a stone pedestal that proclaimed in deeply chiseled capitals, OUR FEDERAL UNION: IT MUST BE PRESERVED. Old Hickory was Tennessee’s special pride and joy, and his legacy had encouraged Tennessee’s beleaguered moderates in their hope that their state might at least remain neutral and serve as an agency of sanity and peace. But all they accomplished was to delay the inevitable. The secessionists’ warnings of slavery’s abolition and the equality of the black man painted Southern moderates as sentimental naïfs or, far worse, traitors to their race.

On the day Fielding Hurst was clapped in irons, West and Central Tennesseeans voted to secede from the Union in such numbers that they overwhelmed the Unionists to their east. Within a few months, a hammer-wielding secessionist would desecrate Andrew Jackson’s statue by chipping FEDERAL and UNION from its pedestal.¹²