River Run Red

Men debated whether their exodus was likelier to weaken the Union or the Confederacy. Andrew Johnson thought it would encumber the Federal government; Grant’s superintendent of contrabands, John Eaton, believed it would destroy the Southern economy. In November 1862, Henry Halleck ordered his officers not to admit any more fugitive slaves into their lines and to expel any who were not already working for the army. Believing this would condemn runaway slaves to death from starvation and exposure or, at best, abandon them to the tender mercies of masters, slave catchers, kidnappers, and rebel home guards, abolitionists decried Halleck’s order and tried to persuade Congress to override it.²

I inflict great hardship upon them, as they would be homeless and helpless. Furthermore, such a course would occasion much personal inconvenience and sincere regret, to other officers no less than to myself. These people are mainly our servants, and we can get no others. They have been employed in this capacity for some time, long enough for us to like them as servants, to find them useful and trustworthy, and to feel an interest in their welfare.³

In the end, it hardly mattered. The floodgates had opened, and no one, least of all Halleck, could ever pull them closed. “The moment the Union army moved into slave territory,” wrote W. E. B. DuBois, “the Negro joined it,” and “it made no difference what the obstacles were, or the attitudes of the commanders. It was ‘like thrusting a walking stick into an ant hill,’ says one writer. And yet the army chiefs tried to regard it as an exceptional and temporary matter, a thing which they could control, when as a matter of fact it was the meat and kernel of the war.”⁴

Many Union and civil authorities treated contrabands no better than slaves: exiling them, even whipping them for carrying weapons, assembling, hiring themselves out, or trading without their owners’ permission. They fined free blacks and even whites for harboring fugitives or selling them liquor. But eventually the contrabands’ sheer numbers made assemblies inevitable, and in their appalling poverty they had to find jobs and sell produce and merchandise in order to survive.

The old Black Code receded slowly from Tennessee’s courts. At Nashville, Police Recorder William Shane fined Federal contractors for housing fugitive slaves and condemned two contrabands to nine lashes each for holding a dance, despite the fact that it had been authorized by the post commander. But at last the army ordered him to stop enforcing the old code altogether. Andrew Johnson began openly to push for outright abolition in Tennessee. The old unilateral antimiscegenation law remained in force, but Johnson issued licenses to contrabands to sell merchandise, and some military courts began to allow blacks to testify against whites. By 1864, the slave code in Tennessee had effectively passed into history.⁵

No one seems to have bothered to count the number of runaway slaves who first made their way to the ruins of Fort Pillow. There probably weren’t many. Slaves elsewhere had escaped to Union lines where Union victories appeared decisive and Union occupation permanent. But even as the Confederates retreated from West Tennessee in early June 1862, slaves could see that there was no guarantee they would not be back, for the Yankees had shown little intention of staying.

All that changed in early September with the arrival of Colonel Wolfe and his 52nd Indiana Infantry. Once word circulated that the Yankees had occupied the bluff, slaves forsook their owners in droves, walking, riding, driving their masters’ wagons and teams up from Fulton and westward from Ripley and greeting one another in a camp they slapped together where the two roads met, within the fort and a half mile back from the river. This would place them about equidistant to the landing and to the camps of the the 52nd, the 32nd Iowa Infantry, and the 2nd Illinois Cavalry up the Fulton Road: a convenient location for the men and women who would work once more on the fortifications, cook and launder for officers and men, and tote freight to and from the steamboats that docked at the post’s landing. Most of the refugees who gathered at Fort Pillow were evidently slaves who had absconded from nearby plantations on both sides of the Mississippi, or rescued runaways deposited at Fort Pillow Landing by passing Union boats. Some of them had undoubtedly worked on the fortifications for the rebels, little knowing that their labor, by Yankee edict, would set them free.

There is scant record of conditions in the contraband camp at Fort Pillow; but the little “negro cemetery” indicated on a soldier’s map, and the fact that at Nashville that winter some 1,400 contrabands died of disease, exposure, and starvation, suggest that conditions must have been dire. It is impossible to estimate how many would gather at Fort Pillow by the spring of 1863, but subsequent efforts to remove them suggest there were several hundred.⁶

The 52nd put them to work almost immediately, repairing the damage from the Yankee bombardment and trying to make a fortification that had originally been designed to be defended by twenty thousand rebels defensible by one thousand Federals. They filled the burrows the rebels had dug to protect themselves from Yankee mortar fire, reported a Yankee correspondent, repaired the “ghastly breaches which we made during its bombardment,” replaced “the loose lumber and crumbling earthworks which we found,” leveled the parapets and properly angled the casements, and finished the intermediary entrenchment the rebels had begun, until “no traces of the damage which our fearful shells inflicted” remained, “save a few deep scars upon the easterly face.”⁷

A great many contrabands brought some of their masters’ property along with them, claiming it as their due after lifetimes of unrewarded toil. They furnished their tents and lean-tos with their masters’ dining chairs and brica-brac, furnished their kitchens with their mistresses’ pots and pans, sold tools and books and silverware to Yankee soldiers. Three Lauderdale County refugees turned up hauling four of their master’s cotton bales, which a Dr. Taliaferro obligingly sold for them at Fort Pillow Landing.⁸

Indignant local masters took their complaints to Henry Cage, the Lauderdale County justice of the peace, who in February arrested five slaves for stealing cotton from a man named Austin. Cage then took his case to Wolfe. “The Civil Law of this state as you are aware has been long since suspended,” he wrote Wolfe. “You will please inform me what you will or I must do in the matter.”

It beat hell out of the colonel, who passed the buck to General Lionel Sandor Asboth of Hurlbut’s 6th Division. “The question raised is one of frequent occurance,” wrote Wolfe, “and Liable to occur again.” His own opinion was that it should fall to the local provost marshal to adjudicate such matters. Asboth apparently agreed, for the provost marshal was thereafter “instructed to punish such offenders by fines, imprisonment & hard labor, either or all at his discretion.”⁹

This was not necessarily what their masters had in mind, however. Under the old order, if a man’s slave committed such a crime he might be flogged but he was rarely imprisoned for very long because, like an errant mule that kicks down a neighbor’s well house, the slave was regarded as brute property, and the sooner he returned to work, the better. But for a slave, imprisonment was not much worse than a field hand’s living conditions at home and deprived his owner of his labor. The mere fact that Union officers listened to slave testimony flew in the face of centuries of Southern jurisprudence, in which slaves had been prohibited from testifying, especially against whites.

The plight of the contrabands and the demands of their owners seemed to tie Colonel Wolfe into knots. “Many negroes have applied to me for some assistance to get their families,” he wrote. “I have told all such that I could not send a force out for that purpose alone, but invariably suggested to all such applicants that they accompany the Cavalry expedition from the Post and by this means bring in their families, frequently notifying negroes myself when the cavalry were going out.”¹⁰

During Wolfe’s absence the previous fall, a Lieutenant Benoni Beale had been dismissed from the service for helping a citizen seize a contraband. In March 1863, a white man flourishing a writ from a justice of the peace rode into Fort Pillow’s contraband camp and seized two slaves he claimed as his own. “These negroes were tied and taken out without my knowledge or consent,” Wolfe reported, “and when informed of the matter,” Wolfe said, he had sent men out “and had the negroes returned to the Fort together with the gentleman who took them.”¹¹

That was not, however, how the Iowans of the 32nd saw it. They claimed that it was only after they protested “vigorously against this high-handed outrage” that Wolfe sent “a small detachment to fetch back the Negroes.” “The Fifty-Second Indiana Infantry was really a pro-slavery regiment,” Scott wrote, “always ready to drive the Negroes who came to the post back into slavery,” whereas the 32nd Iowa, he said, was always eager “to espouse the cause of the loyal against the disloyal, regardless of the color line”: so eager that the 52nd referred to the Iowans as the “abolition regiment.”¹²

By January 1863, so many refugees had gathered at Fort Pillow that a reluctant Colonel Wolfe, under orders from General Grant, detailed Second Lieutenant B. K. Logan of the 52nd as “post superintendent of the colored men.” Thanks to the men of the 32nd, his responsibilities would expand exponentially, for the Iowans seemed to regard it as part of their duty to collect slaves from the surrounding area. Local whites were outraged by the encouragement they gave slaves to evacuate their masters’ farms and plantations. But the Iowans blandly replied that slaves simply followed them to the fort and never had to be compelled. As the 32nd headed back from a scout around the dismantled town of Osceola, Arkansas, with sixty slaves, a master protested that he would be ruined without his slaves. “You will only have to work with your own hands,” their officer loftily replied, “as we have to do in the North,” and there, he said, would be an end to treason.¹³

Some Union volunteers liberated slaves merely to debase their owners. A Nashville barber recalled, “All the soldiers as a rule were willing to break up that easy life of the owners of the Niggers.” In Memphis, local whites who tried to fetch their slaves were subjected to “humiliating treatment—such as riding the rail horse, or carrying a barrel up the hill and rolling it down again, and they would continue this process for hours.” Simply by association with the Iowans, Wolfe’s Hoosiers were accused by the locals of abolitionism. Addison Sleeth of the 52nd recalled how local people accused them of harboring “‘Nigger’ loving propensities.” In September 1863 a letter written by a visiting photographer from Rushville, Indiana, bitterly denounced the 52nd’s officers as “Judases” who had turned from good Democrats into “nigger lovers” in hopes of currying favor with the Lincoln administration. The letter caused such a stir that Wolfe had it read aloud at dress parade, eliciting indignant groans from his men. When the colonel asked if any of his men agreed with the letter’s appraisal, not a single man stepped forward.¹⁴

The way the Hoosiers saw it, for the sake of the Union they had endured the perils and privations of army life for almost two years, only to find themselves pressed into a crusade to free “ignorant, promiscuous slaves,” who, if liberated, would only move north and take their jobs. “Tha niger was in is right plase before tha War commenced,” wrote a Union private, “and i hope to god they will let im Stay there. But Still,” he said, “if freeing them will Stop this war then i say free them. But it is not for me to say what tis right nor what is rong. I came here to fight tha battels of this my adopted country and I Am willing they Should be free if there is know other way to stop tha war.”¹⁵

A Hoosier captain wrote home from Fort Pillow that even the Republicans among his men had renounced the party and were actively preventing contrabands from entering Fort Pillow, though another soldier later wrote to deny it. An Iowan reported in mid-February that the Emancipation Proclamation was only going to make the war last longer, and that if the Yankees tried to conscript contrabands they would sooner run back to their masters than serve in the Union army, for the blacks at Fort Pillow did not seem to them anxious to volunteer for anything, though they stole the Iowans’ firewood, received fresh army tents, and were doled out the same rations as the men who were now expected to fight to set them free.¹⁶

Some of the poor country boys who served in the Union army did not think the slaves had had it so bad in the first place. “Niggers are thicker here in this country than catapillars on an apple tree,” Joe Edwards of the 12th Michigan Infantry reported to his sister from his hospital bed in Helena, Arkansas. “All along the Mississippi you can see large villages of nigger huts arranged nicely in rows, the chimneys built outside & the house whitewashed. Some are log & some are very nice frame buildings.” Yet it is hard to imagine men barracked in battened cabins that winter envying the bare-foot contrabands as they shivered with their families in their icy, wind-whipped tents.¹⁷

Though Yankees deplored the amount of thievery that went on around contraband camps, it was often necessary to the residents’ survival. Theft had a curious place in the protocols of the South, for while some slaves deemed it only just to steal back at least a slice of the fruits of their labor, some masters actually encouraged their slaves to steal from their neighbors’ larders. The result was that contrabands proved accomplished foragers on their Yankee employers’ behalf, and some Union soldiers paid their black cooks and servants to steal.¹⁸

The necessary deceptions and constant monitoring of their masters’ behavior and intentions turned many blacks into excellent spies and informers for the Union army. Posing as a Southerner, Allan Pinkerton, the chief of the United States Secret Service, went to Memphis on a spying mission in 1861. “Here, as in many other places,” he recalled, “I found that my best source of information was the colored men, who were employed in various capacities of a military nature which entailed hard labor.” Pinkerton mingled with them, and found them “ever ready to answer questions and to furnish me with every fact which I desired to possess.” Slaves used their networks—Underground Railway systems, the hiding places runaways established in the woods surrounding their masters’ plantations—to spirit escaped Yankee prisoners northward. A Union soldier escaping from Andersonville passed from black hand to black hand, and was refused help by only one slave: a woman who told him that she hated all whites so much that she had promised herself never to help a white man, not even a Yankee.¹⁹

As the contrabands continued to find their way to Union posts, officers desperately wired Memphis for instructions. No sooner had Cairo, Illinois, been cleared of refugees than three hundred more limped in, most of them “helpless women and children.” Union general Napoleon Bonaparte Buford asked Hurlbut “how to support them & what to do with them.”²⁰

Colonel Wolfe’s solution was to send as many of his contrabands to Island No. 10 as he could. On October 22, 1863, he ordered their superintendent, B. K. Logan, to evacuate “all negroes now at this Post not legally employed,” leaving only the officers’ body servants, company cooks, laundresses, wood choppers, and teamsters, since by now the repairs to Fort Pillow were all but complete. But apparently Logan had grown so devoted to the contrabands, or so attached to his position as their superintendent, that he reacted bitterly to Wolfe’s order, calling him and his officers “a set of asses.” The colonel relieved him of duty and replaced him with deputy provost marshal Lieutenant J. C. Alden, whereupon Wolfe’s evacuation proceeded apace.²¹

None of Wolfe’s papers indicate that the contrabands had caused him any significant problem; in fact, he could not have repaired his post without them. But their condition affronted the colonel’s military desire for order, and their mere presence had been divisive. Though the contrabands themselves had been little trouble, the same could not be said of their white champions or their former owners, who had precipitated the war in the first place. Nevertheless, over five hundred contrabands, many of them transferred from Fort Pillow, were banished to Island No. 10.²²

Even self-proclaimed abolitionists harbored profoundly contradictory feelings toward the contrabands they encountered. A Michigan surgeon named Samuel Henry Eells professed outrage at the way blacks were neglected in their camps. “Whenever they are gathered in together in any large numbers and kept at government expense,” he wrote, “they are neglected by those whose business it is to take care of them, and die off rapidly in consequence, and everybody seems to feel as if that was about the best way to get rid of them.” But Eells abhorred tending to the Hardeman County slaves who sought refuge in his camp. “I would as less doctor hogs,” he wrote home, “and would much rather horses.” He made himself a beneficiary of their high rate of mortality. “We intend to keep a dead nigger or two this winter for analytical purposes,” he cheerfully declared. With contrabands at the camp at Bolivar, Tennessee, “dying at the rate of three or four a day,” he hoped to obtain “plenty of subjects in Bolivar from the Negro ‘corral,’ as they call it there, and have got one already.”²³

Slaves nevertheless elicited a measure of sympathy from many Northern soldiers. “If a dog came up wagging his tail at sight of us,” explained Colonel John Beatty of Ohio, “we could not help liking him better than the master, who not only looks sullen and cross at our approach but in his heart desires our destruction.”²⁴

Their sympathy was reciprocated. “I could not express to you the whole of my feelings and hopes and regard I had for the Federal Army,” wrote Jack Daniels. “As sure as you are born it was a great thing, and as they first passed along—as long as I had milk or anything I carried it to them, and my wife sot up all night a-cooking for them, and we never charged them nothing for it.”²⁵

Once wrenched loose from their masters’ thrall, even the most reluctant slaves sensed that something in their own hearts and minds had changed forever. Hemmed in, exploited, abused, overworked they might be by the Union army, but they were nevertheless regaining entire dimensions of their humanity that had been denied them for centuries: freedom from captivity, sale, separation, and the lash; the right to act as agencies of their own will; the right to choose their own spouses and name and raise and protect their own children; the right to be rewarded for work with more than an occasional buttered biscuit or a pass to visit the next farm over; the right to learn to write their names, count their wages, read the ballot and the Bible.

Expecting no consideration from white strangers, they were astonished and touched by sympathetic soldiers’ little acts of kindness. “By and by” Tennessee slaves found Yankee soldiers “to be much nicer” than rebel troops, “and they treated everybody more courteously.” One slave remembered how the Yankees would go from slave shack to slave shack, calling slaves out to follow them on their march, and distributing their masters’ clothes to them as they followed the regiments down the road. Shared rations, the gift of a blanket, even a soldier’s hand placed gently on a child’s head elicited from many slaves paroxysms of relief, joy, and gratitude.²⁶

Relations between the Hoosiers and the Iowans continued to deteriorate. Colonel Wolfe took a certain pleasure in recommending the dismissal from the service of the 32nd’s revered Chaplain Lorenzo S. Coffin, whom he accused of being absent without leave. An outspoken abolitionist, Coffin had been a thorn in Wolfe’s side. Perhaps Wolfe hoped to divert attention from the rampant venality at Fort Pillow, for which he was ultimately responsible. Loyal to the Union and probably not personally corrupt, Wolfe was nonetheless precipitate and neglectful. He allowed traders, informers, smugglers, and spies to infiltrate Fort Pillow, and in the process made a good many enemies out of men who should have been, if not his friends, his allies.²⁷

In June 1863, Hurlbut removed the 2nd Illinois Cavalry from Fort Pillow. Stranded, sullen, idle, Wolfe’s men grew slovenly, strewing garbage around their camps. After the cavalry’s departure, the garrison fell into a rocky, contentious period marked by soldiers taking “French leave,” and engaging in fistfights and drunken sprees. Wolfe’s scouts indulged in a round of depredations, stealing cash from local farmers.²⁸

Scott reported to Memphis that a number of local people had testified to him that they had been robbed by Wolfe’s men. Other officers weighed in as well, and the cumulative accusations of corruption began to gather over Wolfe’s head like a toxic cloud. It was charged that Wolfe had allowed traders to bring some twenty-three barrels of whiskey into Fort Pillow “by Government Teams and Guarded by soldiers at this post,” and eventually to transport it all down to Fulton under escort to be sold. It was also “believed and asserted by some” that Wolfe ordered “the cavalry and Mounted Infantry at this Post” to escort a trader to the Fort, and that officers had received illegal payments for captured horses of from thirty-five to forty dollars a head.²⁹

Seeing his chance to vent his outrage over Wolfe’s management of the garrison and dismissive treatment of the 32nd, Colonel John Scott weighed in with his own charges against the commandant. Though Scott primly prefaced his allegations by asserting that he had not “encouraged criticisms of my immediate Commanding officer” or kept a “black book of his administration of affairs,” Scott alleged that Wolfe had “the confidence of the disloyal of this section to a degree that is especially uncomplimentary to a man professedly loyal.” Under Wolfe’s command, Fort Pillow had become a leaky sieve out of which wagonloads of contraband salt and barrels of whiskey were frequently and mysteriously hauled off into the interior. Blankets and shoes that passed through the post were routinely found scattered around captured rebel posts. Wolfe had ordered the provost at Fulton “to pass the goods of a man who buys large quantities of ‘family supplies’ every month. I saw the June supply at Fulton to-day. Under his statement it is a shameless farce, and the man is indubitably disloyal.”³⁰

Scott’s most serious charges, however, related to Wolfe’s treatment of contrabands. He accused Wolfe, the provost marshal, and other officers of the 52nd Indiana of “want of sympathy” for refugee slaves that was “openly expressed.” Scott backed up this allegation with several instances of neglect and abuse. The first involved a former Confederate soldier named Jones who manacled two runaway slaves who had taken refuge in the fort and led them off to a whipping post with the intention of flogging them to death. “They were rescued on the following day,” Scott reported, but Wolfe had initiated “no investigation of this matter” despite its notoriety “throughout this whole region of country.” In another case, a black man was “enticed without the guard lines and carried into slavery.” His abductors were briefly imprisoned but “released with assurances that their conduct was not improper.” An officer’s servant was shot while traveling upcountry to visit his family, but “though his murderers are known and could be arrested without difficulty, no notice has been taken of the outrage.”

Scott said that Wolfe had provided “no assistance or protection” to blacks who reached his lines, nor any assistance in retrieving their families “though frequently asked for and by men who wish to be enlisted as soldiers as soon as their families can be rescued.” Wolfe refused to allow officers of the 32nd Iowa to round up slaves who wished to escape from rebel masters, and discouraged recruitment of black soldiers. When one of the officers of the 52nd Iowa volunteered to recruit black troops, one of Wolfe’s lieutenants remarked in the colonel’s presence that he “ought to be shot,” to which “Wolfe expressed no dissent or reproof.”³¹

Trying to keep the noise down, General Asboth summarily transferred Colonel Scott and his 32nd Iowa to Columbus with all their “camp and Garrison Equipage and Stores.” However earnestly Scott may have wanted Wolfe brought to justice, he made no more accusations, delighted, under any circumstances, to be out from under the colonel’s thumb.³²

The 32nd’s transfer was bad news for the contrabands. Nevertheless, it was with a giddy sense of renewal that John Scott and his men departed in stages on June 17 and 18, 1863, bidding Fort Pillow and the busy smugglers at Fulton Landing a hearty good riddance, relieved, as one of their captains put it, that they would no longer have to allow a “Hoosier colonel to abuse and vilify us.”³³

Scott and his men may have hoped that the army or the fates might reward them for their long-suffering service in West Tennessee. But as their steamer pulled away from the landing and chugged upstream around Craighead Point, they could not know that after leaving Fort Pillow they would spend many months guarding bridges “and doing very irksome garrison duty” around Columbus, until April 9, 1864, three days before Forrest attacked the garrison at Fort Pillow, when the 32nd Iowa Infantry would lose almost half its men in a battle at Pleasant Hill, Louisiana. “The 32nd, which had hitherto been confined to garrison duty, until all connected with it were impatient and indignant at such treatment,” one of them wrote, “has at last been tried in the severest shock of battle, and the long list of killed and wounded demonstrates what Iowa men do when their blood is up.”³⁴

Wolfe’s men sulked on for the rest of the year, and at one point drunkenly threatened to mutiny. His garrison was down to 580 men, of whom 112 were on the sick list or otherwise out of commission. When a small squad of his mounted infantry returned from Brownsville to report that Colonels Jacob Biffle and Jesse Forrest had trotted into the area with about a thousand Confederate cavalry, Wolfe pleaded that he had “not sufficient force to operate against them” and asked Asboth for “two full companies of Cavalry immediately.” At last, on July 27, 1863, Hurlbut announced to Colonel Wolfe that he was no longer commandant and that Fort Pillow itself was no longer to be considered a Union post. Nevertheless, Wolfe and his Hoosiers were left to rot at Fort Pillow for another six months.³⁵

“The time is now for the execution of a design long contemplated,” wrote William Tecumseh Sherman on January 11, 1864. He was discreetly referring to the first of his so-called Hard War campaigns: a mass march on Meridian to destroy the railroad and thus make it “impossible for the enemy to maintain any considerable force in Mississippi.” “At the same time,” he added in his memoirs, “I wanted to destroy General Forrest.”³⁶

For this enormous expedition he would no longer countenance Hurlbut’s excuses, nor accept that all he could spare was the 52nd Indiana. Sherman therefore ordered that Paducah’s garrison be reduced to three companies, Cairo’s to seven, Columbus’s to one white and one black company, and Memphis’s to two black and two white regiments; the remainder—most of Hurlbut’s command—was to fall into step with the rest of Sherman’s expedition.

A South Carolina lawyer who had fled Charleston to escape his debtors, Stephen Augustus Hurlbut had settled in Illinois in 1845 and immersed himself in politics. He had been the tall, dark beau ideal of a Southern gentleman, but decades of dissipation and defeats at the polls had fattened his midriff, dimmed his eyes, blemished his face with erysipelas, and thinned his hair sufficiently to betray a large and distracting pair of ears. A spend-thrift, a climber, and a drunk, he had been a loyal supporter of the president, swelling Lincoln’s cheering sections at the Lincoln-Douglas debates with his Illinois militia. The president had sent him down to Charleston to assess the situation at Fort Sumter, and after spending most of his time dodging his creditors, Hurlbut returned to report that secession was inevitable. Considering his political connections, his commission as brigadier general was no less inevitable. Though Hurlbut was a notorious inebriate whose binges would shame his adopted state, the president apparently took his drinking no more seriously than he took Grant’s. But in Hurlbut’s case, Lincoln was mistaken.

As Union commander at Memphis, Hurlbut oversaw perhaps the most blatantly corrupt regime of the many that disgraced Northern occupation throughout the West. His subordinates would trade in rebel cotton, assist smugglers in exchange for bribes, and collect ransom from wealthy families whose homes they ransacked and whose sons they held hostage in the verminous dungeons of Fort Pickering.³⁷

When, in April 1864, he was ordered to explain why he had again garrisoned Fort Pillow, Hurlbut would plead that he “never had any orders to evacuate” Fort Pillow. “My orders from General Sherman,” he said, “were to hold certain fortified points on the river. I never had any instructions with regard to Fort Pillow one way or the other that I recollect. I considered it necessary to hold it, and never intended to abandon it.” He believed that Fort Pillow “should be held always, and there is nothing in my instructions that requires it to be abandoned.”³⁸

Hurlbut was mistaken, or lying. He did receive such instructions, and Sherman could not have been more explicit. “Abandon Corinth and Fort Pillow absolutely,” he commanded on January 11, “removing all public property to Cairo or Memphis; also leave all black troops and such of the local Tennessee regiments as can be employed, with minute instructions to the commanders of posts at Paducah, Columbus, Cairo, Memphis, and such others as you judge best to have fixed to organize and arm the loyal citizens for self-defense”—thereby replacing the Northern troops Sherman was scooping up with Southern blacks and whites.³⁹

Though Hurlbut hated to see the lower Mississippi’s Union defenses reduced to such a remnant, he did as he was told. The very day he received Sherman’s order, he commanded Wolfe to “send forward to Memphis the two best of his three batteries of light artillery,” send “all public property” to Cairo or Memphis, completely abandon Fort Pillow, and transport his garrison to Memphis.⁴⁰

Wolfe was delighted to comply with Hurlbut’s order. To prevent Hurlbut’s entertaining any second thoughts about evacuating the garrison, the colonel continued to report little rebel activity in the area. “The surrounding country is at present unusually quiet,” he wrote, “free from marauding bands with the exception of a very few guerrillas that still infest Tipton County.”⁴¹

Abandoning Fort Pillow was no small matter. The heavy guns had to be dismounted and loaded on steamers. To accomplish this, twenty-five black artillerists of the 1st Tennessee Heavy Artillery were shipped up from Memphis. All of the contrabands who had moved into Fort Pillow since Wolfe’s last purge had to be transported up to Island No. 10, which Hurlbut had urged General Andrew Jackson Smith to garrison with “Negro soldiers” to guard against Confederate attacks. On January 24, 1864, on an island two miles north of Helena, Arkansas, 250 rebel cavalry had “fired upon a party of black woodchoppers, stolen some two dozen mules and oxen, and set fire to their shanties.”⁴²

Fifteen months’ worth of the garrison’s supplies and equipage, “horses, Mules, Bridles, Saddles, and Wagons,” and surplus tents and clothing had to be collected and inventoried and turned over to the quartermaster. Soldiers’ families posed an even more complicated problem. “Twelve or thirteen Tennessee boys had enlisted in our Company,” recalled Addison Sleeth. “Some of these were married. Then some of our old Yankee boys had married Dixie girls, and it was now a question what to do with their wives. Most of them sent their wives to Northern homes and soon all was ready to go.” On Tuesday, January 19, the 52nd “left the keeping of Ft. Pillow to others” and crowded aboard the steamer Thistle, which would take three days to make its way to Memphis, plowing down a river clogged with ice.⁴³