River Run Red

The Bradfords of Tennessee had a history of swimming upriver. William’s father, Theodorick Fowke Bradford Sr., had been an East Tennessee state legislator and publisher of the Shelbyville Herald, Bedford County’s first newspaper. Denouncing Andrew Jackson’s Union Bank as a despotic scheme to benefit big land speculators at the expense of poor settlers, he ran unsuccessfully for Congress against James Knox Polk, and joined forces with the contrarian Davy Crockett in his virulent attacks on Old Hickory.²

Theodorick raised six daughters and three sons on the Duck River’s Wartrace Fork, less than a mile from Nathan Bedford Forrest’s birthplace. His sons Barkley and Ted were about Forrest’s age, and it is reasonable to imagine the Bradford and Forrest boys encountering each other on their gambols along the Duck. The eldest boy, Barkley, followed Crockett to his doom in Texas. But Ted junior and his little brother William, who was born a year before the Forrests emigrated to Mississippi, joined the bar and moved to West Tennessee after their father’s death, bringing their East Tennessee Unionism with them.

Neither of them prospered. Ted hung his shingle in Dyersburg. By 1860 and the age of thirty-five, he had married a New England girl and sired three children, but listed assets of only about two thousand dollars, including his horse. William set up his practice in neighboring Obion County. At the age of twenty-eight, William was the more prominent, or in any case conspicuous, of the Bradford boys: trumpeting his Unionist sympathies, spying on his secessionist neighbors, and eventually reporting their plots and machinations to Military Governor Andrew Johnson. In November 1862, he denounced a local judge named Samuel T. Williams for convening his court without legal authority and delivering secessionist diatribes from the bench, whereupon General Hurlbut closed his court and threatened to bar Williams from running for office.

According to Colonel Thomas Harris of the 54th Illinois, Troy, Tennessee, in wartime was “a hot-bed of traitors.” In the fall of 1862, Bradford was apparently kidnapped by a band of rebel guerrillas who haunted a nearby swamp, “carrying off Union citizens and robbing them of their property, especially horses.” Federal authorities regarded Bradford as such a Unionist “main stand-by” that Harris threatened to burn Troy to the ground if he was not returned. The threat apparently worked, for Bradford reemerged from the bottoms more vehemently Unionist than ever. But during his captivity Judge Williams, who claimed to support the Union but nonetheless felt that local Yankee officers had “exceedingly wrong notions on the subject of slavery,” was exonerated after Union colonel Isaac Hawkins of Tennessee, later the victim of an ingenious rebel bluff at Union City, intervened with a plea and, according to local lore, a gift to Governor Johnson.

Enraged, Bradford gave up on law and politics and, fashioning himself a colonel, raised a company of Home Guards. “Under the pretense of scouring the country for arms and rebel soldiers,” wrote Forrest’s authorized biographers, Bradford “traversed the surrounding country with detachments, robbing the people of their horses, mules, beef cattle, beds, plates, wearing apparel, money, and every possible movable article of value, 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.” Such, in any case, would be the rebels’ postmortem case against William Bradford.³

Many of Bradford’s enlistees were Unionist refugees who, like the contrabands, had fled with their families to the Yankee lines. They were small farmers, for the most part, and many were family men. Daniel Stamps of Coffee County, Tennessee, was married with one daughter and a small farm within a few miles of Fort Pillow when he and his brother Jack joined the latecomers to the Union standard who enlisted in Company E. Some of them were long in the tooth. The oldest enlisted man at Fort Pillow was apparently Leander C. Vaught of Company C, a comparative codger at forty-seven years of age. Forty-year-old Al Middleton of Weakley County had a wife and daughter when he enlisted at Union City in Company C.⁴

Their median age was about twenty-three, two years older than Forrest’s men. Twenty-seven percent of Bradford’s troopers were over thirty, and about half claimed to be in their twenties, although so many boys lied about their age that some of them were probably considerably younger. Over a fifth gave their ages as nineteen and under.⁵

At least 10 percent had deserted from the rebel army. Afraid for their families in Union-occupied West Tennessee, convinced the secessionist cause was already lost, or simply sick to death of war, they had shucked their butternut uniforms in disgust and returned home to protect their families from rebel guerrillas and Yankee foragers. By early 1864, many of them had fled to the Union lines for safety and, like some of their black counterparts, joined up out of sheer necessity.⁶

Posted to Union City in the fall of 1863, Bradford tried to bring some order to his motley companies of aspiring cavalry. He banned “promiscuous and straggling firing” of weapons, “pleasure riding,” horse races, and raiding the fortification’s abatis for firewood. “Not fewer than three persons will be permitted to leave camp together, and these must be armed, and must not go more than two miles from camp.” Each officer was required “to attend ‘water call’ to see personally that all the horses of his company are properly taken to water.” Horses were to be kept “well groomed morning and evening, and at noon need only be fed.” But commanding a regiment required more than do’s and don’ts and timetables. It required earning men’s trust, something Bradford would find elusive.⁷

Early in his recruitment drive, Bradford reckoned he had found a shortcut to the formation of his first company in a Kentuckian named Jonathan F. Gregory whom he had encountered recruiting men for Hurst’s 6th Tennessee Cavalry. Bradford promised Gregory a captaincy if he brought his recruits into the 13th instead. Gregory agreed, and his men took Bradford’s promise so seriously that they immediately and proudly took to calling their enterprising commander Captain Gregory as they gathered at Paducah to be mustered in.⁸

On February 2, 1864, William Sooy Smith, the Department of the Mississippi’s chief of cavalry, ordered Bradford to Fort Pillow to establish a “recruiting rendezvous” for his 13th Tennessee Cavalry. Approved by General Hurlbut, the order reached Bradford at Union City, and two days later, as Sherman set forth from Vicksburg to take Meridian, the 13th Tennessee Cavalry proceeded via Columbus to Fort Pillow.⁹

Thomas H. Harris insisted that Smith had merely acceded to Bradford’s own request to leave Kentucky, where he had been “finding recruiting very difficult,” and search for enlistees in Fort Pillow’s vicinity. It is possible that Sherman himself had had second thoughts about abandoning Fort Pillow “completely,” and directed Smith to station the 13th there. But there is no documentary evidence to support this conjecture, and though Sherman did at one point expansively declare that he would leave the garrisoning of the Mississippi to Hurlbut’s “discretion,” he meant the garrisoning of only those posts he intended Hurlbut to continue to occupy. After the fall of Fort Pillow, Sherman would maintain that he had assumed all along that, as per his original orders, Fort Pillow had remained abandoned. “I think General Sherman did not purpose to withdraw a heavy force to pursue Forrest,” testified General Mason Brayman, at Cairo, for Sherman believed “we had force enough to hold the important points on the river.” But Brayman and Hurlbut second-guessed Sherman because they felt that “the strength of the enemy and the scattered condition of our small detachments was not fully understood.”¹⁰

Contradicting Harris and the documentary evidence of Bradford’s original orders, Hurlbut claimed that his intention was not just to establish a recruiting station but to occupy Fort Pillow and thus prevent the rebels from planting artillery on the bluff. But the deployment would seem so inexplicable and the explanations so contradictory that some retrospectively suspected Hurlbut of sending troops to protect his interest in the illegal cotton trade. But it seems unlikely that Booth would have acceded without protest to sending his black troops into harm’s way merely to patrol West Tennessee cotton crops.¹¹

taking advantage of any intrenchments that may already exist, and constructing any that may be necessary. You will scout the surrounding country thoroughly as far to the rear as you may deem it safe to take your command, making every effort in your power to hunt up and destroy guerrilla parties. You will subsist your command upon the country as far as possible, and take the stock necessary to keep it well mounted, giving vouchers to loyal men only. Keep your command in condition for active service at all times, drawing arms, ammunition, and equipments from the ordnance department at this city. Use all diligence to recruit your regiment rapidly, and apply to the chief commissary of musters, stationed here, to muster your men promptly.¹³

A commissioned officer and forty men from Company A of what was about to be dubbed the 2nd U.S. Colored Light Artillery (USCLA) arrived from Memphis about a week later to place field guns at the fort. On March 7, Lorenzo Thomas announced that he intended “to find competent garrisons” for black troops along the Mississippi, and it may have been at his urging that Hurlbut deployed black artillery to Fort Pillow.¹⁴

Though Bradford himself had supported the enlistment of black troops, many of his West Tennesseean white recruits, some of whom had fought for the Confederacy until Donelson and Shiloh, were hostile to blacks and doubted their ability to fight, let alone man artillery. To keep the two groups separated, Bradford assigned the 2nd USCLA to an abandoned camp behind the northernmost breastworks of the fort and kept them at their guns while his white troopers scoured the countryside for forage.

Contemptuous of neutrals, Bradford immediately began to round up local men. A North Carolina native named Jim Alsobrook had been farming ninety acres about thirty-five miles from Fort Pillow for some thirty years. Alsobrook had been conscripted into the 15th Consolidated Tennessee Cavalry (CSA) but deserted soon afterward and returned to his farm. On February 15, a squad of foragers from the 13th trotted up to his gate and handed Alsobrook a note for $250 in exchange for a horse and a quantity of salt. As the soldiers were leaving, a slave Alsobrook had hired from his mother-in-law suddenly bolted. The soldiers chased him down and asked him why he had run. The slave replied that he had been told that the Yankees were rounding up blacks and taking them to Dyersburg. The soldiers arrested Alsobrook for spreading rumors and brought him to Fort Pillow, where he claimed he had been set up by an old enemy named Miles A. Goforth, “who was mad with me and told Maj Bradford that he knew me and that I was a guerilla.” Nonetheless, he was incarcerated at Fort Pillow for several weeks, and spent two more in Memphis before a friend could finally arrange his release.¹⁵

Bradford had little respect for the locals’ professions of loyalty. “Some of the worst rebels have been captured here with oaths of allegiance in their pockets,” recalled Captain James Marshall of the Union gunboat New Era. “Major Bradford captured some whom he knew personally to be the worst rebels.” Sixty-five-year-old Lemuel Curlin of Obion County was born in North Carolina and served briefly in the War of 1812. “It was hard for that kind of Men to turn against the US Government,” his physician explained. “I was a soldier in the Mexican War. That made my devotion so great to the Old Flag I could not turn against it.” His three sons felt differently, however, and joined James J. Neely’s 4th Tennessee Infantry CSA. Curlin “done my best to keep them from going. I tried to get the two oldest to go to Canada,” he said, “because I could not keep them from going into the southern army. They went contrary to my voice.” Curlin voted twice against secession and often fed the Union soldiers who passed his farm, but this did not prevent Captain Joseph F. Peck of Bradford’s Battalion from relieving this illiterate old Unionist veteran of two mules and a sack of bacon.¹⁶

In early 1864 Fielding Hurst’s 6th Tennessee Cavalry brought Bradford a most unlikely captive: the Reverend George Washington Harris. Known as the “unmitred or unordained bishop of West Tennessee,” G. W. was the sixty-seven-year-old big brother of rebel governor Isham Harris, who was then riding with Forrest in Mississippi. The Bradfords were acquainted with the reverend, for he and William had been neighbors in Dyersburg. Bradford duly took him into custody for sedition, but, lacking a chaplain of his own, prevailed upon Harris to preach to the 13th. The old man thereupon launched into a blistering secessionist harangue studded with biblical defenses of slavery plucked from the pages of Leviticus. Though Bradford decided to let it pass, and Harris was apparently treated with deference, Forrest demanded that the old man immediately be given “a fair trial before a competent tribunal,” threatening that if “the Bishop of West Tennessee” died in Yankee custody, Forrest would execute five of his Yankee prisoners. The reverend was eventually set free.¹⁷

Bradford’s boys were ordered to grub up the countryside for provisions. Compared even to the 52nd Indiana Infantry, they proved voracious foragers. A farmer named Embry complained that Bradford’s men took all nine of his horses, “depriveing me of the means of makeing a crop.” In early March, a former state legislator from Lauderdale County reported that West Tennessee whites flocking to the Union standard at Fort Pillow had “stripped the people of provisions.”¹⁸

Bradford eventually broke his promise to Jon Gregory and gave the captaincy of Gregory’s Company A to his brother Ted after he and his wife were chased out of Dyersburg for their Unionist views. Ted’s appointment was not sanctioned by Memphis until January, by which time Bradford had assembled four full companies and was rapidly recruiting a fifth. Hurlbut’s examining board was so doubtful of William’s military aptitude, however, that it declined to make him even a lieutenant colonel. Eventually describing Bradford as “very young” and “entirely inexperienced,” Hurlbut made him a major instead, thus stalling the rise of the ambitious young men who had signed up to serve under him.¹⁹

On paper, at least, his battalion numbered 419 men by the end of March, but only 292, or about 70 percent of his command, including 65 unassigned recruits, were at Fort Pillow. Of these, only 266, or a little less than two-thirds, were fit for duty. One hundred twenty-seven men were absent or sick: 112 of them (more than a quarter of Bradford’s total force) were absent without leave, and four were under arrest. Five had died of disease, 26 were sick, and though 12 deserters had returned in the previous month, 24 more men had deserted, half of them from Company D. The regiment had collected only 107 horses, 3 of which were unserviceable, and the highest proportion of horses to men (54 percent) was among the “unassigned recruits” of Company E, indicating that they had probably brought their own. The lowest proportion (23 percent) was in Theodorick Bradford’s Company A, whose deserters had apparently taken their horses with them.²¹

Recruitment had stalled; the only gains Bradford could report were the twelve deserters who had returned and one invalid who had recuperated, but they were outnumbered more than two to one by his losses. By the eve of the attack on Fort Pillow, the number of men on the sick roll would decline somewhat to twenty-three, but on the night of April 10 alone, twenty of Bradford’s men would desert en masse.²²

Young Read Johnson had been a clerk in his father’s grocery store in Hickman County, but sometime early in the war the store went under, and in November 1863, Johnson enlisted in the 13th Tennessee Cavalry. After his regiment was posted to Fort Pillow, Johnson was detached to serve as a mail clerk in the provost marshal’s office. On February 20, he wrote one of the few letters that survive from the last Union garrison at Fort Pillow. “I am well and as fat as a Bear,” he said, and doing “a good deal better than I was doing at Union City,” where he had been assigned “to stand picketts.” At Fort Pillow he didn’t “have Eney thing to do but rite passes and tend to the mail.”

In a previous letter he had told his mother that his company had found comfortable lodgings at Fort Pillow in what he described as good “slave houses.” But by the first of March they were to move into some winter quarters the regiment was constructing. In any case, Johnson did not imagine the regiment would remain at Fort Pillow very long, “for all our boys is leaving here and runing [off] and going home. Since we came here we have lost 15 men. Our company lost 8 men last night, and I think that we will be moved to Memphis soon.” In fact, Bradford had just left to persuade Hurlbut to assign his regiment to Memphis. “Yuo can come on a visett,” Johnson told his mother, who hoped to join her only son at Fort Pillow if she could “only get a house,” “but yuo cant get a house here but store houses and hotels.”²³

Bradford’s mission to Memphis was unavailing. Inexplicably, Hurlbut refused to allow Bradford to evacuate a post Sherman had ordered abandoned, and the young major returned to his regiment in a funk. On February 23, in the presence of several other officers, Bradford accused the embittered Lieutenant Jon Gregory of encouraging his men to desert and ordered his staff to arrest him. Cursing Bradford, Gregory reportedly reached for his pistol, but Bradford somehow beat him to the draw and felled him with a single shot to the stomach that took five days to kill him. Though Gregory’s mother decried the shooting as an “unprovoked murder,” Bradford was never charged.²⁴

Gregory’s death did not cool Bradford’s temper nor slow the 13th’s desertions. With his “captain” dead, an earnest young volunteer named James Park left Bradford’s regiment and made his way to Paducah to join the 15th Tennessee Cavalry. But the 15th’s Major Wiley Waller told him that “he had done wrong to leave his company, and that he could not join another command without first obtaining a transfer.” So Park returned to Fort Pillow, where Bradford denied his request and refused to remove a charge of desertion. Only his death at Fort Pillow would save him from a court-martial. “It is a burning shame for such a patriot to be Branded with the dishonor of desertion,” wrote Major Waller after the war. “The boy had no notion of desertion, and his father and family are true and tried patriots.”²⁵

Perhaps the best gauge of what a poor commander Bradford proved to be was the eagerness with which his men tried to join Fielding Hurst’s ill-managed 6th instead. An impoverished Kentuckian named James M. Moore shuttled haplessly between the two regiments. Captured by Forrest while on patrol with the 6th, he was paroled at Trenton, Tennessee, in December 1862. Moore was disgusted by the way Hurst and his officers treated their men. A comrade recalled that for six months the men of his company “could see other soldiers around us who were treated as soldiers, drawing their pay &c. and everything going along smoothly when with us we got no pay and - could see no prospect for it.”

So in November 1863, Moore left the 6th and signed up with the 13th, only to find that things were no better under Bradford than they had been under Hurst. Caught between a rock and a hard place, Moore was among those who deserted from Fort Pillow in February to join—or in his case, rejoin—the 6th. But no sooner had he reached Hurst’s command than he was arrested for desertion. Released on a technicality after his captain conceded that he had never actually been mustered in, the ill-used James M. Moore resignedly returned to the 13th, only to fall into the hands of the rebels after the assault on Fort Pillow, languish in Andersonville, and die in September of scurvy, dysentery, and starvation.²⁶

A firm number of actual as opposed to alleged desertions from so decimated, irregular, and undocumented a regiment as the 13th is impossible to pin down. Among the men of the 13th who almost certainly deserted was Bill Henry of Weakley County. A member of Company E, he would claim that his captain had permitted him to leave his regiment at Union City sometime in late March so that he could escort his mother to safety in Illinois. He said he then tried to return to his regiment at Union City only to find that the garrison had surrendered. Some twelve miles from Union City, he had the bad luck to be captured himself.²⁷

Anderson Jones claimed that five days after he enlisted in the 13th, Bradford granted him a sixty-day furlough, “and the very day my furlough expired my said regiment was attacked and cut to pieces by Forrests men and were all killed or captured or scattered so that I never rejoined my said company.” Nothing, however, could be unlikelier than Bradford’s granting furloughs at a time when desertions were so rife and Forrest was at large. In fact, his returns for March show only one man absent with leave.²⁸

By the spring of 1864, in a hollow perpendicular to the river, a veritable town arose. The station included stores, groceries, a hotel, even a photographic portrait studio. In fact, to one observer the post appeared to be nothing but a military town boasting an “extra large supply of sutlers goods” which merchants hoped to barter for whatever cotton they could find that was still “in the hands of planters.”²⁹

Among the merchants was the aspiring New England barrel maker Edward B. Benton. He must have been especially pleased that Hurlbut had seen fit to regarrison Fort Pillow, for by now he had employed “government darkeys,” as he called them, to begin to prepare one hundred nearby acres for cotton cultivation. The contrabands had been provided courtesy of their superintendent at Memphis, and lived in their predecessors’ camp.³⁰

By the authority of the adjutant general’s office, Fort Pillow was one of the few places along the Mississippi where civilians were allowed to go ashore, and thus proved a magnet for smugglers and entrepreneurs. Another of the garrison’s merchants was Eugene Bestor Van Camp. Born in Kentucky in 1838, he had moved with his father, Aaron, to Washington, where Van Camp senior opened a practice as a dentist. Dr. Van Camp was “one of the most bitter and uncompromising secessionists in the city,” and when war broke out his house in D.C. became a kind of rebel post office, funneling correspondence to secessionists throughout the South. Leaving his studies at Georgetown University, Eugene joined the Confederacy, enlisting in the 6th Virginia Cavalry in April 1861. Wounded at the Battle of Strasburg, he either deserted or was captured; either way, the Yankees transported him to Baltimore, where, upon reciting the Oath of Allegiance, he was eventually paroled and returned to D.C. Accused of rebel sympathies, he was banished from the capital by the provost marshal and warned not to return to the South. Nevertheless, January 1864 found him in Vicksburg, Mississippi, assisting his father in his cotton speculations. A Memphian named B. D. Hyam described Eugene as “very erratic, going backwards and forward between Vicksburg and [Memphis] pretty often,” and suspected both father and son of spying on behalf of the Confederacy. Nevertheless, Dr. Van Camp managed to wangle a trading permit from Hurlbut, and in early April sent Eugene to Fort Pillow to establish a store. Only three days before Forrest attacked Fort Pillow, the unfortunate Eugene Bestor Van Camp opened for business.³¹