River Run Red

“We fought till we were nearly surrounded,” wrote a private in Hurst’s 6th Tennessee Cavalry, “& Then we had to run like young Devils just from the Lower regions of hell.” Neely’s outnumbering cavalry killed a score of Hurst’s men and took some fifty prisoners, plus hundreds of rounds of ammunition, all of Hurst’s wagons, ambulances, and papers, as well as his “mistresses, black and white,” and drove him “hatless into Memphis.” Assigned to guard duty, Hurst and his men were ridiculed as “Conquered Rebels” by Yankee regulars who insinuated “that they had just as leave have us on the other Side as not.”²

Guarding Memphis would “not at all Suit” Fielding Hurst. “I don’t like to be compelled to keep my Regiment where a Rebel has more influence over the authorities than a loyal man,” he fumed to Andrew Johnson, “neither do I like the idea of guarding Rebel Property, whilst the owners of Said Property are living luxuriently under the protection of my Government, and at the Same time plotting treason against that Government.” But like it or not, Hurst’s boys would never again be allowed to venture far from Memphis, and by the end of the war, Major General Edward Hatch would accuse Fielding Hurst’s brother-in-law of extorting fifty thousand dollars from the - people of McNairy County, and Hurst himself of taking home one hundred thousand dollars in extortion and bribes.³

Abraham Buford’s division of Confederate cavalry started south via Mayfield, where it encamped with the 22nd Tennessee and the 8th Kentucky, enabling the men of the 3rd and 7th Kentucky regiments to proceed in detachments to their homes to scare up recruits and “visit their kindred, from whom they had been long separated.”⁴

During the recent reorganization, Forrest had placed Tyree Bell in command of one of his brigades. Unlike Chalmers, Bell was Forrest’s kind of man. Few dared to cross him. Over the course of the war he had developed a special hatred for the “Haystack Secessionists” and “Homegrown Yankees” who obstructed his recruiting drives at every turn. Commissioned a captain in the 12th Infantry in the summer of 1861, he was soon elected lieutenant colonel by his men, whom he led so deep into the thick of battle at Belmont and Shiloh that at Shiloh alone the Yankees shot two horses out from under him. After bridling under Braxton Bragg’s petulant and inept command, he was delighted to attach himself to Bedford Forrest, a man after his own bold heart.⁵

Bell’s brigade was allowed to remain at Trenton, from whose environs most of his men had come, in order to recruit and obtain summer uniforms from their families, while McCulloch’s brigade hovered around Bolivar, trotting to and fro to give Unionist informers the impression of vast numbers. Forrest meanwhile ordered the remainder of his force to fan out by regiments and scour the country between the Tennessee and Obion rivers, hunting deserters and rounding up horses and arms.⁶

After Union City’s surrender, McDonald’s battalion had been assigned the task of tracking any Yankee movement out of Memphis. But when no such movement materialized, he was allowed to take his men back to their native Fayette County “to visit their friends and refit, especially clothing.” The battalion’s Lieutenant Colonel James M. Crews kept twenty men from each of three companies in camp, and on the night of April 2 heard that a large Yankee force was approaching on the Somerville Road. Part of this force consisted of the vestiges of Fielding Hurst’s command, sent out from Memphis with a day’s rations on orders from Grierson. Crews raised his colors on high ground and did everything he could to conceal from the Yankees that they far outnumbered his sixty men.⁷

As the Yankees lined up in a long battle formation with detachments covering their flanks, Crews sent twelve men through the woods to attack the right and ten to attack the left. As they opened fire, he charged down the middle of the road with the rest of his men, and so panicked the center of the Yankee line that the Federals fell back hundreds of yards. Darting back and forth, barking commands at imaginary units, Crews employed his commander’s wizardry to convince the Federals that they were outnumbered and outclassed. Thus as Grierson retreated all the way to Memphis, sixty Confederate cavalrymen, at the cost of only two men wounded, sent four Yankee regiments—perhaps as many as 2,200 men—fleeing back to Raleigh with a loss of six killed, at least fifteen wounded, and three captured. Delighted by yet another of his officers’ victorious bluffs, Forrest granted six-day furloughs to the men of the 13th, 14th, and 15th so they could go home and “secure clothing, horses, and supplies.” They would not return to service until a day after the attack on Fort Pillow.⁸

By April 3, Buford’s loyal Kentuckians had returned from their furloughs and ridden down to Trenton, where Buford established his division headquarters. There they were joined by Tyree Bell’s brigade, Faulkner’s regiment, and a contingent of aspiring but unmounted Kentucky cavalry, all with orders to keep their men ready to move at a moment’s notice “with ten days’ subsistence constantly on hand.”⁹

Forrest and his men returned to Jackson, where he received a hero’s welcome. Until Grant moved his army south into Mississippi, Jackson had been the center of Union military operations in West Tennessee, and its neighborhood had been “well combed for supplies for the army” ever since. It was Jackson that Fielding Hurst had held for ransom, and now its citizens greeted Forrest and his men as liberators. “’Twere useless to dilate upon the cordial reception with which we were greeted by the citizens,” wrote Dewitt Clinton Fort, “especially the beautiful ladies of the place.” Even the most aristocratic women “engaged in familiar conversations with the common soldier.” Fort and his comrades “were glad to see the beautiful Jackson ladies, and they seemed glad to see ‘we’ soldiers.” Confederate governor Isham Harris, who had apparently remained in Jackson during the assault on Fort Pillow, was pleased to inform Lieutenant General Leonidas Polk that he had come away from Forrest’s raid “highly gratified with the state of feeling among the people” of West Tennessee.¹⁰

Forrest settled into his headquarters and dictated a report on his progress. “In all engagements so far in west Tennessee,” he said, “my loss in the aggregate is fifteen killed and forty-two wounded” while the loss of the enemy was “79 killed, 102 wounded, and 612 captured.” Forrest felt “confident of my ability to whip any cavalry they can send against me,” and asserted he could, “if need be, avoid their infantry. If permitted to remain in west Tennessee,” Forrest said, he “would be glad to have my artillery with me, and will send for it, as I could operate effectively with my rifle battery on the rivers.” In the meantime, he was “clearly of opinion that with a brigade of infantry at Corinth, as a force upon which I could fall back if too hard pressed, that I can hold west Tennessee against three times my numbers, and could send rapidly out from here all conscripts and deserters for service in infantry.” Though he was finding “corn scarcer than I had thought,” he had collected “plenty of meal, flour, and bacon for troops. If supplied with the right kind of money or cotton,” he could “furnish my command with all small-arm ammunition required, and I think with small arms also,” for he had encountered a smuggler who claimed he could provide Forrest with ten thousand pounds of lead from the Union armories at Corinth.¹¹

In this first declaration of his intention to attack Fort Pillow, the Wizard made no mention of the garrison’s wickedness, or depredations by the 13th, or rape and pillage on the part of Booth’s black troops. Only later, after allegations of a massacre began to circulate, would Forrest and his officers assert that he had never intended to attack Fort Pillow until implored to do so by delegations of Jackson’s leading citizens, male and female, who claimed to have been cruelly victimized by the garrison.¹³

“For days before the capture of Fort Pillow,” Colonel Clarke Russell Barteau of the 22nd would write twenty years later, “citizens fleeing to us from its vicinity brought doleful tales of outrages committed by the Federal forces in that stronghold. The helpless families of some of our soldiers had been victims of their raiding parties. A strong feeling prevailed in favor of capturing the fort, but it was not expected to be done without fighting and loss of life.”¹⁴

“The families of many of Forrest’s men had been grievously wronged, despoiled and insulted by detachments of Bradford’s men,” wrote R. R. Hancock of Barteau’s regiment. “Forrest determined to break up their lair, and capture or destroy them before leaving that section of the country for other operations.” Another local story had it that Bradford’s men had hanged a man named Erasmus Thurmond who refused “to divulge where he had hidden his gold,” though it is likelier that this was the work of a Union guerrilla leader named Tom Mays. One of the chief complaints was that Bradford had been “negro stealing”—he would have called it emancipating and recruiting—among the local farms.¹⁵

According to John Johnston, when a delegation of men and women came to Forrest and begged him “to capture and break up the garrison” at Fort Pillow, “he replied that he did not have men enough to take the place (as they were strongly entrenched and had six pieces of artillery) and could not do so without a great sacrifice of his men. But the women tearfully begged him to deliver them from the ravages and insults of these wretches, at which Gen. Forrest was so affected that he said to the ladies, ‘You may go home and rest assured that I will take the fort if it costs me my life.’” “General Forrest was a man of great sympathy,” wrote Ted Brewer of the 20th Tennessee, “and when he heard the pathetic stories told by the ladies, he changed his plans and decided to attack Fort Pillow.” Despite the fact that “attacking the fort would take him fifty miles out of his way, Forrest felt that if he ignored the citizens’ complaints he would lose many new recruits to desertion before he could reach northern Mississippi.” But John Wyeth gave less credence to the claim that Forrest’s principal intent was avenging Yankee depredations and believed, as Forrest’s own declaration stated, that the attack arose out of his “determination to appropriate the much needed horses and supplies of the garrison.”¹⁶

Perhaps it is fitting that the Battle of Fort Pillow should have been preceded by a lynching. On April 4, as the Wizard rested at Jackson, Dewitt Clinton Fort obtained permission to ride twelve miles north to Spring Creek to shoe his horse. “Arriving there early on Monday morning,” Fort was told that the local blacksmith was two miles off assisting in the investigation of the murder of a local white girl named Margaret Hennings. Proceeding to her family’s farm, Fort found

the neighbors for miles around assembled to ferret out the villainy of one of the most atrocious, cruel and bloody murders ever committed by brutal man. Miss Margaret Henning, a beautiful, accomplished and lovely young lady about the age of twenty, had on the evening before been murdered near the house by having her head almost severed from the body with a sharp instrument in the hands of some unknown person or persons. A full day’s investigation established the fact that certain negroes in the neighborhood deserved punishment for the offense.

Whether or not the three blacks were actually guilty of killing Margaret Henning, they apparently had long been suspected of cooperating with the Yankees, and “the condition of the country,” wrote Fort, “rendered it dangerous for the people and impractical for the courts to do justice in this matter,” for Fort Pillow had afforded an “asylum to which the offenders could flee and forever escape the punishment merited by the grossest violation of human, natural, and divine laws.”

So that evening the three men were dragged out and hanged in a proceeding that was “irregular and summary.” Fort explained that because the ordinary “institutions of society were so broken down by the law and its ministers having been swept from the land,” lynchings were all that prevented “the weak and defenseless” from living at “the mercy of the strong, cruel and unrelenting.”¹⁷

“So far,” Forrest bragged to Joe Johnston on April 6, “I have been successful in every engagement with the enemy and have accomplished all that could be reasonably expected of me.” He claimed “entire possession of West Tennessee and Kentucky south and west of Tennessee River, except the posts on the river of Memphis, Fort Pillow, Columbus, and Paducah.”¹⁸

To capture Fort Pillow, Forrest decided first to arrange an elaborate diversionary feint on Memphis. On the Wizard’s behalf, Chalmers ordered Duckworth of the 7th to “assume command of all the troops near Brownsville” and assemble all but three companies of the 7th “as rapidly as possible. Scouts will be kept out in the direction of Fort Pillow,” Chalmers continued, “and a picket at the railroad bridge who will prevent all crossing without proper authority & will keep the water well pumped out of the boat in the pontoon bridge.” Forrest instructed Neely to take his entire brigade, minus the furloughed companies of the 7th Cavalry, back to the scene of his recent triumph at Raleigh, “and make every preparation as if to build a bridge across Wolf River,” while part of his command ranged conspicuously along “the Big Creek and Moscow road as if intending to cross the river at those places, the object being to impress the enemy with the belief that General Forrest was about to descend on Memphis.” Colonel John McGuirk and his Mississippians were ordered to ride out of their native state and spread the word that General Stephen D. Lee was about to join Forrest in a pincer movement on Memphis. It would later please Chalmers to report that both Neely and McGuirk “executed these orders with promptness and success.”¹⁹

Abraham Buford proposed that he be sent on a separate errand. During a sojourn at Trenton, the hulking Kentuckian had picked up a Yankee paper and read a report that ridiculed Forrest’s men for capturing only citizens’ horses at Paducah, and neglecting to seize the garrison’s 140 mounts, which Colonel Hicks had kept hidden at a rolling mill on the outskirts of town. Affronted by the ridicule but grateful for the tip, Buford received permission to march on Paducah with eight hundred Kentuckians and correct Forrest’s oversight with a raid on the garrison’s secret stable of “very much needed” horses.²⁰

In the meantime, Forrest had moved Tyree Bell’s brigade to Eaton in nearby Gibson County, almost forty miles northeast of Ripley, where they were joined by Colonels Russell and Greer. McCulloch’s brigade encamped on the Forked Deer River, some nine miles from Brownsville, where they were to remain on the alert. On April 8, Forrest issued both brigades “five days’ Cooked ration” and ordered them to “be ready to move” at a moment’s notice.²¹

The moment came on April 10. Forrest commanded Tyree Bell’s brigade from Buford’s division, McCulloch’s brigade from Chalmers’s division, and Captain Edwin S. Walton and his battery of three mountain howitzers to ride hard for Fort Pillow. Chalmers’s orders were to reach Fort Pillow before daybreak on April 12, by forced march if necessary.

It certainly was necessary. Chalmers set off at once from Jackson and collected McCulloch’s 1,500 troopers outside Brownsville. Together they would get a formidable head start on Tyree Bell, who had to be notified by sending a courier thirty miles to his encampment at Eaton, Tennessee, some fifty miles from Fort Pillow. Bell and his 1,700 men spent the afternoon cooking their five-day rations and did not mount up until 9:00 p.m. Even then they had to wait until midnight for Walton’s battery to catch up after an arduous slog through the bottoms, during which Walton himself, badly shot up at Vicksburg, may have slowed his battery’s progress. Bell’s brigade made only ten miles through the rain that night, and then just before daybreak rested for one soggy hour. Otherwise, from the time they left Eaton to the time they trotted up to within a mile and a half of Fort Pillow, they were in the saddle for almost sixty hours straight.²²

After returning from Paducah, Forrest’s consumptive adjutant general, Major John P. Strange, had begun to cough up blood. As Forrest prepared to move on Fort Pillow, he decided to leave him in the care of Willie Forrest, the Wizard’s son and aide-de-camp. This made Captain Charles W. Anderson the only officer from Forrest’s staff to accompany the Wizard on his expedition against Fort Pillow.²³

Anderson had originally joined the Confederacy’s transportation department, but was so outraged by Yankee depredations in his hometown that he applied to join up with Forrest. “Soon after applying to Forrest,” recalled a comrade, “he wrote an official paper so concisely that the General determined to make him his secretary.” Anderson looked the part: an unprepossessing but vigorous little man with a large head, a prominent nose, and a shrewd squint. To him had fallen the task of translating his commander’s terse, profane backwoods patois into the kind of erudite rhetoric that Richmond required of its officers’ dispatches.²⁴

“I move to-morrow on Fort Pillow with two brigades,” Forrest wrote Stephen Lee on the night of April 10, “the force at that point being 300 whites and 600 negroes”: an enlargement on his original and more accurate estimate of a total Union garrison of from 500 to 600 men. Be it 500, 600, or 900 men, Forrest was taking no chances. The Yankees would estimate his force at anywhere from 2,500 to 10,000 men; Forrest himself would put it at 1,500. But almost certainly his combined force, including his escort of 80 elite troops, could not have been less than 2,300 strong, or about four times the size of the Union garrison at Fort Pillow.²⁵

On the morning of the eleventh, Forrest followed Chalmers’s trail with his escort and a detachment from the 19th Tennessee Cavalry. Their saddlebags were stuffed with four days’ rations and sixty rounds of ammunition, and their blood was boiling over news of the summary execution of five of their comrades by Hurst’s Homemade Yankees. Duckworth’s 7th Tennessee Cavalry ranged around Randolph, on the watch for a Yankee advance up the Mississippi. Buford sent a portion of his division to demand the surrender of the Union garrison at Columbus as Union gunboats desperately steamed west along the Cumberland to lend the garrison support, while Buford himself moved on Paducah to rustle the last of the garrison’s horses.²⁶

At about two in the afternoon, Forrest caught up to Chalmers at Brownsville and ordered him and McCulloch to march at whatever pace would be necessary to reach Fort Pillow before dawn the next morning: a distance of thirty-eight miles. They set off at 3:30 in the afternoon and rode through the rain and into a night so dark that McCulloch’s men could barely make out the rumps of the horses in front of them, let alone the muddy parameters of the road. But except for an occasional pause to examine the condition of a doubtful, slip-slapped country bridge, they rode all night without stopping.²⁷

“Travailed west,” one of Forrest’s Escort wrote in his diary: an inadvertently apt description of the march that night, for it fell to Forrest and his Escort to follow some miles behind the rest of the expedition, their horses slipping and sinking in the mud churned up by McCulloch’s brigade.²⁸

Also known as Jackson’s Company of Tennessee Cavalry, Forrest’s Escort had been raised at least in part by a grandnephew of Daniel Boone named Montgomery Little, and included a Lieutenant Nathaniel Boone. “A splendid company, of seventy five young men,” wrote Chalmers, “who each seemed inspired with the reckless courage of their leader,” the Escort was composed of picked men from middle Tennessee, whom Forrest had provided with “the best horses.” After the Battle of Somerville in late December 1863, they had acquired “a complete outfit of Sharps Rifles, Colts, Repeaters & accoutrements.” It was their “use of these arms in future engagements that aided so materially to make the Escort a terror to the Enemy.” Though they were the finest marksmen in Forrest’s command, the men of his Escort, perhaps alone among Forrest’s enlisted men, apparently carried sabers, and would employ them most notably in hand-to-hand fighting with Federal cavalry at Memphis.²⁹

Some of Forrest’s regiments despised the Escort because one of its primary duties was to ride in the rear of a column, rounding up stragglers and shooting deserters. But it was a favorite of Colonel Bob McCulloch, who at the Battle of Okolona two months before had “asked as a special favor that his regiment and the Escort be permitted to fight together.” Mustered into service in October 1862, the Escort suffered heavy casualties and would lose at least two-thirds of its men by the end of the war.³⁰

Forrest’s entourage included the shot-up Colonel Drew Moore Wisdom of the 19th, a lifelong West Tennesseean who had been badly wounded serving as an infantry captain in Missouri. After Shiloh, he joined the cavalry, and fighting under Forrest was wounded again at Harrisburg, Mississippi. He would take a leading part at Brice’s Crossroads, and was about to have the honor of leading Forrest’s Tennesseeans in their assault on Fort Pillow.³¹

Riding with Forrest that day was Samuel Hughes, one of a large contingent of black servants and teamsters who accompanied his command throughout the war, cooking, washing, holding their masters’ horses as they advanced on foot. Born the property of Reinold Long of Alabama in about 1839, he was taken as a boy to Carroll County, Mississippi, by Reinold’s son-in-law, Andrew Hughes. Sam’s relatives, including a nephew named Charles Koon, joined the 6th USCHA. But Sam went to war as a cook for two local Confederate boys, Private F. C. Gardiner and Second Lieutenant Richard T. Gardiner of the 15th Tennessee Cavalry, and would encounter his nephew in the bloody aftermath of the battle that was about to commence.³²

Another of the slaves riding with Forrest that day was thirty-two-year-old Nick Hamer. Hamer was born in North Carolina and hired out at the age of twenty-five to a Choctaw County, Mississippi, farmer. But when the war broke out four years later, his owner, William F. Hamer of the 5th Mississippi Cavalry, fetched his slave along “to wait on him and finally to cook for his mess.” Hamer served his master faithfully, and remained with his master throughout the war.

We left the camp and trodded all day, and just at night we came to our camping place, and then we found a farmer’s house. When we went out to him and asked him for corn and fodder to feed our horses, he said that he did not have any. We knew this was not true, and so we hunted around and finally found his corn hid in a double log house. There was a great lot of it and, as we got the corn out and had just commenced to feed our horses, an order came for us to mount and march.³³

Also riding with Forrest was Paul Anderson, his chief of scouts, an old Texas Ranger who “affected all the vagaries of the cowboy costume, mingled with that of the Mexican greaser, as shown in the white sombrero, leather-fringed breeches, and jangling spurs. His voice had a peculiar nasal twang,” recalled Mercer Otey, “and his slowness of speech caused him great difficulty in spinning his yarns.” As they rode into Lauderdale County, however, Anderson appears to have been temporarily superseded by a local man named W. J. Shaw who had just escaped from Bradford’s custody and was thus “entirely familiar with the topography of the enclosure, as well as the number of troops defending the works.”³⁴

They may well have been further enlightened by a Tipton County man named Inman (his first name was not recorded) who had ostensibly enlisted in Company E of the 13th Tennessee Cavalry (USA) on the eve of the massacre. He then disappears from the record, but he may well have been one of the Inmans who rode with Barteau’s 22nd Tennessee Cavalry and had recently joined the 13th only in order to spy on the garrison.³⁵

In fact, any number of recent deserters from Bradford’s garrison could have provided Forrest with intelligence; Surgeon Charles Fitch “learned that there were some twenty of the Tenn. Cav. Deserted during the night of the 11th.” Perhaps tipped off by a rebel spy, Private Fred Kelso of Company C of the 13th (13/C) deserted Fort Pillow the day before the massacre and went home to Dyer County. At the time of his enlistment, Johnny Walters was a struggling young Obion County farmer reduced to renting his “poor and worn out land” to his neighbors just so he could afford to buy corn for his wife and three children. A private in 13/D, Walters deserted his regiment on the eve of the massacre, probably to see to his impoverished family; his ailing wife would die within the year. He did not return to service until September, but perhaps because of his family’s desperate straits, he was neither shot nor imprisoned but forfeited “all pay and privileges.”³⁶

The ostensible field commander in the assault on Fort Pillow was the diminutive, ferocious James Ronald Chalmers. While serving as a lackluster infantry officer, he had briefly and ineffectively commanded Forrest at Shiloh. After switching over to the cavalry, however, he spent the fall of 1863 in Mississippi harassing Yankee patrols and earning the affectionate sobriquet “Little ‘Un” from his troopers. The son of the De Soto County senator who had approved Forrest’s appointment as Hernando’s coroner, peacemaker, and slave catcher, Chalmers graduated from South Carolina College and joined his father’s law practice in Marshall County. Following the senator’s death in 1853, Chalmers labored hard to establish himself as his father’s political heir, eventually winning election as one of the youngest district attorneys in the country.³⁷

In 1861, as a delegate to Mississippi’s secession convention, Chalmers had chaired the committee on military affairs. The roots of his commitment to the secessionist cause were entangled in his family’s heavy investment in the peculiar institution. By 1860, slightly over 50 percent of Mississippi’s population were slaves, but the ratio in De Soto County had risen to almost 60 percent. The Chalmers family housed its forty-four slaves in six slave cabins. Twenty-six of their slaves were male, thirty-one were over the age of twelve (including a nonagenarian and a centenarian), and ten were of mixed race: an unusually high proportion for the area.

A decade younger and about a foot shorter than the Wizard of the Saddle, Chalmers nonetheless had an aristocratic self-regard that was positively Virginian. In breeding, education, politesse, and sheer refinement of character, he deemed himself the semiliterate Forrest’s superior. (One young gentleman-soldier groaned at the prospect of being commanded by a “vulgarian” like Forrest, “a man having no pretension to gentility—a negro trader, gambler,—an ambitious man, careless of the lives of his men so long as preferment be en prospectu.”³⁸)

Forrest did not like Chalmers much either, and seemed to go out of his way to discomfit him. They began to exchange chilly little notes about trifling slights and inconveniences: Forrest requisitioned Chalmers’s tent for his brother’s use, took a wagon from him to haul his cook’s stove. On March 9, Forrest replaced Chalmers as commander of his First Division with McCulloch, whom he now recommended for a brigadier generalship. Reporting to Polk that Chalmers had “never been satisfied since I came here, and being satisfied that I have not had and will not receive his support and cooperation,” Forrest “deemed it necessary that we should separate. I must have the cordial support of my subordinate officers in order to succeed and make my command effective.”³⁹

As McCulloch led his division to Panola, Mississippi, destroying stills and collecting deserters and stragglers along his way, Chalmers demanded a court of inquiry. Polk ruled that Forrest had exceeded his authority, and restored the badly ruffled little Mississippian to command, whereupon Forrest ordered Chalmers to meet him in West Tennessee, “and bring with him all the scattered remnants of his command.”⁴⁰

Now, in the wee hours of April 12, Chalmers paused one ridge east of Fort Pillow to deploy his command for a three-pronged attack. “McCulloch’s brigade moved down the Fulton road to Gaines’s farm,” he wrote, “thence north to the fort on a road running parallel with the Mississippi River.” A large detachment of the 16th Tennessee moved along the Ripley Road under the command of Colonel A. N. Wilson, whose brother J. Cardwell Wilson—one of four Wilson brothers who served under Forrest—would be mortally wounded in the attack that followed. And an officer was posted to direct Tyree Bell’s brigade, with Barteau’s 22nd (previously the 2nd) Tennessee Cavalry and the 21st under Colonel Robert Milton Russell, a West Point graduate from Trenton, Tennessee, to move down Coal Creek and attack the fort from the north.⁴¹

“Forrest will carry his men further than any other man I know of,” Hurlbut would testify. “He is desperate.” His men would have agreed. Of all of Forrest’s troops, Bell’s brigade was the most exhausted. “McCulloch’s men had decidedly the advantage of Bell’s,” wrote Sergeant Hancock, “from the fact that by getting well on their way Sunday they got to rest Sunday night, while, as we have seen, Bell’s men were in the saddle nearly all night, and then also Monday and Monday night, resulting in many of Bell’s men being made sick.”⁴²

By this time Forrest’s veterans were already “contemplating not only the possibility but the probability” of the Confederacy’s ultimate defeat, wrote John Milton Hubbard, “and were therefore mentally prepared for almost anything which fate could decree.”⁴³ Frustrated by their failure to capture and hang the elusive Hurst, humiliated by their failure to take Paducah after Duckworth’s ingenious triumph at Union City, provoked by the unexpectedly lethal skill of Fort Anderson’s black gunners, they had been encouraged by their officers to lump Booth’s black artillerists with Bradford’s men and Bradford’s men not only with Hurst’s atrocious cavalry but the vagrant bands of Unionist guerrillas that still ranged along the river. “Tho’ hungry, tired and sleepy,” wrote Dewitt Clinton Fort, “we went cheerfully into the fight.”⁴⁴

“Those within the fort knew that they deserved condign punishment,” wrote Hubbard, “because of the outrages committed on innocent people.” “The rebel Tennesseans,” wrote a Confederate paper, “have about the same bitterness against Tennesseans in the Federal army, as against the negroes.” Bell had a special hatred of the deserters from the 47th Tennessee Infantry who had served in his brigade earlier in the war and had now given their allegiance to Bradford. As Forrest himself declared, “The fort was filled with niggers and deserters from our army—men who lived side by side with my men.”⁴⁵

“It is difficult for those who did not live through this unhappy period, and in this immediate section,” explained John Wyeth, who served with the 4th Alabama Cavalry during the war, “to appreciate the bitterness of feeling which then prevailed.” Three years of civil war had had

a deplorable effect upon the morals of the rank and file of either army. War does not bring out the noblest traits in the majority of those who from choice or necessity follow its bloodstained paths. Too often the better qualities hide away, and those that are harsh and cruel prevail. Some of Forrest’s men treasured a deep resentment against some of the officers and soldiers of this garrison. They had been neighbors in times of peace, and had taken opposite sides when the war came on. These men had suffered violence to person and property, and their wives and children, in the enforced absence of their natural protectors, had suffered various indignities at the hands of the “Tennessee Tories,” as the loyal Tennesseeans were called by their neighbors who sided with the South. When they met in single combat, or in scouting parties, or in battle, as far as these individuals were concerned, it was too often a duel to the death. Between the parties to these neighborhood feuds the laws of war did not prevail.⁴⁶

Black troops had already distinguished themselves at Milliken’s Bend, among other battles, and then at Paducah, and the Southern white nightmare of a servile war, and the prospect of a Northern victory setting blacks above their former masters, meant that it was not just militarily but psychologically essential to the Confederates to nip black recruitment in the bud. The recent murder of Margaret Henning outraged the troopers who had camped at nearby Jackson and listened with relish to Dewitt Clinton Fort’s account of her alleged black murderers’ lynching.

Some Southern accounts would blame Yankee depredations on Booth’s black artillerists. “Many of the citizens of West Tennessee, principally ladies,” wrote Ted Brewer of the 20th, had begged Forrest “not to fail to take Fort Pillow before he left the State,” because “the troops at Fort Pillow were principally negroes who formerly belonged to people that lived in West Tennessee. They had terrorized their old masters’ families until they did not know what to expect next.” A. J. Grantham of Lieutenant Colonel Reid’s 5th Mississippi Cavalry recalled as a nonagenarian that he and his men had been told that the black troops stationed at Fort Pillow had robbed and plundered Lauderdale County. By another account, Forrest told his men that “many of the Colored troops at the fort were runaway slaves from the area, and were now engaged in a campaign of terror against their former owners.”⁴⁷

told by citizens living in the direction of Fort Pillow, that bands of Federal and negro soldiers made frequent raids through the country, robbing people of any thing they could find, and insulting in the grossest manner any lady who protested against their action. The negro soldiers were especially insulting to the wives and families of Confederate soldiers. In some cases, they committed an unpardonable, brutish and fiendish crime on ladies. Numbers of our men lived in that country, and they joined in the appeal to Forrest to give them protection. He decided to do so.⁴⁸

The charges against the black troops were almost certainly false. After the war not a single one of the many claims against the garrison made by local citizens for compensation involved any of the black regiments. One reason the Union Army formed black artillery companies, especially heavy artillery, was in order to keep them fixed at Union posts. Booth was under orders to keep his men holed up in the innermost bastion and away from the locals, and every evidence suggests he did. Not one of the men of the 6th USCHA had a horse, and the forty members of the 2nd USCLA had only seventeen mounts, all of which were required to haul artillery. The 13th itself had many fewer horses than men, and would not have spared any of them for a black foraging expedition.

The very presence of black troops at Fort Pillow, however, and the attitude of the freedmen toward their former owners, were enough to outrage local whites. It is possible, though unlikely, that contrabands from Fort Pillow committed depredations, but any rapes would almost certainly have been reported to the Union authorities by local Unionist slaveholders eager to prove that blacks were unworthy of freedom. It is far likelier that this charge was invented either beforehand by local secessionists to whip up Forrest and his men, or afterward by soldiers seeking to explain and excuse the slaughter of black troops that was to follow, for it was a reflex in that time and place to counter allegations of white barbarity with perfervid accusations of black men assaulting white women.

say repeatedly that they intended to kill negro troops wherever they - could find them; that they had heard that there were negro troops at Union City, and that they had intended to kill them if they had found any there. They also said they had understood there were negro troops at Paducah and Mayfield, and that they intended to kill them if they got them. And they said that they did not consider officers who commanded negro troops to be any better than the negroes themselves. ⁴⁹

Stopping about a mile and a half from Fort Pillow, Chalmers’s cavalry dismounted in the dark and, “leaving every fourth man to hold horses,” crept up to within sight of the fortifications. As Wilson and his men approached the mouth of Coal Creek, McCulloch’s “Missouri Mongols” made their wary way past the unmanned watchtower on the Fulton Road and then along “the ravines and short hills which encompassed the place,” with Captain Frank J. Smith and his advance guard leading the way.⁵⁰

McCulloch’s men crept up on the Union garrison’s drowsy pickets from Bradford’s 13th, capturing or killing them as they dozed, stoked fires, played cards. But at least one of their number escaped, and as Captain Smith led his skirmishers through the gloom, the rattle of musket fire rose out of the snarl of the abatis, skittering up the slopes to where Booth and Bradford were stirring.⁵¹

McCulloch’s boys were a fiery lot. Black Bob and his cousin and second-in-command, Lieutenant Colonel Robert A. McCulloch, had grown up together in Cooper County, Missouri, in the densely slaveholding portion of the state known as “Little Dixie” that ranged along the western bank of the Mississippi and both banks of the Missouri as it traversed the state from St. Louis west to Kansas City. But by Cooper County standards, the McCullochs were small-time slaveholders: five of them owned fourteen slaves, of which Robert McCulloch apparently owned but two. Colonel McCulloch, nicknamed Bob, was born in Virginia in 1820, five years before his cousin, Robert A. But they were so inseparable that some historians have mistaken them for brothers, or even father and son.⁵²

Though their early martial training was negligible, almost every man in Cooper County, excluding slaves, carried a gun, for it fell to each man to protect his family and property from brigands, Indians, and the “whisky traders, grog-shop keepers and their bloated customers, blacklegs, and infidels” who served as sheriffs and deputies. It is hard to imagine anyone likelier to start a fight or less likely to take orders than a Cooper County white man.⁵³

Robert A. McCulloch intended to become a brick mason, while his older cousin Bob prepared to take over the management of his family’s farm. But in 1849, they caught the gold fever that was then raging through Missouri, emptying farms of menfolk. In April, they ventured forth with half a hundred of their kith and kin, bound for California on the Santa Fe Trail, which in those days originated in Boonville and led young men, so it was said, “from Civilization to Sundown.” It took them four months to reach California, and along the way Robert A. tried to lift his fellow forty-niners’ spirits with his fiddle. They staked a claim on the Sacramento River, but two years’ panning did not yield even enough gold to pay their way home. Robert A. limped back to Cooper County as a mule train captain; Bob returned a year later with nothing to show for his pains but an experience transporting a body of men over great distances that, unbeknownst to him, would one day serve him as well in preparing him for cavalry command as slave trading had prepared Forrest.⁵⁴

Upon their shamefaced return, the McCulloch cousins found their proslavery kith and kin girding their loins to prevent Kansas from voting itself a free state, thereby joining Illinois to the east and Iowa to the north to isolate Missouri as a vulnerable peninsular outpost of American slavery. Disappointed in their dreams of riches, the two McCullochs apparently jumped into the fray with both feet, joining proslavery vigilantes in taking potshots at the steamboats that carried Kansas-bound abolitionist settlers up the Missouri River. Bob was appointed a delegate to the proslavery convention of 1855, traveling to Lexington to rub elbows with secessionist movers and shakers. In 1856, one of the cousins (they are sometimes difficult to distinguish on contemporary rolls) attended a meeting in Boonville “for the purpose of raising men and money to aid the law and order men in Kansas. Let every pro-slavery man attend,” trumpeted a broadside. “Bring your guns and horses. Let us sustain the Government, and drive back the abolitionists who are murdering our citizens.”⁵⁵

Perhaps nowhere and at no previous period in American history did white American kill white American with such impunity as in Kansas and Missouri in the 1850s. The atrocities committed by both sides stank in the nostrils of North and South. Bob would raise a rebel company in Missouri, go on to command a number of brigades, fight with almost superhuman bravery, and at different times rescue James Chalmers and Nathan Bedford Forrest himself from annihilation. In October 1863 Chalmers reminded his superiors that McCulloch had been “recommended for promotion several times before, and was informed recently that as soon as a brigade could be organized for him, he would be promoted.” But there was something sufficiently malodorous about him to prevent his promotion to brigadier general until the Confederacy’s eleventh hour. In fact, his commission would not reach him until after the cause was lost.⁵⁶

The inseparable McCullochs commanded together, of course: Bob as colonel and Robert A. as lieutenant colonel of the 2nd Missouri Cavalry. To distinguish between the two, their men took to referring to Bob as “Black-haired Bob” and to Robert A., whose hair was turning gray, as “White-haired Bob.” “A man of strong personality and a strict disciplinarian,” Colonel Bob - could be as “gentle and tender as a woman,” recalled one of his men. “He knew personally every man in his regiment, and when in camp made their comfort his first consideration.” He was a square-built, ham-handed man with a full beard that emphasized a high forehead and a rather empty gaze. Robert A. was a ganglier, more approachable man with a reputation for fair-mindedness and a penchant for entertaining his men with his fiddle.⁵⁷

Whatever their differences, they sure could fight. General Sterling Price, William Jackson, Stephen Lee, Earl Van Dorn, and William N. R. Beall all selected the McCulloch boys and their Missouri Mongols to serve “on the point of danger.” Like Forrest, the McCullochs subscribed to the notion that war meant fighting and fighting meant killing. By the end of the war their flesh would bear proof of their fearlessness. Colonel Bob was shot in the shoulder at Tupelo, the ball piercing his lung, and another ball shattered his hand at Harrisburg, Mississippi; in fact he spent much of the latter part of the war traveling in an ambulance. At Wilson’s Creek in August 1864, Robert A. would be shot in the stomach by a Yankee firing from such close range that he powder-burned the lieutenant colonel’s butternut coat.⁵⁸

It is possible that what stuck in Richmond’s craw was simply Colonel Bob’s gambling, which was so prodigious that when his command bivouacked in a church during the Battle of Holly Springs, his men changed its name from Antioch to “Ante-Up.” Or perhaps it was his regiment’s habit of “stealing cotton, horses, mules, waggons and slaves, and keeping the spoils for themselves.” Judging from the regiment’s records, Bob McCulloch’s officers were a restive lot: always noisily protesting promotions and demotions; demanding elections; resigning or deserting, and in one case taking most of a company with them.⁵⁹

Such shenanigans, however, were hardly unique to the 2nd Missouri Cavalry. More likely what offended Richmond’s olfaction was the regiment’s whiff of the bushwhacker. The 2nd Missouri Cavalry consisted in significant part of men who had disgraced the proslavery cause with their depredations in Kansas. Its core companies were initially mustered into service at the same place and on the same day as William Quantrill’s cutthroat band. Slavery had been so baldly and undeniably the cause of the border wars that they were an embarrassment to those Confederate statesmen who, to ennoble their cause and reassure their British sympathizers, contended and, in many cases, convinced themselves that they were fighting not for slavery but for human freedom. But Colonel McCulloch’s nickname was soon shortened to “Black Bob,” and carried with it the snap of the black flag.⁶⁰