River Run Red

Sounding the alarm “to the hotel and stores as I passed,” Fitch returned immediately to the hospital to evacuate his patients. Panicked black women and children were already rushing past him, racing for the river. Gazing up beyond the log and wattle dispensary, Fitch saw smoke and flames begin to rise as the rebels set the contraband camp ablaze.

“In an instant I started for Major Booth’s Quarters,” wrote Fitch, “and found him at or near the Earth work, making preparations to give the Rebs a warm reception.” Buttoning his coat, Booth hustled Companies D and E of the 13th into the outermost rifle pits to hold the rebels back and “ascertain the position and number of the enemy” as his artillerists trained their guns on the roads to Ripley and Fulton.²

Bradford’s crony, attorney James McCoy of Obion County, had attached himself to the major’s entourage and was lying in bed in Bradford’s quarters recovering from a recent injury to his hands when he first heard the alarm. “Major Bradford was up immediately the alarm was given,” McCoy recalled, and after Booth sent orders to Captain James Marshall of the New Era to evacuate the noncombatants fleeing down the ravine to the river, Bradford urged McCoy to join them because with his “mashed” hands he would only get in the way.³

At the first alarm, Captain Marshall had “immediately got the ship cleared for action” and pulled her out into the stream. But he still “had no idea that there would be a fight” and, thinking “it would merely be a little skirmish,” served his men their breakfasts. Booth and Marshall “had previously established signals,” Marshall testified, “by which Booth could indicate certain points where he would want me to use my guns.” As the crackle of musket fire skittered across the water, and a glow rose above the bluff from the flames consuming the tents and shacks in the contraband camp, Booth signaled Marshall “to commence firing up what we call No. 1 ravine,” the defile that ran from the junction of the Ripley and Fulton roads down to the river. “Then he signaled me to fire up Coal Creek ravine No. 3, and I then moved up there. Before I left down here at ravine No. 1, the rebel sharpshooters were firing at me rapidly.”⁴

At yet another signal from the bluff, Marshall brought the New Era up to the bank, where “women and children, some sick negroes, and boys” had gathered around the largest of the three coal barges moored along the bank. A loyalist “refugee in the Federal lines,” Rosa Johnson, testified that she was at Fort Pillow looking after her son William of Bradford’s Battalion when the rebels attacked. Accompanying Rosa was Anna Ruffin, who had been tending her husband, Thomas, who had recently ruptured himself on the horn of his saddle chasing after a detachment of Texas Rangers. She and Rosa would return the next morning to search for their menfolk.⁵

Rosa Spearman Hooper, the wife of Tom Hooper of 6/C, was one of the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of slaves Forrest had bought and sold. In about 1859, Rosa was sold to Forrest by her Lexington, Kentucky, master and transported in one of Forrest’s droves to Yalobusha County, Mississippi. She and Tom escaped together, and together they had remained, until now: though Major Booth had officially forbidden the regiment’s wives and womenfolk to accompany them, Rosa had defied Booth’s ban and “went anyhow.”⁶

Crouching with her in the barge was Rachel Parks, wife of another family man: Ransom Parks of 2/A. In 1859, a white minister named Enloe, whose cousin Abraham Enloe was once rumored to have been Abraham Lincoln’s natural father, had officiated at her wedding to Ransom Parks. After the war broke out, they picked up their two children and fled from the William Buford plantation in Lafayette County, Mississippi, to Jackson, Tennessee, where Ransom worked as a cook for Fielding Hurst’s 6th Tennessee Cavalry. After the fall of Corinth, however, he enlisted in Company A of the 2nd USCLA. A low, heavyset man with a pockmarked gingerbread complexion, Parks was always sickly, recalled Rachel, “and was never able to do much duty as a soldier and was in consequence of his health detailed as a nurse.”⁷

Marshall shouted to them over the din “to get into the barge if they wished to save themselves, and I would take them out of danger.” After the panicked exodus of sutlers, clerks, contrabands, and cavalry wives had scrambled aboard, Marshall yanked the barge away from the riverbank and towed it above Coal Creek as rebel sharpshooters continued to fire at them, reportedly killing one woman. None of the wives would learn their husbands’ fate until the next morning. Reaching the bar, Marshall urged the refugees to seek shelter among “the trees and bushes around them there”; then he steamed back downstream to resume firing on the rebels.⁸

A second doctor, Chapman Underwood, had just returned from detached duty at Memphis and was rooming with another of Bradford’s old Obion County cronies, First Lieutenant Nicholas Logan of 13/C. “About the time I got up and washed,” wrote Underwood, “the pickets ran in and said Forrest was coming.” As Underwood started for the fort, Logan advised him to escape on the New Era, for he “knew the feeling the rebels had towards me,” recalled Underwood, who described himself as “a notorious character with them” who always had to flee “whenever they came around,” for they had been hunting him for months, and shot at him “frequently.” Underwood rushed aboard the coal barge, but, unlike McCoy, he remained aboard the New Era to serve as a volunteer sharpshooter.⁹

Chugging back up toward Coal Creek ravine, Marshall saw that the refugees on the bar were still being “fired at much.” He bullhorned to them to find shelter in a nearby house. At a little after 8:00 a.m., Marshall would resume his fire along the river, “keeping underway, running a head, and dropping as required,” while “firing as signaled from the fort.” Because of the strong wind and the swift, rain-swollen current, however, “our firing was from our starboard battery,” whose guns soon became “quite hot and very foul.”¹⁰

Other civilians, including at least two contraband women and a number of black boys, either refused to flee aboard the barge or were too late to join the exodus. Some of the boys, still in their teens, ran into the fort as stranded women and children sought refuge in the snarl of driftwood along the riverbank. Jacob Thompson was a former slave from Brown’s Mills in the new state of West Virginia, whose Unionists had seceded, in effect, from secessionist Virginia in 1863. His master, however, was Lieutenant Colonel Tazewell Lee Hargrove of the 44th North Carolina Infantry (CSA), but while the 44th was on the march, Thompson had run off and ingratiated himself with officers of the 11th Illinois Cavalry, for whom he cooked for two years. He returned briefly to his master, “but he got to cutting up,” Thompson recalled, “and I came away again.” The morning of April 12 found Thompson cooking at John Nelson’s shabby little hotel. Though Thompson had never received any military training, when Forrest attacked he “went up in the fort and fought with the rest.”¹¹

Several white civilians joined in the defense as well. The hotelier John Nelson, Thompson’s boss, “entered the works and tendered my services to Major Booth.” The newly arrived merchant Eugene Van Camp joined the garrison’s riflemen along the parapets, where a minié ball would all but sever his left hand. A clerk from upstate New York named James Brigham inserted himself behind a parapet “and was engaged with a musket in defending the fort.” The merchant Hardy Revelle also took his place behind the breast-works, while the Minnesota photographer Charley Robinson and his partner George Washington Crafts “put on our blouses and went up to the fort & got our guns & amunition. George took his station in the Fort while I took my place in ‘Co C’ 13th Tenn who were outside skirmishing.” Elvis Bevel, who had crossed from Arkansas to find refuge from rebel guerrillas, now slid into one of the rifle pits, from which he was soon evicted by rebel sharpshooters, forcing him to withdraw “behind a large stump near the fort.”¹²

In his house in town, Edward Benton, the entrepreneurial owner of the bluff, was awakened by a contraband in his employ. “Oh, Mr. Benton,” he said, jarring his boss awake, “all of Forrest’s men have come, and they are just going into the fort. What will I do?”

Packing his valise, Benton “started for the fort in a roundabout way.” He tried to bring along three of the many contrabands he had hired from the camp in Memphis to put in a cotton crop, but they ran off, while the rest, including “one yellow woman,” shut themselves up in his house. “By running the pickets,” Benton proceeded “immediately to Major Booth and asked for a gun, and took my stand with the soldiers inside the breastworks, where I remained and shot at every person of Forrest’s men that I could get a chance at, firing forty-eight shots in all.”¹³

First Sergeant Henry Weaver of 6/C had just called the roll and gone down to the river to converse with Lieutenant Thomas W. McClure when the two men “heard an uncommon noise and commotion around headquarters, and soon the cry that the rebels were coming.” A husband and father, and the semiliterate son of a pioneer, McClure and his old friend John D. Hill had worked together as cabinetmakers in Wabash, Indiana. They were about to be separated by Hill’s admission to law school when the war reunited them in the ranks of the 14th Indiana Light Artillery. After the Battle of Parker Crossroads, they had both applied for commissions in the 6th USCHA, in which Hill and McClure were appointed Company C’s first and second lieutenants respectively. Described by his commander as a “sober, reliable and trustworthy officer,” McClure was a “healthy, active” thirty-year-old who had never been “excused from duty a day on account of disease or sickness.”

After McClure and Weaver commanded Company C to fall in, Booth ordered them to take possession of two ten-pounder Parrott guns and haul them into the fort. McClure’s artillerists installed the guns in the south end of the works, with McClure taking charge of the cannon on the right and Weaver on the left.¹⁴

Awakened by the rebel fire, post adjutant Mack J. Leaming hastily ascended the ravine road and scrambled into the fort. Formerly a private in the 72nd Illinois Infantry, Lieutenant Leaming of La Porte, Indiana, was a veteran of the siege of Vicksburg and numerous expeditions against guerrillas in Tennessee, Kentucky, and Missouri. Rushing into the fort, he found everyone in a state of “so much hurry and confusion that our flag was not raised.” Leaming ordered it flown immediately, and at the sight of it “our troops set up vociferous cheers, especially the colored troops, who entered into the fight with great energy and spirit.” Many of his men, “particularly the colored soldiers, had never before been under fire; yet every man did his duty with a courage and determined resolution, seldom if ever surpassed in similar engagements.” And yet it must have rattled Bradford’s officers to learn that some twenty more of their men had deserted since roll call the night before. ¹⁵

Though the 13th occupied a superior position southeast of the black troops’ camp, they soon abandoned it for the safety of Booth’s battery. Thus the garrison was a victim, in part, of its own bigotry. Because of the bad feeling between the black artillerists and the Southern whites of the 13th, the two groups had been kept separated. Had they been able to camp together, or had some of Booth’s artillerists been stationed with their guns in the 13th’s camp, Bradford’s boys might have held the knoll and denied the rebel sharpshooters their advantage. But now, perhaps dismayed to find that another twenty of their comrades had slipped off in the night, they rushed “back in disorder, leaving their horses and all their camp equipage behind. The rebels soon commenced running off the horses” despite the garrison’s “brisk fire of musketry,” as well as a cannonade from the 2nd USCLA’s battery.¹⁶

Booth reinforced the skirmishers from the 13th with a detachment from 6/B under twenty-six-year-old Sergeant Wilbur Gaylord, a white nurseryman from Geneva, Ohio, who, as member of the 14th Independent Battery of the Ohio Light Artillery, had seen action at Shiloh. In November 1863, he had been detailed to assist in the training of black gunners, and he had only recently risen from his sickbed after a bout with the measles. Booth deployed Gaylord and twenty of his best men to a position more than a hundred yards southeast of the fort with orders “to hold the position as long as possible without being captured.”¹⁷

At first the rebel advance seemed inexorable. Wilson’s regiment had been deployed by now “to occupy the close attention of the garrison by an immediate, vigorous skirmish.” “They kept up a steady fire by sharpshooters behind trees, and logs, and high knolls,” recalled Leaming, and at one point Booth thought he saw them “planting some artillery, or looking for places to plant it. They began to draw nearer and nearer.” By 8:00 a.m. most of the garrison had been driven into the fort, and the rebels, “realizing their advantage, pushed up near.” They advanced “so close, in fact,” wrote an officer of the 22nd Tennessee Cavalry, “that it became decidedly hazardous” for a Federal to show his head “to our marksmen, to say nothing of their features which they managed to keep pretty much below the battlements.”¹⁸

“The Rebel sharp shooters must have fired at the Breast works over one hour without doing any harm,” countered Dr. Fitch. “I was the first one wounded, which was merely a flesh wound in my left Thigh.” Booth commanded him “to take his instruments and his medicines down under the bluff and stick up flags there and have the wounded taken down to him.” So Fitch limped down the ravine road to the riverbank, where he tore his red flannel shirt into flags that he tied to “every bush around the bottom of the hill.”¹⁹

Wounded while firing at the rebels, the civilian James Brigham soon tumbled after Fitch and spent the rest of the battle assisting with the wounded by the river. Dr. Fitch was impressed by the wounded men’s resilience. “There was little or no straggling of our Forces,” he reported. “They all fought like Braves. The wounded were all brought down to the Bluff as fast as they were wounded, and their wounds dressed.”²⁰

Approaching from the east, some nine miles from the fort, Forrest and his entourage could begin to hear the distant thrum of Union artillery. Spurring their horses, they trotted for another five miles, the sound of battle crackling now in the morning air, until they were met by a local man named Laney with a message from Chalmers reporting that he had driven the enemy into the works and rifle pits, but that the fort itself could not be taken “without heavy cost.”²¹

On the western outskirts of Ripley, Forrest turned left onto a small road that ran through the tiny settlements of Mack, Glimp, Cherry, and finally Price, where he and his men turned right onto a muddy little road running - toward the low hills between Price and the river. He arrived at the outer fortifications midmorning, and as his Escort dismounted to fill their canteens from a nearby spring, Laney directed him to where Chalmers’s officers were conferring under a giant oak tree that Fort Pillow’s successive garrisons had spared.²²

“From ten a.m. until General Forrest came, there was but little change in our position,” wrote Anderson French of the 22nd Tennessee Cavalry. “We had taken shelter behind trees and logs, and would occasionally jet a shot at some venturesome Federal who would expose his head above the fort.” Otherwise the assault had stalled. “The enemy felt perfectly secure,” recalled one of Chalmers’s Mississippians, “and had no idea that any force could successfully storm their position. They waved their hats, telling our men: ‘Come on, you dirty rebels.’” In fact, “the negro soldiers were perfectly offensive in offering banters.”²³

According to Nick Hamer, the slave who had accompanied Forrest on his ride to Fort Pillow, by the time Forrest arrived, Chalmers’s men had begun to fall “back toward their horses.” Forrest demanded “to know why they were going back, and our men said they had got out of ammunition. He asked where their wagons were, and they said they did not know, as the wagons could not keep up. He then ordered them to stop” and commanded his Escort “to donate their cartridges.”²⁴

Chalmers deemed the fort impregnable, but Forrest, who tended to trust “no other eyes than his own,” decided to see for himself. “No matter how much confidence he had in his officers,” explained Wyeth, “he never entrusted to anyone the task of making him acquainted with the strength of a point to be assailed, the topography of the ground to be traversed, or the various obstacles to be overcome.”²⁵

Spurring his horse westward with Captain Charles Anderson at his side, Forrest began to gallop to and fro, well within the garrison’s range, examining firsthand every knoll and ravine and devising “a final plan of operations.” “Almost immediately a rifle ball fired from the fort struck and mortally wounded his horse,” wrote Robert Selph Henry. “Frantic with pain, the animal reared and fell over backward, carrying his rider with him and inflicting upon the General bruises and injuries which were painful and even serious.” But Forrest wiped away the mud from his bruised limbs and mounted a second horse, which, after cantering a few yards, was also shot and killed. An alarmed Captain Anderson begged him to proceed on foot, but Forrest mounted yet a third horse, declaring that he was “just as apt to be hit one way as another,” and, besides, could see better and scout faster from horseback. ²⁶

All the while the Wizard kept exhorting his men forward “through the underbrush and stumps toward the fort in short rushes, each advance being covered by the fire of sharpshooters converging from both sides upon the defenders behind the parapet.” As he ranged around the field he deployed sharpshooters “on every commanding position” with instructions “to shoot at anything which showed itself from the fort.”²⁷

Forrest was especially eager to keep the New Era at bay, for he had seen what these lethal turtles had done to Floyd’s command at Fort Donelson and to his own men two weeks earlier at Paducah. Though the gunboat’s fire had been ineffectual so far, Forrest knew it was only a matter of time before more Yankee gunboats joined the fray.²⁸

Before his hour’s scout was over, his third mount was slightly wounded, but by now the Wizard had determined that if his men could occupy a portion of the trench to the south of the fort, they would be protected from Fort Pillow’s fire. In addition, Forrest surveyed two ridges “four to five hundred yards distant, eastward and north-eastward from the enemy’s position,” which would give his men “excellent cover, from which they completely commanded the interior of the Federal works, and might effectually silence their fire.”²⁹

To Forrest the assault looked far from hopeless, and it must have been satisfying to return from his perilous ride to tell the vaunting little aristocrat so. Pointing westward, he turned to his old warhorse Black Bob McCulloch and asked if he would consider “capturing the barracks and houses which were near the fort and between it and my position.”

He ordered a no doubt chagrined General Chalmers “to advance his lines and gain position on the slope, where our men would be perfectly protected from the heavy fire of artillery and musketry” because the garrison “could not depress their pieces so as to rake the slopes, nor could they fire on them with small-arms except by mounting the breastworks and exposing themselves to the fire of our sharpshooters, who, under cover of stumps and logs, forced them to keep down inside the works.”³¹

At Forrest’s “move up,” McCulloch “made the charge in short order, and very soon,” he recalled, “had my men in and behind the houses, from which the artillery on that side was silenced by sharpshooters,” while other portions of his brigade occupied the rifle pits Bradford had evacuated, southeast of the fort. Forrest ordered Russell’s and Wilson’s forces forward to Barteau’s left, “to a position in which their men were well sheltered by the conformation of the ground.” The fire was intense. “I was one of a squad placed out on the old confederate trenches as sharpshooters to keep them down in the fort,” recalled J. J. White of Russell’s 20th. “I was sent by officers with [a] message to General Bell and had to go down a long hill in plain view of the fort, which was very risky business. But,” concluded White, “I made it through.”³³

Though Sergeant Weaver and his crew had to improvise a platform under their gun before it “could be used to any effect,” they managed to lay it down in time to fire “at the advancing enemy as they came in sight,” though to his dismay “not more than one in five of the shells burst, owing to poor fuses.” Suddenly, Weaver recalled, “some one called out that Lt. McClure was wounded, and I saw him going toward and over the bluff, holding one arm in the hand of the other,” headed for Fitch’s riverbank hospital. His wound must have been excruciating: the ball had passed just above McClure’s elbow, carrying a wad of his uniform with it and hacking through his humerus before passing out of his arm and lodging in his side.³⁴

His friend and immediate superior John D. Hill fared worse. From the moment the alarm spread, many of Booth’s artillerists had urged the major to burn down the four rows of barracks the 32nd Iowa had erected to the south of the inner works. But Booth had refused at first. Had Major Booth permitted his sappers to destroy the barracks, insisted burly Thomas Addison—at forty years of age the grand old man of 6/C—“the rebels never would have got the advantage of us”; but the barracks would soon afford the rebels “better breastworks for them than we had.”³⁵

Watching now as the rebels swarmed toward the barracks, however, Booth changed his mind and deployed Lieutenant Hill to put the barracks to the torch. But Booth’s order came too late; Lieutenant Hill and a civilian were able to put only the first row to the torch before Hill was shot and killed by one of the rebel sharpshooters who were already creeping in among the adjacent rows. Within an hour and a half of the outbreak of hostilities, Captain Smith’s absence, Lieutenant Hill’s death, and Second Lieutenant McClure’s wound had left 6/C under the sole command of Sergeant Henry Weaver.

Booth had been right to worry about the approach of rebel artillery. Though Captain Walton’s two rifled howitzers were still several miles away, his advance scouts were indeed searching the terrain for the most advantageous emplacement. Booth darted from gun to gun, directing his crews to fire shrapnel at the snipers gathering like hornets on the surrounding knolls. As the rebels moved closer, he must have wished he had been equipped with mortars, for the angle of fire was proving too steep for his artillery. But Lionel Booth would not live long enough to see his worst fears realized. At nine o’clock, as he stepped over the trail of Sergeant Weaver’s gun and exhorted his men never to give up their colors, a rebel sharpshooter’s minié ball came buzzing through porthole number 2 and slammed into his chest.³⁶

Hardy Revelle, the dry-goods clerk, was “standing not more than 10 paces from Major Booth when he fell, struck in the heart by a musket-bullet.” “He expired instantly,” recalled Sergeant Wilbur Gaylord, who picked up Booth’s body and skidded down the hill with it, depositing it on the riverbank for the gunboat to retrieve.³⁷

Command now fell to the brave but erratic and woefully inexperienced William Bradford. Though rebel sharpshooters had infiltrated the three remaining rows of barracks and snipers nested in superior positions on two knolls had “commenced a brisk fire on the fort,” the garrison’s skirmishers had been holding their own. But Bradford was in a state of considerable shock. As the rebels drew nearer, some white skirmishers began to abandon the rifle pits. “The rebels came within thirty rods” and stole two horses, recalled Sergeant Gaylord of 6/B, and “at the same time stuck a rebel flag on the fortifications.” While he and his artillerists held their rifle pits, “the white men on my right retreated to the fort,” and rather than order them back, Bradford decided to heed their alarm.³⁸

As rebel minié balls continued to hack away at the parapet, Bradford’s first act as Booth’s heir to Fort Pillow’s command was to order his skirmishers out of the rifle pits and back into the fort. It was the first in a series of fatal mistakes Bradford would make that day. Private John Kennedy and his comrades in 6/D believed that had Bradford allowed his sharpshooters to remain in their rifle pits, from which they could fire far more effectively than the men behind the enfiladed parapet, they could have held off the enemy indefinitely. In any case, the skirmishers’ retreat proved costly. Leading his squad out of the rifle pits, Second Lieutenant John C. Barr of 13/D had climbed to within six feet of the inner works when a rebel sharpshooter sent a ball through his head, sending his lifeless body rolling down the slope.³⁹

The rebels seemed intent on beheading the 6th by increments. With Booth dead, Captain Charles J. Epeneter of Company A became the 6th USCHA’s senior officer, but his tenure was brief. His men had always had a hard time pronouncing his last name; it came out “Ebony” or “Ebeneezer.” An Iowa brewer and vinegar maker, he had joined Lionel Booth in the 1st Missouri Light Artillery as a sergeant. After participating in a hard-won Union victory at Hill’s Plantation in Arkansas, however, he was demoted to private for insubordination, which must have made him all the more receptive to Lorenzo Thomas’s call for white officers for black regiments. In the fall of 1863, Epeneter and his messmate, Peter Bischoff of St. Louis, had traded their dwindling prospects in the 1st Missouri Light Artillery for lieu-tenancies in the 6th USCHA, in which Epeneter had risen to captain upon Booth’s promotion to major. Now, just as Gaylord returned from depositing Booth’s body by the river, Epeneter and Bischoff were manning the gun at portal number 4, up the line from Lieutenant Alexander M. Hunter of the 2nd USCLA, when a sniper’s bullet sideswiped Epeneter, shattering the right side of his forehead all the way up to his hairline, just as Lieutenant John H. Porter of 13/B fell to the ground with a wound to the head.⁴⁰

Standing at their portholes, Booth’s black artillerists were especially exposed to the rebels’ lethal fire. Early in the fight, Rachel Anderson’s ailing husband, Ransom, of 6/B was severely wounded in the shoulder and chest. Alfred Isbell suffered gunshot wounds to his left arm, wrist and hand. The slave of two masters in East Tennessee, Eli Cothel had fled from the plantation of a Major Fleming in July 1863, made his fitful way to Corinth, and joined Company B of what was to become the 6th USCHA. Over the course of his brief military career he had been promoted to corporal and then sergeant, reduced to ranks for “conduct unbecoming,” and in February 1864 promoted back to corporal. Now Cothel was shot in the leg and littered down to Dr. Fitch’s “little hospital under the hill.”⁴¹

Eli Falls of 6/A had followed the Union army to Corinth, cooked for Major Booth and Captain Epeneter, and messed with Elias and West Erwin, fellow slaves of Jack Williams and William Cherry of Savannah, Tennessee. Shot during the battle, he nonetheless remained on the bluff with the garrison. Henry Gibson of the 2nd USCLA was struck so hard in the shoulder that his comrades Frank Hogan and Sandy Addison, who had run away from neighboring plantations with him, guessed he’d been hit by grapeshot. Whatever it was, it ripped his arm from his body, and within fifteen minutes he had bled to death. Fighting alongside the artillerists of the 2nd USCLA, a “poor but honest” fifty-year-old Memphis sutler named Alexander was killed during the fight and was “afterwards seen dead, still holding in his hands the musket he used so well.” He left a widow and two small children.⁴²

While standing between comrades Rufus McKissick and Benjamin Collier of 2/A, twenty-six-year-old Charles Jackson of Hardeman County was fatally shot in the head. At forty-two, Jacob Jones was one of the regiment’s oldest soldiers. The slave of a Madison County, Tennessee, farmer named David Jones, he had married a fellow slave named Adaline in 1845 and by the outbreak of the war had fathered two children. He and his brother Benjamin had joined 6/A in June 1863, and were fighting side by side at Fort Pillow when Jacob was struck by a bullet “in the breast. He was killed instantly,” recalled Benjamin, who pulled his brother’s body “back out of the way.”⁴³

At the commencement of the fight, artillerist Sam Green had taken his place at the northernmost gun with Sergeant Mullins of 6/B. Green had been run off by his master to Jackson, Mississippi, where he was captured by the Union army and taken to Vicksburg. Eventually transported to Corinth, he was recruited by a French lieutenant named Henry Lippett. “And a good one he was,” recalled Green, as vouched for by the fact that not one of his recruits deserted. After “both infantry drill and also artillery drill upon the siege guns at Corinth,” Green was proud of his skill as an artillery-man, and his “artilleryman’s jacket with the red trimmings.”

His eyes chronically inflamed by gun smoke, Green was assigned the task of installing cartridges and fuses and thus “acting as springer and primer to one of the heavy siege guns early in the action.” The gun was among the most exposed to enemy fire, for the embankment came up to only “about our waists.” During the battle, Sergeant Mullins was severely wounded but managed somehow to make his way to safety after Green’s lieutenant, Epeneter, was shot in the head.⁴⁴

Nor did Green emerge unscathed. “While I was serving my gun, I was first struck upon the left foot by a rifle ball that cut off my big toe.” He was subsequently shot through the back of his right hand, and suffered a severe contusion when his gun recoiled and “the butt end of the cannon” struck him in the hip, knocking him to the ground. His comrades carried him to a tent, but remarkably, Green soon shrugged off his injuries and “returned to my duty.”

Green’s valor was by no means unique. Though shot in the forearm, Private Willis Ligon, the former house slave who had waited on Forrest and his brothers during the Wizard’s slave-trading days, now stood by his gun at Fort Pillow. “I had nobody to relieve me,” he recalled, so he “just stood in one place until the fight was over.” Already deaf in his left ear from boyhood infections, he was now nearly deafened in his right by the battery’s pounding roar.⁴⁵

“There were a great many of the negroes wounded,” recalled Sergeant Weaver of 6/C, “because they would keep getting up to shoot, and were where they could be hit.” “Never did men fight better,” wrote Second Lieutenant Daniel Van Horn of 6/D, “and when the odds against us are considered it is truly miraculous that we should have held the fort an hour. To the colored troops is due the successful holding out until 4 p.m.,” for they “were constantly at their posts, and in fact through the whole engagement showed a valor not, under the circumstances, to have been expected from troops less than veterans, either white or black.” According to “the uniform and voluntary testimony of the rebel officers as well as the survivors of the fight,” a correspondent for the Missouri Democrat would write after interviewing various participants the following day, “the negro artillery regiments fought with the bravery and coolness of veterans and served the guns with skill and precision.” When a reporter for the Cairo News asked the survivors from the 13th Tennessee Cavalry “about the conduct of the negroes, they gave them great praise, saying they fought as only brave men can fight.”⁴⁶

James Brigham of New York declared that every man, “both black and white, fought manfully. I saw several negroes wounded, with blood running from their bodies, still engaged loading and firing cannon and muskets cheerfully.” Five or six hundred men “successfully” defended Fort Pillow for eight hours “against 3,500 to 4,000 barbarians.” Brigham would later overhear Confederate officers declare the assault on Fort Pillow “the hardest contested engagement that Forrest had ever been engaged in.”⁴⁷

“Although our garrison was almost completely surrounded,” wrote Lieutenant Leaming, “all attempts of the enemy to carry our works by assault were successfully repulsed, notwithstanding his great superiority in numbers.” Late in the morning, the rebels made a second concerted attempt to take the inner works, but “were again successfully repulsed with severe loss.” Every time Forrest’s men attacked, the black troops “would put their hats on the bayonets of their guns and hold them up for the confederates to shoot at, and also would make insulting remarks to their former owners who were in the attacking forces.”⁴⁸

Nevertheless, the mass of Forrest’s command did not retreat all the way back from whence they came, but advanced incrementally, shooting and scurrying from stump to hillock to ditch. Firing from high knolls east of the fort, rebel sharpshooters kept the garrison’s riflemen pinned down as a large contingent of McCulloch’s men, obscured by the smoke from the incinerated row of barracks, slipped in among the three remaining rows that stood a mere sixty yards down the southwestern slope, where the angle of fire was so steep that the garrison’s cannon could not dip their muzzles far enough to reach them.⁴⁹

A white teamster named David Harrison had brought his rifle into the inner works and joined in the defense. But late in the morning Bradford asked him to organize a wagon train to haul ammunition and provisions into the fort. “The rebels were throwing balls around there,” he said, “but I kept hauling.” Though the rest of the wagons refused to go back after delivering their first load, Harrison returned four times before he “concluded I would not haul any more.”⁵⁰

Walton’s battery, the rebel artillery the late Major Booth had been dreading, arrived before noon and began to fire upon the New Era from a section of high bluff south of the ravine, “where a plunging fire would necessarily drive her from her position,” wrote Captain Anderson. But “of this movement she was doubtless advised by a signal from the fort,” for the New Era immediately “steamed up the river and out of range before we could open fire on her.” Had Marshall piloted his gunboat downriver instead, the battle might have turned out differently, for he could have fired directly upon McCulloch’s men, smashing the barracks and driving Forrest’s sharpshooters back from knoll and bluff.⁵¹

Barteau and his 22nd Tennessee Cavalry moved along the bottom of the bluff, which effectively shielded them from the garrison’s fire. It should have rendered them vulnerable to gunfire from the New Era except that Marshall had shut his ports to protect his men from Anderson’s sharpshooters as they fired from below the steamboat landing. Dodging fire from Walton’s field pieces, the New Era could only maneuver “around for a while, as though she was trying to scare us off of that bluff without firing a gun,” and finally, to Barteau’s enormous relief, came to a “halt several hundred yards above the fort,” where the New Era would remain a “silent spectator” for the rest of the fight, “and as useless to the enemy,” added Dewitt Clinton Fort, “as it was harmless to us.”⁵²

After Anderson returned from helping Walton position his two guns at the southernmost reach of the bluff, he found “our whole force, under a terrific fire from the artillery and small arms of the garrison, was closing rapidly around the works. Bell’s brigade was on the right, extending from the mouth of Coal Creek southward. Raising the standard of Chalmers’s 18th Mississippi Battalion within view of the garrison, McCulloch’s brigade occupied the left, extending from the ravine below the Fort north to where it met Bell’s line abreast of the fort.”⁵³

“Our men pushed forward across the gullies and over the rough ground under a heavy fire from the fort,” wrote Lieutenant James Dinkins of Mississippi. The bluecoats “exposed themselves above the works, firing at our line, and cursing and daring us to come on.” After several hours’ combat and “considerable loss,” wrote Forrest, “the desired position was gained,” and his main line “was now within an average distance of 100 yards from the fort,” extending in an almost unbroken arc from Coal Creek in the north to the bluff south of the ravine.⁵⁴

“These positions thus secured were fatal to the defense,” wrote Hancock, “for the Confederates were now so placed that artillery could not be brought to bear upon them with much effect, except at a mortal exposure of the gunners, while rearward of the advance line were numerous sharp-shooters, favorably posted on several commanding ridges, ready to pick off any of the garrison showing their heads above, or, indeed, any men moving about within the circuit of, the parapets.” By now, insisted Anderson, “it was perfectly apparent to any man endowed with the smallest amount of common sense that to all intents and purposes the fort was ours.” Nevertheless the firing eased off somewhat as Forrest’s men began to run out of ammunition and had to wait for the command’s ordnance wagons to drag their way “through the April mud of the road from Brownsville.”⁵⁵

The news that Forrest had marched out of Jackson and, contrary to expectations, had not headed directly south but east, toward Fort Pillow, snapped Hurlbut out of his torpor. At 7:00 a.m. he had telegraphed Buckland to “send with all possible dispatch a good regiment, with four days’ rations” and “forty rounds of ammunition,” to rescue Fort Pillow’s garrison from Forrest’s clutches. “Promptness,” he concluded, “is all important.”⁵⁶

Buckland promptly ordered Colonel Ignatz G. Kappner and his 55th U.S. Colored Infantry, many of whom—including the slaves of Williams and Cherry of Savannah—had lived in bondage with Booth’s men, to embark immediately on the steamer Glendal. With these reinforcements, Hurlbut assured Kappner,

and the great natural strength of the place, you should be able to hold it. Immediately upon landing, ascertain as nearly as you can from Major Booth the precise state of affairs, and send report to Cairo and here. If you find on approaching Fort Pillow that it has unfortunately been taken, you will request the officer of the gunboat to reconnoiter as closely as possible, and develop some accurate idea of the strength of the enemy, and return. If you succeed in re-enforcing the fort, in time it must be held at all hazards and to the last man. Report immediately and by every boat that passes.⁵⁷

After deploying the 55th, Hurlbut hit the bottle. That afternoon he sat in on a court-martial, where Colonel Thomas Worthington of the 46th Ohio Infantry, describing Hurlbut as “a General scarcely ever clear of liquor,” watched him as he “staggered into his court room to decide on the cases of men better and abler than himself.”⁵⁸

Writing from Nashville on the day of the attack on Fort Pillow, Sherman told Hurlbut that even if he could find Forrest he did not intend to move against him for fear such a diversion would weaken his campaign against Johnston. “Until McPherson’s Veteran Volunteers assemble at Cairo,” Sherman wrote, “I cannot make any plans to attack Forrest where he is.” In fact, weary of Hurlbut’s cries of wolf, and ignorant of Forrest’s attack on Fort Pillow, Sherman was still convinced that the Wizard was on his way back down to Mississippi.⁵⁹

Observing the battle from “an eminence included in the old Confederate lines, from which Forrest commanded a full view of the interior of the Federal works, and of their whole defensive resources,” the Wizard saw that though even Wilson, positioned at the bottom of the deep ravine on the northern end of the line, was as protected from the garrison’s fire as McCulloch’s men to the southeast, nevertheless “to make a rush for this point for two or three hundred yards would expose him to great loss, for although there were numerous depressions intervening, there were just as many hilltops which could be swept by the artillery and small arms from the east and north faces of the parapet.” Forrest therefore concluded that though “the place was practically in his possession,” actually storming the fort would cost him more men, and to little purpose.⁶⁰

The Wizard proceeded on foot to the far northern end of the skirmish line where Barteau’s men, at considerable loss, had occupied the ravine that ran down to Coal Creek. As they lay huddled some seventy-five yards from the parapet, Forrest demanded to know who was in charge. Company A’s twenty-three-year-old Second Lieutenant Anderson H. French of Barteau’s 22nd identified himself with a crisp salute.⁶¹

“Never did men behave more bravely and nobly than did those under me,” French wrote of his company’s actions at Fort Pillow. “Over half of them were killed or wounded before the fort was stormed.” By the time Forrest came around, they had “advanced to within about one hundred yards of the fort,” where they were subjected to “a galling fire from the fort and the gunboat in the river.” They had taken cover behind trees and logs and could only occasionally “jet a shot at some venturesome Federal who would expose his head above the fort.”⁶²

French turned to his men, gave the order to advance, “and at the same time started forward.” But none of his men would follow, “and well it was that they did not, for they could not have lived one moment.” The garrison’s sharpshooters immediately opened fire, peppering the ground with minié balls. French dashed “some ten steps from where I started” and dropped down behind a log, where, as minié balls hacked and chipped at its bark, he decided to await further orders.⁶³