River Run Red

Meador watched as one rebel trooper forced a Union sergeant to “kneel down and ask for quarter,” while another came up and snapped his pistol at him twice. In the end, the others “told him not to shoot him.” Nevertheless, Meador “saw them shoot others when they were kneeling down.”²

“Here in this melee,” wrote Wyeth, “in the fire and excitement of the assault,” the rebels “found opportunity and made excuse for bloody vengeance. No official surrender; the flag still flying; some of the Federals, no matter how few, still firing back; and they shot them down regardless of the cry for quarter.”³

After the Battle of Shiloh, the survivors from the 47th Tennessee Infantry had been inducted into the 12th Tennessee Cavalry under the same Tyree H. Bell who now commanded the center of the attack on Fort Pillow. But ten of them had deserted and eventually enlisted in Bradford’s Battalion, where Bell’s officers recognized them among the Homemade Yankees at Fort Pillow. Twenty-two-year-old John Scoby of Company B would be the only one of the ten to survive Bell’s wrath that day, only to die of dysentery at Andersonville the following September.⁴

Bryant Johnson of 13/D had served in the Confederate army as a trooper in the 2nd Kentucky Mounted Infantry, another of the rebel regiments that had been captured at Fort Donelson and then paroled, only to wade into the carnage at Shiloh. Johnson deserted and returned to his farm in Gibson County. But in late 1863, rebel depredations had compelled him to borrow a horse from a neighbor, bid his wife and two children good-bye, and ride off to Union City to join the 13th. An old friend, Orderly Sergeant A. C. Foster of Forrest’s Old Regiment, kept him out of harm’s way. But neither Foster nor the ministrations of his comrade and fellow prisoner Doc Alexander - could save his life at Andersonville, where he died that summer of scurvy and fever.⁵

Woody Cooksey of 13/A was in his thirties and the father of four children when his wife died in Paducah in June 1863. Placing his children in his brother’s care, he was about to ride off to join Bradford’s Battalion when his oldest daughter, Mary Jane, “called his attention to the fact, that he might never return, and that the ages of his children had never been set down.” So Cooksey “got her bible & gave instruction to her” to write down their ages. Now, in the midst of the mayhem, he threw down his gun just outside the fort when a rebel shot him in the left thigh bone with three buckshot and a minié ball.

Before he could make good on his threat, however, his attacker “heard a rally about the bank and went down” where the rebels were shooting Union soldiers “and throwing them in the river.” Cooksey could not explain why he was shot, except that it appeared to him that the rebels intended to shoot “the balance” of the survivors.⁶

Jason Loudon of 13/B was “shot after I had surrendered, and while I had my hands up and was imploring them to show me mercy.” He must have instinctively dropped his hand to protect his leg when the rebel shot him, because the bullet passed through his hand and into his thigh. As he crumpled over, another rebel struck him down with the butt of his carbine.

Loudon saw the rebels shoot six men after they had surrendered, including Virginia-born thirty-eight-year-old Commissary Sergeant Leonidas Gwaltney of 13/B, who had just handed his pistol over to the rebels and was throwing up his hands and begging for mercy when “they took his own revolver and shot him with its contents twice through the head, killing him instantly.” ⁷

Unanimously elected 13/E’s first lieutenant and quartermaster, Cordy Revelle had nevertheless worked as a clerk for a local cotton trader while his brother Hardy clerked for one of the post’s dry goods merchants. In this capacity Cordy had probably acted as a bagman for the various Union officers who profited from the cotton trade at Fort Pillow. “I knew him well,” recalled Eli Cothel of 6/B. “I worked with him. He was a small fellow, weak and puny.” From his refuge by the river, Cothel watched as the rebels disarmed Revelle, cursed him, and shot him through the head.⁸

The next morning a white man would report that the rebels had burned Revelle to death, but according to his comrades he was shot. A somewhat likelier victim of burning was Captain John Akerstrom of 13/A, whose fate was the subject of persistent rumors and speculation. Jack Ray of 13/B, who was beside Akerstrom when he was shot in the forehead, saw him fall on his face “about two minutes after the flag of truce went back.” Ray thought he had been killed, “but later heard he was only wounded.” Eli Carlton testified that he saw Akerstrom walking in rebel custody, and his captors declaring, “Here is one of our men. Let’s take him up and fix him.”⁹

As the rebels began to finish off the white soldiers who had remained in the fort, twenty-year-old Sergeant Billy Walker of 13/D and his comrades “ran down under the hill.” But the rebels “followed us up” and “just shot us down without showing us any quarter at all.”

He heard one soldier declare that a general whose name Walker could not quite make out (he guessed it was Chalmers) had commanded them to “shoot every one of us, and take no prisoners,” whereupon “they shot us down.” Walker handed his money over to a rebel private and begged for his life, but his captor raised his pistol and fired at least three times, hitting Walker’s arm and neck, grazing his face, and slicing open his eye, while shouting, “Take that, you ‘negro equality.’”

Walker testified that he watched as the rebels began to shoot everyone around him: blacks first, he said, then whites. He saw “some knock them over the heads with muskets, and some stick sabers into them.”

“They were shooting continually,” testified the sharpshooting Daniel Stamps of 13/E, whose bugler brother would be captured that day. “I saw them shooting the white men there who were on their knees, holding up their hands to them.” He saw them spare one man whom they forced to “get down on his knees and beg of them.”¹⁰

Over the din, Stamps could just make out the voice of a rebel officer shouting a command from the rim of the bluff. Turning to one of the rebels guarding him, Stamps asked what the officer was saying.

“Kill the last damn one of them,” replied the soldier, who shouted back up to the officer that Stamps and his comrades had surrendered and therefore “must not be shot.”

Shot in the hip, James Taylor heard the same officer shouting from the bluff. “Kill them, God damn them,” he bellowed. “It is General Forrest’s orders.”¹¹

Wiley Robinson of 13/A was not quite eighteen years old at the time of the attack, but had already served, however briefly, in two other Union regiments. He probably received more wounds that day than any other survivor from Bradford’s Battalion: once in the hand during the battle, and then five or six more times in various parts of his body after he had run down to the river and thrown down his gun. Bullets passed through his thigh and his ankle and one lodged in his left lung. Considering the extent of his injuries, his testimony two weeks later would be understandably brief. The rebels “swore at us,” he said, “and then shot us.” He saw more than one rebel officer ride past, commanding their men “to kill us all,” and was shot the last time in the leg while he lay on the ground.”¹²

Nineteen-year-old Ike Ledbetter of Lauderdale County, Tennessee, had enlisted at Bradford’s Fort Pillow recruiting station. He must have been a young man of considerable promise if doubtful allegiance, for he had already served as a second lieutenant in the 3rd (Lillard’s) Tennessee Mounted Infantry (CSA). He resigned early in the war, ostensibly to join the East Tennesseean 5th Tennessee Cavalry (CSA), but he deserted instead, returning home to his farm to get married. Either to protect himself from his former comrades or escape his new bride, he had joined Company E of Bradford’s Battalion in February.

Private Ledbetter claimed he saw about twenty of his comrades “hold up their hands and cry to them not to shoot, but they shot them just the same.” Ledbetter himself was shot twice: the first ball “slightly grazed my head,” apparently just before he dislocated his elbow by flinging himself off the rim of the bluff. But as he lay by the river, gripping his arm, a second shot struck him in the right side, exiting his left hip.

His assailant skidded after him down the bluff “and finding I was not dead, he cursed me,” and “was fixing to shoot me again” with his revolver when another rebel “told him not to,” whereupon “they took everything I had, even to my pocket-knife.”¹³

Among the men of the 13th killed that afternoon were the former slave overseer Neal Clark; the already badly injured Andrew Glass, an apparently hapless father of twin boys who in 1863 had been run over by a rolling log, accidentally shot by a comrade, and infected with syphilis; Daniel Fields of 13/B, who was in his thirties and the father of four children; and nineteen-year-old Robert McKenzie of Coffee County, Tennessee, who would take two agonizing days to die from a shot in the bowels. ¹⁴

The rebel fired, fracturing both of the bones in his thigh, and Fulks crumpled to the ground. Another of the rebels immediately “set out to shoot me again,” but one of his Confederate comrades interceded, saying, “Don’t shoot the white fellows anymore.”¹⁵