River Run Red

Captain Deloz Carson of 6/D, who had spent one hundred dollars of his own money to recruit his company, was not so fortunate. “I heard some of the enemy ask him if he belonged to a nigger regiment,” recalled Frank Hogan. “He told them he did. They asked him how he came here. He told them he was detailed there. Then they told him they would give him a detail,” whereupon a rebel first lieutenant shot him dead: “a prisoner without arms.”²

Emerging from the river, Sergeant Henry Weaver of 6/C surrendered to a rebel, begging him not to shoot. “We don’t shoot white men,” the rebel replied. “But what in hell are you here fighting with the damned nigger for?”³

“I soon got away from him,” Weaver testified, “for he was too intent on murder to mind me.” But Weaver had gone only a few steps “when another rebel met me and demanded my greenbacks, and after robbing me of everything but my clothes,” left Weaver “as not worthy of his further notice.” Some men were “shot down so close to me,” recalled Weaver, “that they would nearly fall on me.”⁴

A portion of his ankle carried off by a minié ball after the rebels stormed the parapet, Sergeant Wilbur Gaylord of 6/B had tumbled down the bluff and lay on the sandy bank. “One rebel noticed that I was alive, shot at me again and missed me,” Gaylord testified. “I told him I was wounded, and that I would surrender, when a Texas ranger stepped up and took me prisoner.” Led back to the fort, Gaylord saw the rebels “shoot down three black men, who were begging for their life, and who had surrendered.”⁵

The slaughter of black troops continued long after the rebels had begun to spare the whites. “After I surrendered I did not go down the hill,” testified Private Emanuel Nichols of 6/B; nevertheless, a rebel shot him under the ear, knocking him to the ground. “If he don’t shoot me any more,” Nichols remembered thinking, “this won’t hurt me.”

His comrade Alfred Coleman recalled hearing the soldiers of the 2nd Missouri Cavalry say they had sworn to “show no quarter to colored troops, nor to any of the officers with them, but would kill them all.” Coleman lay near the fort “under a white-oak log” and therefore “could not see a great way.” Nevertheless, he did see two men force one wounded white cavalryman—probably Nathan Fulks—“to stand up on one leg,” and then shoot him down. He claimed that he saw a single Missouri captain shoot “six colored men himself, with a revolver.”⁶

The rebels gave “but little” quarter, wrote Achilles Clark of Forrest’s 20th Tennessee. “The slaughter was awful. Words cannot describe the scene. The poor deluded negros would run up to our men, fall upon their knees, and, with uplifted hands, scream for mercy. But they were ordered to their feet and then shot down.”⁸

The two rebels shot him three times, and a half hour later, as Edmonds lay bleeding, a lieutenant rode up to him and reined his horse to a halt. “You goddamn nigger,” he exclaimed, raising his pistol. A rebel captain standing nearby commanded him not to shoot, but the lieutenant fired anyway, grazing Edmonds’s right temple before spurring his horse away.⁹

“He raised his gun and fired, and the bullet went into my mouth and out the back part of my head. They threw me into the river,” he testified, where he somehow “swam around and hung on there in the water until night.”

As he squattered through the shallows, Shaw came within ten feet of three teenage contraband boys struggling “in the water, with their heads out. They could not swim.” The boys begged for mercy, but the rebels shot each of them in the forehead. “They were not soldiers,” he said, “but contraband boys, helping us on the breast works.”

As John F. Ray of 13/B ran down the bluff, he saw “12 white soldiers and perhaps 30 negroes shot down after surrender and while begging for mercy.” Ray himself was shot in the back of the knee after he had thrown down his weapon. Crumpling to the ground, he “saw a small negro boy” of about eight years of age seated on a horse behind a rebel lieutenant.

Joe Key of 6/A sometimes called himself Joseph Jarrett, after his original owners, the Barrett family of Virginia. Before the war, he had been transported to Lauderdale County, Alabama, where he became one of the 130 slaves of William Henry Keys, a spectacularly wealthy planter and gun maker whose plantation occupied a fertile tract known as the Reserve. Joe had married a stout and resourceful slave named Clara who, under circumstances she would not discuss, had already borne a child by another man.¹²

Married by an elderly slave minister named Jerry Key, Key and Clara lived happily as man and wife. Clara bore three sons and two daughters and was pregnant with a sixth child when a Yankee detachment passed by their owner’s plantation in August 1862. Camping by the Tennessee River, opposite the Key place, the Yankees began to ferry across to gather up “all the colored men they could.” “All of us children stood around and hollered and cried,” recalled his son Taylor. “I don’t know whether they were compelled to go or not, but I know that all the able-bodied negroes on the place did go with the Yankees that day.” “The Union soldiers came through and told us we ‘had to go,’” recalled a fellow slave named Jesse Smith, “and we all saddled up and went together.”

“A good many of the men had their wives with them,” recalled Key’s comrade, Henry Garner, “and some married after they joined the regiment.” When Joe’s regiment left for Corinth, he begged Clara to join him, but she had to remain behind to care for their newborn daughter, Alice Virginia. For the rest of what little life remained to him, Joe Key pined for his family. “I saw Joe nearly every day while he was at Corinth,” Jesse Smith recalled. “He did not marry or take up with any woman. He never noticed a woman at all, but was concerned about his wife and children.” Now he lay dead upon the riverbank. ¹³

To the charge that African American women and children were killed after the surrender, Forrest’s defenders answered that all of the contrabands had been evacuated by the New Era that morning. But the impromptu evacuation was carried out while the battle was already under way, and it is certain that, as at Paducah, not every woman and child made it to the gunboat in time to steam to safety on the bar. After the battle, Forrest’s officers would themselves report taking black women and children captive at Fort Pillow, and since the rebels never reached the refugees stranded on the bar, they must have been captured around the fort. ¹⁴

Several straggling and terrified women and children could have sought refuge behind the parapets, under the bluff, or, like Benton’s “Yellow woman,” in one of the shelters in town. Some soldiers’ wives may have decided to stay by their husbands, or to nurse their ailing menfolk in the hospital tents. Edward Benton would assert that the rebels captured his servant woman and executed two or three of the hands who had followed him into Booth’s bastion, including the “boy” who had awakened him that morning and alerted him to the attack.¹⁵

“Yes,” he said, “God damn you. You thought you were free, did you?” He shot them all with his carbine, and all of them fell but “one little fellow” whom he knocked “in the head with the breech of his gun.” James Lewis of 6/C claimed he also saw “two women shot by the river bank and their bodies thrown into the river after the place was taken.” And his comrade - Thomas Addison knew the names of two officers’ errand boys—Dave and Anderson—who had stuck by their employers during the battle. Though he heard but did not see the rebels shoot them down, he later watched them tote the boys’ corpses up the bluff for burial “because they were small.”¹⁶

After the rebels captured Sergeant Jerry Stewart of 6/A, First Lieutenant J. J. Eubanks of McCulloch’s 2nd Missouri Cavalry “told me to tell him if there were any nigger officers taken prisoners, and to point them out to him.” Knowing what would befall them if he did, however, Stewart claimed he “did not know any.” In their frustration, the rebels confronted a civilian named Alexander and asked him where he belonged. “He told them he was a sutler,” Stewart remembered. “They then told him he was no better than the rest, and they shot him.” At one point Stewart heard one of Forrest’s lieutenants brag that he had just put five balls into the body of a Federal who was trying to escape.¹⁷

At forty years of age, burly Tom Addison of South Carolina was apparently the oldest man in Company C of the 6th USCHA. Born in South Carolina, he had been taken to Mississippi in 1843 when he was nineteen years old, but more than twenty years of hard use had given him the grizzled, hangdog appearance of an old man. During the siege that morning, a minié ball grazed his face, but he received his most terrible wound after he ran to the river, when a rebel fired his pistol from four or five paces, sending a ball smashing through his nose, destroying his right eye, and shattering every bone in the right side of his face. Addison collapsed to the ground in shock, blinded by blood, whereupon a rebel “came along and turned me over.”¹⁸

“God damn his old soul,” the rebel remarked to a comrade as he snatched money from Addison’s pockets. “He is sure dead now. He is a big, old, fat fellow,” the soldier declared, and proceeded to the next victim. For two hours, Addison played possum, listening as the rebels shot down wounded soldiers and young officers’ servants all around him. “They shot a great many that evening,” he testified. “I heard them say, ‘Turn around so that I can shoot you good,’ and then I heard them fire.”¹⁹

Sherry Blain and George Houston of 6/D were two “of the few who escaped by hiding under a washed-out stump.” According to Houston, as the slaughter began, the two comrades had “just schemed around and got away.” Their buddy Wesley McDowell tried to squeeze under the stump with them, but the rebels “spied him and killed him.” From their hiding place, Blain and Houston heard a rebel officer ride up and declare that General Forrest had “ordered every damned nigger to be shot down.” Among the wounded was Blain’s brother Aaron. After throwing down his arms and surrendering, Aaron was shot through both legs by a rebel with a carbine who declared, as Aaron fell, that “they were going to kill us all.” Though he somehow managed to avoid further injury, Aaron saw the rebels shoot two men as they attempted to swim away, and kill a wounded man that evening while holding him up by the arms.²⁰

Sandy Cole of 6/D testified that a rebel private shot him twice as he retreated down the bluff, first in the arm and then in the thigh. But he managed to scramble out into the shallows and hide behind some brush, from which vantage point he saw about seven of his comrades shot “right through the head.” Left by the rebels for dead, Cole’s comrade Nathan Hunter lay under the bluff. The rebels rifled his pockets, pulled his boots from his feet, rolled him over, and finally pronounced him “killed.” The rebels “shot down a whole parcel along with me,” Hunter testified. “Their bodies were lying there along the river bank the next morning. They kicked some of them into the river after they were shot dead.”²¹

Alexander Nason was a twenty-year-old Mississippi slave who had adopted the last name of his master, R. M. Nason of Grenada, Mississippi, when he joined the Union army. Born in South Carolina, he had been taken as a boy to Carroll County, Mississippi, by an aspiring planter named Nathan Koon, from whom he ran away with at least two fellow slaves to join Company C of the 2nd USCLA.

After running under the bluff, Nason tried to hide behind a log with a number of his comrades, but the rebels found him “and told me to get up, and as I got up they shot me” along with “several other black men with me.” Nason claimed to have seen the rebels throw several of his comrades into the river after they were “about dead.” They declared that they were “allowed to kill every damned nigger in the fort—not spare one.” The rebels shot Nason in the back of his head and neck and left him for dead.²²

Benjamin Robinson of 6/D was one of only a few black soldiers who, by the time of the battle, had attained the rank of sergeant. He saw his friend and comrade Sandy Sherman “murdered in cold blood, while a prisoner.” He saw the rebels “shoot two white men right by the side of me after they had laid their guns down,” and a black man “clear over into the river.” The rebels then “hallooed to me to come up the hill, and I came up.”

“Then they told me to lie down, and I laid down.” After they had “stripped everything off me,” they dragged Robinson up the hill “a little piece, and laid me down flat on my stomach,” where he lay “till night.”²³

After Jacob Thompson of Nelson’s hotel surrendered, a rebel private raised a pistol to his head. “God damn you,” he exclaimed, “I will shoot you, old friend,” and fired. Thompson was holding his hand to his head, and the bullet shattered his thumb and lodged in his skull. “After they shot me through the hand and head,” Thompson testified, “they beat up all this part of my head”—indicating one side of his head—“with the breech of their guns.” The rebels “shot about fifty, white and black, right there,” he said. Forrest’s troopers “called them out like dogs” from their hiding places under the bluff “and shot them down. They would call out a white man and shoot him down, and call out a colored man and shoot him down: do it just as fast as they could make their guns go off.”²⁴

Struck over the head by a rebel musket, Armstrong Burgess of 6/B regained consciousness only to find himself in rebel custody, from which he would not escape until the following spring. Burgess would bear a deep dent in his skull from his wound at Fort Pillow. Oliver Scott of 6/D was remembered by his comrades as having been the “blackest complected man” in the regiment. The slave of Nathaniel Scott of Yalobusha County, Mississippi, he was about nineteen when he joined the Union army. He quickly fell ill, and was not able to return to active duty until January 1864. Perhaps because of his complexion, he was singled out for especially brutal treatment at Fort Pillow: “beaten and trampled in the action of that day by the rebel troops under Forrest.” He was struck on the back of the head, near the base of his neck, with a carbine, and after receiving injuries to his left wrist and right elbow, “besides blows and bruises in other parts of the body,” was left senseless on the ground.²⁵

Rebels continued to skid down from the fort to fire short range into the Federals dashing up and down the riverfront, jumping into the river, or cowering among the detritus of stumps and logs and brambles that bristled along the base of the bluff. But others contented themselves with standing along the rim of the bluff and sharpshooting, and Charley Robinson “heard them laugh & cheer when they were shooting our boys who had jumped into the river to keep from being cut to pieces.”²⁶

It apparently amused some of Forrest’s men to shoot their victims in the leg, force them to stand, and then shoot them dead. “In many instances,” testified Lieutenants Smith and Cleary, who interviewed the wounded the next day, “the men begged for life at the hands of the enemy, even on their knees. They were only made to stand upon their feet and then summarily shot down.” James Walls of 13/E saw rebels “make lots of niggers stand up, and then they shot them down like hogs.” Alfred Coleman of 6/B “saw them take one of the Tennessee cavalry, who was wounded in one leg, so that he - could not stand on it. Two men took him, and made him stand up on one leg, and then shot him down.”²⁷

Dr. Fitch’s hospital became the target of some of the rebels’ most craven attacks. “A short distance from me,” wrote John Shelton of 13/E, “and within view, a number of our wounded had been placed in an area marked off by red flags,” near where “Major Booth’s body lay.” But as they passed these wounded men, the rebels “fired right into them and struck them with the butts of their muskets. The cries for mercy and groans which arose from the poor fellows were heartrending.” According to Edward Benton, not only was “the hospital flag flying,” but the wounded were “holding white handkerchiefs over their heads. I saw at least ten soldiers shot individually with white handkerchiefs over their heads. They tore off pieces of their shirts—anything they could get—for flags of truce and to denote surrender.”²⁸

Fitch and his steward, Thomas C. George of the 7th Kansas Cavalry (USA), stood together among the wounded soldiers. “They were assembled, as it were, with red flags stationed around them,” Fitch recalled; nevertheless, he thought, the rebels killed all but two: Epeneter and Bischoff of 6/A. “The most of them were chopped to pieces with sabers.”²⁹

While lying in Fitch’s hospital with a leg wound he had received that morning, Eli Carlton of 6/B was shot in the left shoulder and fell back, feigning death. “Do you fight with these God damned niggers?” a rebel asked one of the wounded whites lying nearby.

“I would not kill you,” the rebel exclaimed, “but, God damn you, you fight with these damned niggers, and we will kill you,” and he “blew his brains out of his head.” Carlton counted eighteen men attacked in the hospital, and six more below him, by the river.³⁰

Nor was Fitch’s station under the bluff the only hospital the rebels attacked. There were three more: the artillerists’ tents in the fort, the permanent hospital east of the parapet, and a row of four or five barracks south of the breastwork. Coming to after having been shot and cracked on the head, the civilian John Penwell joined a wounded artillery captain in one of several plank-floored “hospital tents” that the garrison’s wounded would occupy. But they too became targets. Corporal Frank Hogan of 6/A watched a squad of rebels “kill three sick men that were lying helpless in their tents.” John Kennedy of 2/D saw some rebels “go in a tent where Sergeant Miles and Private Lewis Ingraham, Peter Lake, and Andrew Smith—all of my Battery—were lying on their beds wounded, and kill them, shooting them through their heads and bodies—notwithstanding their cries for mercy.”³¹

One of Wiley Robinson’s comrades from 13/A was killed when the rebels “fired into the hospital,” presumably meaning the original log and wattle hospital building southeast of the parapet. Survivors would tell Surgeon Horace Wardner of Mound City that “nearly all who were in the hospital were killed.” Wardner himself treated “a young negro boy, probably sixteen years old, who was in the hospital there sick with fever, and unable to get away. The rebels entered the hospital, and with a saber hacked his head, no doubt with the intention of splitting it open. The boy put up his hand to protect his head, and they cut off one or two of his fingers.” Unconscious when he reached Mound City, the boy would die of his wounds a week later.³²