River Run Red

Whether the massacre was premeditated or spontaneous does not address the more fundamental question of whether a massacre took place, which, going solely by the disproportion of Union to Confederate casualties after the fort was overrun, it certainly did, in every dictionary sense of the word. Forrest’s defenders have argued that Bradford should have surrendered and thus spared his garrison what followed. But many rebels insisted that they would have slaughtered the garrison whether or not it surrendered. Be that as it may, blaming the victims of the massacre for not taking Forrest’s threat seriously cannot excuse the threat itself nor its protracted and anarchic execution.²

Forrest had watched proudly from the knoll as his men teemed over the breastworks and overwhelmed the garrison. One officer of the 22nd described how he “calmly surveyed his success, regarding it as a natural result of an encounter with the vandals.” Bruised from his earlier fall, his horse limping along under him, it took the Wizard ten minutes to cover the broken ground that lay between his overlook and Fort Pillow’s breastworks. After two horses had been shot out from under him and one wounded, his uniform must have been a bloody mess, which probably accounts for the rumor that he had been wounded during the siege.³

There was still firing going on when he reached the parapet: scattered fire within the fort itself, and a more intense barrage down by the river as the garrison’s survivors ran and hid and begged for mercy. Barteau ordered the Union flag cut down, and Private John Doak Carr of the 22nd sliced the halyards. After the Stars and Stripes dropped to the ground, Carr presented the flag to Forrest. But according to John Nelson, “After I entered the fort, and after the United States flag had been taken down, the rebels held it up in their hands in the presence of their officers, and thus gave the rebels outside a chance to still continue their slaughter, and I did not notice that any rebel officer” forbade it.⁴

The strong river wind would have blown the gun smoke away almost as quickly as it issued from the barrels of his troopers’ carbines and pistols, so Forrest would have been able to see what was transpiring below. But if he paid any attention it was fleeting, for his first concern was to prevent the New Era from firing on his men or moving in to retrieve the garrison’s survivors. Captain Theodorick Bradford had just wigwagged, “We are hard pressed, and shall be overpowered” to the New Era when Forrest spotted him and ordered his men to “shoot that man with the black flag” (it was actually blue), whereupon the major’s brother “was literally shot to pieces.” The correspondent for the Cairo News painted a more heroic picture of Ted Bradford’s death. “After he had surrendered,” he wrote, “he was basely shot, but, having his revolver still at his side, he emptied it among a crowd of rebels, bringing three of the scoundrels to the ground.” Be that as it may, Captain Bradford “was instantly riddled with bullets,” Smith and Cleary were told, “nearly a full regiment having fired their pieces upon him.”⁵

As several survivors climbed back up to the fort, the firing continued. “When I re-entered the fort there was still some shooting going on,” recalled the hotelier John Nelson, though he “heard a rebel officer tell a soldier not to kill any more of those negroes. He said that they would all be killed, anyway, when they were tried,” presumably for servile insurrection.⁶

A week after the massacre, one of Forrest’s own men, Sergeant Achilles Clark of the 20th Tennessee Cavalry, wrote home that he “with several others tried to stop the butchery and at one time had partially succeeded,” but that “Gen. Forrest ordered them shot down like dogs, and the carnage continued” until “finally our men became sick of blood and the firing ceased.” The Henry County native’s account, written not for public consumption but for his sisters, both of them the wives of slaveholding Confederate soldiers, was one of two known accounts provided by a rebel participant who ranked lower than lieutenant. For all these reasons, and because it parallels so many of the Yankee accounts of Forrest’s orders to “kill them all,” his letter provides perhaps the most damaging evidence of Forrest’s initial role as a proponent of massacre. The other account came from the scout Dewitt Clinton Fort, who wrote that “neither General Forrest nor any other general living - could have checked the assault sooner than it was done, after having carried the works. So loud was the noise that General Forrest could not have been heard could he have given orders,” which suggests that he didn’t. “Gabriel’s trumpet would not have been listened to had it sounded; for at least thirty minutes after we were in possession of the fort.”⁷

“What in hell are you down here for?” Forrest demanded to know. “I have a great mind to have you killed for being down here.” Declaring that if only “the North West had staid at home, the war would have been over long ago,” the Wizard finally ordered one of his men to take charge of Fitch “and see that I was not harmed, for which I thanked him.”⁸

Thus Forrest extended his protection to a Union surgeon, but on the narrow grounds that he was not an officer of a colored regiment, a West Tennesseean, or a combatant, but an Iowa surgeon of a white regiment, and even then he expressed his “great mind” to kill him. But the real significance of this encounter lies in the fact that it occurred while the massacre was still going on, for though some Southern accounts claim that Forrest’s first order of business was to stop the slaughter and lower the garrison’s flag, he was obviously more concerned about the threat posed by the New Era, to whose fire his men were now dangerously exposed.

“’Twas but the work of an instant to turn the guns, so lately used for our destruction, upon the boat,” an officer from the 22nd Tennessee reported. “Two shots were fired, and she headed off up the stream.” This might suggest that Forrest did not linger long at the guns, but the anonymous officer was wrong on both counts. Lee H. Russ of Forrest’s Escort, who had followed the general into the fort, recalled how he and two of his comrades had to grab the wheels of the Parrott gun, back it out of the embrasure, roll it to the rim of the bluff, and aim it at the gunboat. As one of his buddies loaded the charge, Russ rammed it home, only to discover that when the artillerists fled down the bluff they had taken their lanyards with them. So one of Russ’s buddies, Sergeant Billy Matthews, unbreeched his carbine, “drew a cartridge and forced it, inverted, into the magazine and closed up the breech, thus cutting off the ball and furnishing him a blank charge.” Stepping to one side, Matthews “deliberately fired his carbine into the touchhole of the cannon.” It worked.⁹

It is possible that as Forrest headed for the Parrott gun he may have issued an order to halt the slaughter within the fort itself. But if so, it was ignored, and as he and his Escort fired at the New Era, Forrest did nothing to stop the slaughter below, much of which was being carried out in his name and well within his view. Fifteen years after the massacre, Dr. Fitch wrote a defense of Forrest, contending that the general had been so preoccupied with his captured artillery that Fitch “did not think” Forrest was aware of “what was going on under the bluffs.” But his encounter with Forrest was brief and occurred well after the slaughter had begun, and the mercy he was shown by both Forrest and Chalmers, and for which he was deeply grateful, has little bearing on the fates of the black soldiers and Homegrown Yankees of the garrison. ¹⁰

It took only five shots from the Parrott gun to dissuade James Marshall from attempting a rescue. He did not even fire back. As the shells fell “over and around us,” Marshall ordered his men to get the New Era under way and move her upstream. At the sound of the guns, the rebels briefly paused in their “bloody work” to let out “a proud, exultant shout of victory” that skittered across the Mississippi’s surface and echoed through the surrounding woods.¹¹

“I had to leave,” Marshall would plead, “because, if I came down here, the channel would force me to go around the point, and then, with the guns in the fort, they would sink me. Had I been below here at the time, I think I could have routed them out.” But this begs the question of why he had not taken “the favorable position” in the first place. Marshall also explained that he refused to fire because “part of our own men were in the fort at the same time, and I should have killed them as well as the rebels.” Once the New Era was out of range, Marshall reported, he at last “came to” beside the bar “and took on board women and children that had been driven from the fort,” plus the Arkansas civilian Elvis Bevel, apparently the only man who had managed that afternoon to beat his way to the New Era. ¹²

By this time Marshall’s crew had expended most of the New Era’s ammunition: 191 rounds of shell, 85 of shrapnel, and 6 of canister, plus 375 rifle and 96 revolver cartridges. Nevertheless, the rebels would denounce Marshall for having been “recreant at this critical moment” by failing to give the beleaguered garrison any support whatsoever. “No timely shower of canister came from its ports to drive back the Confederates, who swiftly and hotly followed after the escaping negroes and Tennesseans.” “The naval commander,” wrote Dinkins, “evidently was more concerned for the safety of himself and his craft” than the garrison’s survival. “It would have been far better for his name and fame,” concluded Anderson, “had he moved his vessel promptly into action, and perished in attempting to do as he promised,” for Marshall’s “abandonment of the garrison, first led and then left hundreds of his countrymen and comrades to a swift and sweeping destruction.” As Sergeant William Winn, a passenger on the New Era, would testify, the gunboat “steamed up the river, out of range, leaving behind us a scene of cold-blooded murder too cruel and barbarous for the human mind to express.”¹³ By now many of Forrest’s men were in a frenzy. Down by the river they began to line up the survivors and the wounded and then shoot them down one after another. “Every man seemed to be crying for quarter,” wrote Fitch, “the rebs paying no attention to their cries except to reply, ‘If you Damn scoundrels surrender, fall into line!’” “There were over 20 who fell into the line, near the edge of the River, when there was a volley fired into them, bringing them all down but two. These men were all holding up their hands, pleading for quarter.”¹⁴

Several witnesses testified that to this point only a few rebel officers had joined their men down by the river, where rebels stalked among the shallows, firing at men they suspected of playing possum, and beating the bushes for survivors. William Mays watched as two rebels dragged a black soldier from behind a hollow log. “One rebel held him by the foot,” Mays wrote, “while another shot him.”¹⁵

“At the river,” wrote Tennessee’s secessionist governor, Isham Harris, the rebels “kept up the fire, until the number was fearfully reduced, and until, as General Forrest states himself, he absolutely sickened to witness the slaughter. He ordered the firing to cease, and dispersed his staff along the lines with orders to that effect. It was next to impossible to effect an immediate cessation of the firing; the enemy themselves still fighting.” Of far greater consequence—for by now just about every Federal had dropped his weapon—was the continual roar of pistols and carbines, the war cries of the rebels, and the screams and pleas of the garrison’s survivors.¹⁷

“War means fighting,” Forrest was said to have remarked, “and fighting means killing.” Whether or not he ever put it that way exactly, he believed it, and in his battle furies never shrank from shedding blood. What he could not abide, however, was losing control. His authoritarian temperament—reinforced by his experience in Mississippi law enforcement, the slave trade, and now the military—could not tolerate disobedience. Nothing - could incite his wrath like a soldier who defied his orders.

Once the New Era had steamed off and the shooting in the fort and along the river had subsided into sporadic gunfire, he left the Parrott gun and mounted his horse, declaring that it was time to gather the survivors together, bury the dead, collect whatever he could carry off—“six pieces of artillery and about three hundred and fifty stand of small arms,” plus large stores of blankets, clothes, “crackers, cheese, lager beer and wines”—and burn whatever was left over. Jacob Thompson, the black cook from Nelson’s hotel, apparently mistook Chalmers for Forrest as he rode along the riverbank, doing nothing to stop the massacre as his men called the Federals “out like dogs, and shot them down.” But after Forrest ordered the firing to stop, wrote Wyeth, “Generals Chalmers and Bell, and Colonels McCulloch, Barteau, Wisdom, and Captain Anderson, who were immediately with their troops, enforced the order.”¹⁸

Or tried to. Up to now Chalmers had been determined to teach “the mongrel garrison of blacks and renegades a lesson long to be remembered.” But now he found it necessary to reverse engines and order a “strong guard” into the fort, “mounted in double file,” to form a hollow square around the prisoners, ”after which,” wrote Dr. Fitch, “we were not molested.” Chalmers was compelled to arrest one of his men for killing a Federal after Forrest ordered a cease-fire. But even this did not entirely stop the slaughter down below.¹⁹

“Both Generals Forrest and Chalmers,” wrote Dinkins, “made every effort to stop the firing, and so energetic were their efforts that the firing ceased within fifteen minutes from the time of the termination of the truce, and all allegations to the contrary are malicious inventions.” But there is much testimony to the contrary from other rebel participants who admired Forrest. A story would circulate that he actually shot one of his men for disobeying his command to cease firing.²⁰

According to Thomas Berry of the 9th Texas Cavalry, Forrest had to employ “the flat of his sword on the back and shoulders of many of his own men before he finally put a stop to it.” Berry claimed that two of Forrest’s regiments turned on him “and threatened him with loaded guns if he should strike another man.” Forrest had to send his aides to fetch his Escort and Old Regiment, “and threatened to shoot the first man that dared to fire another gun.” A rebel officer told a correspondent for the Cairo News “that Gen. Forrest shot one of his men and cut another with his saber who were shooting down prisoners”: a story Union captain John Young would confirm for a correspondent for the Memphis Argus.²¹

Three days after the battle, Surgeon Sam Caldwell of the 21st Tennessee Cavalry wrote home that “if General Forrest had not run between our men & the Yanks with his pistol and saber drawn, not a man would have been spared.” But it was too little too late. By the time the Wizard intervened, Caldwell reckoned that only about 170 of over 535 Federals, contrabands, and Unionist citizens had survived the slaughter. “The rest,” he said, were “numbered with the dead.”²²

The Wizard’s reasons for saving the remaining black troops were practical. Alfred Coleman of 6/B heard one of McCulloch’s captains say that Forrest put a stop to the slaughter because he needed negroes “to help to haul the artillery.” According to Coleman, about a dozen artillerists were put to work pulling the garrison’s guns out from behind the breastworks, and “the secesh whip them as they were going out, just like they were horses.” According to Private Major Williams of 6/B, after one of Forrest’s officers said, “Kill all the niggers,” a second officer replied, “No. Forrest says take them and carry them with him to wait upon him and cook for him, and put them in jail and send them to their masters.”²³

Forrest apparently stepped in to save several individual black soldiers whom he recognized from his slave-trading days. “General Forrest rode his horse over me three or four times,” Manuel Nichols of 6/B testified. Nichols did not recognize Forrest “until I heard his men call his name. He said to some negro men that he knew them; that they had been in his nigger yard in Memphis.” Forrest bragged to them that he had not been “worth five dollars when he started” but had “got rich trading in negroes.”²⁴

to kill everybody: the well ones and the wounded. Someone struck me on the back of my head and knocked me senseless when I was in line with the prisoners. I finally came to myself and got up again, and I tell you, Boss, if it had not been for General Forrest coming up and ordering the Confederates to stop killing the prisoners, there would not one of us been alive today to claim a pension .²⁵

His ears ringing and his arm bleeding, Willis Ligon of 6/C had almost made good his escape. “I was off to myself, trying to run away,” when he was shot in the head “after the firing had ceased.” The ball hit him in the back of his skull and exited his face. Willis guessed that of the twenty survivors from his regiment whom the rebels rounded up by the river, ten were wounded, and nearly all of those who had been killed had thrown down their arms.

any other people, under similar circumstances, would have killed - every Negro in the fort. The feeling which a Southern man has for a negro is difficult for others to understand. He was regarded then as a piece of property, and when he did wrong was treated in the same way that a refractory horse or child would be. He was brought into subjection, after which there was no feeling of bitterness. Our men felt outraged, and killed every rascal as long as they resisted or ran. But, when they had been captured, they were as safe as they could have been anywhere. ²⁷

This was antebellum claptrap. But Forrest did describe black troops as “that ignorant, deluded, but unfortunate people” who had been tricked by the treacherous Yankees into fighting against their former masters, whereas he condemned the garrison’s whites as deserters, traitors, rapists, and thieves. Despite Northern accusations to the contrary, Forrest may have been more inclined to save blacks than whites. He was certainly determined to teach them the terrible consequences of joining the Union army. But masters flogged their errant slaves; they rarely killed them. Besides, as a former slave trader he understood the value of black captives and would have regarded the artillerists’ utter annihilation as a terrible waste of manpower.

Forrest was not the only Confederate to recognize former slaves among Fort Pillow’s dead and wounded. The brothers Adam, Simon, and Essex Middleton, all of them privates in 6/C, had run away together from their secessionist master, Holland Middleton of Panola County, Mississippi. On the afternoon of April 12, Holland’s oldest son, Captain William Green Middleton of the 18th Mississippi Cavalry, encountered Essex in the fort. Recognizing his master, Essex “threw down his gun” and surrendered. But by then Simon and Adam had already been killed; Middleton would come upon their corpses by the river. Their little brother reckoned that Captain Middleton himself had “helped kill them”; in any case, only a few months before he himself would be killed at Harrisburg, the captain returned Essex to slavery.²⁸

Charles Macklin stood out among his comrades in 6/C. Over six feet tall and of a gingerbread complexion, from birth he sported a small patch of white hair near his temple. When Macklin was “very young,” a man named Koon sold him away from his parents to a Carroll County, Mississippi, planter named Macklin whose name Charles adopted after he ran off in August 1863 and joined the Union army. Charles’s uncle, Samuel Hughes, had gone off to war to cook for two Confederate brothers who rode with Forrest on this his second West Tennessee raid. Hughes had last seen his nephew on the the night he ran away from their master. By Forrest’s order, “the negroes belonging with or attached to the various commands” were not to be permitted to remain with the wagon train, “nor at the front,” but were “sent to the rear in charge of led horses.” Consequently, they did not witness the slaughter by the river, only its aftermath. But that evening, Hughes was permitted to pick his way along the riverbank, where he was grieved to recognize his nephew’s corpse by the patch of white hair above his ear.²⁹

In 1844, a planter named John Meeks of McNairy County had celebrated his brother Orval’s majority by purchasing a family of slaves from their grandparents and dividing them up between them. Though separated by ten arduous miles of hilly terrain, Frank Meeks and his parents, Lucinda and Lewis, would often visit. Their strong bond of “love and affection,” wrote Frank’s master John, “common from parent to child, and from child to parent, was plain to be seen,” though John claimed to know “as much about Frank as I knew about my children,” and recalled that “Frank lived with me like one of my children.”

Frank apparently did not share Master John’s regard for his brother, for according to Frank’s sister, while the Yankees were encamped at Corinth, he used to black the boots of Union officers every Sunday and bring his tips and snatches of dress goods and cooking utensils home to his mother. “I never saw him afterwards,” wrote John Meeks, “but was frequently informed sometime afterwards that he belonged to the Federal army.” Ever since joining the 6th USCHA, he had sent portions of his pay to his mother via his sister, who also worked for the Yankees, cooking and washing. Meeks was told that Frank was killed at Fort Pillow, where he was seen “lying among the Slain by one of my neighbor soldier boys who knew him well.” According to James Lewis of 6/C, he was shot well after he had surrendered. ³⁰

“When from my position on that hill I saw my men pouring over these breastworks,” he declared, placing his hand over his chest, “it seemed that my heart would burst within me. Men,” he continued over their shouts and cheers, “if you’ll do as I say, I‘ll always lead you to victory. I’ve taken every place that the Federals occupied in West Tennessee and North Mississippi except Memphis,” he boasted, “and, if they don’t mind, I’ll have that place too in less than six weeks. They killed two horses from under me today—a third was wounded—and knocked me to my knees a time or two.” The Federals had “thought, by damn, they were going to get me, anyway.” But he had gotten them instead.³¹