PLUNDER

FORT PILLOW
5:00 p.m. to Midnight, April 12, 1864

DURING THE MASSACRE, “SOME FEW OF THE REBEL OFFICERS AND MEN objected to these cruelties and outrages,” John Kennedy of 2/D told his captain, “but could not prevent it.” Shot in the ankle, and fired at as he lay bleeding by the parapet, Sergeant Wilbur Gaylord was saved from further injury by a Texas Ranger. The teamster David Harrison had been denied water by two passing rebels, but “another man, who was a man, came along and brought me some water.”¹

“One line officer,” the Cairo News was told, “exerted himself to stop the slaughter. To this man’s noble exertions are due most of the lives that were saved. Several of the wounded said, ‘He saved my life, God bless him!’ His name, if ever known, will be honored by all loyal men, while they execrate the memory of Chalmers and those who carried out his fiendish orders.”²

Lieutenant Mack Leaming was fortunate to run into a fellow Mason among the rebel officers. “He got two of our colored soldiers to assist me up the hill, and he brought me some water.” (This may well have been Chalmers himself, for long afterward, Leaming would greet Chalmers in the halls of Congress and otherwise inexplicably thank him for his kindness.) Leaming testified that around dusk he heard some gunfire and someone called out, “They’re shooting the darky soldiers!” Whereupon a rebel officer rode up and shouted, “Stop that firing! Arrest that man!”³

The survivors seemed to single out the Texans as decent men who protected the wounded and fetched them water. Tom Burney of the 8th Texas Rangers once tried to explain his views on the shooting of prisoners. While being led to prison during the Atlanta campaign, one of the ten Yankees that his company had captured “began to be very boisterous and just wouldn’t be quiet at all,” wrote Burney. One of Burney’s comrades “told him if he didn’t stop his racket he would kill him and he got worse than ever and cursed the fellow and dared him to shoot. Well, he shot and Mr. Yank fell dead, shot in the eye and through the head. That was the first prisoner I ever saw killed, and the man who did the shooting killed himself in this county.” Burney declared that he “never did anything of that kind in the four years I served in the army, and if I should serve as long again I could not shoot a prisoner.”⁴

 

Less fastidious rebels continued to pick their way among the wounded, finishing them off with the butts of their carbines. Others employed sabers and the garrison’s discarded bayonets. They may have intended these blows as coups de grâce, or reverted to more silent means of killing the Federals to avoid alerting officers to the protracted slaughter. In any case, rebel claims that all firing had ceased within fifteen to thirty minutes of their taking the fort do not address these more furtive means of killing prisoners or the sporadic gunfire that according to most witnesses continued well into the evening and would resume before dawn.⁵

“I had as yet had no guard over me,” wrote the daguerreotypist Charley Robinson, “and as I had a grey suit on except the blouse” and because after the rebels “killed our boys they would take off their coats & put them on,” he was “dressed as they were,” and was able to walk “right amongst them” to the rim of the bluff. As the firing ceased in the fort, he stood and watched the mayhem below. “I saw them shoot & bayonet our poor fellows after they surrendered,” he said. “I saw them take off their clothes after they were dead. I saw them pick the pockets of the dead, & heard them laugh & cheer when they were shooting our boys who had jumped into the river to keep from being cut to pieces.” And he continued to stand there “after the firing was over,” and, thinking the rebels had done “all they could do,” looked down at the dead and wounded Federals littering the riverbank below. “It was truly a hard sight,” he said.⁶

“When the fight was over and the smoke cleared,” wrote John W. Carroll of Wilson’s 21st, “there was not many of them left.” Billy Mays of 13/B testified that after the principal firing had stopped, the rebels returned, “shooting and robbing the dead of their money and clothes.” “They robbed - every citizen,” Benton testified, “taking off most of their clothing.” Benton himself was relieved of seventy dollars and his pocketbook by a rebel captain.⁷

Thinking Nathan Hunter of 6/D was dead, they pulled off his boots.⁸ “They thought they had killed me,” recalled Sergeant William Walker of 13/D. “They searched my pockets half a dozen times or more and took my pocket-book from me.” Some rebels offered their protection only after their captives handed over their money, knives, coins, pocket books, watches. “Soon after I was shot I was robbed,” Leaming testified. “A secesh soldier came along, and wanted to know if I had any greenbacks. I gave him my pocket-book. I had about a hundred dollars, I think, more or less, and a gold watch and gold chain. They took everything in the way of valuables that I had. I saw them robbing others. That seemed to be the general way they served the wounded.”⁹

Fleeing to within two feet of the water, John Kennedy of 2/D had been shot through both of his legs and was lying in the mud when “he was taken by the rebels, who searched him, turning his pockets inside out, requesting him to give up his greenbacks, &c.” As Manuel Nichols played possum, a rebel dug around in his uniform and stole his pocketwatch and pocket-book. “I had some of these brass things that looked like cents,” he remembered. “They said, ‘Here’s some money; here’s some money.’ I said to myself, ‘You got fooled that time.’”¹⁰

“After the fight,” wrote Sam Caldwell of the 16th Tennessee, his comrades “commenced the plunder of the town” and set it ablaze. “I got nothin except what the boys gave me which was a new hat—a pair of the finest boots you ever saw—a pair of pants—two shirts—2 ladies collars & 2 pair of shoes too large for anybody & 2 bolts of Sea Island domestic,” though he expected he would have to dispose of the bolts, “for my horse can’t possibly pack them.” Forrest assessed the plunder at over one hundred thousand dollars, not including the garrison’s six guns and 350 small arms. ¹¹

“The plundering of the encampment,” exulted an officer of the 22nd, “afforded no small feature of interest; the sacking of the stores no little excitement, and the brave band of soldiers, after becoming undisputed masters of the fort, with prisoners properly secured, devoted energies and attention to the well filled stores of the commissary and quartermaster’s department, and the encampment, which abounded with crackers, cheese, lager beer and wines, to the hearty delight of our troops, who had ridden all night and fought all day without eating.”¹²

Edward Benton, the owner of Fort Pillow’s site, sought protection from the rebel captain who had robbed him. Benton told him that since “he had taken all my money, he must keep me from being shot like a dog, as I was a citizen,” he added disingenuously, “and had nothing to do with the fight.” Cursing Benton and the rest of the garrison for fighting “like devils” and trying “to kill all of Forrest’s men,” the captain nevertheless allowed Benton to follow him down the southern slope of the knoll to the rear of the row of improvised hotels and stores that his comrades were already looting. “He gave me a soldier’s coat and told me to wait a moment until he could step in and steal his share.” But as soon as the captain ducked off to claim his plunder, Benton grabbed some clothing, a saddle blanket, and a halter. Posing as a rebel, he headed eastward, toward the abatis. Along the way, near the smoking ruins of the contraband camp, he saw “three persons shot—mulattoes and blacks—shot down singly in cold blood.” Considering himself lucky to be alive, Benton worked his way among the abatis’s maze of fallen timbers, where he hid himself until nightfall. ¹³

Sergeant Henry Weaver of 6/C was captured by a rebel “and taken into the town.” Weaver entered a store, where his rebel captor “went to pillaging.” Weaver found some civilian clothing and slipped it on, and after ducking out of the store soon realized that no one knew he was a Federal. Being a white man, he decided not to run but to mingle with the rebels until nightfall, when he “walked off just as if I had a right to go.” Hardy Revelle, whose lieutenant brother Cordy was by now among the slain, had a similar experience. “At the top of the hill I met a man named Cutler, a citizen of Fort Pillow,” who spoke to a rebel captain on Revelle’s behalf. The captain ordered them down to Revelle’s store to help him filch a pair of boots. Mission accomplished, the captain led the two civilians to Colonel McCulloch’s field headquarters, where “the captain introduced me to a lieutenant and to a surgeon of the rebel army.” After the surgeon compelled Revelle to show him “where goods could be found, the lieutenant got a saddle and bridle and some bits, and then we helped them to carry them to where their horses were outside of the fortifications.” Their party was soon joined by another civilian named Medlin, who “helped the lieutenant to mount and pack his goods,” in return for which he gave them all permission to depart “and instructed us as to the best means of escape.”¹⁴

During the assault, the daguerreotypist Charley Robinson got separated from his partner, George Washington Craft, but soon spotted him among the rebels’ drove of prisoners. “I can tell you, we were glad to see each other. He said that he was all right & not hurt,” Robinson wrote. “They wouldn’t let us talk much so I had to leave him & go on to the Fort” with McCulloch’s adjutant, John T. Chandler, “who had ridden back to see where I was. I had a little dispute here with the guard who had George in charge & he pulled out his revolver & said he would shoot me. But Chandler came back & took me with him,” after which Robinson did not see Craft again. Apparently on Chandler’s recommendation, McCulloch granted Robinson’s release and wrote out a pass. But “now I had no place to stay,” he wrote home, “for they had burnt my house & in fact every house in town & the country people were about all Secesh.” After being arrested repeatedly, Robinson “concluded to go to the swamps & stay until the rebels left the country,” so he “staid in the swamp in day time & slept at one of the citizens’ houses at night.”¹⁵

James Brigham was another of those taken prisoner and marched to McCulloch’s headquarters. Along the way he “saw the Confederates shoot and kill and wound both white and black Federal prisoners.” He saw “officers as well as privates kill and wound prisoners,” and heard them threaten to take the “prisoners still further into the country, and make an example of them.” McCulloch released Brigham also on the grounds that he was a private citizen.¹⁶

 

Squads of rebels continued to make their way along the riverbank, searching among the tangle of logs and brush for fugitive Union soldiers. Two months later, after the Battle of Brice’s Crossroads, rebel patrols would bluff black soldiers hiding in the bushes into giving themselves up by employing an old slave catcher’s trick: randomly calling out, “Come out of there, you grand rascals, or I will kill you,” whereupon two or three, “thinking they had been discovered, would come crawling out and surrender.”¹⁷

Forrest’s defenders dismiss as outlandish Edward Benton’s assertion that the rebels used bloodhounds to flush out the survivors of the massacre. But not only was it said that Forrest sometimes kept dogs among his equipage; there is also testimony that his recruiters employed bloodhounds to track down skulkers and deserters. In any case, they would not have been required to bring their own hounds, since there were a number of substantial plantations with a full complement of slaves, and among large slaveholders hounds were a necessity. According to Elvis Bevel, for at least two days squads of Forrest’s men ranged through the woods at Plum Run, six miles above Fort Pillow, “hunting for negroes.” It hardly strains credulity to imagine that men serving under Forrest, himself an ex-slave catcher and slave trader, some of them professional slave catchers themselves and many of them veterans of recruitment campaigns, could at least have borrowed hounds from local secessionists and employed them in time-honored antebellum fashion to catch men they regarded, after all, as runaway slaves.¹⁸

Sometime before 7:00 p.m., Forrest returned the command of the two brigades to Chalmers, ordering his men “to complete the burial of the dead,” to collect all “arms and other portable property, and, if possible, to transfer the Federal wounded to the first steamer that might be passing; and, finally, to follow with the division and the unwounded prisoners, as soon as practicable, to Brownsville.” Chalmers commanded Bell and his brigade to take charge of “all the unwounded prisoners and those whose injuries were not serious enough to prevent them from marching” and follow Forrest back to Jackson.¹⁹

Bell and his brigade camped about a mile farther east, while Forrest and his Escort would spend the night six or seven miles up the road to Brownsville. By seven o’clock, wrote Chalmers’s adjutant, “the prisoners and artillery had been removed, and the troops were moved back from the river and put into camp.” McCulloch’s Missourians camped less than a mile from the breast-works, leaving only a small guard to look after the wounded prisoners, while McCulloch himself found shelter in a nearby farmhouse. Frank Hogan of 6/A reported that as a captive he overheard the colonel ask his adjutant, Lieutenant Lucius Gaines, how many Federals had been killed. Three hundred so far, Gaines replied, but not all of the returns were in.²⁰

 

Black Bob McCulloch’s Missouri Mongols were an odd choice to entrust with the safety of the survivors. They had declared within Alfred Coleman’s hearing that “they would show no quarter to colored troops, nor to any of the officers with them, but would kill them all,” and that “they had been talking about fighting under the black flag,” and had “come as nigh fulfilling that here as if they had a black flag.”²¹

Colonel Clarke Barteau would recall that after the battle, Black Bob had been “earnest in his expressions of the good conduct, forbearance, and obedience of his men after the foolhardy and strange manner in which the Federals had acted, causing unnecessary sacrifice of life.” In later years McCulloch himself would flatly deny that anyone was shot after the garrison surrendered, and swear that “not a gun was fired, nor a prisoner or non-combatant shot, to my knowledge or belief, after the surrender was made,” a claim to which nobody gives credence. Barteau himself hedged a little on McCulloch’s mea non culpa. He maintained that “the best fighting men” in Bell’s and McCulloch’s brigades “had no hand in the barbarities. Only one hundred and fifty men out of the two brigades had any hand in it,” he wrote, and “their atrocities disgraced them in the eyes of the better soldiery.” Be that as it may, 150 men would have been capable of extensive mayhem, and the “better soldiery” never brought a single charge against them.²²

After the prisoners had been collected and herded back up the slope to the breastworks, “the unwounded of the garrison were detailed, under the supervision of their own officers, to bury the dead and remove the wounded to the hospitals, tents and buildings.” But several survivors testified to seeing rebel burial details at work as well, as they would have been required to do after the most able-bodied prisoners were marched off. “As fast as possible,” wrote Hancock, “the wounded of both sides were gleaned from the bloody field and placed under shelter and the professional care of Confederate surgeons of the several regiments present.” “The most of our Wounded,” wrote Dr. Fitch, “were gathered up by the Rebels and placed in a building which Major Booth used for his Head Quarters.”²³

As it became apparent that many of his prisoners were too grievously wounded to travel, Forrest ordered his adjutant, Charles Anderson, to “procure a skiff, and take with him Captain Young,” the provost marshal of the decimated garrison, with whom the rebels had become acquainted during the truce negotiations, and deliver a message signed by Forrest and addressed to Captain Marshall of the New Era. “Sir,” it said, “My aide-de-camp, Captain Charles W. Anderson, is fully authorized to negotiate with you for the delivery of the wounded of the garrison at this place on board your vessel.”²⁴

“The object was to deliver into his hands as soon as possible all the Federal wounded,” wrote Jordan and Pryor. But Anderson discovered that all the boats and skiffs had been “taken off by citizens escaping from the fort during the engagement.” So he and Young trotted up and down the riverbank, trying to summon the New Era with a white flag.²⁵

After what Marshall had just witnessed, however, he was not about to trust another of Forrest’s flags of truce. He presently repaired upriver, around Craighead Point, where he would remain through the night, all the while “fearful,” as he testified, that the rebels might “hail in a steamboat from below, capture her, put on four or five hundred men, and come after me.”²⁶

“When Major Anderson returned and reported his failure to communicate with the New Era,” recalled Robert Burfford of Forrest’s Old Regiment, “the General at once caused details to be made of all the unwounded Federals under their own officers to first bring into the fort and houses on the hill all their wounded comrades,” and then to bury their dead. Once the wounded and their comrades’ denuded corpses “had been removed from the face of the bluff, a detail of our own men was sent down to gather up all the small arms thrown down by the garrison.”²⁷

The rebels had already thrown some of the wounded into the river to drown; others who had fled into the Mississippi—many of them undocumented contrabands and civilians—disappeared under the turbid current; and after the firing ceased, some rebels saved themselves the trouble of toting bodies uphill by simply rolling them into the stream. ²⁸

At the captive Major Bradford’s own request, Forrest ordered his burial parties to inter the garrison’s dead in the ditch outside the southernmost breast-works: the remains of the whites at the upper end, those of the blacks at the bottom. The officers’ corpses were to be buried separately, including the riddled body of Bradford’s brother Ted, for whose interment Bradford had been temporarily paroled. Most, but apparently not all, of the officers were buried by the rebels. Some were buried in the ditch with their men. Major Booth “was buried on the bank,” Sergeant Benjamin Robinson testified, “right side of me,” where a rebel trooper had stripped Major Booth’s corpse of its bloody uniform and was amusing his comrades by parading around in it.²⁹

As the rebels imprisoned most of the wounded whites in Bradford’s old headquarters south of the parapet, “the unwounded of the garrison were detailed,” wrote Anderson, “under the supervision of their own officers, to bury the dead and remove the wounded to the hospitals, tents and buildings” under the overall command of Captain O. B. Farriss of 22/K.³⁰

Farriss must have been in a hurry to return to camp, for the burials were hasty and unceremonious. “They were all pitched in in any way—some on their faces, some on their sides, some on their backs.” “Some had just been thrown in the trench at the end of the fort,” Eli Bangs testified after viewing the graves the next day, “white and black together.” Some of the bodies “had their hands or feet or face out. I should judge there were probably 100 bodies there. They had apparently thrown them in miscellaneously, and thrown a little dirt over them, not covering them up completely.”³¹

Black prisoners buried their comrades, brothers, cousins, former fellow slaves of the same master. Corporal Reason Barker and Private Henry Miller buried their comrade Harry Hunter of 6/D. Charles Williams helped to bury Robert Green of 6/A; they had escaped together from neighboring plantations. Granville Hill buried Corporal Tom Davis of 2/D; the two had been slaves of the same master. Davis’s slave name had been Warren, but he had changed it to Davis upon enlisting. His newly widowed mother, Martha, had lived in Jackson, Tennessee, until she followed Thomas’s regiment to Memphis in January 1863, whereupon he rented her a house in the city and gave her fifteen dollars a month out of his soldier’s wages .³²

Severely wounded in the side, Lieutenant Leaming of the 13th was carried up to the edge of the fort and laid down where “there seemed to be quite a number of dead collected” that the rebels were throwing “into the outside trench.” “There’s a man who’s not quite dead yet,” Leaming overheard a rebel declare, and Frank Hogan of 6/A testified that he “saw them bury one of our men alive, being only wounded.” Sergeant Benjamin Robinson of 6/D spied one black man “working his hand after he was buried.”³³

By the next day stories would circulate that several blacks had been buried alive. “One negro was made to assist in digging a pit to bury the dead in, and was himself cast in among others and buried,” the Cairo News reported from interviews conducted at Fort Pillow the next morning. “Five are known to have been buried alive; of these two dug themselves out and are now alive in the hospital. Daniel Tyler of Company B was shot three times, and struck on the head, knocking out his eye. After this he was buried, but, not liking his quarters, dug out.”³⁴

Forrest’s defenders protested that if any men were buried alive that night it must have been the fault of the burial details, which, they maintained, were composed exclusively of Federal prisoners. Though a few Federal survivors testified that they assisted in the burial, others who witnessed the interments testified that their dead comrades were buried either by the rebels or under strict rebel supervision. The burials apparently proceeded in two stages: the first performed by the “unwounded prisoners” under rebel supervision, who labored until late evening when Bell, as per Chalmers’s command, collected them all and marched them off as prisoners; the second undertaken by the rebels themselves, whose burial parties continued to work well into the night.³⁵

Captain James Dinkins of the 18th Mississippi hinted at what may have resulted in the burying alive of several of the wounded. He recalled that as the rebel burial parties worked their way along the bank, some of the artillerists lay “flat on their faces, pretending to be dead. When one of them was reached, the men began to dig his grave near where he lay. He raised his head just a little, and said, ‘Marster, for God’s sake, spare me; I didn’t want to leave home; dey ’scripted me. Spare me, marster, and take me home. Dey ’scripted me.’ He was spared, and many others in the same way.” It may be that some men, among them Daniel Tyler, were either too badly wounded to protest their interment or chose to let the rebels bury them under a thin layer of sand rather than risk being shot outright.³⁶

For over four hours the burial crews labored, while most of the wounded—especially the black captives—would be “left unattended for the night and most of the dead unburied.” “After securing all desirable articles,” wrote an officer of the 22nd, “we ignited stores, tents and stables, and as in the affair at Paducah, withdrew by its light.”³⁷

In disputing the claim that as the rebels put the fort to the torch, some men were burned alive, Forrest’s defenders conceded “that burned bodies were found by the burial parties from the Silver Cloud, the Platte Valley and the New Era,” but Jordan and Pryor, with Forrest’s authorization, maintained that “these were the bodies of some negroes who had been killed in the tents.”

The burning to death of invalid blacks was not without precedent. On June 29, 1863, Alfred Ellet of the Mississippi Marine Brigade docked with his command at Goodrich Landing to find the surrounding plantations—mansion houses, cotton gins, and slave quarters—in flames. After an engagement with rebel cavalry, Ellet “found the road strewn with abandoned booty stolen from the houses they had burned; among other articles, a very fine piano.” But the rebels’ “main object” had been “to secure the negroes stolen from the plantations along the river, some hundreds of whom they had captured.” At three plantations Ellet came upon “the charred remains of human beings who had been burned in the general conflagration. No doubt they were the sick negroes whom the unscrupulous enemy were too indifferent to remove.” He believed that “there were many others on the 20 or more other plantations that I did not visit which were burned in like manner.”³⁸

In defending Forrest against this one charge, the Wizard’s champions unconsciously conceded another, which was that the rebels shot sick and wounded men as they lay helpless in the hospital tents. Wyeth conceded that the rebels set fire to buildings that night, but rather disingenuously cited the hotelier John Penwell’s testimony that before the tent he shared with a wounded artillery officer was torched, the rebels carried the two of them out, as if this somehow negated the possibility that other rebel squads set fire to tents and cabins with wounded men inside, or that in the gloaming the rebels could have mistaken some of the more severely wounded men for corpses.³⁹

In any case, Wyeth failed to add that the rest of Penwell’s testimony actually supported the claim that wounded men were burned alive. Shot through the breast, tromped on, and robbed, Penwell lay among the wounded in a tent near one of the four or five huts the rebels set aside for prisoners south of the breastworks. “In the night,” a rebel officer appeared with a squad of arsonists and “roused us up.”

“Get out,” he barked, “if you don’t want to get burned to death.”

Penwell appealed to the officer in charge to allow some of the less seriously injured prisoners to remove their comrades from the huts nearby, “as there were some eight or nine wounded men in there, and a negro who had his hip broken.”

“The white men can help themselves out,” replied the officer. “The damned nigger shan’t come out of that.”

Though it was “very painful,” Penwell staggered out of the tent, reckoning that he “could bear the pain better than run the risk of being burned up.” But he never knew “whether they got the wounded out or not.”⁴⁰

James Walls of 13/E heard the rebels tell each other “to stick torches all around.” “They came with a chunk of fire to burn the building where I was in with the dead,” recalled Billy Mays of 13/B. A rebel poked his head through the door and gave the interior a hasty look.

“These damned sons of bitches are all dead,” he declared, and moved on .⁴¹

“While I was in the major’s headquarters,” said Nathan Fulks of 13/D, “they commenced burning the buildings, and I begged one of them to take me out and not let us burn there.”

“I am hunting up a piece of yellow flag for you,” the rebel sneered.⁴²

The most vivid, and the only purportedly eyewitness, testimony came from Ransom Anderson of 6/B. He claimed that the rebels escorted some of the most badly wounded men into a hut. “They were wounded,” he said, “and could not walk.” Their captors “told them they were going to have the doctor see them,” he said, and then they bolted the door from the outside. “I saw a rebel soldier take some grass and lay it by the door,” Anderson testified, “and set it on fire. The door was pine plank, and it caught easy.” Asked how he knew his comrades were trapped inside, Anderson replied that he had previously looked in on them and that now, as the flames rose, he “heard them hallooing there when the houses were burning.”⁴³

Robert Selph Henry dismissed Anderson’s testimony by claiming that “all other evidence is that the tents and huts were burned on the following day.” Whatever the merits of Anderson’s story, however, in fact there is ample testimony from both sides that the rebels burned most of the station on the night of April 12 but spared Bradford’s former headquarters and its adjacent outbuildings, to which some white prisoners had been taken, and outside of which many of the wounded blacks had been collected.⁴⁴