River Run Red

Two weeks before he would die of his wounds, Woody Cooksey of 13/A would testify that “late into the night” the rebels were “burning houses and burying the dead and stealing goods,” but in the morning “they commenced on the negroes again, and killed all they came across, as far as I could see.” Lying near the fort, he saw them kill about seven blacks that morning. “I saw one of them shoot a black fellow in the head with three buck shot and a musket ball.” But the soldier still lived, so the rebel “took his pistol and fired that at his head. The black man still moved, and then the fellow took his saber and stuck it in the hole in the negro’s head and jammed it way down, and said, ‘Now, God damn you, die!’

After nightfall, Daniel Stamps of 13/E had managed to drag himself up to the fort and spent the night tending to the deep bullet wound to his thigh. Before the sun rose at 5:30 a.m., a squad of McCulloch’s men returned to the fort on a mission. Though “they did not attempt to hurt us white men,” Stamps saw them execute “some 20 or 25” wounded negroes who had made their way back up the hill.³

That morning James Walls of 13/E was lying by the river when the rebels came “prying around there, and would come to a nigger and say, ‘You ain’t dead are you?’” The black soldier “would not say anything, and then the secesh would get down off their horses, prick them in their sides, and say, ‘Damn you, you ain’t dead. Get up.’ Then they would make them get up on their knees, when they would shoot them down like hogs.”⁴

By one account, possibly apocryphal, undoubtedly embellished, the rebels came upon an artillerist’s biracial wife who had ventured out before dawn to search among the dead and wounded for her husband.

Going from body to body with all the earnestness with which love - could inspire an affectionate heart, she at last found the object of her search. He was not dead; but both legs were broken. The wife had succeeded in getting him out from among the piles of dead, and was bathing his face, and giving him water to drink from a pool near by, which had been replenished by the rain that fell a few hours before. At this moment she was seen by the murderous band; and the cry was at once raised, “Kill the wench, kill her!” The next moment the sharp crack of a musket was heard, and the angel of mercy fell a corpse on the body of her wounded husband, who was soon after knocked in the head by the butt-end of the same weapon.⁵

Acting Master’s Mate Eli Bangs of the New Era testified that among the seventy to eighty bodies his detail would bury was the corpse of “one white woman” who may have been the mulatto wife Brown memorialized. Additionally or perhaps alternatively, Chapman Underwood did claim that he heard “a gun or a pistol fired up the bank” that morning, “and soon afterwards a negro woman came in, who was shot through the knee, and said it was done about that time.”⁶

Well after daybreak, Lieutenant Mack Leaming began to make out the muffled report of “cannon down the river.” The rebels immediately set the remaining buildings ablaze, including the two cabins in which Leaming and several other white Union survivors lay wounded.

Someone called out that there were wounded men inside, but the rebels set fire to them anyway. Shot through the side, the bullet having ranged down through one lung and lodged in his hip, Leaming was “entirely helpless,” and as the fire engulfed the building he had “almost given up every hope of being saved” when one of his own men, “who was less severely wounded than myself, succeeded in drawing me out of the building, which the flames were then rapidly consuming.” The rebels “drew us down a little way, in a sort of gulley, and we lay there in the hot sun without water or anything.”

A squad of rebels now approached, apparently “for the purpose of murdering what negroes they could find. They began to shoot the wounded negroes all around there, interspersed with the whites. I was lying a little way from a wounded negro, when a secesh soldier came up to him.”

Another black soldier who did not seem badly wounded stood nearby and begged the same rebel not to shoot him. But the Confederate reloaded his gun and “drew up his gun and took deliberate aim at his head.” At first the gun would not fire, but he pulled the trigger again and the gun went off, killing him instantly.⁷

One rebel soldier threatened to kill Daniel Stamps “because I would not tell him where a poor negro soldier was who had been wounded badly, but who had crawled off on his hands and knees and hidden behind a log.”⁸

The cause of the rebels’ frantic activity was the approach of the Union gun-boat Silver Cloud. On the night of April 12, the news of Fort Pillow’s fall had reached Admiral David Porter via the steamer Ike Hammett, whose captain reported that for the first time since the Battle of Memphis, the rebels had blockaded the Mississippi.⁹

Porter’s command had immediately dispatched the General Lyon to confirm the report, while Captain William Ferguson of the Silver Cloud hitched his gunboat to the swift steamer Platte Valley and headed for Fort Pillow. ¹⁰

As they passed the little settlement of Fulton in the predawn light, the Platte Valley’s crew spotted a file of rebel cavalry trotting along the river road. Ferguson ordered his gunners to open fire, and the horsemen spurred their mounts across the swampy fields that flanked the town, galloping out of sight and range. It was then, as the boom of the Silver Cloud’s artillery rolled up the Mississippi (her guns could be heard as far away as Memphis), that McCulloch’s men began to burn what was left of the station.¹¹

Unhitching itself from the Platte Valley and proceeding on its own steam, the Silver Cloud had begun heaving its way up against the Mississippi current the two and a half miles to Fort Pillow when somebody signaled from a flatboat on the Arkansas shore. It turned out to be Jacob Wilson and the three wounded comrades he had pulled aboard the night before. Hoisted onto the Silver Cloud’s deck, he and his men gave Ferguson their first account of the massacre. ¹²

Pulling back into the stream, the Silver Cloud resumed its journey, coming within view of Fort Pillow at about 7:00 a.m. Seeing that the rebels had carried off the garrison’s guns, Ferguson fired a few volleys and made a landing to bring aboard “some twenty of our troops, some of them badly wounded, who had concealed themselves along the bank, and came out when they saw my vessel. Whilst doing so I was fired upon by rebel sharpshooters posted on the hills, and one wounded man limping down to the vessel was shot.” Heaving the Silver Cloud back into the river, Ferguson transferred his rescued passengers to the steamer Lady Pike (which had just rounded Craighead Point, ahead of the New Era) and resumed his cannonade.¹³

“The commissary and other public buildings, together with some 12 stores, private property, were in flames,” wrote a passenger. “The rebels - could be seen moving about, applying torches to the barracks, huts, and stables.” Captain Ferguson ordered his pilot to move up within range for his five-second shells, which, for some thirty minutes or more, he continued firing at the detached squads they spied moving along the riverbank. ¹⁴

Back at the fort, Daniel Stamps had seen only one rebel officer that morning riding “along while they were shooting the negroes, and said nothing to them.” The officer sported “a feather in his cap,” he said, “and looked like he might have been a captain.” In any case, he “was the only man I saw pass that looked like an officer while they were shooting the negroes.”

Aboard the Silver Cloud that morning were Captain William T. Smith of 6/C, First Lieutenant Frank Smith of 13/D, and Second Lieutenant William Cleary of 13/B returning from their mission to Memphis. Watching from the deck as the gunship came within view of Fort Pillow, Cleary saw the rebels “shoot one man just before we landed,” and watched as “an escort of about twenty men rode up to a livery stable and set it on fire. The gunboat fired at them but did not hit them, and they got on their horses and rode off at a trot. There were some paths down the hill, and a man came along down one of them.” As the escort paused, Cleary saw a soldier he took for an officer pull out a revolver and “very deliberately” shoot at the man before galloping off “in quick time.”¹⁶

At Forrest’s temporary camp at Durhamville, a few miles south of Ripley, the Wizard and his Escort were preparing to proceed to Jackson when their horses twitched and balked at the thump of the Silver Cloud’s cannonade. Fearing that the New Era had pinned McCulloch’s men in the fort, Forrest ordered Captain Charles Anderson and an escort of three men back to the river to see how McCulloch was faring and to try once again to persuade the New Era to pick up the wounded under a flag of truce. That Forrest felt the need to send Anderson back as his emissary suggests that after the slaughter of the day before, he did not trust Chalmers to honor a truce and properly oversee the transfer of prisoners. ¹⁷

Pausing to announce his presence to Chalmers, Anderson encountered Captain Young among the Mississippian’s prisoners and received Chalmers’s permission to take the captured station’s provost marshal with him to flag down the New Era, as they had attempted to do the evening before. Chalmers contributed seven of his men to Anderson’s escort, and Anderson and Young departed.¹⁸

When Anderson reached Fort Pillow, he found McCulloch’s men huddled in the ravines as Union shells arced up from the river and burst around them. Acting under Forrest’s authority, Anderson ordered McCulloch’s men to withdraw to the woods beyond the abatis as he trotted up to the rim of the bluff. ¹⁹

Below, on the river, he saw that the barrage was coming not from the battered and depleted New Era, which was still hanging back behind Craighead Point, but a fresh Federal gunboat with an abundance of ordnance.

Anderson immediately led Captain Young down to the riverbank, waving a flag of truce. “The Silver Cloud ceased firing and steamed warily forward,” he recalled, “shutting her engines within hailing distance of the fort.”

Ferguson cast around for an army officer willing to parley with Anderson. Captain William Smith was the senior army officer on board, but as he surveyed the horrific scene along the riverbank, he told Ferguson that “he did not like to go on shore” for fear the rebels would make good on Richmond’s policy of summarily executing white officers of black troops. First Lieutenant Frank Smith, perhaps because he was heartily despised by Lauderdale County’s secessionists, also recused himself. So Ferguson assigned the task to Second Lieutenant Cleary of the 13th and one of his own naval officers.

As the Silver Cloud’s crew lowered a launch, Anderson turned away to write down his terms. But when he turned back around, he was alarmed to see that the launch was manned by six armed marines rowing a pair of officers toward him under not a white but a Union flag.

“Waving him back, and calling his attention to our white flag,” Anderson told Cleary that he would not parley “until he returned to his vessel, hoisted a white flag, and returned in his launch with his oarsmen unarmed.”

Cleary realized his mistake, and after returning to the Silver Cloud, drew up to the landing, unarmed and flying a flag of truce. Stepping out of the launch, Cleary greeted Anderson and retrieved his note. Anderson proposed that “if we would recognize the parole of Forrest, we might take our wounded on the gunboat.” He offered the Yankees a nine-to-five truce during which he would guarantee the safety of the Silver Cloud and the Platte Valley and their crews as they littered the garrison’s wounded aboard.²⁰

“I am authorized,” Anderson wrote, “to say by Major-General Forrest” that he intended “to place the badly wounded of your Army on board of your boats, provided you will acknowledge their parole. I shall send all (white or black) who desire to go.”²¹

After a brief conference with Cleary and his comrades, Ferguson accepted Anderson’s terms. Ferguson wigwagged to the Platte Valley, poised about a mile upriver, to meet him at the landing. After the two great boats steamed up to the wharf, Ferguson welcomed Anderson aboard and offered him pen and paper to draw up a formal agreement in duplicate.

It is agreed that until 5 o’clock p.m. this evening details from United States forces or others interested in the burial of the dead or the recovery of the wounded, shall have free access to the fort and the grounds around it until 5 o’clock p.m. this evening.²²

Anderson delicately explained to the bantam Mississippian and his staff that they were of course entirely free to come down to the riverside at any time, but “for fear of a collision,” none of Chalmers’s enlisted men would be “allowed to come within the old Confederate intrenchments.” Chalmers agreed and Anderson sent his escort to clear the fort of rebel stragglers, allowing only surgeons and their assistants to remain.²⁴

Anderson was joined at the landing by a clerk from the Platte Valley and an ensign from the Silver Cloud to record the names of the parolees. All night long, Captain James Marshall had kept his New Era anchored around Craighead Point, well out of range of Forrest’s captured artillery, to await orders, ammunition, reinforcements, or some other dispensation. Marshall warily steered his pockmarked gunboat around the bend to discover that the Silver Cloud and the Platte Valley were now moored at the landing while a line of rebel onlookers—Anderson’s escort—watched from the rim of the bluff. “We acted pretty cautiously,” wrote Dr. Underwood, “and held out a signal, and the gunboat answered it, and then we went in.”²⁵

The New Era’s arrival agitated Anderson, whose sharpshooters had - driven her off the day before. He insisted that all of the wounded be loaded onto the Platte Valley, which had the capacity to transport six hundred men, and posted guards at both of the gunboats’ gangways to prevent any of the garrison’s wounded from sneaking aboard and taking part in a counterattack once the truce was over.²⁶

Still under the watchful eye of a rebel sergeant, Captain Young learned that his wife was aboard one of the steamers “in great stress of mind as to his fate.” He begged Anderson to permit him to visit her and “assure her of his safety, give some instructions as to his private affairs, and bid her farewell.” Anderson granted his request, stipulating that on his honor he must return by 2:00 p.m. This special favor made Young’s comrades suspicious. “It was a subject of considerable remark,” read an insinuating report in the Missouri Democrat, “that Captain Young was treated by the rebels with so much favor, and it is said that his brother, who has been in the rebel army, kept a grog shop at the fort, and was a rebel sympathizer.”²⁷

Once his men had herded the rebel stragglers out of the fort, Anderson signaled to Ferguson to “run out his stagings,” as “the fort and all its surroundings were now in his possession.” Anderson himself stood on the gangway of the Platte Valley, recording the names of the garrison’s broken, bleeding survivors as the sailors and marines escorted and littered them onto the deck.²⁸

A reporter traveling aboard the Silver Cloud wrote that “those wounded who could walk were generally brought down the bluffs, supported on either side by a rebel soldier.” With the assistance of rebel surgeons, Anderson’s squad sorted the prisoners into two groups: badly injured parolees and captives fit to march. About fourteen blacks and thirty-four whites were granted paroles. Some stood, some knelt, some lay flat on their backs. All of them were badly wounded, soaked in gore, and streaked with mud and ashes. Several lay unconscious from loss of blood and blows and shots to the head, and a few of them would not survive their voyage to Mound City. The rebels had stripped them of their jackets, belts, boots, and personal effects, and though some of the whites had been bandaged by rebel surgeons, the rest had improvised their own bindings, slings, tourniquets, and splints from torn shirts, drawers and stockings, belts, bark, and driftwood.²⁹

The parolees proceeded one by one, whites first. Some teetered aboard unassisted, some leaned on a marine’s shoulder, others had to be littered up on stretchers. The sight of them, as they paused before Anderson at the foot of the gangway to croak their names, ranks, regiments, and companies, filled the passengers of the Platte Valley with rage.

“Thomas Loftis, Company A, 13th Tennessee Cavalry,” declared a burly survivor in a thick Irish brogue as he marched up the gangway, his arm shattered the morning before. After recuperating at Overton Hospital in Memphis, Loftis would return to his regiment at Columbus, Kentucky, and suffer saber wounds and a gunshot in his side in the defeat and capture of Jim Kess’s rebel guerrillas. Deemed “unable to perform any manual labor,” he would be discharged in August, and spend the rest of his working life in Martin, Tennessee, “ditching for the farmers” and coughing up blood. In 1904, his employer would describe Loftis as “a poor ignorant Irishman” who had lived “a hard life” from “hand to mouth” without “home or friends.” Loftis was “good natured and harmless,” he concluded, “and is a pal with our children and grand children.” But he was also a drunk. Eventually admitted to the Western Kentucky Asylum for the Insane, he died in 1908.³⁰

A marine assisted John C. Simmons of 13/A up the gangway. A native of Henry County, Simmons had received an “ugly wound at time of capture,” a ball striking his back and doing “great violence” to the muscles of his shoulder. He would be treated at Memphis and Mound City, and finally at Jefferson Barracks in Missouri, from which he was eventually discharged on a surgeon’s certificate. Unable to raise his hands above his head, subject to fits of nervous irritability, he would spend the rest of his life farming first in his native Henry County and then New Concord, Kentucky, where he moved in 1884 and struggled to make ends meet for himself and his five children.³¹

Simmons’s comrade James Meador was shot clear through one lung during the battle. A second wound, striking near his left collarbone and passing out his back, would not be discovered until he had been taken to Mound City, where Simmons feared it would be “impossible for him to recover.” But he did, in part, and was discharged in November. No doubt fearing reprisals if he returned to Henry County, Meador moved immediately to Illinois, studied in public school for a few months, clerked for a grocer in Indiana a few years, and then moved down to Kentucky to manage a tenant farm. Described by an examiner as “totally incapacitated” and unable to “stoop or exorsise without pain,” Meador died in 1887 at the age of forty-two. ³²

Simmons’s brother-in-law, Sergeant Bill Albritton, had been shot after surrendering. The shot had injured his left elbow so severely that the day after he was brought to Memphis on the hospital boat Red Rover, the surgeons at Overton Hospital would elect to amputate two-thirds of his arm. Nevertheless he returned briefly to service in June. His wife died without issue in 1876, and though he was incapable of performing manual labor and relied on the charity of his neighbors, he remarried in Christian County, Kentucky, and fathered five children. The pension office sent him fifteen dollars a month for his pains, but refused to fit him with an artificial arm.³³

After suffering six serious wounds, seventeen-year-old Wiley Robinson of 13/A had to be littered aboard the Platte Valley but he eventually recovered. Jim McMichael of 13/C had been shot no fewer than four times after he had surrendered: the first shot glancing across his skull, the second plowing up his forearm, the third lodging irretrievably in his stomach, the fourth penetrating his side.³⁴

Shot four times after surrendering, a final shot plowing across his left eye, Sergeant William Walker of 13/D would live the rest of his life crippled and half blind. Discharged on a surgeon’s certificate, he left his native Tennessee for Illinois and died in Metropolis in 1922. Wounded in the side, the ball plunging downward into his vitals, Isaac Ledbetter of 13/E would almost succumb to “bowel trouble.” Discharged in July, he became a Methodist minister and postal clerk and sired six children. Probably the longest-lived of the survivors of the Fort Pillow massacre, Ledbetter died in Morrilton, Arkansas, in 1935. ³⁵

Shot as he fled over the bluff, unable to walk, Daniel Rankin of 13/C had been carried about two miles from the parapet and given a parole. The next morning three rebels put him on a horse and led him to the house of an elderly farmer, who began to escort him down to the gunboats in the company of a couple of rebel surgeons. He almost did not make it. When they reached the river, “a rebel lieutenant colonel took my parole from me, said it was forged, and that he was going to take me back.” But the surgeons vouched for him, and at last Rankin was allowed to board the Silver Cloud .³⁶

Rankin would eventually move to the president’s old hometown of Salem, Illinois, but it did not prove to be the stepping-stone it had been for young Abe Lincoln. Rankin complained that as a result of his wound “my knee is enlarged, and I can cary nothing more than my own wait, or the cap of my knee will fly out of place and render me unfit for labour for several weeks at a time.” He declared that his experience at Fort Pillow had deranged him, and for the rest of his life he suffered from “melancholy and a demented mind.”³⁷

After lying all night with a deep gunshot to his thigh, Daniel Stamps of 13/E was transferred to a boat bound for Memphis, where the surgeons deemed his wound “severe.” No sooner had he recovered sufficiently to rejoin his regiment than he came down with measles and then developed, perhaps as a consequence, a case of night blindness. “He could not see any after sunset,” his friend John Copher testified. “He would hafte be led abut by some of his comrades.” In fact his brother John found it necessary to “lead him on the car when we was mustered out of serves.” Stamps’s first wife bore him two more children, but apparently left him, for she died in 1877, two years after he married a Texas girl named Sally Hill. He died in Kaufman County, Texas, in 1907.³⁸

Edward Benton, whose property was now strewn with Union dead, spent the night lost in a tangle of fallen timber. “About two o’clock,” he said, “the dogs were getting so close to me that I knew they were on my track.” Stumbling out of the abatis and down Coal Creek ravine, he swam across to the bar and climbed aboard the Lady Pike. By now he had had enough of West Tennessee, and moved to St. Louis to open a store. Eventually he migrated down the Mississippi to Shreveport, Louisiana, where he prospered as a businessman, and then moved to New Orleans, where he became the president of something called the Accommodation Bank.³⁹

At ten in the morning, Dr. Fitch was escorted to the river with his hard-won parole in hand. “As I came in,” he said, “I passed by the Hospitals. They were burned down.” Joe Turpin of 13/E “was lying on a Cot some five Rods from where the log cabin Hospital stood,” too sick with typhoid fever to “give me any reliable information of what became of the rest of them.” Fitch and Acting Assistant Surgeon William N. McCoy treated twelve of the parolees from Fort Pillow, all of whom had been wounded after surrender. Fitch continued to serve until August, when he allowed his contract with the army to lapse and returned home to Chariton, Iowa. He died in 1890.⁴⁰

Billy Bancom of Obion County, the father of two children, was brought on board the Platte Valley with a compound fracture of the right forearm and died two months later at Overton Hospital in Memphis of chronic diarrhea. Frank Key of Henry County was the father of five when he enlisted in 13/D. He survived the night, but died of his wounds before he could be littered aboard. Shot in the back and arms after surrender, the gallant teamster Davy Harrison would survive only three more weeks and die of his wounds in May.⁴¹

After the last of the thirty-four white parolees had been helped aboard, it was the black artillerists’ turn to proceed up the gangway. All day long they would rise like ghosts from the clusters of dead, the river, the piles of driftwood, even from the shallow graves in which they had been buried the night before. “Old man” Thomas Addison of 6/C emerged from the river where, at a rebel soldier’s kindly suggestion, he had been hiding all night. With one eye shot out and his nose blown away, he was a ghastly apparition, and though the surgeons at Mound City would give him little chance of surviving, survive he did, and spent the rest of his life in Mound City as a laborer.⁴²

Still shaking with rage after seeing his wounded comrades shot and burned, Ransom Anderson of 6/B stumbled up, blood caked around the saber wounds to his head and hands. After throwing down his arms and surrendering, Aaron Blain of 6/D had been shot through both legs by a rebel with a carbine who declared that “they were going to kill us all.” But he somehow managed to avoid further injury. After Anderson raised his flag of truce and the Platte Valley began taking on prisoners, Aaron heard a rebel soldier declare that “they would have shot us all if the gunboat had not come along.”⁴³

That morning Aaron was reunited with his brother Sherry, who emerged from his hiding place with their comrade, George Houston. Sherry Blain would return to his regiment and serve for the rest of the war with what little was left of his company. After his discharge in January 1866, Blain reclaimed his father’s name—Thornton—and he and his sergeant, Frank Thompson, moved to Vincent, Arkansas, where they boarded with Thompson’s half sister Ellen, whose husband, Samuel Evans, was another former Fayette County slave and Union veteran. There they would all labor for a couple of years, but the presence of black Union veterans riled the local whites, and one day in 1868 masked Klansmen shot Evans down as he was walking home along the Bay Ferry Road. Evans managed to stagger home but died in Sherry’s arms, leaving Ellen a widow. Though about a dozen years Sherry’s senior, she married Blain, and they lived out their lives in poverty, working as field hands for local white farmers.

Praising God for his deliverance from Forrest’s men, Blain’s friend George Houston became a minister of the gospel. Perhaps recalling his place of refuge at Fort Pillow, he would live out his days in Memphis “at the foot of Alabama Street, under the bluff, Fort Pickering region,” in a place a pension examiner described as “almost inaccessible,” which was probably how Houston wanted it.⁴⁴

His arm shattered, his right leg mangled, Corporal Eli Cothel of 6/B would be discharged in November on a medical certificate with his comrade Arthur Edmonds, who had somehow survived a pistol shot to the head. After the war, Edmonds became an itinerant preacher, but his slave wife, Fannie, refused to travel with him, and they were divorced in 1870. Preaching may have been about all he was fit for. The wounds to his head gave him a “swimming so that I cannot stoop,” his right wrist was shattered, and his shoulder was so mangled by a burst of rebel buckshot that his arm merely hung by his side. He lived the rest of his life in a declension of communities: first Memphis, then Tupelo, and finally Delta Bottoms, Mississippi.⁴⁵

Wounded in the arm and thigh, Sandy Cole of 6/D had to be helped up the gangway and would be discharged at Mound City on a surgeon’s certificate. Hardin Capers of 6/A had suffered wounds severe enough to secure his parole and to prevent his testifying in detail. But on April 23 he managed to dictate a statement naming all the men he had seen murdered that morning.⁴⁶

Shot in the back of his head and neck and left for dead, Alexander Nason of 2/C picked his way out from among a tangle of driftwood and gave his name to Anderson. A Mound City surgeon would judge his wound “not serious,” and three months later, Nason would return to his regiment. By the time of his discharge in October 1865, Nason had risen to orderly sergeant. His wound would leave a deep depression just behind his left ear, and he spent the rest of his life as a Memphis teamster and “chore boy,” collecting a pension of eight dollars a month. Dizzy, half deaf, he would complain in old age that “most all the time I has a deadly pain on [the right] side of my head. It works down the leader of my back,” he said, “and hurts me powerful.”⁴⁷

Manuel Nichols of 6/B, the putative freedman from Michigan, crawled out of his hiding place with wounds to his head, hands, and arm. His surgeon was convinced that he would not survive his wounds, and William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator would print his eulogy. “Manuel’s blood is crying to me from the ground,” his comrade Daniel Tyler was represented as declaring, “and I want to be able, sometime, to say to Manuel Nichols’ wife, up there in Michigan, that his fall has had a compensation. And may God speed the day when this whole slaveholders’ rebellion—what remains of it—shall be ‘Buried Alive!’” But the eulogy was premature. Ten days after the massacre, Nichols was well enough to give a brief, if somewhat conflicting, affidavit, and he would live to join the 11th U.S. Colored Infantry, into which the remnants of the two black artillery regiments that served at Fort Pillow were eventually merged.⁴⁸