River Run Red

The Yankees would soon get the chance to ask the same question of Chalmers himself. Around midday, the little general and his staff trotted down the ravine road to notify Anderson that he was prepared to move his division to Brownsville. But before he departed, he wanted to offer Anderson a detachment to escort his little squad back to Forrest’s headquarters at Jackson. Convinced he would be able to catch up to Chalmers, encumbered as they were by wagons and artillery, Anderson politely declined the offer. But Chalmers and his staff lingered for about an hour, introducing themselves to the Federal officers gathered at the landing.²

Contrary to what Anderson had blurted to Smith and Cleary, Chalmers claimed that neither he nor Forrest ordered a massacre and had stopped it “as soon as they were able to do so.” Nevertheless, Chalmers said that the black troops’ treatment “was nothing better than we could expect so long as we persisted in arming the negro.”

In the meantime, Cleary accepted Chalmers’s invitation to tour the battle-field “to find out if any of our men were left alive.” He was accompanied by Captain Ferguson, Captain John G. Woodruff of the 113th Illinois Infantry, N. D. Wetmore of the Memphis Argus, a reporter for the Virginia Repository, and a rebel escort under the “Little ’Un’s” brother, Colonel Alexander Chalmers of the 18th Mississippi Cavalry. Dr. Chapman Underwood, who had ridden out the battle aboard the New Era, declined to join them, for though “there were some sick men in the hospital,” he was “afraid to go on shore after the rebels got there.”⁴

Though Cleary was relieved to find that the man he had earlier seen fired upon was able to walk, what he was about to witness would turn his stomach. Riding up to the top of the bluff, he came upon “some of our dead half buried,” he said, and the corpses of five negroes “lying upon the boards and straw in the tents which had been set on fire. It seemed to me as if the fire - could not have been set more than half an hour before,” he testified, because “their flesh was frying off them, and their clothes were burning.”

Cleary could not tell from his inspection whether the rebels had moved the sick out of the post hospital before they set it ablaze, but “understood the rebels went in where there were some twenty or thirty negroes sick, and hacked them over their heads with sabers and shot them. The negroes,” and not the white survivors from the 13th, “had been moved from the heights up on the hill into two large tents” until they were “full of colored troops.” For his part, Captain Woodruff counted “the dead bodies of 15 negroes,” including two burning corpses. Most of them had been shot in the head at close range, he guessed, for they “were burned as if by powder around the holes in their heads.”⁵

Captain Ferguson found what he called “unmistakable evidences of a massacre carried on long after any resistance could have been offered, with a cold-blooded barbarity and perseverance which nothing can palliate.” The corpses “with gaping wounds, some bayoneted through the eyes, some with skulls beaten through, others with hideous wounds as if their bowels had been ripped open with bowie-knives, plainly told that but little quarter was shown to our troops.” They were “strewn from the fort to the river bank, in the ravines and hollows, behind logs and under the brush where they had crept for protection from the assassins who pursued them.” He saw bodies of men that had been “bayoneted, beaten, and shot to death, showing how cold-blooded and persistent was the slaughter of our unfortunate troops.”⁶

“I passed up the bank of the river and counted fifty dead strewed along,” wrote a reporter. One of the victims “had crawled into a hollow log and was killed in it; another had got over the bank into the river, and got to a board that ran out into the water.” The reporter found him lying on it “stark and still” and facedown, “with his feet in the water.” Other men “had tried to hide in crevices made by the falling bank, and could not be seen without difficulty, but they were singled out and killed. From the best information I - COULD get the white soldiers were, to a very considerable extent, treated in the same way.”⁷

Wetmore of the Argus counted “200 or more dead bodies mangled, dying as they did, pleading for quarter, many with faces distorted with pain, eyes bayoneted, skulls broken, and some with bowels torn from the human casements, some so besmeared with blood and the flesh of comrades as to render them incognito to even their own fathers and mothers.” In the storming of a fort “where such desperate resistance is offered,” Wetmore conceded that “many, very many, must fall. But at Fort Pillow I have every evidence that instead of honorable warfare,” the rebels had “pursued that of indiscriminate butchery.”⁸

Described by a female admirer as “a handsome young fellow, as gallant as he looked, and full of humor,” the colonel replied that “he could not control his men very well,” and in any case regarded the treatment his men had meted out as “justifiable in regard to negroes,” for they “did not recognize negroes as soldiers.” Cleary also heard “a great many rebel soldiers say they did not intend to recognize those black devils as soldiers.” If Cleary’s comrades in Bradford’s Battalion “had not been fighting with black troops,” they said, “they would not have hurt us at all, but they did not intend to give any quarter to negroes.”⁹

By now local people had begun to emerge from the surrounding woods to inspect the field and scavenge for supplies and keepsakes. Anderson would contend that he “cheerfully and pleasantly” permitted a number of the New Era’s refugee passengers to search for their loved ones and inspect the fort, though by the terms of the truce the fort was now in Ferguson’s control anyway. “All of them did so, many of them bringing back in their hands buckles, belts, balls, buttons, etc., picked up on the grounds, which they requested permission to carry with them as relics and mementoes.”¹⁰

Ferried across from her refuge on the sandbar, the former slave Rachel Parks sought her husband, Ransom, of 2/A, only to be told by a survivor as she returned to the New Era that he had died of his wounds in the night. Nancy Hopper looked in vain for her brother Danny of 13/D, who was already on a long march to Andersonville, “black scurvy,” and death. Rosa Johnson climbed up into the fort, expecting to find her son Bill of 13/B, who had written her in February advising her not to come to Fort Pillow until proper shelter was available. “I went around,” she testified, “where I saw some half buried, some with feet out, or hands out, or heads out; but I could not find him.” She came upon a pile of earth with “a crack in it, which looked like a wounded man had been buried there, and had tried to get out, and had jammed the dirt, for they buried the wounded and the dead altogether there.” Elsewhere she “saw a man lying there burned, they said; but I did not go close to him. I was looking all around the fort for my child, and did not pay attention to anything else.” But he too was marching to Andersonville and his doom. Anne Jane Ruffin was more fortunate. She spotted her husband, Tom, of 13/C painfully making his way up the gangway, and would join him on the Platte Valley for the journey upriver to Mound City.¹¹

Three women testified that while searching along the river for their loved ones, they came across the charred body of Lieutenant John C. Akerstrom, which appeared to them to have been nailed to the side of his quarters and set on fire. Anne Jane Ruffin described Akerstrom’s body “lying upon the back, its arms outstretched, with some planks under it.” Cleary testified that when someone asked the rebels why Akerstrom’s body had not been properly buried, “some of the rebels said he was a damned conscript that had run away from Forrest.”¹²

Cleary had “never heard Lieutenant Akerstrom say any such thing.” In fact, Akerstrom was a New Yorker, and there is no record of his having served in the rebel army. Nevertheless, congressional investigators would accept this probably groundless claim as fact. In the unlikely event that James McCoy identified him correctly from his vantage point on the New Era, four hundred yards from the bluff, Akerstrom, like his comrade Ted Bradford, may have earned the special enmity of the rebels by having tried during the truce to wigwag a signal to the gunboat. ¹³

Jacob Thompson, the cook from Fort Pillow’s lone hotel, claimed that as he made his way down to the river that morning with a bullet lodged in his skull, he saw a man nailed through his wrist “to the side of a house,” and the smoldering bodies, “burned almost in two,” of white sergeants from black regiments who had been nailed to logs and set on fire. As outrageous and singular as this seems, it was a common practice in McCulloch’s Missouri to execute errant slaves by burning them to death. Nevertheless, what these witnesses probably saw were the bodies of men who, either pre- or post-mortem, had been burned in the barracks in a conflagration that had incinerated the plank floor, leaving only charred log joists studded with nails. ¹⁴

The crew of the New Era, with the assistance of several of the more ambulatory survivors Ferguson had picked up, “buried 64 men before the flag of truce was withdrawn,” reported James Marshall, who estimated that the rebels had already buried “between 300 and 400.” An unknown number of these had been buried where they lay, in the soft flats along the riverbank, only to be washed away by the rising Mississippi. ¹⁵

Among the missing was James Ricks of 6/A. When his slave father, Alfred, died in early cotton-picking season in 1857, Ricks had been the one child old enough to support his widowed mother, Louisa, and his siblings. He proved a diligent and industrious provider. His fellow slaves and future comrades-in-arms recalled that James was “very thrifty,” and worked “outside of his regularly required duty as a slave” cultivating his own cotton, corn, and vegetable patches and selling charcoal to his master’s blacksmith shop. “In this way he procured considerable” and gave his mother “all he made,” including the fifteen dollars he earned annually from his cotton patch. After joining the 6th USCHA under the name James Ricks, he continued to support his family with his soldier’s wages, including a ten-dollar greenback he relayed to Louisa a few days before the Battle of Fort Pillow.¹⁶

Some artillerists sought out the bodies of their brothers and comrades and messmates: fellow slaves of the same master who had joined up with them ten months before. Henry Richardson came upon his fellow slave Daniel Ray of 6/D. Sandy Addison and Charles Williams buried the body of their comrade Robert Green of 6/A. In 1856, repeating the vows recited to him by a black minister named James Bosworth, Green had married Elizabeth, the slave of a Dr. Crump of Hardin County, Tennessee. By the time he joined the 6th, Elizabeth had borne him several children, now rendered fatherless in the slaughter by the river.¹⁷

As the truce deadline approached, the Federal burial parties made their way back up the gangway, leaving many bodies still unburied. The white parolees were shown to the Platte Valley’s staterooms. “Too much praise cannot be bestowed upon Captain Riley, as well as all other officers of the Platte Valley, ” reported Wetmore of the Argus, “for the manner in which they provided for the wounded, requiring the passengers to give up their staterooms, furnishing at once proper sustenance of food, and nourishing drinks to those who were unable to eat. There were a great many ladies on board who, God bless them, true to their nature, went at once to work alleviating as far as possible their sufferings.”¹⁸

Fitch reported that eight parolees died en route to Mound City, all but one of them white. Eighteen more would die at Mound City that spring and summer, among them Lieutenant John H. Porter of 13/D. Married for ten years, the father of two sons and two daughters, he had been shot in the head during the siege and died of infection on June 21. Another was a black officer’s servant named Bill Jordan who was picked up by the Platte Valley with his arm shot up and his ankle so badly shattered that his foot would have to be amputated. Jordan died in Mound City of shock and loss of blood.¹⁹

While the wounded whites were attended to indoors, the blacks were placed upon the gunwales. “I was in Cairo when the Platte Valley came up, and it was an awful scene,” a correspondent for the Mound City Dispatch would write the next day. “There were quite a number of colored soldiers on board, who had been wounded, and were not as well cared for as the whites: they were lying on the guards and on the deck, and some of them were suffering from cold; others were wet by the water that sloshed over the guards, while they were suffering from their wounds.”²⁰

Almost as disgraceful was the welcome accorded Chalmers and his staff by “two or three Federal band-box officers on board the Platte Valley” who, according to the Missouri Democrat, “made themselves conspicuous in fawning around the rebel officers. They brought Gen. Chalmers and several subordinate cut-throat looking officers on board the Platte Valley, drank with them, introduced them to their wives, and invited them to dinner.” It seemed to parolee Bill Johnson of 13/B that the Union officers made “very free with them.” Astonishingly enough, one of the Union officers who cordially fraternized with Chalmers and his staff was Captain John G. Woodruff of the 113th Illinois Infantry, who had just toured the battlefield and counted fifteen corpses of black troops, several of them still smoldering.²¹

Anderson accepted the two officers’ invitation to share a drink at the Platte Valley’s bar, “little thinking,” he wrote, that it would “cost them their commissions. For this courtesy and kindness, one officer was cashiered and the other reduced to the ranks.”²²

“I went on board the boat,” recalled John Penwell, “and took my seat right in front of the saloon,” for he was acquainted with the bartender “and wanted to get a chance to get some wine, as I was very weak.” But just as he stepped up to the rail, “one of our officers—a lieutenant or a captain, I don’t know which—stepped in front of me and almost shoved me away, and called up one of the rebel officers and took a drink with him; and I saw our officers drinking with the rebel officers several times.” “I thought our officers,” Lieutenant Mack Leaming bitterly remarked, “might have been in better business.”²³

Chalmers and his men “were generally well clad,” the Democrat reported, “but had very little to distinguish them from the privates. Gen. Chalmers had simply a black feather in his hat, and the other officers stripes on their collars.” The Union officers on board made room for Chalmers and his men “at the ladies’ table.” As they sat down to await their luncheon, the little general and former DA soliloquized that though he did not “countenance” nor “encourage his soldiers in killing captive negro soldiers,” he believed “it was right and justifiable.” Some of the rebel officers declared that “they had only about twenty-five colored prisoners, and they were old servants of white officers, and that all colored soldiers were killed.”²⁴

Several of the little Mississippian’s officers “bragged a great deal about their victory,” Chapman Underwood testified, “and said it was a matter of no consequence. They hated to have such a fight as that,” and not kill or capture more Federals. One of the officers from the New Era “got into a squabble” with the rebels, “and said they did not treat the flag of truce right.”

James McCoy testified that the Union officers greeted Chalmers and his men cordially, “just as though there had been no fight.” In high dudgeon, McCoy stomped over to the New Era and asked Captain Marshall’s permission to shoot Chalmers then and there. But Marshall reminded the irate civilian that while “the flag of truce was up,” killing the Little ’Un would violate “the rules of war.”²⁶

Nevertheless, “either by accident or from a just idea of the fitness of things,” a “high-spirited” James Marshall peremptorily rang the signal to move out, whereupon the rebel officers rushed up from the table and “skedaddled, leaving their soup untouched.”²⁷

A little before 5:00 p.m., Anderson disembarked from the Platte Valley and urged Chalmers to order the steamers to shove off, for he intended to burn what little remained of the post. Anderson assured Ferguson that Forrest’s command was miles off and that he could “depart at his leisure, and without fear of molestation.” Letting go their lines and lowering their white flags, the steamers chuffed and heaved back into the current.²⁸

In the meantime, the Union hospital boat Red Rover had arrived on the scene. After the Platte Valley pulled away from the landing, Anderson signaled that he had discovered over a dozen more wounded Federals in the smoking ruins of the fort. So the Red Rover came in and brought them aboard, where “fleet Surgeon Ninian Pinkney, with his usual promptness, provided comfortable quarters for them,” the Argus reported, “and with his little army of assistant surgeons soon had their wounds dressed.”²⁹

The New Era headed downriver to recover a coal barge that had broken loose during the fight and tow it to Flour Island, opposite Fulton. The Red Rover, with its cargo of “refugees, women and children,” headed south for Memphis under the Silver Cloud’s protection while the Platte Valley and the Lady Pike proceeded upriver to Cairo. Despite Anderson’s assurance of safe passage, the Platte Valley’s artillerists kept her nine guns primed all night.³⁰

Saluting Ferguson, Anderson and his detachment of ten troopers slowly made their way back up to the fort, where he ordered his men to dismount and begin distributing tinder among the remaining buildings. As the Silver Cloud swung back into the stream, Anderson’s men piled hospital beds, bunks, and mattresses into teetering heaps and, kindling them with straw, put what remained of the ruined fort to the torch.

Major William Bradford had emerged from the massacre without so much as a scratch. Though Wyeth took it as “proof of the control that Forrest had over his men that he was not shot, even after the surrender,” it was not for want of trying. Whether he was unusually fleet or momentarily charmed, none of the hundreds of shots that were fired at him had so much as grazed him as he ran into and then out of the river, back up to the parapet, and into Forrest’s grudging custody. Bradford had given “his parole of honor that he would report again to the Confederates in their camp that night as soon as his brother was interred.” But here the story gets blurred.³²

The captured trader W. R. McLagan testified that he also encountered Major Bradford that evening. “He told me himself that he was Major Bradford,” he claimed, but wanted his identity kept from the guards “as he had enemies there; and it never would have been known,” McLagan continued, “but for a detective in the confederate army from Obion county, Tennessee, named Willis Wright, who recognized him as Major Bradford, and told them of it.”³³

Apparently McLagan had a personal beef with Wright, whom he called “a notorious spy and smuggler,” and the rebels had already established Bradford’s identity. But it is possible that what McLagan meant was that after dressing himself in civilian clothes, Bradford tried to lose himself in McCulloch’s drove before slipping off toward the Hatchie. “The Rebel soldiers were frequently making the remark that Major Bradford ought to be killed,” Dr. Fitch recalled. “The Major must have heard such remarks often during the night.” The last Frank Hogan of 6/A saw of Bradford was his hunched form lying under a blanket among the other prisoners. But the next morning, when McCulloch came by to order the prisoners to light a camp-fire, Bradford was nowhere to be found.³⁴

As the prisoners were driven south, they asked “why Major Bradford was not with us.” Some of the rebels told Fitch “that he had been paroled for twenty-four hours, others that Forrest had taken Bradford with him.” But Fitch found it hard to believe that Bradford “would take a parole for 24 hours, knowing, as he did, that his life would not be safe.” Captains Poston and Young predicted to Fitch “that the Rebs would kill Major Bradford,” and tell their prisoners the next morning “that Major Bradford had violated his parole.”³⁵

When a search party from the 7th caught up with Bradford, he was dressed in civilian clothes and preparing to cross the Hatchie. He claimed to be a rebel conscript, but he had no papers to prove it. Duckworth’s men brought him before their colonel, who recognized him as Bradford and placed him in the 7th’s custody, bound for Forrest’s headquarters in Jackson. But as they set forth, five of Bradford’s guards were ordered back to Duckworth’s headquarters, where “those five guards,” including one of the 7th’s lieutenants, “seemed to have received special instructions about something,” McLagan testified. “I don’t know what. After marching about five miles from Brownsville, we halted” and five guards prodded Bradford “about fifty yards from the road. He seemed to understand what they were going to do with him. He asked for mercy, and said that he had fought them manfully, and wished to be treated as a prisoner of war.”

At 2:00 a.m. on April 15, McLagan escaped, and as he fitfully wended his way back to Fort Pillow, he passed by Bradford’s “yet unburied” corpse. “The moon was shining brightly,” McLagan testified, “and it seemed to me that the buzzards had eaten his face considerably.” McLagan surmised after inspecting Bradford’s corpse that three of the five guards had shot him down. “One shot struck him about in the temple, a second in the left breast, and the third shot went through the thick part of the thigh. He was killed instantly. They left his body lying there.”³⁶

Two months later, when Forrest protested Northern charges that his men had perpetrated an atrocity, Union general Cadwallader Colder Washburn replied that Bradford’s murder “hardly justifies your remark that your operations have been conducted on civilized principles, and, until you take some steps to bring the perpetrators of this outrage to justice, the world will not fail to believe that it had your sanction.”³⁷

Forrest replied in high dudgeon that he had not known anything about Bradford’s death until about nine days after the fact, when Duckworth’s men reported that Bradford had been shot while trying to escape. “It was an act,” wrote Forrest’s authorized biographers, “in which no officer was concerned, mainly due, we are satisfied, after the most rigid inquiry, to private vengeance for well authenticated outrages committed by Bradford and his band upon the defenseless families of the men of Forrest’s Cavalry.” “If he was improperly killed,” Forrest told Washburn, “nothing would afford me more pleasure than to punish the perpetrators to the full extent of the law.” But “there is nothing in the records,” concluded Wyeth, “to show that the men who murdered Major Bradford were ever brought to trial for this unwarrantable act.”³⁸

In the late afternoon of April 13, Captain Young had duly returned to Anderson’s custody, pausing for a moment on the riverbank to wave to his tearful bride. Despite Young’s services as a truce bearer, or any secessionist sympathies his fellow prisoners suspected him of harboring, the rebels prized their young captive too much to let him go. He and Bischoff “were conveyed or taken on foot by forced marches,” during which they “had to sleep on the ground entirely without beding or any Covering,” the rebels having taken their “Over coats, blankets and all heavy clothing.”³⁹

At Somerville on April 15 they were all placed in the custody of Colonel Barteau and his 22nd Tennessee Cavalry. The weather “was very inclement” and Young came down with a “violent cold, resulting in pleurisy and a Cough which Settled on his lungs, which disability soon prostrated his system to such an extent” as to render him incapable of walking, so that he had to be “conveyed the last few days of said march in an open wagon.” They all proceeded from Okolona to Meridian, Mississippi, and from there to Demopolis, Alabama, where for two days they were locked up in a “very open” old cotton shed that exposed them “to greater suffering.”⁴⁰

The rebels transported them next to Selma, Alabama, from which they “marched by foot to Cahaba, Alabama, at which place they were kept in prison about five weeks,” during which time Young was treated in a rebel hospital. They were then taken to Montgomery and shortly thereafter “conveyed to Andersonville prison where they remained a few days” before proceeding to Macon, Georgia, “where they were confined in prison several weeks,” before shuttling back to Cahaba, where the rebels separated Bischoff and Young.⁴¹

In the meantime, to counter Northern accusations that he and his men had perpetrated a massacre, Forrest urged General Leonidas Polk to take special care of Young in hopes of persuading the young captain to corroborate Forrest’s version of the battle. Eventually a letter signed by Young emerged stating that “when the final assault was made, I was captured at my post inside the works, and have been treated as a prisoner of war.” On June 23, in a letter to Union general Cadwallader Washburn, Forrest enclosed a second purported missive as proof that no atrocities were committed at Fort Pillow, that the garrison never surrendered, and that he had treated his prisoners with decency and consideration.⁴²

The letter was predated April 19 and addressed to Forrest. “Your request, made through Judge Scruggs, that I should make a statement as to the treatment of Federal dead and wounded at Fort Pillow, has been made known to me,” it began. “Details from Federal prisoners were made to collect the dead and wounded. The dead were buried by their surviving comrades. I saw no ill-treatment of the wounded on the evening of the battle, or next morning.” Among the wounded “were some colored troops,” the note continued, though it did not say how many. It went on to endorse the brief portion of Anderson’s report that Young was permitted to see: an account of Young’s waving down the Silver Cloud and the subsequent evacuation of the wounded.

General Washburn was not impressed. “How far a statement of a person under duress,” he wrote Forrest’s superior, Major General Stephen Dill Lee, “and in the position of Captain Young, should go to disprove the sworn testimony of the hundred eye-witnesses who had ample opportunity of seeing and knowing,” Washburn would leave others to judge. But what really struck Washburn was what Young did not say. “Does he say that our soldiers were not inhumanly treated? No. Does he say that he was in a position to see in case they had been mistreated? No. He simply says that he ‘saw no ill-treatment’ of their wounded.”⁴³

If Young is to be believed, Washburn’s suspicions were well founded. In a letter written after his release from rebel prison in September, Young reported to Washburn that he had signed these letters “under protest.” When General Stephen D. Lee ordered Young removed from Andersonville, returned to Cahaba, and separated from Bischoff, Young “appealed to the officer in command to know why I was taken from the other officers, but received no explanation. Many of my friends among the Federal officers who had been prisoners longer than myself felt uneasy at the proceeding, and advised me to make my escape going back,” for fear the rebels intended to retaliate against him. “Consequently I felt considerable uneasiness of mind.”

On the day following, I was informed by a sick Federal officer, also in hospital, that he had learned that I had been recognized by some Confederate as a deserter from the Confederate army, and that I was to be court-martialed and shot. The colored waiters about the hospital told me the same thing, and although I knew that the muster-rolls of my country would show that I had been in the volunteer service since 1st of May, 1861, I still felt uneasy, having fresh in my mind Fort Pillow, and the summary manner the Confederate officers have of disposing of men on some occasions.

After several days of gnawing suspense, the rebel provost marshal summoned Young to his office and handed him a sheaf of papers “made out by General Forrest, for my signature. Looking over the papers I found that signing them would be an indorsement of General Forrest’s official report of the Fort Pillow affair. I, of course, returned the papers, positively refusing to have anything to do with them.” Later the same day, Young was shown a modified version of Forrest’s draft. Young again refused to sign, and sent a note to Forrest saying that although he dismissed as “exaggerated” some of the Northern versions of the Fort Pillow affair that he had seen reprinted in Southern papers, “I also thought that his own official report was equally so in some particulars.”

Forrest now asked Polk to delegate his old friend Judge Phineas Thomas Scruggs of Shelby County to interview Young and extract from him a letter that toed the rebel line. A week later, the commander of the Cahaba prison introduced Young to Scruggs to “have a talk with me about the Fort Pillow fight,” as Young recalled. “I found the judge very affable and rather disposed to flatter me.” Conveying General Forrest’s high estimation of Young as “a gentleman and a soldier,” Scruggs “went on to [talk] over a great many things that were testified to before the military commission which I was perfectly ignorant of, never having seen the testimony. He then produced papers which General Forrest wished me to sign.⁴⁴

“Upon examination I found them about the same as those previously shown me, and refused again to sign them; but the judge was very importunate and finally prevailed on me to sign the papers,” promising Young “that if I wished it, they should only be seen by General Forrest himself; that they were not intended to be used by him as testimony, but merely for his own satisfaction.” Indeed, even in the letter in which he had transcribed the notes that had been exchanged during the truce at Fort Pillow, Young had added a caveat. “My present condition,” he had written, “would preclude the idea of this being an official statement.”

Captain John T. Young wanly hoped “that these papers signed by me, or rather extorted from me while under duress, will not be used by my Government to my disparagement, for my only wish now is, after over three years’ service, to recruit my health, which has suffered badly by imprisonment, and go in for the war.”

After Young’s release, he was found to be suffering from “the effects of general debility with his whole system breaking down & laboring from the effects of a weakness & disease of the lungs resulting from disease contracted while a prisoner which rendered him unable to perform further duty as a soldier. But being anxious to perform some kind of service & being a very valuable officer, he was placed on duty as Assistant Provost Marshall at St. Louis, Missouri, where he remained until discharged.” In 1869 he became a schoolteacher in Randolph County, Missouri. Suffering from a diseased spleen and weak lungs, he died in 1915 in Los Angeles at the Pacific branch of the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers.⁴⁵

As the Platte Valley proceeded upstream, officers and correspondents flitted from survivor to survivor, pumping them for information about the battle. “The wounded negroes we have aboard,” reported the Cairo News, had “feigned themselves dead until we came along,” and all told the same story about truce violations, attack, surrender, and massacre.⁴⁶

At Cairo the Platte Valley turned up the Ohio, and it reached nearby Mound City at 9:00 p.m. on April 14. Cairo sat on a small panhandle of Illinois that the Union army considered a “geographical wedge piercing the South.” But Cairo was one of the Union’s strangest posts: a floating city populated by contrabands, engineers, carpenters, soldiers, shipwrights, stevedores: all barracked on barges whose hulls bumped and grated against steamboats, tugboats, hospital ships, and floating machine shops. The army’s presence was insignificant; it was to the Mississippi fleet’s rotation of gun-boats that Mound City owed its security. Cairo’s garrison was even smaller than Fort Pillow’s: 358 officers and men, of which 35 were troopers from Hawkins’s otherwise surrendered 7th Tennessee Cavalry (USA). This small guard tediously patroled parapets “very much injured by the rains.” Only one of Cairo’s six guns was serviceable, and that was aimed upriver at the city. The post’s magazine was nearly empty, and what ammunition there was had been soaked by rain leaking in through the roof.⁴⁷

So it was not exactly safe harbor. Convinced that Forrest’s (or Buford’s) next move would be “to destroy the large amount of ordnance stores we have at Mound City, and other Government property at that place,” Fleet Captain Alexander M. Pennock ordered his gunboats to destroy all the ferries and skiffs between Mound City and Paducah. “We have taken every precaution in our power to guard against it,” reported Pennock, whose sailors kept “a constant lookout for rebel arsonists.” But on the night of April 15, a hundred Confederate guerrillas from Kentucky crept into Mound City, fired upon a Union gunboat, and merrily galloped away.⁴⁸

“Thousands of our brave soldiers are frequently landed here,” wrote General Mason Brayman, “often at night and during storms; and it must continue to be so, for this must remain the great point of reshipment, yet no proper barracks are provided.” That spring, Union regiments had “spent the nights in the open air, deep in the mud, and assailed by storms. The Soldiers’ Home, under the benevolent care of the Sanitary Commission, provides temporary food and shelter, but is inadequate to the demand.” Men who arrived without officers were often left to fend for themselves in the street, “to become the prey of sharpers and victims of the many temptations which beset them.”⁴⁹

The Mound City hospital had been notoriously filthy until the arrival of a stout, no-nonsense nurse named Mary Bickerdyke. Like some frontier Florence Nightingale, Bickerdyke had bullied a staff of indolent quacks and orderlies into allowing her to dress wounds, scrub floors, and boil all the linens every week. Bickerdyke had long since moved on to other battlefields, but her legacy was a staff that, by the dismal standards of the day, kept the hospital clean and orderly. ⁵⁰

Head Surgeon Horace Wardner met the Fort Pillow parolees at the landing with a corps of navy litter-bearers and ushered them into his hospital. He counted thirty-four whites on the Platte Valley, “twenty-seven colored men, and one colored woman, and seven corpses of those who died on their way here.” They were “the worst butchered men I have ever seen,” he said. “I have been in several hard battles, but I have never seen men so mangled as they were.”⁵¹

Their wounds were filthy, and fearing that if they were kept together they would spread infection to one another, Surgeon Wardner distributed them throughout the hospital. “Dr. Wardner says the negroes exhibit wonderful tenacity of life,” wrote the Cairo News, “and of the desperately wounded at Fort Pillow nearly all will recover.” But before the week was out, Wardner would become less sanguine, predicting that about a third of them would not survive their wounds. When an officer was sent to collect the survivors of the 6th USCHA from Cairo, Mound City, and New Madrid, Missouri, and return them for duty at Memphis, few of them were able to make the journey. On April 19, Colonel William D. Turner would begin to assign men from various white regiments to replace the sergeants of the 6th USCHA who had been killed or disabled at Fort Pillow. ⁵²

Coming within sight of Fulton, Captain Marshall brought aboard a cluster of civilians who had been “captured by the enemy and released.” As he pulled back into the stream, however, he spied a band of fifty rebels who had made their way out to Flour Island and set fire to the runaway coal barge he had towed there the night before. “I put the refugees on the shore,” Marshall testified, “took down the white flag, and started after them.” The rebels dashed out of sight, leaving burning piles of wood, “and we followed them clear round and drove them off.” The Union gunboats Moose and Hastings joined in the fray, the former blocking a rebel attempt to capture the steamboats that had paused by the bar, the latter shelling the woods all the way up to Plum Point. In all, Marshall fired thirty-four rounds of shrapnel “to scatter the rebels swarming along Coal Creek, setting fire to shacks and coal barges.”⁵⁴

Marshall was about to find out that the dead were not the only Unionists the Platte Valley had left behind. After returning to Fort Pillow that morning, the daguerreotypist Charley Robinson had been horrified to find that he had not yet seen all of the rebels’ “cruel actions, for there were the charred remains of some of the wounded soldiers, who we had left in their houses, thinking that as they were wounded, they would be treated kindly.” Now he ran up and down the riverbank, shouting to the New Era to pick him up.⁵⁵

All through the night of April 13, Private Major Williams of 6/B had remained in hiding from the rebels’ dogs and search parties, and did not dare return to the fort until the next day. Williams encountered a comrade and half a dozen local whites “who were walking over the place.” During the Silver Cloud’s barrage the previous morning, Duncan Harding of 6/A had slipped away from his captors and spent the night of the thirteenth in a pile of brush and logs.⁵⁶

Sergeant Wilbur H. Gaylord testified that on the afternoon of April 14, the rebels took “a young man whose father lived near here, and who had been wounded in the fight, to the woods,” and shot him three times in his back “and into his head,” and left him where he fell. On the morning of the fifteenth, a group of local men brought the half-dead boy to the house where Gaylord was being cared for, “and then carried us both to Fort Pillow in an old cart that they fixed up for the occasion, in hopes of getting us on board of a gunboat. Upon our arrival there a gunboat lay on the opposite bank, but we could not hail her.” The locals carted the boy away, said Gaylord, “but I would not go back.” The following afternoon, he was picked up by the gun-boat Silver Cloud. ⁵⁷

On April 14, after working his way up along the Mississippi’s Tennessee bank, the Unionist refugee Elvis Bevel of Arkansas encountered Captain Oliver B. Farriss of Barteau’s 22nd Tennessee Cavalry (CSA). “His soldiers said they were hunting for negroes,” Bevel testified, but a day later the gun-boat Moose would shell them out of the woods. Charley Robinson added that until the New Era chased them off, the rebels scoured the swamp south of the fort with hounds. As late as the fifteenth, vestiges of Forrest’s command still lurking in the surrounding woods continued to take potshots at the Union gunboats that drew up to Fort Pillow to collect survivors and bury the dead.⁵⁸

The Cairo News reported that “about four miles above the fort, lodged against the trunk of a tree, were seen by passengers on the Platte Valley, six dead bodies. In another place three bodies were seen. A number of other bodies were seen singly on the banks.” But corpses don’t float upriver; these were probably the remains of soldiers and contrabands who had fled up the Tennessee shore, only to be hunted down by squads of rebels and packs of hounds.⁵⁹

On the afternoon of April 13, as the survivors of the massacre were still limping up the Platte Valley’s gangway, the Wizard had arrived at Brownsville, where “citizens of all classes, old men and women, received General Forrest with tokens of gratitude. The ladies assembled at the courthouse,” recalled Dinkins, “received him publicly, and testified their profound appreciation for delivery from further insult and outrage.”⁶⁰

According to Thomas Berry of the 9th Texas Cavalry, Forrest had commanded eleven thousand men during his West Tennessee campaign: “effectives equipped without a dollar’s cost” to the Confederacy. “This unlettered modern Ajax,” as Berry called him, “had not met with a single reverse in his belligerent career since October 1, when he became his own master. He had fought 46 battles, captured 31,000 prisoners, and destroyed over $10,000,000 worth of property.”⁶¹

“With this affair at Fort Pillow,” wrote John Johnson, “ended the story of robberies and murders by such irresponsible and lawless bands” as Hurst’s Unionists. “Their time of retribution had come, and Forrest was now a terrible factor to be counted on in all future operations in this part of the country, and such men as these had no stomach for encountering this kind of an enemy.” “West Tennessee,” trumpeted Chalmers, “is redeemed.”⁶²

On April 15, Forrest and his scribes would report from Jackson that his victory at Fort Pillow had been “complete.” He guessed that the garrison’s loss was “upward of 500 killed” with “but few of the officers escaping” and expressed the hope “that these facts will demonstrate to the Northern people that negro soldiers cannot cope with Southerners.” Though the Union’s loss would never be known because “large numbers ran into the river and were shot and drowned,” the Mississippi, he bragged, “was dyed with the blood of the slaughtered for 200 yards.”⁶³

It was “unfortunate” that Forrest had “repeated this boast that had probably been made by some of his men,” wrote a cavalryman of the 14th who was not present at Fort Pillow. “As he did not go down the slope to the river, this had to be hearsay evidence. With the current of the river as it was, a herd of a hundred cattle could have been slaughtered there and not give enough blood to dye the river for fifty yards.” But however inconvenient Forrest’s boast was to his defenders, the Wizard had actually enjoyed a splendid view from the bluff of both the river and the shallower and slower-moving Coal Creek. In any case, whether or not this description was exaggerated hearsay, it was, after all, a boast: proof that Forrest at least initially took great satisfaction and even pride in the extent of the sanguinary slaughter his troopers had perpetrated.⁶⁴

The Southern press loudly broadcast Forrest’s triumph. “The invincible and unconquered Forrest never wearies in his accustomed vocation,” raved the itinerant Memphis Daily Appeal, which was reduced to hauling around its press and publishing from the road. “Each victory, although great, seems to be eclipsed by another still greater. The capture of Fort Pillow is one of the most brilliant achievements of the war. It has been regarded as Gibraltar. Our own people spent much money and labor in fortifying it,” and the Yankees had “added much to its strength. Nature has made it almost impregnable. But General Forrest, strong as it was known to be, conceived the idea of storming and taking it.”⁶⁵

“We have an account from the West,” wrote a Confederate War Department clerk in Richmond, “to the effect that Forrest stormed Fort Pillow, putting all the garrison, but one hundred, to the sword.” At a time when the Confederate government was seriously considering abandoning Richmond to free itself of extortionate prices, Forrest’s victory was welcome news. “The bloody work has commenced in earnest.”⁶⁶

“Hear today some items from Forrest,” wrote the Reverend Sam Agnew of Mississippi. “It is said he has recently captured Fort Pillow. This place was garrisoned by negroes mostly—the garrison numbered about 500. They felt secure and at the outset hoisted the black flag and consequently no quarter [was] given them and many were slaughtered. Forrest is said to have been slightly wounded three times in the fight. Forrest I hear had only 7 killed.”⁶⁷

“Out of 700 men composing the garrison,” reported the Charleston Mercury, “500 were killed, these last including all the officers of the fort.” “I write with pleasure,” wrote an anonymous officer of the 22nd, “that another brilliant and decided victory has attended our operations in Western Tennessee and Kentucky, and that Gen. Forrest has added immeasurably to the imperishableness of his acquired laurels, as one of the greatest military chieftains of this age by his splendid success in the capture of Fort Pillow on the 12th inst.” “Your brilliant campaign in West Tennessee has given me great satisfaction,” Leonidas Polk wrote Forrest, “and entitles you to the thanks of your countrymen.”⁶⁸

As the Northern press began to publish its denunciatory coverage of the fall of Fort Pillow, however, the Wizard began to suppress the note of triumphant glee with which he first reported his attack on Fort Pillow and to prepare a more sober account. But for the Southern public’s consumption he was not so circumspect. Seven months later, in a speech in Florence, Alabama, where several Fort Pillow captives still languished in prison, an obdurate Forrest would employ the same imagery before a crowd that had come to serenade him, boasting that he had “seen the Mississippi run with blood for 200 hundred yards, and I’m gwine to see it again.” The crowd responded with cheers.⁶⁹

After Forrest returned to Jackson, Colonel James Neely led a diversionary expedition to Wolf River, where, as conspicuously as possible, he built pontoon bridges as if preparing to cross with a large cavalry force and attack Memphis. Colonel John McGuirk of the 3rd Mississippi Cavalry meanwhile scampered around the city’s southern suburbs, firing at Union pickets. These feints had the desired effect on General Stephen Hurlbut, who, instead of attempting to cut off Forrest’s imminent escape south, hunkered down at Fort Pickering and called on Vicksburg to send him four regiments’ worth of reinforcements “that I may have some moveable troops.”⁷⁰

Forrest’s troops were eminently movable, of course. As the sun rose on the carnage at Fort Pillow, a detachment from General Abraham Buford’s brigade rode up to the parapets at Columbus, Kentucky, to demand that garrison’s surrender. The terms were boilerplate Forrest.

Fully capable of taking Columbus and its garrison by force, I desire to avoid the shedding of blood and therefore demand the unconditional surrender of the forces under your command. Should you surrender, the negroes now in arms will be returned to their masters. Should I, however, be compelled to take the place, no quarter will be shown to the negro troops whatever; the white troops will be treated as prisoners of war.⁷¹

to exercise unusual precautions & to strengthen our position much as may be. For several days every man, not otherwise on stated detail, has been in the trenches, widening and deepening the ditches—also constructing works to protect the commissary. Buildings outside of & near the fort have been either taken down or burned so that the enemy can not employ them for a lodgment .⁷²

After serving the rebel truce delegation a hearty breakfast, Lawrence conferred with his officers and composed the following reply: “Being placed by my Government with adequate force to hold and repel all enemies from my post,” he declared, “surrender is out of the question.”⁷³

The rebels—some estimated the size of the detachment at merely 80 to 150 men—decided against an attack and soon retired, consoling themselves with the capture of about 150 horses and mules. Though the garrison’s surrender would have been nice, Buford’s detachment had accomplished its primary purpose, which was to prevent the Columbus garrison from sending reinforcements to Fort Anderson while Buford himself bore down on Paducah. ⁷⁴

After driving Colonel Stephen Hicks’s pickets into the fort and dodging fire from four Yankee gunboats, Buford and his men rounded up the horses the Paducah garrison had hidden from Forrest at a rolling mill nearby. “As a part of his movement,” wrote Wyeth, “as soon as he had driven the pickets in, he sent a flag of truce to the Federal commander, with a note, to which the name of General Forrest was signed, demanding the surrender of the garrison and fort,” and again “threatening to give no quarter if he were compelled to carry the place by assault.”⁷⁵

Long since reinforced, reequipped, and resupplied, Hicks accepted Buford’s offer of an hour’s truce in which to evacuate women and children to the gunboats. “After that time,” he replied, “come ahead. I am ready for you.” But Buford was by no means ready for him. Leaving a detachment under Faulkner to “keep up the scare,” the hulking general departed that night with some 140 Union army horses.⁷⁶

In late April, while Forrest was packing his kit at Jackson for his escape south, the Union army sent two infantry regiments fanning out across Lauderdale County. Remarking that his attempt to lure Sherman into chasing him into West Tennessee “was about played out,” Forrest cantered out of Jackson on May 1. Refusing an order to campaign alongside “Fighting Joe” Wheeler, in whom his men “had no confidence,” Forrest took a lot of men with him out of Tennessee, though “not as many,” claimed Union general Granville Moody, “as had been widely reported.”⁷⁷

Before departing, Forrest and his staff prepared a second, more complete account of the Fort Pillow affair, free of the gloating tone of the first. He had demanded the garrison’s surrender “to prevent further loss of life,” he said, and believed the garrison’s “capture without further bloodshed a certainty.” He still made no mention of the garrison being intoxicated, claimed that among his captives were “about forty negro women and children,” and praised Chalmers and his men for their “gallantry and courage.”⁷⁸

Dinkins remembered that the women of Jackson fawned upon Forrest and his officers and “served the men with nice things to eat and welcomed them heartedly.” As his detachments kept Memphis wondering where he would strike next, Forrest slipped back down to Mississippi virtually undetected, just as he had done after his first West Tennessee raid. “The command had been actively engaged for some time,” wrote Dinkins, “and the beautiful prairies of East Mississippi, with plenty of corn and fodder, were just what the men and horses needed.”⁷⁹