River Run Red

Toward the end of their dismal journey south, many of Forrest’s white prisoners were too weak to walk and had to be transported in open wagons to Andersonville Prison, where they were to join Hawkins’s disgraced 7th Tennessee Cavalry (USA), fresh from its fiasco at Union City. But some white captives did not live long enough to enter Andersonville’s stockade.³

Billy Nail of 13/E had the misfortune of falling into the hands of the very Confederate unit from which he had deserted earlier in the war: Forrest’s 16th Tennessee Cavalry. His family back in Crockett County believed he was killed during the battle, but he appears on Forrest’s list of captives. Since there is no record of his reaching a rebel prison, either he died of his wounds during the march, or his former comrades executed him as a deserter. His second wife, Sally, was pregnant with his sixth child when he died, and in August gave birth to a boy.⁴

In one of the cruelest ironies of the war, the white Fort Pillow survivors would, with the rest of Andersonville’s prisoners, fall victim to the North’s indignation over the Fort Pillow massacre, for by the time they arrived at Andersonville an outraged Stanton had declared that after Fort Pillow the Union would no longer exchange prisoners with the Confederacy until Richmond agreed to recognize black soldiers as prisoners of war. The rebels refused, and the impasse contributed to the horrendous overcrowding of rebel prisons.⁵

Built to accommodate a maximum of ten thousand, Camp Sumter, as Andersonville’s prison was called, would contain as many as thirty-three thousand Federals at a time. Apparently the rebels barely deigned to recognize homegrown Yankees either, for though almost 30 percent of Andersonville’s aggregate forty-five thousand inmates would die by the end of the war, Andersonville would claim the lives of 107, or 77 percent, of its 139 documented Fort Pillow prisoners.

After the Union captured Vicksburg, the army discovered a great many rebel combatants who turned out to have previously signed paroles pledging not to take up arms again. Grant was therefore in no hurry to resolve the impasse, for the termination of exchanges benefited the side that could afford to lose the most men. If such was the Federals’ calculation, the Union itself must share some of the blame for Andersonville’s subsequent horrors. But there was plenty of blame to go around. The camp was located in a malarial swamp with nothing but an open trough for human waste and an inadequate and contaminated water supply. Richmond’s callous inattention, sadistic guards, inadequate medical care, Georgia’s swelter, the camp’s incompetent administration, and the Confederacy’s own shrinking resources combined to make Camp Sumter the Civil War’s ultimate hellhole.

Some five hundred Tennesseans, who had been captured by Forrest—arrived among us; the most of who were hatless, bootless, and shoeless, without coats, pants and blankets. . . . They were wholly destitute of cups, plates, spoons, and dishes of every kind as well as of all means of purchasing them; they having been stripped of these things by their captors. In their destitute condition they were turned into the stockade and left to shift for themselves in the best manner they - could. To borrow cups of the fellow-prisoners was an impossibility, for no one could be expected to lend what, if it were not returned, would insure his own destruction, particularly when the borrower was an utter stranger. There was nothing left for them but to bake their raw meal and bacon upon stones and chips, eat it without moisture, and afterward to go to the brook like beasts to quench their thirst.⁶

The first of the Fort Pillow survivors to die at Andersonville was apparently nineteen-year-old Bill Lovett of 13/A, who succumbed on May 19, only a few days after he and his comrades reached the prison. He was one of six who died that May, but the fatalities accelerated as the weather turned tropical. Eleven would die in June, seventeen in July, twenty-eight in August, twenty-seven in September.

These deaths reverberated throughout West Tennessee. One of the casualties that June was George W. Babb Jr. From the age of eleven, Babb had been his family’s mainstay. His father had kidney trouble and could not farm, so every spring his diligent son would work for his grandmother for twelve dollars a month and, except for what little he spent on clothes, hand over everything else to his parents. A Union sympathizer, Babb had fled from the Confederate press gangs that plagued Obion County and moved to Illinois in 1862 to live with his older brother Jasper. But on November 25, 1863, he had returned to Tennessee to serve in Bradford’s regiment, and ten days later he was mustered into Company A. While out on a scout his feet froze, and on February 12 he was admitted to the hospital at Paducah, about twenty miles from his home, and became one of the many Marine Hospital patients Forrest captured and offered to exchange. His mother was informed of his capture by Colonel Edward Crossland of Forrest’s command, who, returning home wounded, promised to try to get him released. But by the time Crossland was well enough to keep his promise, Babb had died at Andersonville.⁷

Paton Alexander of Obion County was in his forties when he enrolled: a married man with five children, the oldest of whom, William, was thirteen years old. He had already seen combat in the Mexican War, serving with Haynes’s Company of Tennessee Mexican War Volunteers, and as one of the few veterans in Bradford’s Battalion had been mustered in as a corporal in Company D. He died of scurvy in July. Another casualty that month, eighteen-year-old Henry Clay Carter, had been working as a farm hand for his widowed mother in Crockett County when he and his big brother William joined 13/E in January 1864. The two brothers were able to escape death at Fort Pillow but not at Andersonville, where Henry died of scurvy and “dysenteria.”⁸

Andrew McKee of Dyer County was thirty-eight years old when he joined 13/C. Having borne him three sons and two daughters, his first wife died in 1857, but a few months later he married Nancy Landry Russell, who in 1858 added another daughter to his brood. Captured at Fort Pillow and imprisoned at Andersonville, in September he died of scurvy with his comrades looking on. Two of McKee’s sons lived for about three years with their stepmother, after which they were “turned loose to drift for themselves and never got any education of any consequence.”⁹

Danny Hopper of Madison County was just a kid when he enlisted in 13/D in December 1863. Captured at Fort Pillow, Hopper died at Andersonville in September of “black scurvy.” Described as an honest, robust Obion County man who always took “a deep interest in the comity of his family,” Benjamin W. King was mustered into Company D in January 1864, captured at Fort Pillow, and died at Andersonville of chronic diarrhea. ¹⁰

Private Ephraim L. Churchwell of Decatur County, Tennessee, was a blacksmith for Company A and the father of five children. Captured at Fort Pillow, he died on October 11, 1864, of scurvy. Jim Clark of Obion County appears to have deserted from the 13th “before Pay Rolls were made out.” His neighbor John Fields filed a claim with the quartermaster general’s office in which he maintained that he used to hide Clark and his friend Chapman Underwood from the rebels when they were home. By April 12, Clark was back with his comrades at Fort Pillow, just in time to be captured and taken to Andersonville, where he died of scurvy in October.¹¹

A few survived, but barely. Trained as a wagonmaker and carpenter, George Ellis was working as a dry goods clerk at Columbus when he enlisted as a sergeant in Company C. In the snows and freezing rains of February 1863 rheumatism sank so deeply into his joints and bones that he was unable to serve in the field. By the time of his capture at Fort Pillow, he was reduced to shuffling papers for Bradford and his staff. Despite starvation and exposure and a case of the mumps, he somehow survived captivity in the Confederacy’s “outrageous prisons” at Andersonville and Florence, South Carolina. Nevertheless, he returned to his regiment a fragile husk of himself, and by 1879 was forced to give up his craft and take up preaching in the woods and fields around Gardner Station, Tennessee.¹²

Jim Christenberg of Company A was a prodigious bounder when he joined the 13th. As a brakeman on the Memphis and Ohio Railroad, he had taken full advantage of his mobility by marrying at least two women: one as a Mr. Medicus, the other as a Mr. James. By the time he joined the 13th, he had already gotten a taste of army life foraging for the 19th and 26th Illinois Infantries. Arrested by the rebels and imprisoned at Trenton, Tennessee, he finagled his release with the help of a friend, and at the age of thirty joined Bradford’s Battalion in the summer of 1863. Prison, however, seems to have been Christenberg’s destiny. Not long after his regiment was moved to Fort Pillow, he was incarcerated again for abandoning his post and committing depredations against local citizens, and then imprisoned yet again by the rebels after his capture at Fort Pillow. He adapted well enough to his captivity to survive both Richmond’s notorious Libby Prison and Andersonville, but perhaps freedom did not agree with him so well, for shortly after his release in March 1865, he died in Nashville of an unspecified disease, leaving at least two wives and an unknown number of children. ¹³

Doctor Z. Alexander was no doctor, though by the end of the war he might have wished he were. A farmer from Obion County, Tennessee, he enrolled at Union City in December 1863, and at the time of the battle at Fort Pillow was recuperating from an illness at home in Troy, when his house “was surrounded by confederate soldiers,” and he was captured as well. An old friend and fellow prisoner named James Welch of the 7th Tennessee Cavalry testified that Alexander “was A sound man untell he was taken prisner at fort piller and placed in that prison Hell at Antersonville georga.” “While in prison,” Alexander himself recalled, “I lay upon the bare ground, and had only one blanket to protect me from the sun and weather. Had very rough, unpalatable food, and but litle of that. I was weak, emaciated, and broken down in health generally.” Suffering from scurvy, lumbago, and a case of chronic diarrhea that resulted in hemorrhoids “quite as large as an English walnut,” Alexander complained that he left Andersonville chronically “ill in body and mind.” Perhaps to divert attention from the rather dubious circumstances of his capture, Alexander accused the pension office of discriminating against Homegrown Yankees like himself. “Don’t doo like Jenral Farest,” he told them, “when he masecred forte piller after surrender becose we wer tenn solgers. There was not but few of bradfords battalion ever returned from prison and not but three was able to doo eny duty, but if you think it is rong” to count him and his comrades as legitimate Union soldiers, then the United States might as well “nock us in the hed as old forist did and let us go.”¹⁴

Tom McMurry of 13/E emerged from Andersonville with aches in his joints and jaws, loose teeth, and chest pains, and eventually drank himself to death. Incarceration reduced Anderson Bailey of Company B to a shell. He suffered from tuberculosis, scurvy, diarrhea, and ulcers on his legs that ran all the way to the bone and reerupted every year for the rest of his life.¹⁵

Hard luck followed even the escapees. Bugler Miles Deason of 13/B slipped away from the carnage at Fort Pillow and eventually returned to what was left of Bradford’s 13th. By July 1864, the 13th Tennessee Cavalry showed only two officers and forty men, and on August 22, 1864, Military Governor Andrew Johnson changed the decimated regiment’s designation from the 13th to the 14th Tennessee Cavalry, and then consolidated it into Company E of Hurst’s 6th Tennessee Cavalry. Deason’s comrade George H. Dunn judged him “a good and faithful soldier whilst in the service,” but Deason was declared a deserter after disappearing near Johnsonville during a skirmish with a detachment of Forrest’s cavalry. A day or so later, his comrades found his bugle hanging from a tree and his horse grazing not far from where Deason had last been sighted. He never returned home, and his parents struggled to accept the army’s claim that their boy had deserted. But thirteen years later, a number of Confederate cavalry veterans came forward to testify that they had seen Deason executed by a squad of guerrillas. “Deason was in arms when captured,” one of them recalled, “and said he belonged to the United States Cavalry.” Nevertheless, a motley squad commanded by Captain Bruce L. Phillips of the 14th Tennessee Infantry shot Deason to death. If the story is true, Miles M. Deason was apparently the only captive from the 13th to be subsequently killed in action. ¹⁶

Perhaps the unluckiest member of that unfortunate garrison was a white farmer from Sevier County, Tennessee, named John W. Long. Caught up in three of the Civil War’s worst horrors, he was probably merely passing through Fort Pillow at the time of the massacre, for he belonged not to the 13th but to the 3rd East Tennessee Cavalry, having enlisted at Murfreesboro the previous December. It is a mystery why Long was at Fort Pillow in the first place, for by March the rest of his regiment had returned to Nashville to escort convoys and guard railroads. Nevertheless, there he was, and he managed to survive the battle in fair enough shape to add his name to the Wizard’s list of prisoners. Nathan Bedford Forrest was the last man on earth a member of the 3rd would have chosen as his captor, however, for just two months before the Battle of Fort Pillow, the 3rd had killed Forrest’s dashing young brother Jeffrey at Okolona, Mississippi. Long managed, however, to survive the forced march south and nearly a year’s imprisonment at Andersonville. Then, in late April 1865, he boarded a steamship with some 2,300 others, most of them fellow parolees from rebel prison camps. Possibly by accident, possibly as the result of sabotage by a former St. Louis fireman and unrepentant rebel arsonist named Robert Louden, the steamship Sultana blew up near Memphis on April 27, 1865. Among the 1,800 men, women, and children who were burned to death or drowned was poor, luckless John W. Long, survivor of the most notorious massacre and most miserable prison in the Civil War only to die in the most devastating marine catastrophe in American history. He was twenty-three years old. ¹⁷

None of the Fort Pillow prisoners at Andersonville escaped, but the few who were incarcerated elsewhere in the South made several attempts. Imprisoned in an old cotton house at Hamburg, across the river from Augusta, Georgia, Martin V. Day of 13/C was “half starved, sometimes more than half naked and often quite sick.” Almost a year to the day after the massacre, he and a Michigan cavalryman escaped by jumping out a window. They spent a little over a week together “hiding and traveling toward Charleston, when one night as they were crossing a stream on a Rail Road bridge in South Carolina they were captured by a squad of Home Guards” and taken to a prison in Midway. Two weeks later, news reached them that General Joe Johnson had surrendered to Sherman. Day’s guards told him that they had orders to release all prisoners of war but because the roads were full of rebel soldiers “they would keep them a while for fear they would be killed.” Two days later, Day was finally “turned out of prison.” “Sick, weak, nearly naked,” and flat broke, he walked for about three days to the nearest Union encampment at Summerville, where his countrymen gave him “an old suit of clothes and something to eat,” and put him on a train to Charleston. After several weeks, he finally found what remained of his regiment reorganized into Company E of the 6th Tennessee Cavalry and stationed at Pulaski.¹⁸

After the war, Anderson Jones of 13/C made the unlikely claim that only five days after his enlistment, Bradford had granted him a sixty-day furlough, “and the very day my furlough expired, my said regiment was attacked and cut to pieces by Forrest’s men and were all killed or captured or scattered.” Captured a few days later at his home “by the troops of Bell and Buford,” Jones was conveyed to Mobile and then to Andersonville, and was finally “sent out to the front to dig pits and build breastworks.” Jones said he was “closely guarded as a prisoner of war,” but on July 3 he managed to escape by jumping from a railroad bridge and into a creek as his train rounded the foot of Georgia’s Kennesaw Mountain. Jones “slowly made my way back by a circuitous route to Columbus, Kentucky,” where he encountered First Lieutenant Frank Smith and joined his comrades in 6/E.¹⁹

Six out of the approximately fourteen Fort Pillow survivors imprisoned at Florence, South Carolina, did not survive their incarceration. Though Colonel John F. Iverson, the prison commandant, was unusually kind to Northern prisoners, he regarded Homegrown Yankees as “damned traitors” and treated them harshly. Humphrey Jones and John Burrus died in the fall of 1864. Turner Lunceford of Haywood County died of scurvy and starvation, and his comrade James W. Antwine, a past deserter from the Confederate army, died of exposure. Lunceford and Antwine each left a widow and four children; their comrade Michael Cleek left five.²⁰

First Lieutenant Nicholas Logan of 13/C was imprisoned at Macon, Georgia. According to Leaming, the guards singled Logan out for “mistreatment” as a “home-made Yankee,” and he died within weeks of his capture, leaving a widow and four children. G. W. Kirk of 13/A had deserted from the 11th Texas Cavalry (CSA) earlier in the war, and subsequently deserted from the 13th in February. He returned to Fort Pillow, however, in time for the massacre, and was captured and shipped off to Richmond, Virginia. He survived his imprisonment, but just barely. Headed home aboard the paroled prison ship Gen, he would die off Cape Hatteras on March 30, 1865.²¹