River Run Red

Long before Fort Pillow’s fall, Forrest’s men had become experienced at disposing of black captives. All through the war his command had intercepted slaves the Union army had emancipated, impressing them as laborers and officers’ servants, or returning them to their masters. The following Union pass was found on a contraband named Wally Carns who, with his family, was captured by General Chalmers while trying to make his way north:

Head Quarters Army of The South West

Helena Ark Aug 15" 186[illegible]

Special Orders No. 1250

Wally Carns & family, a colored formerly slaves, having by direction of their owner been engaged in the rebel service are hereby confiscated as being contraband of war, and not being in the Public Service are permitted to pass the pickets of this command northward, and are forever emancipated from a master who permitted them to assist in an attempt to break up the Government and Laws of our Country.

By Command Of Major General Curtis.²

Forrest now ordered Chalmers to see to it that “no negroes will be delivered to their owners on the march. They must all go to Jackson.” Though Sandy Addison testified to seeing four black captives shot down after marching a mile or so from Fort Pillow, the black soldiers who were taken prisoner after the massacre fared far better than their white counterparts. Of Forrest’s approximately sixty-two black prisoners, thirteen escaped, and forty-three eventually returned to their regiments, and all this despite the fact that more than half of them were wounded, many of them seriously.³

The reason their mortality rate was comparatively low was because the artillerists, unlike their white comrades, “were considered as private property by the Confederates, who did not recognize Mr. Lincoln’s proclamation as giving their slaves legitimate freedom.” Acclimatized to the South, accustomed to hardship, well trained in the art of survival, they also had monetary value to the South, and, once the rebels’ rage was expended, received far better treatment than Andersonville’s inmates.⁴

Badly wounded, exhausted, convinced in some cases that their execution was imminent, some of them endeavored to elicit their former masters’ sympathy. Colonel Barteau reported that along the march his black prisoners “freely expressed themselves as to the conduct of many of their white officers, and many of them admitted with expressions of condemnation the great error into which they had been led as to the defense of the fort, their drunkenness and folly of conduct, putting the blame upon their officers.”⁵

As their battle rage receded, the rebels spared a few prisoners they deemed too weak to continue their journey south. Henry Parker of 6/D was so badly wounded in the hip that three days after the massacre the rebels pronounced him worthless as a slave and left him by the side of the road to die. He did not die, however, and somehow made his way back to Memphis, where the Union army pronounced him worthless as a soldier and discharged him. Shot in the groin, John Cowan of 2/C was also left by the wayside; he would live another thirteen years until his chronically infected wound finally killed him.⁶

Over the days following the massacre, escapees trickled into Memphis and Cairo, picked up from the riverbank by a variety of vessels. By one exaggerated account, seventy-one men of the 6th USCHA had turned up by the first of May “after being prisoners several days.” On the night of April 16 a gunboat had turned up at Mound City with ten more wounded men and twenty other escapees and refugees. Over the next month more men would stagger into Fort Pickering, one by one.⁷

More blacks than whites escaped from Forrest as they made their way south, in part because the rebels, trusting that the artillerists were reluctant conscripts and so sentimental about their bondage that they were eager to return to their masters, sent them off on errands. Alfred Coleman of 6/B, for example, was assigned the task of feeding the rebels’ horses, but once he “got the horses between me and them,” he escaped into a “dark and drizzling rain.”⁸

Sent down to a creek to fetch water for McCulloch, Frank Hogan of 6/A escaped from Forrest about two hours before daylight on April 13 and, zigzagging back and forth along the river road after the manner of runaway slaves, made his way to within a few miles of Fort Pickering, where he was brought in by a Union patrol.⁹

Philip Young of 6/A was held captive for thirteen days and brought to Holly Springs, Mississippi, with over a hundred white and about thirty black prisoners. Along the way, he repeatedly heard rebel officers declare “that they intended to kill the last one of the negroes after they got as far down south as they wanted to,” and a rebel captain “swore he would shoot me after I had been prisoner thirteen days.” Taking him at his word, Young slipped away on the morning of the thirteenth day and found his way back up to Memphis.¹⁰

Armstrong Burgess, who had fled his master in Franklin County, Alabama, to join 6/B, was among those who, though presumed to have been killed at Fort Pillow, limped back to their regiment a year or so after the massacre. Struck over the head by a rebel musket, he regained consciousness only to find himself in rebel custody, from which he did not escape until the following spring. Burgess bore a deep dent in his skull from his wound at Fort Pillow, an injury that may have contributed to the fistfights that led to his eventual incarceration in Irving Block prison. Burgess apparently ascribed his mood swings to a case of syphilis he claimed to have contracted during the war, but his doctor could never find any evidence of it. Burgess’s first wife, by whom he had eight children, died in 1906, whereupon this luckless old veteran married a woman named Lewisa who, within a few months of their wedding, was killed in Brinkley, Arkansas, by a tornado.¹¹

Fifteen-year-old Joe Boyd Jr. and his mother, Caroline, had toiled as slaves on the Boyd plantation in Somerville, Tennessee, while his father, Joe senior, labored on the Bright place nearby. Boyd was among the host of runaway slaves who flocked to the Union lines after the fall of Corinth on May 30, 1862. For some months he lived in the sprawl of Corinth’s contraband camp and apparently worked as a servant, accompanying his Yankee employer on scouts around Meridian and Coldwater, Mississippi, until finally, in November 1863, he joined Company D of the 6th USCHA. Though shot through the right knee, Boyd was one of those badly wounded black soldiers whom Forrest’s command nonetheless deemed fit to march. Marched and transported to Chickasaw, Mississippi, “and held for about a year,” he escaped “and returned to my regiment at Memphis, Tennessee” on July 18, 1865.¹²

After his capture, Henry Dix of 6/D cooked for a sergeant of the 15th Mississippi Cavalry, which spent most of its time with no fixed camp, scouting in Mississippi and Alabama. He was recaptured every time he tried to escape, but finally released with a number of other prisoners after the Battle of Selma “by Gen. Forrest of the Confederate Army who informed them that they were free,” whereupon Dix immediately reported to his regiment in Memphis. ¹³

Another of those who staggered back to Memphis that first year was - Thomas Grier of Madison County, Tennessee, who had found himself a few days after the battle languishing in rebel custody in La Grange, Tennessee, the scene of his enrollment in the Union army. Separated from the other prisoners, he was taken to De Soto County, Mississippi, where he slaved for a planter named Arthur McKracken. But in March 1865, he made his escape and found his way back to his regiment.¹⁴

According to a comrade, Elias Irwin was “subjected to such ill treatment” at Fort Pillow that he was nearly “buried alive.” He was taken with Samuel Green and Charles Fox to Mobile and eventually to the salt works at Clarksville, Alabama. The following spring he managed to slip away from his guards and make his way to the Union lines near Selma. General James Harrison Wilson and his officers offered to employ him as a servant until, they said, they could find a safe way to transport him back to his regiment. But either Wilson’s command grew so attached to Irwin’s services that they would not let him go or Wilson was far more cautious than his counterparts about obtaining transport for the survivors of the Fort Pillow massacre, for Elias cooked and washed and guarded rebel prisoners for them for almost a year, and was not allowed to return to Memphis until September 1865.¹⁵

At the time of Fort Pillow’s fall, General Leonidas Polk complained that he was having “great difficulty” procuring slaves from local planters “to complete the works for the defense of Mobile.” He eagerly requisitioned Forrest’s black captives and on May 20 delivered them to Mobile’s commander, General Dabney H. Maury. “Put them to work on fortifications,” Maury instructed his chief engineer, and “keep records of the time in order to remunerate their owners.”¹⁶

Georgia-born Anthony Flowers, who had had the bad luck to enroll in Company C of the 6th USCHA less than a week before the massacre, was put to work building Confederate fortifications, despite a right leg so severely damaged by gunshot wounds that his broken shin had practically formed a second knee, and a left foot so shattered that it merely flopped alongside him when he walked.¹⁷

Saved from death by Forrest himself, the gallant gunner Willis Ligon of 6/C “did not sign any papers with the Confederates or enlist with them,” but they “made me promise to stay with them.” At the end of August, however, he escaped during the rebel retreat from Holly Springs. “The confederates kept passing me and saying, ‘trot up or the Yankees will get you,’ so I just kept dropping back, and at last I just got out into the wood and waited until night and traveled two or three days before I reached the Union soldiers.”¹⁸

A rebel struck Roach Turner of Madison County, Tennessee, in the lower abdomen with a rifle butt before taking him into captivity. A boyhood friend who, as a private in the 61st USCI, was aboard the Silver Cloud the morning after the battle, recognized him sitting among Forrest’s prisoners. Turner was taken down to Pontotoc, Mississippi, and put to work on the plantation of John E. Steel. But that May his owner, a Confederate major named Turner, found out where the Confederates were keeping him and brought him home to Tennessee. Escaping from Turner’s plantation in October, he returned to his regiment and was mustered out the following January. ¹⁹

“I was not treated like the other prisoners,” recalled Allen James Walker. After his capture, Corporal John C. Peevey of Willis’s Texas Battalion made Walker “change my U.S. uniform for Confederate clothes and kept me with them for nearly a year” as his servant. “I went with them all over Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi,” until around New Year’s 1865, when “Peevey sent me with his brother” to their small farm near Gonzales, the “Cradle of Texas Independence,” where they made him “practically their slave, and I put in a crop that Spring for them.”²⁰

Like many another Texas slave, Walker was not informed that the war was over until mid-July 1865. “Hearing of some U.S. soldiers coming through there, I ran off and got with a wagon train” that took him to Columbus, Texas, sixty-five miles west of Houston, “where I was turned over to headquarters and given transportation to Galveston. Here I was sent to New Orleans by ship,” and from there to New York, where he fell in with a crowd of veterans from the “many regiments scattered about.” The army “sent us all round in Virginia and North Carolina, dropping each man off as he reached his command,” until they reached Baltimore, where Walker “was given transportation by rail to Cairo, Illinois, and from there by boat to Memphis, Tennessee, where I arrived about November 14, 1865, and found my regiment camped on Vance Street.” Now known as “the 11th U.S. Colored Volunteer Infantry” and commanded by Colonel Turner, “the regiment was filled up with strangers, recruits and substitutes,” though he was relieved to find that “several of the old company boys were still there.” After being discharged, Walker lived in Germantown, Tennessee, until he moved back to Memphis in 1894. ²¹

One of the few black captives to survive the battle uninjured was a former slave from Grenada, Mississippi, named Charles Fox. After Forrest’s drove reached Ripley, he was separated from the others, taken to Oxford, Mississippi, and briefly returned to his master in Grenada. What befell him at his master’s hands he does not tell, but after only a week he was sent away to a military prison in Mobile, Alabama, from which he would be taken in irons and under guard to work the town wharf as a stevedore. After four months of loading and unloading cargo for the Confederates, he was taken up the Tom Bigbee River to labor for five more months in Clarksville, Alabama, on one of the Confederacy’s few remaining sources of the saltpeter required for the manufacture of gunpowder. He was then taken to Huntsville, where, to impede Sherman’s progress, the rebels put him to work burning bridges and destroying railroads. When the Federals closed in on Alabama, he was taken to Jackson, Mississippi; from there, General Chalmers, whom he had last seen riding along the riverbank, exhorting his soldiers to wipe out black troops, sent him to work on a plantation near Shreveport, Louisiana. There he remained until the Federals ventured into the parish, whereupon he and perhaps a dozen other slaves and prisoners ran to the Union lines. The Federals transported him to Little Rock and finally back to his regiment in Memphis, where he reappeared, a ghost of himself, in mid-July 1865. After the war Fox would become an accomplished cook at a distinguished Memphis hotel called the Carlton House.²²

Badly wounded in the hip, the sole survivor of his gun crew, the heroic Sam Green of 6/B had a tale to tell. After the rebels separated out the black prisoners, they eventually loaded them into boats bound for Fort Gaines, an island stronghold at the head of Mobile Bay. There they were imprisoned on a barge, to which “sand was brought by other boats, and we took wheelbarrows and carried this sand and dumped it in the bay and built up the land inside of the spiles until we could plant siege guns upon the fort we built.”

Green remained on Mobile Bay for about six months, “when I was taken across to Mobile and put to work in Hitchock’s Press,” a large ironsmith shop that specialized in forging iron for rebel pontoons. Here he ran into Henry Dix of his old regiment, who had also been captured at Fort Pillow but had proceeded to Mobile by a roundabout route, via Horton County, Mississippi, where he had worked under guard on an officer’s plantation.

At Hitchock’s Press, Green labored as “a striker for a white blacksmith” and in his spare time split firewood for an Irish woman who lived next door. Green remained in Mobile until the city was attacked by the Federals in late July 1864. “While the fight was going on at Fort [Blakely],” he recalled, “the forges and iron work at Hitchock’s Press were all loaded on a steamboat to be taken to Selma, Alabama. It was intended that all the workmen should go on the boat and go to some place. But after the iron was loaded, I just stepped around the corner” and ducked into the house of the Irish woman for whom he had split wood and who now hid him from the rebels until the Union army landed on Sunday, April 9, 1865, just three days shy of the anniversary of his capture at Fort Pillow.

At ten that morning, Green bade farewell to his Irish hostess and made for the Yankee camp, where Green informed the Union commander that there were black Union prisoners in Mobile, and the Yankee general immediately sent squads fanning out through the city to gather them up. The general told him and his comrade Armstrong Burgess that their regiment was back in Memphis. Even though it had been “made up new,” he said, they still belonged to it “and must go back.”

The general wrote out “transportation papers to go to New Orleans” and then up the river to Fort Pickering on the Belle of Memphis, the same boat that had transported Green’s company to Fort Pillow over a year before. At Memphis, Green “found my old company at Dunn Green at the foot of Poplar Street.” But he and Burgess hardly knew their own company, “as we had all new officers and many new men. The men who recognized us—there was mighty few of them left—said, ‘The dead had come to life.’”

During the year following the attack on Fort Pillow, recalled Green’s sergeant, Wilbur Gaylord, “the old men of company B came straggling back one at a time.” According to his comrade Benjamin Jones, who had himself survived wounds received at Fort Pillow, Green had returned to Memphis “a generally used-up man” who “didn’t do much duty” after his return but hung “round the camp pretty much.” After his discharge in January 1866, Green worked on the levee at Memphis and lived with his wife, Jane, “in a little hut on the Pigeon Roost Road” until a white man named Peck “claimed the ground we lived on” and ran him off. For a while he worked for a Memphis reaper, packing grain and stacking hay, for which, because of his injuries, he was paid about half the standard wage. He subsequently tenant-farmed for Bev Davis of Horn Lake, Mississippi, but by now his nagging wounds and his ever dimmer prospects had embittered him. His fellow tenant farmers found him a “not entirely peaceable person.” A black neighbor named Morning Clay recalled how Green had “tried to Boss me, and I wouldn’t have it. Sam had a quarrel with me: two or three of ’em. He hit me, and I have the marks of it now. Sam was quarrelsome,” Clay concluded, “a kind of bigoted fellow.” Deeming him “a good worker, but a bad man,” Green’s employer dismissed him after he had planted a single crop.

Green returned to Memphis and worked nights manning the casting ladle in Randall and Heath’s Foundry, where he did what he could to hide his disability so that his employers would not cut his wages. He finally emigrated by steamer to Helena, Arkansas, where he took on a series of jobs, harvesting a crop on what had been none other than Gideon Pillow’s plantation, and hauling seed for Bennett’s Cotton Seed Factory. But by the time he reached the age of sixty his old wounds and a life of crushing poverty had turned him into what a white benefactor described as “an almost helpless cripple” who would “doubtless have died of starvation but for the contributions of his neighbors.”

“I have no home or any means of support,” he wrote the Pension Office in an apparently futile effort to receive support. “I have no family except one small boy called Jessy who is my child and is seven years old. He is all the help I have about the house. He brings my wood and water.” In fact, at the time of Green’s writing, Jessy was “away asking for food for both of us to eat.”