River Run Red

Meanwhile, General Mason Brayman telegraphed Sherman from his headquarters at Cairo that he feared that Fort Pillow had fallen. “General Shepley passed yesterday and saw the flag go down and thinks it a Surrender,” he said. “I have enough troops now from below, and will go down if necessary to that point. Captain Pennock will send gunboats. If lost, [Fort Pillow] will be retaken immediately.”²

Sherman, however, dismissed Brayman’s fear for the simple reason that four months earlier, as per his order, Hurlbut had evacuated Fort Pillow. “Fort Pillow has no guns or garrison,” he wired back confidently. “It was evacuated before I went out to Meridian.” But on April 14, Brayman confirmed Shepley’s report. “Fort Pillow was taken by storm at 3 p.m. on the 12th,” he told Sherman, “with six guns.” Approximately one hundred were taken prisoner, “and the rest killed. The whole affair was a scene of murder.”³

Sherman was thunderstruck. Not only had Hurlbut proved too timid to chase Forrest out of West Tennessee, he had garrisoned, inadequately and in violation of Sherman’s orders, one of the most demonstrably indefensible forts on the entire Mississippi. “We have lost 250 killed and wounded,” Hurlbut wrote Sherman. “The rebels butchered the negro troops after resistance ceased. Our garrison was four companies U.S. Heavy Artillery (Colored), and 250 recruits [of the] 13th Tennessee Cavalry, in all about 550 men,” which he insisted should have been “a sufficient force” for a fort originally designed to garrison ten thousand. Though Hurlbut tried to put the best face on it by guessing that “the enemy will not remain long,” he had no intention of finding out for himself. He told a lieutenant commander of the Mississippi fleet that he would “be much obliged if you will direct such movements on the part of the gun-boats as will ascertain the fact of occupation or abandonment.”⁴

On April 15, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton wrote Grant to confirm that Forrest had indeed captured Fort Pillow, and to report that the rebels had “sacked Paducah again, and have demanded surrender of Columbus, which has not yet been given up. The slaughter at Fort Pillow is great.” “The Sioux Indians after this,” Washburn wired Sherman, “will be regarded as models of humanity.” “I don’t understand it, as the place was long since abandoned by my order,” Sherman wired McPherson. “I don’t know what these men were doing at Fort Pillow,” he wrote Grant. “I ordered it to be abandoned before I went to Meridian, and it was so abandoned. General Hurlbut must have sent this garrison up recently from Memphis.” So many men were on furlough, he said, that Grierson and Hurlbut were afraid to go after Forrest. “I don’t know what to do with Hurlbut,” Sherman groaned. He had “full 10,000 men at Memphis, but if he had a million he would be on the defensive.” Sherman saw the disaster at Fort Pillow as the “first fruits of the system of trading posts designed to assist the loyal people of the interior. All these stations are a weakness,” he declared, “and offer tempting chances for plunder.” It seemed to Sherman that Forrest “has our men down there in cow, but I will try new leaders, for I believe our men will fight if led.”⁵

Realizing the full extent of the catastrophe, Grant finally overcame his understandable reluctance to demote one of Lincoln’s most loyal political allies. A few days after the massacre, Sherman wired Hurlbut, accusing him of “marked timidity in the management of affairs since Forrest passed north of Memphis. General Grant orders me to relieve you. You will proceed to Cairo and take command there.”⁶

Hurlbut demanded a court of inquiry, a request Lincoln gently—and Grant not so gently—would deny.⁷ In a pioneering nondenial denial, Hurlbut would answer the charge of drunkenness by dismissing it as “a very old story,” and address the charge of timidity by asserting that during the time he had “held the City of Memphis for two weeks, cut off by Van Dorn’s raid from Genl Grant’s army, with four regiments of untried Infantry and a squadron of Cavalry,” at every sunrise he could be found “on horseback and on the lines.”

His dismissal opened a floodgate of accusations that he was not just a drunkard but a crook and an extortionist whose underlings had imprisoned the sons of Memphis’s wealthiest families and held them for ransom. One of the worst allegations centered around Hurlbut’s favoring an Illinois pal named McCarty, who, it was claimed, had used his influence in Washington to obtain Hurlbut’s appointment as a major general and shared the profits of his nefarious speculations in exchange for permits to trade in illegal goods, including a shipment he made to De Soto County, Mississippi, in December 1862. Hurlbut denied any knowledge of McCarty’s machinations and characterized his two accusers as traitors, smugglers, and even adulterers. When Provost Marshal C. M. Willard of Chicago accused the general of dismissing him for interfering in his profiteering, Hurlbut denounced him as a “perfect ‘Copperhead.’” He summed up his defense by inviting his superiors’ “scrutinizing investigation,” but in effect conceding his utter failure as a district commander. For despite his “almost arbitrary power” over the citizens of Memphis, the “atmosphere [reeked] with corruption in a city where all the quick witted rascals from all quarters have accumulated, where honesty is the exception and vice the rule, where trade runs riot in speculation, and speculation grows into gambling,” a pursuit Hurlbut knew something about.⁸

Grant shrewdly replaced Hurlbut with his own close friend and tireless promoter, General Cadwallader Washburn: the brother of Illinois Republican congressman Elihu Benjamin Washburne (the added e was Elihu’s touch) and, like Hurlbut, one of Lincoln’s staunchest political allies. But Sherman’s choice of General Samuel Davis Sturgis to replace the once-lionized Benjamin Grierson was peculiar. Sturgis had been severely criticized for prematurely withdrawing his forces at Wilson’s Creek in 1861, and within a couple of months would so disgrace himself at Brice’s Crossroads that he would spend the rest of the war “awaiting orders.”⁹

“I have sent Sturgis down to whip Forrest,” Sherman declared. General James Birdseye McPherson, now in command of the Army of the Tennessee, ordered every Union regiment in West Tennessee to hunt down and destroy Forrest or, failing that, to prevent him from hauling his plunder back to Mississippi. Though “Paducah, Cairo, Columbus, Memphis, Vicksburg and Natchez must be held at all hazards,” McPherson took a dim view of defending small river forts like Fort Pillow and Columbus, and proposed a system of larger garrisons, cavalry scouts, gunboats, and marines to keep the Mississippi open to Union traffic. “All troops along the Miss. and Ohio Rivers,” McPherson ordered, “must strike at the Enemy wherever he is in reach and strike hard.”¹⁰

Hurlbut’s belated and well-deserved demotion did nothing to humble the righteousness of the North’s indignation. General McPherson deemed Fort Pillow “a deplorable affair”—the annihilation of a force that should not even have been there in the first place—but believed that in the end its propaganda value would make it “most damaging to the rebels.” “This is the most infernal outrage that has been committed since the war began,” wrote General Augustus Chetlain, who had answered Hurlbut’s call for artillery at Fort Pillow by sending Booth and his 6th USCHA to Bradford’s aid. “There is a great deal of excitement in town in consequence of this affair, especially among our colored troops. If this is to be the game of the enemy they will soon learn that it is one at which two can play.”¹¹

As details of the massacre sifted in, Northern editorialists and politicians vied with one another to issue the most vehement expressions of outrage. A delegate to Union-occupied Louisiana’s constitutional convention condemned the “Slaveholding chivalry” that had induced “the enemies of this country” to wage “a war of extermination” and “provoke the United States government to a bloody retaliation.” The New York Herald reported how “insatiate as fiends, bloodthirsty as devils incarnate, the rebels commenced an indiscriminate butchery of the whites and blacks, including those of both colors who had been previously wounded.” “The whole civilized world will be shocked by the great atrocity at Fort Pillow,” the Chicago Tribune predicted, “but in no respect does the act misrepresent the nature and precedents of Slavery.” Such was the theme of many Northern editorials that week: that the butchery at Fort Pillow could only have been committed by the soldiers of a slaveholding society.¹²

“I want no peace with Fort Pillow murderers,” declared a delegate to Maryland’s constitutional convention. “I want no peace with men who will destroy and torture our prisoners in the way they have done, until they will lay down their arms,” he said, “and submit to the authority of the Government, and acknowledge and yield to the civilization of the age.”¹³

“we will have suffered the fate of the troops at Fort Pillow. It is currently reported that the fort was taken by the rebels, and the garrison massacred. If I must lose my life thus, I will not die begging; and if this report be true, I look for the time when they will be rewarded.” But because there were so few white officers of colored regiments they were in “much more danger.”¹⁴

Belle Edmondson of Shelby County was delighted to observe that after the fall of Fort Pillow, “the Yanks are frightened to death in Memphis. How I wish we could get possession of our City once more!” she exclaimed. “Navigation of the Mississippi above blockaded for the present, and I hope, forever to the Yankees.”¹⁵

Hurlbut wanted to move five thousand men to the Tennessee River but felt he was not “at liberty to deviate from Genl Sherman’s orders” to turn his command over to Brigadier General Ralph Pomeroy Buckland until Washburn reached Memphis. The city was “full of all kinds of flying reports,” he said. Many civilians believed that Leonidas Polk with his infantry was descending on Corinth, while others said he was moving on La Grange.

“Memphis itself, if attacked by a competent force, is not a defensible point,” Hurlbut reminded McPherson. But in the event of an assault, he declared, he would draw in his pickets, burn all the bridges, and hold on “as long as it may be tenable.” However he had “no expectation” of such an attack, “as it is very generally & properly understood that as a last resort I will destroy the city before it shall be held by the enemy.” Though the Union army had managed to repair all the damage Forrest had wrought along the railway between Mobile and Okolona, Hurlbut still considered “the situation in West Tennessee very precarious and one that calls for the early concentration of troops to drive the enemy from their location.”¹⁶

In Gallatin, Tennessee, a diarist wrote that the Yankees were “scared to death; they are looking for Forrest. No passes given. All the stores are closed.” “The Yankees have a great dread of Forrest,” wrote a Southern correspondent. “The first question asked by nearly every prisoner we capture is ‘Where is Forrest?’” The Yankees “believe the extravagant stories of the Yankee papers in reference to the massacre at Fort Pillow, and they expect no quarter if they should unfortunately fall into his hands.”¹⁷

Frederick Douglass hoped that “contrary to the expectations” of those Northern whites who saw the slaughter as the inevitable consequence of black recruitment, “this horrible massacre at Fort Pillow” would instill in African Americans not terror but “an eagerness for the chance to avenge their slaughtered brethren.” Congressman William Darrah Kelley of Pennsylvania also defended black recruitment, but not by appealing to the better angels of white Americans. “I ask you, mother, was it not better that we should take the rebel’s slave and put him in the ranks of our army to fight, than that we should take your son and put him there?” And did “you, father, regret that it was not your son who was put to death at Fort Pillow?”¹⁸

Some black soldiers, however, had grown weary of being told by whites that it was up to them to avenge Fort Pillow and free their people. “I want to know,” asked a black soldier stationed in South Carolina, “if it was not the white man that put them in bondage. How can they hold us responsible for their evils? And how can they expect that we should do more to blot it out than they are willing to do themselves?” He did not wonder “at the conduct and disaster that transpired at Fort Pillow. I wonder that we have not had more New York riots and Fort Pillow massacres.”¹⁹

The African American press begged its readers, however, to rededicate themselves to the Confederacy’s defeat. “The southern breezes bring a wail of horror from the devoted Fort Pillow,” the Christian Recorder editorialized. “Yet, through this bloody sea lies the land of liberty; and although we may have to pour out rivers of blood, liberty is not attainable without it.” For ex-slaves, the massacre was merely butchery “on a grander scale, than those thousands of similar ones performed daily by the lords of the lash, before this rebellion—and, instead of daunting our courage, should only nerve us to do and dare more in this struggle for human rights and universal liberty.”²⁰

Despite such hopes, black recruitment in the West stalled and desertions from black regiments multiplied as it became clear that Lincoln was reluctant to order reprisals against the rebels who had decimated their brethren at Fort Pillow. In Texas, three days after Fort Pillow’s fall, a regiment of black Rhode Island artillery had to be subdued with cannon after declaring themselves “out of the service.” In late June, Chetlain reported that “the crime of Desertion” among black troops was “prevailing to an alarming extent,” and warned that all deserters, “when apprehended, will immediately be placed in close confinement, proceedings instituted against them, and vigorously prosecuted with a view to making examples of flagrant cases.” By October, the remaining companies of the 2nd USCLA were reporting that eighty-one men had died of disease, and forty-one men, twenty of them unmustered recruits, had deserted.²¹

if noticed, as the people generally anticipate it will be, by a vigorous proclamation from the Government, directing severe retaliation on the enemy for any similar outrages in the future, will impart a fresh momentum to recruiting. The colored people are excited. They now need to be encouraged. If the Government will give emphatic expression to the general desire on the subject . . . and Congress should speedily place black troops on the same footing as other troops, we - could raise, in my judgment, two, three, or more regiments here. At present recruiting is dull in spite of the liberal bounties offered. ²²

The number of whites volunteering to officer black regiments also sharply declined, and a great number of applicants withdrew their names. General Chetlain blamed their reluctance to join on “the tardiness of the Government to retaliate for the outrages committed at Fort Pillow.” So few whites were coming forward to command black troops that Chetlain asked whether Lorenzo Thomas would consider promoting blacks to serve as officers.²³

When it came to assigning blame for the massacre, some editorialists did not limit themselves to the Confederates. The Anglo African blamed the Federals as well. What could anyone expect when colored troops were being offered inferior pay and Union soldiers abused black people “right under the windows” of the White House? “Villains dressed in the garb of Union soldiers were permitted to insult colored people,” and it was not until whites complained that the soldiers were removed to a camp outside the city.²⁴

“We cannot pass over the Fort Pillow massacre in silence,” wrote a Connecticut woman to the New York Independent. She proposed that the best retaliation would be to give black men “the right of suffrage” and make them citizens. “Such a response would be a greater protection to the black soldier,” she wrote. “He would be recognized as a man. It would do infinitely greater damage to the rebel cause; for it would be a blow aimed at its very corner-stone. We must remember that, while we deny to these blacks the rights of men, we share in the guilt of those who slaughter them like cattle.”²⁵

The sixty-seven-year-old New York abolitionist Gerritt Smith, who had helped to bankroll John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, extended the blame for Fort Pillow all the way to England “because it was she who planted slavery in America, and because it is slavery out which this crime has come. Our nation however is the far guiltier one. The guilt of this crime is upon all her - people who have contributed to that public sentiment which releases white men from respecting the rights of black men.” Smith believed that even President Lincoln was “not entirely innocent” of the massacre because he had been so slow to extend protection to black troops and refused to recognize the right of African Americans to vote.²⁶