River Run Red

Forrest ordered his men to charge across an open field, recalled Sol Brantley of Duckworth’s 7th, but “we kept on going, and the enemy was so excited that they was shooting too high and cannon balls and bombs was flying over our heads, singing like bumble bees.” After the rebels broke their lines, the Federals, black and white, rallied two miles from the crossroads “and again made stout battle for about half an hour,” recalled Hancock of Barteau’s 22nd Tennessee Cavalry. At last they countercharged their pursuers, only to run into range of double charges of rebel canister. “As the negro soldiery broke, after their last stand, they were seen generally to tear something from their uniform and throw it away, which subsequently proved to have been a badge on which was printed, ‘REMEMBER FORT PILLOW,’” while at the same time their white officers “threw off their shoulder straps, or insignia of rank.”²

Convinced they would be massacred like their comrades at Fort Pillow, “many of them were shot down while thus wildly persisting in seeking safety in flight,” and “some of them even went so far as to cut off the legs of their pants at the knees” so they could pass themselves off as slaves. Forrest’s weary men pursued them for five or six miles, not giving up the chase until dark. Some black troops were betrayed by civilians as they cut through the brush. “We were more humane to them,” Hancock declared, “than they had sworn to be to us. We did not kill them on the spot,” he said, “as the poor, misguided wretches had been made to believe” would happen, but treated them “kindly” by arranging to have them “put up for sale, assigned as laborers to Confederate forces, or returned to their masters as slaves.”³

The rebel Sol Brantley remembered it differently. “We run them all the way from the field of battle to Ripley, Miss.,” he wrote, “a distance of 60 miles. We capture white prisoners all along, but no negro prisoners were taken. The negroes throwed their guns down and then their coats and last of all their shoes and run back towards Memphis much faster than when they come out to meet us, and I venture to say,” Brantley concluded, “that if any of those negroes are living today they will tell you that they dident even have time to start a crap game in Miss.”⁴

Exhausted after a day’s fighting, the rebels were nonetheless rejuvenated by the repeated cry, “Here are the damn negroes!” According to Union accounts, as their white officers fled into the woods, the black troops covered Sturgis’s retreat, pausing to fire every two hundred yards and thus preventing the rebels from cutting up the Yankee rear, even countercharging at one point with fixed bayonets and at great cost. John A. Crutchfield of Russell’s 20th Tennessee Cavalry called Tishomingo Creek “one of the hardest fought battles since the war began.”⁵

Wounded stragglers hid as best they could in the underbrush, and the road in both directions was lined with abandoned Union wagons “as far as - could be seen,” recalled a resident. “Several dead negroes in blue uniform were lying by the roadside not far from our dwelling.” It was “certain that a great many negroes were killed. They wore the badge, ‘Remember Fort Pillow, ’ and it was said that they carried a black flag. This incensed the Southern soldiers, and they relentlessly shot them down.” In fact, wrote Samuel Agnew, “most of the negroes were shot, our men being so much incensed that they shoot them wherever they see them.” Agnew conceded that “we have in our army some as vile men as the Yankees can have.”⁶

A local farmer and his slaves helped to inter the Union dead. The whites were “buried shallow, the negroes especially so.” On their march into battle, the black troops had struck Agnew as “specially insolent.” They had shaken “their fists at the ladies” and boasted that “they were going to show Forrest that they were his rulers.” But now, “as they returned, their tune was changed. With tears in their eyes, some of them came to my mother and asked her what they must do. Would Mr. Forrest kill them?” But not all the black survivors of the Battle of Brice’s Crossroads were so meek. After the battle, in the hills above Tishomingo Creek, a large black soldier attacked a Mississippi lieutenant, “throwing a large hickory stick at him, which came very near striking him.”⁷

Sherman deplored Sturgis’s dismal loss against so inferior a Confederate force. The debacle would haunt the remainder of Sturgis’s army career, which would include sending George Armstrong Custer and his 7th Cavalry to their doom at Little Bighorn in 1876. Sherman ordered General A. J. Smith to turn back from Mobile and “go out from Memphis and defeat Forrest at all costs.”⁸

There seemed a good chance he might succeed. “Forrest’s horses are much jaded and need rest,” wrote Samuel Agnew, “and if the Yankees would come out now he would not be prepared to meet them.” The Yankees managed to capture a number of Forrest’s officers, including his ailing adjutant general John P. Strange. “After moving us to several places,” wrote a fellow captive, “we eventually reached Cairo, Illinois,” where a Federal detachment “with fixed bayonets came into camp and called out five of us.” They had read in the papers about Union threats to retaliate against Forrest’s command “for something he was charged with having done.” Incarcerated in “a horrid dungeon, or jail, in the town of Cairo, and locked in a loathsome, filthy cell,” the captive rebels concluded that their “end was near, and resolved to meet it as soldiers.” But to their great relief they were treated like all the other prisoners and put on a boat bound for the prison camp at Alton.⁹

Forrest’s subsequent letter to Union general Washburn demanding to know what treatment rebel prisoners were going to receive after Fort Pillow triggered some of the war’s most acrimonious correspondence. “The recent battle of Tishomingo Creek was far more bloody than it would otherwise have been,” he wrote, “but for the fact that your men evidently expected to be slaughtered when captured, and both sides acted as though neither felt safe in surrendering, even when further resistance was useless.” Forrest declared that he had “conducted the war on civilized principles, and desire still to do so,” but that he owed it to his command to “know the position they occupy and the policy you intend to pursue.”¹⁰

At first, Washburn replied not to Forrest but to his superior, S. D. Lee. “From statements that have been made to me by colored soldiers who were eye-witnesses,” he wrote, “it would seem that the massacre of Fort Pillow had been reproduced at the late affair at Brice’s Cross-Roads. If true and not disavowed they must lead to consequences hereafter fearful to contemplate.” If Lee and his subordinates “intended to raise the black flag against that unfortunate race, they will cheerfully accept the issue,” he continued. “No troops have fought more gallantly and none have conducted themselves with greater propriety. They have fully vindicated their right (so long denied) to be treated as men.”¹¹

Two days later, Washburn addressed a letter directly to Forrest. “Your declaration that you have conducted the war on all occasions on civilized principles cannot be accepted,” he said, “but I receive with satisfaction the intimation in your letter that the recent slaughter of colored troops at the battle of Tishomingo Creek resulted rather from the desperation with which they fought than a predetermined intention to give them no quarter. You must have learned by this time that the attempt to intimidate the colored troops by indiscriminate slaughter has signally failed, and that, instead of a feeling of terror, you have aroused a spirit of courage and desperation that will not drown at your bidding.”¹²

Forrest and his staff were outraged. “I regard your letter as discourteous to the commanding officer of this department,” he fumed, “and grossly insulting to myself.” That Washburn’s troops “expected to be slaughtered,” he wrote, “appears to me, after the oath they took, to be a very reasonable and natural expectation. Yet you, who sent them out, knowing and now admitting that they had sworn to such a policy, are complaining of atrocities, and demanding acknowledgments and disavowals on the part of the very men you sent forth sworn to slay whenever in your power.” Washburn’s rank forbade “doubt as to the fact that you and every officer and man of your department is identified with this policy and responsible for it,” and Forrest would “not permit” Washburn “to limit the operations of your unholy scheme and visit its terrible consequences alone upon that ignorant, deluded, but unfortunate people, the negro, whose destruction you are planning in order to accomplish ours. The negroes have our sympathy,” he said, “and so far as consistent with safety,” Forrest would “spare them at the expense of those who are alone responsible for the inauguration of a worse than savage warfare.”

The Confederacy regarded captured black troops as recovered property, Forrest said, and if Washburn wanted to challenge that policy, he should take it up with Richmond. Forrest informed Washburn that he had in his custody “over 2,000 of Sturgis’ command prisoners, and will hold every officer and private as hostage until I receive your declarations and am satisfied that you carry out in good faith the answers you make, and until I am assured that no Confederate soldier has been foully dealt with from the day of the battle at Tishomingo Creek to this time.”¹³

“The character and tenor” of Washburn’s letter was “so outrageously insulting,” Forrest wrote S. D. Lee, “that but for its importance to my men—not myself—I should not have replied to it at all.” Up to then he had resisted defending his actions at Fort Pillow against Wade and Gooch’s charges, but now he submitted Anderson’s account to the assistant adjutant general, along with Young’s ambiguous letter. As for himself, Forrest was “entirely conscious of right” and had “no explanations, apologies, or disavowals to make to General Washburn, nor to any one else but my Government, through my superior officers.”¹⁴

“We have counted the cost,” S. D. Lee wrote Washburn, “and are prepared to go to any extremes, and although it is far from our wish to fight under the black flag, still if you drive us to it we will accept the issue.” Nor would white Union soldiers be exempt, for “the unfortunate people whom you pretend to be aiding are not considered entirely responsible for their acts, influenced as they are by the superior intellect of their white brothers.”

Lee closed his missive by reporting that the black troops who had survived Fort Pillow and Tishomingo were “wandering over the countryside, attempting to return to their masters.”¹⁵ “If this remark is intended as a joke,” Washburn snorted, “it is acknowledged as a good one, but if stated as a fact, permit me to correct your misapprehensions by informing you that most of them have rejoined their respective commands, their search for their late ‘masters’ having proved bootless.” The Federal government was “lenient and forbearing,” Washburn told Forrest, “and it is not yet too late for you to secure for yourself and soldiers a continuance of the treatment due to honorable warriors, by a public disclaimer of barbarities already committed, and a vigorous effort to punish the wretches who committed them.” Enclosing with his compliments a copy of Wade and Gooch’s Report, Washburn declared it was “useless to prolong the discussion. But I say to you now, clearly and unequivocally, that such measure of treatment as you mete out to Federal soldiers will be measured to you again. If you give no quarter,” he growled, “you must expect none.”¹⁶

Thus, just as Lincoln had feared, threats and reprisals had bred nothing but more threats and reprisals, and not only cost the North casualties but a measure of its moral hegemony. “The implied admissions of the Federal generals are infamous,” Confederate secretary of war James Alexander Seddon wrote his president, “and are properly exposed, especially in General Forrest’s second letter, which, though neither elegant nor strictly grammatical, is better, being very much to the point and in the true spirit.”¹⁷

“The tone of the correspondence on the part of our officers is approved,” Jefferson Davis replied. “Much misrepresentation of events connected with the capture of Fort Pillow has been thrown upon the world,” and it was “due to our Government that the truth should be sent out to correct the false impression extensively created.” But Forrest’s own account of the battle had been lost with the effects of Leonidas Polk on June 14, when he was killed by a Yankee cannonball at Pine Mountain, Georgia.

To counter Wade and Gooch’s extensive interviews and the affidavits that Brayman had collected from Union survivors, Davis now urged Seddon and Forrest to obtain more testimony to corroborate their account. But aside from eliciting a second ambiguous note from the captive Captain Young, they never did.¹⁸

On an expedition along the Rappahannock River, Private George W. Reed of the 36th USCI “had the pleasure of conversing with some of the colored soldiers who were wounded in the late battles. I am told by them that their officers could not manage them, they were so eager to fight. Whenever they caught a rebel they cried out, ‘No quarter! Remember Fort Pillow! No quarter for rebs!’ &c. They distinguished themselves highly,” and were “all eager to go back to retaliate for the Fort Pillow massacre.”¹⁹

Addressing his soldiers at Chicago, Colonel John A. Bross of the 27th USCI vowed that “when I lead these men into battle, we shall remember Fort Pillow, and shall not ask for quarter. I leave a home and friends as dear as can be found on earth, but if it is the will of Providence that I do not return, I ask no nobler epitaph than that I fell for my country at the head of this black and blue regiment.”²⁰

Just before allegedly executing twenty-three rebels they had captured during an engagement in Georgia, Yankee soldiers first demanded to know whether their captives remembered Fort Pillow. “We want revenge,” one of the Yankees declared, “and we are bound to have it one way or another. They must pay for these deeds of cruelty. We want revenge for our brother soldiers and will have it.” George Templeton Strong, cofounder of the Sanitary Commission, claimed that black troops never reported any prisoners. “I suppose they have to kill their prisoners before they can take them,” he commented. “When they go into action, they yell ‘Fort Pillow!’” An officer in the Army of the Potomac remarked that when black soldiers went into battle yelling “Fort Pillow,” Confederate troops “did not normally hold up very well.”²¹

“You heard of the rebs murdering our prisoners at Fort Pillow,” wrote Charles Boardman of the 145th Pennsylvania Infantry. “Shot & burned them alive. Makes a man’s blood cold to think they will come with a flag of truce & kill so many after they surrendered & set bloodhounds on them that tried to escape.” A Union cavalryman encountered a detachment from Forrest’s command at Bolivar. “They stood us a little fight,” he said, “but we just gave the yell” and leaped over their bulwark “without much opposition on the part of the Fort Pillow [murderers]. Some of our cavalry did not take them prisoners. They just killed them where they found them,” he wrote, “that is to pay for their unmercifully murdering our men” at Fort Pillow. ²²

After Forrest’s victory at Tishomingo Creek, Charles Anderson addressed the Wizard’s troops on the general’s behalf. At Fort Pillow, he said, they had exhibited “conspicuous gallantry. In the face of a murderous fire from two gunboats and six pieces of artillery on the fort, you stormed the works and either killed or captured the entire garrison, a motley herd of negroes, traitors, and Yankees.” Then, after Sturgis and Grierson and the “best appointed forces ever equipped by the Yankee nation” marched out of Memphis “with threats of vengeance toward you and your commander for the bloody victory of Fort Pillow, made a massacre only by dastardly Yankee reporters,” Forrest’s troopers had again “met the enemy and defeated him. Victory was never more glorious, disaster never more crushing and signal. From a proud and defiant foe, en route to the heart of your country, with declarations both by negro and white troops of ‘no quarter to Forrest or his men,’ Sturgis had become an enemy beaten, defeated, routed, destroyed.”

In the name and recollection of ruined homes, desolated fields, and the bleaching bones of your martyred comrades, you are appealed to again. The smoke of your burning homesteads, the screams of your insulted women, and the cries of starving children will again nerve your strong arms with strength. Your fathers of ’76 had much to fight for, but how little and unimportant was their cause compared with yours. They fought not against annihilation, but simply to be independent of a foreign yet a constitutional and free Government. You are struggling against the most odious of all tyranny, for existence itself, for your property, your homes, your wives, and children, against your own enslavement, against emancipation, confiscation, and subjugation, with all their attendant horrors.²³

The United States Colored Infantry did itself proud in the siege of Petersburg, Virginia, bravely charging a series of well-fortified positions with the same reckless daring (and some of the same mercilessness) that the rebels had shown at Fort Pillow. “Away went Uncle Sam’s sable sons across an old field nearly three-quarters of a mile wide,” reported Chaplain Henry Turner of the 1st USCI,

in the face of rebel grape and canister and the unbroken clatter of thousands of muskets. Nothing less than the pen of horror could begin to describe the terrific roar and dying yells of that awful yet masterly charge and daring feat. The rebel balls would tear up the ground at times, and create such a heavy dust in front of our charging army, that they could scarcely see the forts for which they were making. But onward they went, through dust and every impediment, while they and the rebels were both crying out “Fort Pillow!” This seems to be the battle-cry on both sides. But onward they went, waxing stronger and mightier every time Fort Pillow was mentioned. Soon the boys were at the base of the Fort, climbing over [the] abatis, and jumping the deep ditches, ravines, &c. The last load fired by the rebel battery was a cartridge of powder, not having time to put the ball in, which flashed and did no injury.²⁴

A white Pennsylvanian fighting before Petersburg wrote home that “the Johnnies are not as much afraid of us as they are of the Mokes [black troops]. When they charge they will not take any prisoners, if they can help it. Their cry is, ‘Remember Fort Pillow!’” Although “sometimes, in their excitement, when they catch a man they say: ‘Remember what you done to us, way back, down there!’”²⁵

In the siege of Richmond, the 29th USCI, consisting primarily of free blacks from Connecticut, would brave heavy rifle fire to charge the rebel breastworks, and as Confederate artillery began to sweep their ranks, they not only held their ground but wiped out the rebel gunners. Replenishing their exhausted ammunition from their own dead and wounded, “they vied with each other in deeds of daring.”

“The Colored Troops do exceedingly well,” wrote C. P. Lyman of the 100th USCI; “everybody speaks well of them. They have raised themselves and all mankind in the scale of manhood by their bold achievements—for I hold that, as water seeks a common level, so the raising of a certain class of the people must of necessity raise the whole community!” This may have been true of the infantry, but not everyone spoke so well of the gunners of the 2nd USCLA, which had lost a company at Fort Pillow two months before. One of their captains wrote to complain that during the attack on Petersburg his men proved incapable of calculating distances or fuse lengths properly, thus forcing their officers to operate the guns.²⁷

Perhaps the army’s faltering belief in black artillery and its commanders’ repeated refusals to arm and supply them properly were why the survivors of the 6th USCHA, most of whose best-trained gunners had been killed at Fort Pillow, were reorganized into the 11th United States Colored Infantry. Despite the continuing high rate of mortality among the black soldiers’ families on President’s Island, just off Memphis in the Mississippi’s stream, Colonel William Turner enforced the prohibition against women in camp, with the exception of hospital cooks and nurses. This meant that black troops had to make their way from Fort Pickering to President’s Island to see their loved ones, and risk capture by the squads of rebels that lurked around Shelby County, capturing stragglers and picking off black pickets. On July 22, 1864, the rebels captured Private Wilson Wood of the 6th USCHA and held him in a prison camp, with the declared intention of handing him over to his owner or putting him to work for the Confederate army. “When the United States made negroes soldiers,” protested Brayman, “it assured towards them the same obligations as were due to any others who might wear its uniform and bear its flag.” But the rebels, of course, had never given any such assurances. ²⁸

In mid-November, members of the 2nd USCLA and a detachment of the 13th USCI acquitted themselves well in a skirmish at Johnsonville, Tennessee, standing their ground against a furious barrage and with their well-aimed shells forcing the rebel batteries across the river to withdraw. Soon afterward the 3rd U.S. Colored Cavalry encountered an outnumbering force near Yazoo City and holed up in a small earthen fort. Confident of victory, dismissing colored troops as “outside the pale of civilized warfare,” the rebels “refused to treat on terms usually accorded to a defeated foe,” and charged them again and again. But the black troopers “responded with yells of defiance as they met the onslaught of the enemy, hurling them back. Again and again the enemy returned to the attack, only to suffer repulse from the well directed volleys of the black.” The rebels learned, “alas, too late,” wrote the regiment’s chronicler, “that they had a foe before them worthy of their steel” and that “the scenes of Fort Pillow could not be reenacted here.”²⁹