River Run Red

Fortunately, he was able to creep to the outer edge of the ditch, where his head would be nearer the surface. “With his one good hand he was able to dig his head out,” but the wounded men buried under him “were buried so deep that they could not get out, and died.” Before dawn on the thirteenth, after Tyler had completely worked his way out of his grave, a rebel informed him that Chalmers intended to take all the blacks away before the gunboat came and kill them on the road. But just then the Silver Cloud opened fire, and the rebels “commenced moving off. They wanted me to go with them,” Tyler said, “but I would not go,” so he “turned around, and came down to the river bank and got on the gunboat.”²

The Cairo News described Tyler as joking that he had dug out of his grave because he had not liked “his quarters. He laughs over his adventures, and says he is one of the best ‘dug-outs’ in the world.” Harper’s Weekly depicted a more sober and stentorian Tyler in an ostensible first-person narrative that has all the markings of abolitionist propaganda. “My name is Daniel Taylor [sic],” it begins, “and my skin is dark, as my mother’s was before me. I have heard that my father had a white face, but I think his heart and life were blacker than my mother’s skin. I was born a slave, and remained a slave until last April, when I found deliverance and shelter under the flag that my master was fighting to dishonor.” Freedom had come to him when “I was working in the fields down in Alabama, my heart full of bitterness and unutterable longings,” and so on, whereas in fact he was a Mississippi slave who was probably scooped up by a squad of Yankee recruiters. Filched from newspaper reports and embellished by the escaped slave and abolitionist author and orator William Wells Brown, the account turned Tyler into a kind of icon.³

His champions apparently lost track of him, however, or chose not to report on his ultimate fate. Though badly wounded and nearly blind, Tyler returned to his regiment in May. But the following November he apparently went off somewhere to recuperate from his wounds. When Tyler returned to his regiment in March, the army charged him with being absent without leave and ordered him incarcerated in the Irving Block military prison in Memphis.⁴

Conditions at Irving Block prison were a scandal. “Nearly all of the partitions” in the prison had been “torn down by the prisoners” for ventilation. Because the gas fixtures had been “wantonly torn out and destroyed,” candles provided the only illumination. The kitchens were filthy, and the dispensary was of “limited scale and in terrible condition,” with no records, stores, or “comforts.” Medical attendance was “very poor indeed” and the assistant surgeon, G. W. Johnson, was “not to be relied upon at all.”⁵

Tyler must have felt as though he had been buried alive all over again. In a sense, he had, for it was in this Union hellhole that Daniel Tyler, abolitionist icon and gravely wounded survivor of the very worst the rebels could dish out, would be left to waste away for four months without charges ever being brought against him. Abandoned and forgotten by his officers, he died a prisoner on July 12, 1865.⁶

we have the flag of the battalion preserved to us in the following manner: Private Eli Cothel Company (B) 6 U.S. Heavy Artillery (colored), being wounded some three different times and scarcely able to move, saw the flag proudly waving from the staff, crawled to the same, and hauled it down. While the rebels were not noticing what he was doing, he tied the same around him, using it as a bandage to his wounds.⁷

In his testimony, Cothel himself made no mention of this spectacular act of heroism, nor did the subcommittee see fit to ask him about it. In fact, his testimony demonstrates that if a black soldier did heroically rescue the flag, it could not have been Cothel, for he was shot in the morning and littered down to Fitch’s makeshift surgery, where he was shot a second time, and from which he escaped by crawling into a stand of brush by the river. It is curious, therefore, that Jackson should have selected as the beneficiary of his extravagant fiction former sergeant Cothel, who had been demoted to corporal in 1863 for “conduct unbecoming a commissioned officer.”⁸

In his report, Jackson further gilded Cothel’s lily by portraying him rather than Tyler digging his way out of a grave, when Cothel himself stated that he hid in the brush until the next morning and then climbed aboard the gunboat. One can only guess at the reaction of men like Tyler, who had indeed crawled out of his grave, and whose thunder Jackson and Cothel had stolen; or courageous artillerists like Willis Ligon and Samuel Green, who had fought the rebels so manfully.⁹

The flag was probably obtained by less dramatic means. Jackson’s subsequent denials and demonstrable falsehoods cast enormous doubt on his integrity, not to mention his sobriety. Briefly appointed commander of the 6th, he probably kept a regimental flag in his possession, pulled it out of his trunk, invented the story for the benefit of the reporters who crowded the bar at the Gayoso Hotel, and staged Mrs. Booth’s ceremonial return of the colors to her martyred husband’s regiment to answer the Northern editorialists who saw the massacre as proof of the folly of arming blacks.

For reasons that would emerge later, Wade and Gooch never called on Jackson to testify. From the joint subcommittee’s point of view the problem with Jackson’s story was not merely evidentiary but political, because any hint that the garrison never entirely surrendered would have muddied their claim that the rebels had committed a massacre from first to last. This may also explain why the only slightly wounded Second Lieutenant Daniel Van Horn of 6/D was not called upon to testify, either, for in his first report he had proudly asserted that the garrison continued to fire back all the way down to the river. This was all very admirable, but rather inconvenient to the subcommittee’s scenario, for in the name of establishing the rebels’ craven barbarity, Wade and Gooch sought to portray the Federals as having all immediately thrown down their arms. Thus would they do a number of Fort Pillow’s most die-hard defenders a considerable disservice.

Twenty-four-year-old Lizzie Wayt Booth, the widow of the martyred major of the 6th USCHA, also proved to be one of the less durable icons of the Fort Pillow affair. She was born in Martinsburg, Ohio, to an English father and a Northern Irish mother, and four of her brothers would serve in the Union army. Where and when she met and married Booth is not known, but it must have been when she was no older than eighteen; the blue-eyed Philadelphia clerk joined the 1st Missouri Infantry in 1858, and in 1864 Lizzie Booth would allude to her prewar “frontier service,” which suggests that she had followed her husband west. ¹⁰

She did not follow her husband to Fort Pillow, however, and when word reached Memphis of the garrison’s decimation, a solicitous Hurlbut ordered a steamboat to take her upriver to learn her husband’s fate. After a pause at Mound City to visit the survivors of the major’s regiment, and a subsequent stopover at Fort Pillow to locate Lionel’s grave, she returned to Fort Pickering in her widow’s weeds to take center stage in a flag ceremony that her friend Tom Jackson had arranged.

Within view of the Mississippi, “whose waters a few days before had been reddened with the blood of their comrades,” about a dozen survivors of the 6th, some of them badly wounded, stood in a row along Fort Pickering’s bluff as Mrs. Booth presented the flag—“torn with balls, stained with smoke, and clotted with human blood”—that Eli Cothel had ostensibly rescued to what little remained of his regiment.

I have just come from a visit to the hospital at Mound City. There I saw your comrades wounded at the bloody struggle at Fort Pillow. There I found this flag; you recognize it. One of your comrades saved it from the insulting touch of traitors at Fort Pillow. I have given to my country all I had to give: my husband. Such a gift! Yet I have freely given him for freedom and my country. Next [to] my husband’s cold remains, the dearest object left me in the world is this flag—the flag that once waved in proud defiance over the works of Fort Pillow. Soldiers, this flag I give you, knowing that you will ever remember the last words of my noble husband: “Never surrender the flag to traitors.”

Accepting the flag, Jackson had her husband’s men kneel down before her and vow to avenge “their brave and fallen comrades,” whereupon she was presented with “something over $500” which various officers had raised among themselves. ¹¹

After playing her part in Jackson’s pageant, the widow Booth met with the widows of the major’s fallen men. They asked her what would become of them now, for though their husbands were eligible for pensions, the government refused to recognize slave marriages. Mrs. Booth promised to do something about it, and, with a portion of the money she had been given, boarded a train for Washington to take up the matter with the president himself.

The bearer of this is the widow of Major Booth, who fell at Fort Pillow. She makes a point, which I think very worthy of consideration which is, widows and children in fact, of colored soldiers who fall in our service be placed in law, the same as if their marriages were legal so they can have the benefit of the provisions [for] the widows & orphans of white soldiers. Please see & hear Mrs. Booth. ¹²

At least in part because of her advocacy, Congress eventually passed a bill “to provide suitable relief for the widows and children of the colored soldiers in the service of the United States, who were lately massacred at Fort Pillow.” The pension office did eventually recognize marriages entered upon “according to the customs of slavery,” so long as the widow could produce witnesses to their betrothal. And on June 15, a month after the publication of Wade and Gooch’s report, black troops finally won their fight for parity.¹³

Upon Mrs. Booth’s return to Memphis, General Washburn offered her a position as an inspector in the provost guard. Her job was to search for contraband on the persons of the Southern women who passed in and out of Memphis. The Provost Guard’s reluctance to search females had made women especially effective smugglers. “The ladies in this neighborhood,” wrote a Mississippian, “take extensive advantage of the extensive domain of crinoline to do an extensive smuggling business.” Suspicious of a woman who seemed to struggle as she climbed out of her carriage, inspectors found that she had tied a dozen boots around an enormous girdle, each filled with “whiskey, military lace, and other supplies greatly in demand in the Confederacy.” A black woman was found with an entire demijohn of brandy under her capacious skirts.

On August 13, it fell to Mrs. Booth to search the person of one Mrs. Mary Noel. For the sake of her subjects’ modesty, she must have conducted these inspections in private, and perhaps hearing a peculiar clinking as she rifled through Mrs. Noel’s skirts and petticoats, she found $280 worth of $20 gold pieces. Conveying gold out of Union lines was strictly forbidden, and would have been enough to land Mrs. Noel in Irving Block prison. But in exchange for a bribe of five $20 gold pieces, Mrs. Booth pronounced her clean of contraband and let her go.¹⁴ As Mrs. Noel proceeded into Mississippi, however, a suspicious guard ordered her to halt and discovered the remaining nine gold pieces. Out of a failure of nerve, or in hopes of ingratiating herself with her captors, she accused Mrs. Booth of taking the rest, whereupon the widow of the martyr of Fort Pillow was taken into custody.

A court of inquiry believed Mrs. Noel, and in drumhead fashion sentenced the major’s wife to a year in prison at Alton, Illinois. “I am a friendless penniless woman,” she protested to Washburn on August 25, “who has ever been devoted [and] patriotic and have suffered much, oh how much! for the national cause.” She described herself as “the needy hapless widow of a gallant officer who fell so nobly at his post of duty,” and yet at her hearing she had not been allowed “one friend or counselor, nor was I allowed to make a statement to you.”

She also claimed that after the hearing, Judge Advocate R. W. Pike followed her home to her “wretched apartment” and suggested “there was one way to be free.” But Mrs. Booth “resented the insult” and spurned his advances, whereupon he sent her to Irving Block prison, where Daniel Tyler of her husband’s regiment lay dying.¹⁵

A back room on the second floor of the middle tier of Irving Block was reserved for white female prisoners, primarily prostitutes the provost guard rounded up periodically and halfheartedly and then released into the dismal stream of Memphis’s back alleys. In June, an investigating committee found the women’s cells unventilated, filthy, and poorly guarded.¹⁶

“You know my loyalty is above suspicion,” Mrs. Booth insisted, though it was her integrity, not her loyalty, that was in question. “Considering the fearful oath I administered to my regiment,” she continued, “and many acts which evince my intense hatred of rebels and my desire to go with the expedition for personal revenge,” how could Washburn think she would “assist the enemy for a few paltry dollars?” Could he “not commute my sentence to requiring me to live any where north? I ask this in the name of common humanity and of Justice and because it will be no honor to the country when it is said that the widow of a Fort Pillow martyr—moneyless, friendless—was charged with official misconduct and sentenced to state prison for one year unless released by welcome death.”¹⁷

It is unlikely that the army was eager to pursue the case and thereby besmirch the memory of a fallen hero. But Mrs. Booth demanded “an immediate thorough investigation which I am confident will not only reflect credit upon my abillity in the position I have filled (not through Service but Poverty) but establish my innocence.” Though she must have retained at least a portion of the five hundred dollars her husband’s officers had collected for her, she said she was “penniless and have no means of support but my own labor, and the injustice done me will prevent my accepting or holding any position under Government, and I cannot seek employment with this invented disgrace hanging over me.” The military reluctantly obliged, and on September 16, officially charged her with bribery.¹⁸

While languishing in prison, Mrs. Booth heard that a recently captured veteran of the Fort Pillow battle, Captain G. P. M. Turner of the 5th Mississippi Cavalry, occupied a cell in the Confederate wing of Irving Block. She asked the provost marshal’s permission to interview Turner to confirm her husband’s burial site. Though she actually already knew where the major was buried, her inquiry may have been part of her effort to remind the authorities of who she was: the grieving, loyal widow of a brave young officer.¹⁹

On September 20, Mrs. Booth was found guilty in an “informal” hearing that Washburn deemed so flawed that he finally let her walk. A week later, the allegedly lecherous R. W. Pike wrote that he was “done with Mrs. Booth.” Weary of her protests and machinations, the authorities asked her—and later commanded her—to leave town on the next boat north. But she had no intention of leaving and, however penniless she had portrayed herself to Washburn, rented a house in the city next to a French restaurant, where she conducted an unspecified business and sublet several rooms. After she went east to visit her sister in Trenton, New Jersey, a tenant laid claim to the entire house and threw out her belongings. “In consequence,” she declared, “my business was broken up, and I am now at great loss.” But Lizzie Wayt Booth was never at a loss for long. In December 1865, she would be asked by a solicitous Major General Montgomery Meigs to assist in the identification of bodies disinterred at Fort Pillow. She eventually married a prosperous German stockbroker named Herman Hill and moved to Salt Lake City.²⁰

Though Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Jackson of the 6th USCHA was another casualty of the massacre, his wounds were self-inflicted. He did not inspire much confidence. A skinny man with extravagant burnside whiskers, he had a slightly cockeyed gaze that alcohol accentuated. Neither Wade and Gooch nor any of Jackson’s superiors read his secondhand account of the battle, which never proceeded beyond a rough draft. Emphasizing the fort’s vulnerability and the last-ditch firing of the retreating garrison, it would not have been welcome.

After Mrs. Booth returned from Mound City, she informed Jackson that several of her husband’s men had told her that during the days preceding the massacre, Major Booth had repeatedly pleaded with Hurlbut to send reinforcements. According to Mrs. Booth, Jackson replied at the time that he was not aware of any requests from her husband, but within a few hours of their encounter, three of his fellow officers heard him loudly contradict himself over drinks at a sutler’s establishment in the lines of the 2nd USCLA.

Jackson reportedly claimed that Booth had actually sent two special messengers down to Memphis to press Hurlbut for reinforcements, but to no avail. Nor would General Chetlain allow Jackson himself to join Booth at Fort Pillow with the remainder of the regiment. “The affair at Fort Pillow,” Jackson concluded, “rests on some Generals’ shoulders.”²¹

The three officers waited almost two weeks before reporting Jackson’s remarks to Colonel Ignatz Kappner. Kappner brought the matter before Hurlbut, who promptly demanded an explanation. Jackson denied ever saying any such thing. “I have never reported that Maj. L. F. Booth made application for reinforcements,” he wrote. “I think the way the report gained currency was through Mrs. Booth,” who said she had heard the story from wounded men at Mound City, “but now believes that it is not so.” Mrs. Booth vouched for this, and assured investigators that she did not “entertain any other sentiment toward Genl Hulburt but the warmest gratitude.” The whole thing, she suspected, had been “gotten up by a person to whom Col Jackson has been a kind friend.” Be that as it may, the following February, a military board judged Jackson “unfitted for the position which he now occupies” and honorably discharged him for “past services.”²²

Though Thomas Jefferson Jackson’s military career is difficult to piece together, one thing is certain: he was not present at the Battle of Fort Pillow. A veteran of Stone River and Chickamauga, he had joined the 6th USCHA from the 42nd Indiana Volunteer Infantry in March 1864. Jackson’s brother, the Reverend John Walker Jackson, had made “the first speech in Philadelphia, on behalf of arming colored men during the late civil war,” and may have persuaded Jackson to make the switch.²³

“I desire authority to raise a regiment of blacks,” Jackson had written Lorenzo Thomas, “to be armed and equipped as soldiers.” He offered to provide “references as to my standing in society, and ability to command and drill a regiment. I have been in the service nineteen months, thirteen of which I have commanded a company.” Jackson had been wounded in the jaw and taken prisoner at Waterford, Mississippi, escaping after almost three months’ incarceration by wading through a cesspool to the Mississippi River and slogging his way back to Memphis.²⁴

That, in any case, is what he told an interviewer while serving as a member of the Kansas state legislature. But he apparently told his friends and colleagues a good deal more. He claimed that he had “a silver jawbone, which was put in by the surgeons when they got through operating on him” after he had been found among “the piles of dead” at Fort Pillow. “In the particular bunch of men which was surrounded in this fight,” wrote the Hutchinson (KS) News, “he and one of the negro privates were all that were left alive.”

Col. Jackson was found, 48 hours after he had been kicked into the river, by a federal gunboat, lying in the stream, his arms clinched around a log, and in a dying condition. He was brought back to life and went to a hospital for a long time. Here a silver, or metal brace, was placed in the side of his head where the rebel musket had beaten in a hole. This metal plate, or others that were substituted, was worn up to the time of his death. He had a huge depression in his side, caused by wounds received, and one arm had been practically useless for a good many years.²⁵

Declaring to President Johnson, “I love the military service,” Jackson applied in vain for reappointment to the army’s officer corps. He moved to Kansas in 1885, served in the legislature as a clerk and then as an elected representative, and twenty years later, while attempting to board a moving train, fell under a Pullman’s wheels. “His right arm was severed near the shoulder,” grieved a colleague, “and both his legs below the knees, thereby crushing and dissevering his limbs, that the armed savage rebel, General Forrest, at Fort Pillow in 1864, tried but failed to do. Although thus horribly and fatally dismembered, he retained consciousness, and was taken to ‘Agnew Hospital,’ where he received every possible attention, and assistance, of skilled Surgeons. He succumbed to the inevitable, and yielded his heroic life there, to the Eternal Hospital of Salvation.”²⁶