River Run Red

It began to seem to these veterans of the pioneer corps and the contraband camps that they had come full circle. On June 5, 1865, two sergeants, a corporal, four privates, and a bugler of the 2nd USCLA were found guilty of mutiny, with sentences of three years of hard labor with, in the case of one of the sergeants, the addition of annual four-month terms in solitary confinement on bread and water.²

Tennessee’s new constitution declared all slaves free, but hedged on their civil rights. Among other things, it forbade them to marry whites or send their children to the same schools with white children. Blacks were subject to the same penal code as white persons, except that “rape by a negro upon a white woman is punishable with death.” No contract between a white and a black could be binding, “unless reduced to writing, and witnessed by a white person.” Though “colored persons may be witnesses in all state courts for or against each other,” they could not testify “in cases to which the parties are white.” Thus, the Christian Recorder pointed out, a former rebel could assault the “widow or daughter of the husband that fell at Fort Pillow” and shoot or stab her “in revenge for the South,” and the legislature would shield him from effective prosecution.

“By the bleached and whitened bones of the thousands slain upon the battle-fields of the Republic in the defense of Republican liberty,” declared the Recorder, “by the mangled corpses of our martyred braves at Fort Pillow—by every attribute of common humanity, we demand that the government shall do justice by the oppressed and loyal people who stood by the fortunes of the country in her hour of darkest trial.” But in many parts of Tennessee, even the limited civil rights accorded the state’s blacks were withheld by farmers who kept their slaves in bondage “until the harvest came in that fall.”³

“Fort Pillow showed no signs of either massacre or defense,” wrote Whitelaw Reid of the Washington Tribune shortly after the war. “In fact, one could see nothing but a blank bluff, whence artillery might command a fine range up or down the river.” One evening he landed below the bluffs and, climbing up the old ravine road, came upon “a row of the rudest cabins, ranged after the fashion of the negro quarters on a plantation.” In one hut he found a middle-aged black woman holding a sick child close to a roaring fire. The cabin contained “an old bedstead, nailed together by pieces of rough boards and covered with a tattered quilt,” a crude table “on which were the fragments of a half-eaten, heavy, sodden corn-pone,” a skillet with a busted lid in the fireplace, an old box piled with broken dishes, and absolutely nothing else.

At the landing, Reid asked a group of black woodchoppers where they came from. They replied they were refugees from the guerrillas who had been raiding downriver cotton plantations. They said a white speculator had established a wood yard for passing steamboats and paid them a dollar a cord. “But the trouble is, sir,” said one of them, “he done never pay us. He say guerrillas sunk the steamboat his money come down on, and we got to take goods for our pay. Then he sell us pork not fit to eat, at three bits a pound, and the meanest cornmeal you ever see.” The speculator had sold them “brass rings at five or six dollars apiece, and gaudy cotton handkerchiefs for the head at three dollars,” until they were all hopelessly in debt.

Two years after the war, a white survivor of the massacre applied to protect and defend the ex-slaves and black veterans of West Tennessee. Shot in the head, six-foot two-inch Captain John L. Poston of 13/E had been captured by the rebels and held a prisoner for seven months in “various places.” Nearly starved, inadequately clothed and sheltered, he developed bronchitis and heart trouble. Escaping in November, he recovered from his wound and the privations of prison life, and returned to duty with the 6th Tennessee Cavalry, to which the survivors of his company had been transferred.

In 1867, Poston accepted a position as an agent for the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands. For fifty dollars a month, he oversaw a district encompassing not only the West Tennessee counties of Haywood and Tipton but Lauderdale itself: the very site of his harrowing ordeal at Fort Pillow three years before. As such, Poston was a firsthand witness to what the Civil War and the end of slavery had accomplished and failed to accomplish in the lives of West Tennessee African Americans.

The freed people of his district were “generally working for half of the crop,” he wrote in his first report to headquarters, “the employer finding the land, team, & farming tools of every description. The freedmen board themselves & pay their own Duties Bill, cultivate the crop, gather it, & house it. Those who work per year, a few men who are extra good hands may get as much as $200 & a few women are employed for cooks &c. at not more than $50.” Although this appeared to be the most profitable system “for the freed people, especially those who are industrious,” white farmers had already learned that they could increase their share of the profits “by forcing contracts on their sharecroppers which obliged them to buy staples and supplies from their employers,” plunging them into a cycle of debt in an early version of the sharecropping system that would trap former slaves and their descendants for impoverished generations to come.

Poston also bore witness to the first efforts of West Tennessee blacks to educate themselves. “There is but one school in my district that I have any knowledge of,” he reported in May 1867, “and that is in Brownsville & numbers 42 students taught by Miss Harriett A. Turner. There is quite a number of children being taught the alphabet & speling & some few to read by the white families.” Though he found “nothing that would amount to even Plantation Schools,” he did know of “a very thrifty little country school in the northern portion of Haywood County taught by a colored man.” But in early April “the house was burned & the school broken up” by a party of “Guerillas or out laws who have been prowling about in Gibson, Dyer, & the northern portion of Haywood County for several months & have committed many outrages upon freedmen in those counties” before Poston arrived in Brownsville to take up his duties. “While a majority of the white people claim to favor the education of the freed people, yet there is such a strong prejudice against [it] by one class of citizens & so few that take any active interest in it that it is almost impossible to organize or carry on any school out of Brownsville.” Though there were some districts in Haywood County “where there is a strong loyal sentiment which favors freed mans schools,” their opponents were “strong enough to deter any person from engaging in it” because prospective teachers could not “feel safe in their person.”

Poston watched as the resurgent tide of white power eroded the freedmen’s rights. Though most of the courts in Poston’s district gave the freedmen “a fair & impartial trial,” whites prevented African Americans “from applying to the courts” or the bureau “for a redress of wrongs by threats of violence,” thereby forcing freedmen “to compromise for a trifle.”

Poston feared that in areas of his district beyond the bureau’s effective reach, emancipated blacks would be allowed to vote only “as their employers or a few ruffians may desire. I hear frequently of threats against those who may take any part in elections & it is to be found that those threats will be carried into execution.”

His superior, Captain James Kendrick, warned Poston that the planters in his district intended to run their workers off their plantations in order to prevent them from voting in the elections that August. During the election, “small squads” of ex-Confederates gathered to “drive off or cruelly punish freedmen,” and Poston was directed to arrest all such “lawless characters and have them brought to a speedy trial.” Poston was to keep careful records of evictions, do his utmost to educate the freedmen about their rights, and urge them to vote, “whatever the immediate consequences may be.” Should any freedmen be evicted, the bureau pledged to take care of them until they could find other employment.⁵

As Congress wrestled with Reconstruction, Fort Pillow was invoked to counter the Democrats’ argument that the United States was intended to be “a white man’s government.” When black soldiers “stood on picket on the cold, stormy night to guard you against surprise,” asked a New Hampshire congressman, “did you creep up and warm their congealing blood with an infusion of the ‘white man’s Government?’ . . . ‘White man’s Government,’ do you say? Go to Fort Pillow; stand upon its ramparts and in its trenches, and recall the horrid butchery of the black man there because he had joined you against rebellion, and then say, if you will, ‘This is the white man’s Government.’”⁷

Fort Pillow was even invoked by the temperance movement. “Did we not charge upon the head of that confederacy, aye, upon the whole confederacy itself,” asked a teetotaling delegate to Michigan’s constitutional convention, “the assault upon Fort Pillow, and many of the similar crimes which were committed by those marauding and plundering chiefs? Why? Because they were acting under the commission, under the license, call it what you will, of that confederacy, and we and the civilized world held the confederacy responsible. Now what do we ask here? We ask that if certain men in our state shall go on serving intoxicating drinks, the State of Michigan shall not be held responsible for it.”⁸

“In the center of the parade ground,” a reporter for the Memphis Argus reported from Fort Pillow in September 1865, “there still stands the lofty pole from which, on that fateful morning, waved the stars and stripes of the Republic. The pole is bare now, and leans over toward the ditch as if still weeping over relics of the slain.” Scattered throughout the fort he came upon “the debris of hats, boots, and clothing mixed with the whitening bones of their wearers. The fort and ditch are all overgrown with weeds,” the reporter continued. On one headboard he saw “the name and fate of one, who had left the waving prairies of Iowa to fight his country’s battles.” Otherwise “no vestige of any of the buildings now remain, except the blackened posts that supported them, and the charred fragments of timbers that once constituted a part of the happy homes of inhabitants now scattered and gone.”⁹

Perhaps it was the Argus’s bleak description of exposed bones that prompted Stanton to order the army to see to it that the bodies of the Federal dead at Fort Pillow were “properly cared for.” Two days before Christmas, the Union army contracted with a Memphis undertaker to exhume, casket, and bury the bodies of the Fort Pillow dead, at a rate of seven dollars per corpse. On December 12, the army asked Mrs. Booth to leave her current home in Cincinnati and return to Fort Pillow to identify the remains of the 6th USCHA’s dead. Assistant Quartermaster W. J. Colburn detailed a detachment of the 11th USCI, which now contained remnants of the 6th USCHA, to assist in the burial. An agent reported that at Fulton and Fort Pillow the graves of about three hundred soldiers were still distinguishable, but only about eighty of them—mostly men who had died under Wolfe’s regime—had headboards. A Mr. Lea, to whom a disillusioned Edward Benton had apparently deeded his land, now sold to the army a forty-thousand-square-foot patch fifty yards southwest of the parapet to serve as a cemetery for the garrison’s fallen, and contracted to build a picket fence around it.¹⁰

In January 1866, the army began to search what remained of the 13th’s regimental records for the names of the fallen. But Mrs. Booth had still not come down to help identify the bodies of black troops. By mid-February, Assistant Quartermaster Colburn ran out of patience and asked permission to begin work without her, for he “could obtain as much information from men who were present at the massacre and whose services may be obtained as - could be furnished by Mrs. Booth.”¹¹

Local people assisted in locating bodies and graves, and by April 9, three days shy of the massacre’s second anniversary, Colburn and his crew had exhumed or recovered the bodies of 124 blacks and 134 whites that were found “scattered over a large area.” They reburied them separately: the blacks in the western half of the cemetery, the whites to the east. Everyone acknowledged that these 258 graves did not represent all of the victims at Fort Pillow, for in addition to the disappearance of the bodies of the men who were shot in the river, Colburn reported that “nearly all the bodies of men who had been killed under the bluff and next to the river have been washed away by the high water during the past year.” Among the bodies recovered, Colburn asserted, was that of Major Booth, “which was supposed to have been removed from its first resting place.” But Booth’s corpse was among those likely to have been washed away, and several men testified that the body Colburn claimed to be Booth’s appeared to them to be the remains of a black.

Each grave was marked by a numbered oak stake corresponding to a list of the dead. But the bodies had been buried so shallowly that no blacks and only forty-one whites were actually identified, all but five of them Indianans, Iowans, New Yorkers, and civilians from the first Union garrison. Colburn had accomplished his mission at a cost of $2,145.65. But when an inspector from the quartermaster’s office visited the cemetery, he saw that cows had broken through the feeble picket gates and grazed among the graves. “Little can be said in commendation of the work,” he wrote. “As a temporary expedient to save the bodies from being washed away to protect them from destruction it can be tolerated, but as a permanent structure worth the martyred heroes, who have been laid within the enclosure, it is wholly inappropriate.” Since, under the circumstances, “it would not be strange, if wanton desecration should be committed,” he urged “the ultimate removal of those bodies to some larger and permanent cemetery to be established on the Mississippi river below.”¹²

In January 1883, Ike Revelle, brother of Cordy and Hardy Revelle, would write his congressman to deplore the condition of the Federal graves at Fort Pillow. The letter was forwarded to Secretary of War Robert Lincoln, the late president’s son, who gently replied that in fact the graveyard was empty, for all the bodies had been removed in 1866 and reinterred in a special “Fort Pillow Section” of the Memphis National Cemetery. Some black Memphians, however, insist that only the whites were buried at Memphis, and that the blacks were buried in a ditch just shy of the city where, in the mid-twentieth century, a road crew excavating for a highway came upon their remains.¹³

Fort Pillow itself was gradually stripped of artifacts from the garrison’s fall. Hobbyists searched the ground for memorabilia; local black children dug minié balls out of the bluff and employed them as fishing weights. In August 1889, the town of Covington employed a six-mule team festooned with flags to haul a nine-foot, six-thousand-pound spiked rebel cannon all the way from Fort Pillow. The old cannon was deposited in the courthouse yard, where it was installed as a monument to the Confederate dead. Not to be outdone, in 1906 the citizens of Ripley hauled away the last of Fort Pillow’s spiked guns for display on their own courthouse square. But eventually Covington’s gun was hauled off in a scrap drive during World War I, as was Ripley’s during World War II.¹⁴

The Mississippi did its part in erasing evidence of the battle. By 1908, it had undercut the bluff so deeply that a huge section collapsed into the river. “The rending and groaning as the landslide took place was heard for miles,” wrote the Bolivar Bulletin, “and caused consternation among the negroes of the vicinity.” As it crumbled into the river, it caused an enormous wave that rolled across the river and beached the houseboats moored along the Arkansas shore. By 1930, the river had side-wound half a mile from the foot of the bluff, and a cottonwood forest had sprung up where the worst of the massacre transpired. “The flat top of the hill on which the guns were mounted that faced the river does not contain at present more than two acres of land,” wrote a visitor. “This is now a cotton patch and the narrow valleys between these high ridges have been cleared and are in cultivation.”¹⁵

In 1970, the state of Tennessee surveyed 1,242 acres of farmland and wasteland along the first Chickasaw Bluff and a year later purchased and dedicated the parcel as Fort Pillow State Park. Under the supervision of a young archaeologist named Robert Mainfort, the state initiated a dig aimed at locating and preserving the principal sites of the battle, and it is thanks to his efforts that an accurate picture of the fort can be approximated. The state’s efforts protected the site from scavengers and developers, but not from the river, which in the spring of 1979 washed away another twenty-five acres. “We’re losing park land to the river,” the park’s superintendent said, “in gulps and gobbles.”¹⁶