River Run Red

I HAVE A FASCINATION—MY CHILDREN SAY A MORBID FASCINATION—with nineteenth-century massacres. I have written two books—a novel and then a historical narrative—about the carnage at Cawnpore, India, in the Great Indian Mutiny of 1857; and an article about Custer’s debacle at Little Big Horn in 1876; and my shelves are packed with books about Kabul, the Alamo, Khartoum, and Isandhlwana. This fixation derives, I suppose, from my growing up a vastly outnumbered white boy in India and my formative hero-worship of the Disney version of Davy Crockett, combined with an irreligious but nonetheless apocalyptic anxiety about death that draws me to accounts of its wholesale form. But, for an American, the story of the Civil War Battle of Fort Pillow in April 1864 contains elements at once more frustrating and more edifying than any of the others, for Northerners and Southerners, not to mention blacks and whites, have never agreed on what transpired there.

When a battle is not completely one thing or another, partisans will subject it to enormous pressure to force it into one definition or another. In this sense, the Confederate and Federal versions of what transpired at Fort Pillow are to varying degrees mistaken. Each side’s efforts to define the Fort Pillow affair as either a hard-won victory on the one hand or a premeditated massacre on the other have led otherwise sagacious writers to commit an uncharacteristic number of sins of commission and especially omission, discarding the other side’s evidence by the most tortured and sometimes precipitate means. The job of creating a true picture of the battle demands a capacity to embrace or in any case try to reconcile the apparent contradictions in various participants’ memories of what they endured.

Few agree about what transpired at Fort Pillow—many authorities still balk, as I initially did, at calling it a massacre. But it is impossible to make sense of it without understanding the atmosphere in which it played itself out: the corruption of Union occupation, the horrors of guerrilla warfare, the rebel triumphs and defeats that immediately preceded it. And it is necessary, I think, to get some sense of who the players were: the liberated slaves and their ambivalent white comrades who constituted the Yankee garrison, and Nathan Bedford Forrest’s men: perhaps the most dedicated and ferocious warriors in the entire Confederate army.

The men who served in the Civil War called going into battle “meeting the elephant.” No one knows exactly why. Perhaps, from a distance, the smoke roiling up from a battle resembled an elephant, but it seems to me just as likely that they could have been referring to the old saw about the blind men and the elephant, each feeling a small portion and none able to describe the beast as a whole. I expect that most men tell the truth as they see it, and that just because they see it from different perspectives and draw different conclusions does not necessarily mean that those conclusions are contradictory or mutually exclusive.

The gaps that complicate the task historians take on—and the temptation to fill them with what we may desire or suspect of our ancestors—are formidable. What follows is a kind of cross between a narrative history of Fort Pillow and a portrait gallery of the people who converged upon it, because I determined early on that it is no more enlightening to characterize the battle as a case of white against black than to characterize the collision at Gettysburg as a case of white against white. In these pages there are slaves and masters and Yankees and rebels of all kinds, none of whom lived his or her life to fit the roles we may want to assign to them out of our retrospective pride or shame. There were soldiers of the noblest intentions who proved cowardly, and soldiers capable of the most terrible atrocities who proved brave.

No investigation of the battle can be undertaken without trying to arrive at some understanding of American slavery. Despite the centrality of race in American history, and especially the history of the Civil War, and even though, by the time the guns opened up at Fort Sumter, one out of every eight Americans and two out of every five Southerners were black, what gets left out of a lot of the mainstream histories of the Civil War is a proportionate representation of the experience of African Americans. The terms we employ to recount the war suggest why. In most histories, Northerners and Southerners are equated with whites, and the South with the Southern cause, even though many Northerners were African Americans and a significant proportion of the South was black and rooting and in some cases fighting for the Union. It is difficult to overcome this problem. Read enough histories, diaries, letters, memoirs, and biographies and even the most conscientious of us slips into the same pitfalls. Someday I hope a more integrated account of the war will be written, but in the meantime I have chosen a battle and its aftermath whose recounting must of necessity encompass some measure of the slave experience.

Though when considering slavery we may want to think of suffering as necessarily ennobling, one reason we do not wish suffering upon ourselves is because it is more likely to be degrading. There are African Americans in these pages who were noble, and others who were merely trying to get by, some who were kind and some who were brutal, and it should be enough to state simply that they were human beings, which is to say as contradictory and complicated as we should understand ourselves to be. Every one of them was more interesting in his or her actuality than in the form black - people took in either side’s propaganda.

It should come as no surprise that the rebel cavalry who committed terrible acts at Fort Pillow would afterward deny them, because especially in the American Civil War men judged themselves not according to the crimes they may have committed in the heat of battle, but by the aggregate of what they considered themselves to be: responsible citizens, patriots, brave soldiers, hardworking farmers, honest merchants, devout Christians, faithful husbands and fathers, loyal and loving brothers and sons. Nor did such acts cost them the respect of their friends and neighbors, because in peace, war, and defeat the South deemed it paramount—and by the 1850s it had become a conditioned reflex—to hunker down and defend their slave society against the calumny of the abolitionist propagandists whom they blamed for the onset of the Civil War.

It seems to be true of most people who have committed a crime that they deny it not because they did not commit it but because they refuse to be defined by it. They know that the basically decent person they try to be, or believe themselves to be, would not—could not—have done what they are accused of doing, even if they did it. The crimes they commit, especially in extremity, do not suit their conception of themselves, and so to keep from shooting themselves or going mad, they must deny the one if they are to salvage the other. But it is not enough to say that the brutal acts depicted in these pages were committed by ordinary men caught up in extraordinary circumstances, because the story of Fort Pillow begs the question of what, exactly, was an ordinary man in the mid-nineteenth century and what the ordinary circumstance was for a society that had predicated itself on 250 years of uninterrupted slavery.

At the New-York Historical Society some years ago, I saw an exhibit of postcards of lynchings from the Jim Crow era. In these nightmare images individually ordinary white folks—farmers, small-town merchants, churchgoers, housewives, children—were captured gathering to celebrate the atrocious killing of a fellow human being, gazing and even grinning into the camera as they stood around the body of a black man or woman they had tortured, shot, burned, hanged. Perhaps because I could hardly bear to look upon the corpses of their victims, I concentrated instead on the individuals standing among the mobs and wondered if, when they made their way home and finished the dishes and tucked their children into bed, they returned to their ordinary “decency.” Or did the lynching mark the end of their normality and humanity?

These are the kinds of questions that haunted their fathers and grand-fathers who served in the war. Americans have never been good at embracing contradictions, so we tend to deny the inevitable discrepancies between ideal and reality, intention and effect. But we are all shaped by circumstance, and the circumstance of slavery had as profound an effect on the whites who owned slaves as it had on the African Americans they held in bondage.

Though I have felt a boyish thrill walking Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg and have tried in these pages to consort with the ghosts of Fort Pillow, I have come to believe that apart from individual acts of heroism, mercy, and generosity, there was nothing glorious about the Civil War. The propertied class on one side of the Mason-Dixon Line profited from the war, and on the other side fought to defend the obscene extension of property rights to their fellow human beings. Most of the generals were of this class; many of them were the very politicians who had brought the nation to this pass in the first place, thus compounding the sheer unseemliness of their often corrupt and incompetent command with their self-interested demagoguery.

As I researched this book I had to keep reminding myself that it would have been far more glorious had our politicians avoided expending hundreds of thousands of young men’s lives and laying waste to half of the country by mustering the courage and decency to legislate an end to slavery and divert a proportionate measure of the resources of a burgeoning nation into providing African Americans with an equal chance at life, liberty, and prosperity. But then it would have been more glorious still had the “peculiar institution” never taken root in North America in the first place.

A final note on my approach to the material upon which this book is based: Much of my examination of the Fort Pillow affair has been devoted to pruning away the flourishes that partisans on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line added to the combatants’ testimony. I have tried to give every account—rebel and Federal—the benefit of the doubt while at the same time separating eyewitness testimony from hearsay, questioning or excluding from my account any incident for which no eyewitness can or could be found, and severely scrutinizing accounts of the battle composed for political purposes and public consumption.

In order to better acquaint myself with Forrest’s men I have leaned hard on the five-volume Tennessee Civil War Veterans Questionnaires compiled between 1915 and 1922 by Gustave W. Dyer and John Trotwood Moore. An even more significant resource was the collection of Union pension records I reviewed at the National Archives, many of which contained transcripts of the oral reminiscences of the former slaves and illiterate whites who took part in the Battle of Fort Pillow. I have tried to approach the latter material critically and to allow for the vagaries of old men’s memories, but what strikes me most about them is how closely they adhere to the testimony they gave immediately following the battle.

Perhaps it is my reliance on pension records that has compelled me to dwell with unusual emphasis on the wounds and illnesses that either killed men outright or plagued them for the rest of their lives. But it seems to me that such aftereffects of war are underreported in even the most epilogic military histories, despite their profound impact on not only the men who fought but their families, neighbors, and employers. Besides, in order to explain why one side suffered exponentially more casualties than the other, I am obliged to describe the horrors of this battle in full, especially where the nature and circumstances of men’s wounds and deaths are so central to defining the lethal dynamics that made such a catastrophe possible. Or perhaps I simply need to justify to myself the weeks I have spent reading reports of rheumatism, dementia, senility, yellow eyes and black tongues, cattarh, piles, boils, and missing digits and limbs, and the nights I have staggered out of the National Archives like some weary small-town general practitioner.

None of the dialogue in this book is invented: all of it comes from firsthand accounts. In quoting from written diaries and letters I have not made any changes in spelling except occasionally to substitute the correct spelling in brackets or to add a punctuation mark for clarity’s sake. In employing oral quotes from blacks as represented by white writers in dialect form, I have retained all idiomatic usages (“knowed,” “Marse,” etc.) but otherwise corrected the spelling (from “dem” to “them” and “dar” to “there,” and so on). I regard the dialect form of transcription as degrading, gratuitous, obtrusive, and almost invariably false; I too slur my speech and drop my g’s, but I don’t expect to be represented in caricature when I am interviewed, and neither should anyone quoted here. Nor should readers be required to impersonate the characters in a book or conspire with their ancestors in denigrating blacks and poor whites.