The committee subsequently ignored or suppressed testimony that put the Confederate actions at Fort Pillow in anything but the worst possible light. At the same time, it accepted as fact statements that clearly were false, including one from a witness who claimed to have seen Forrest personally ordering the killing of helpless soldiers. The so-called eyewitness described the 6-foot, 2-inch Forrest as “a little bit of a man.”

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Despite such obvious inconsistencies, the committee issued a final report accusing the Confederates of “an indiscriminate slaughter, sparing neither age nor sex, white or black, soldier or civilian. No cruelty which the most fiendish malignity could devise was omitted by these murderers.” Going even further, the report declared, “The atrocities committed at Fort Pillow were not the result of passions excited by the heat of conflict, but were the results of a policy deliberately decided upon and unhesitatingly announced.”

The committee’s findings served the panel’s chief purpose, which was to inflame public sentiment against the Confederacy at the exact moment that Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant was leading the nation’s largest army into a deadly new round of fighting in northern Virginia. Meanwhile, the fallen at Fort Pillow, particularly the black soldiers who by all accounts had fought fiercely and bravely against overwhelming odds, were reduced to the role of mere passive victims. Truth, as the saying goes, is the first casualty of war–and sometimes the last, as well.

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