Battle of Fort Pillow

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The early spring of 1864 was cold and bleak in west Tennessee. For Major General Nathan Bedford Forrest and the 3,000 troopers he led from northern Mississippi that March–mostly Tennesseans who were eager to re-enter their home state–the land seemed devoid of warmth or welcome. Two years of Union occupation, interspersed with Confederate raids and counterraids, had spawned a poisonous atmosphere of revenge and reprisal that seemed to have sickened the entire region. ‘The whole of West Tennessee,’ Forrest reported angrily, ‘is overrun by bands and squads of robbers, horse thieves and deserters, whose depredations and unlawful appropriations of private property are rapidly and effectually depleting the country.’

Forrest himself was a native Tennessean, born in 1821 in Bedford County. Although he was raised in the backwoods of northern Mississippi, he had made his fortune in Memphis, and he always considered Tennessee his home. Now he was back, and what he saw did not amuse him. The land was picked over and brown, with burned farmhouses and ruined barns dotting the horizon. Nor was Forrest much amused by the tales he heard from local residents while he was camped at Jackson, Tenn., en route to Kentucky on a horse-gathering mission. A ‘regiment of renegade Tennesseans,’ he noted, led by Colonel Fielding Hurst of the 6th Tennessee (U.S.) Cavalry, had been plundering throughout southwestern Tennessee, perpetrating ‘wanton destruction of property’ and demanding–and getting–a sum of $5,139.25 from the residents of Jackson in return for not burning the town to the ground. (The sum was exactly, to the penny, the amount of a legal judgment made against Hurst by Federal authorities in Memphis on behalf of a female resident of Jackson whose property had been destroyed by the colonel’s raiders.)

Even worse than Hurst’s extortionate tactics was his treatment of several Forrest subordinates who had returned to their hometowns to recruit new soldiers for the Southern cause. Seven of these men had been murdered by Hurst’s forces in the past two months, including Lieutenant Willis Dodds, who had been killed less than two weeks earlier at his father’s home in Henderson County. Forrest reported that Dodds had been ‘put to death by torture,’ noting that a witness, who had seen the young lieutenant’s body shortly after his death, found the victim ‘most horribly mutilated, the face having been skinned, the nose cut off, the under jaw disjoined, the privates cut off, and the body otherwise barbarously lacerated and most wantonly injured.’

Jackson residents warned Forrest of another ‘nest of outlaws’ currently holed up in an old abandoned Confederate fortification, Fort Pillow, overlooking the Mississippi River 40 miles north of Memphis. These Unionists, members of the 13th Tennessee Cavalry under the command of Major William F. Bradford, included many former Confederates who had joined forces with the occupying Federals. These ‘homemade Yankees’ were hated by Forrest’s men, many of whose families reportedly had been victims of the turncoats’ threats, abuses and outright thievery. Bradford, an attorney who came from Forrest’s own home county of Bedford, was particularly loathed. Prior to receiving a commission in the Union Army, Bradford had led a band of pro-Northern guerrillas in raids against Confederate sympathizers in middle and west Tennessee. ‘Under the pretense of scouring the country for arms and rebel soldiers,’ said Forrest’s first biographers, Bradford had ‘traversed the surrounding country with detachments, robbing the people of their horses, mules, beef cattle, beds, plates, wearing apparel, money, and every possible movable article of value, besides venting upon the wives and daughters of Southern soldiers the most opprobrious and obscene epithets, with more than one extreme outrage upon the persons of these victims of their hate and lust.’

For the time being, Forrest could do nothing about the alleged atrocities–he was under orders to remount and refit a new division of Kentucky cavalry in the Bluegrass State–but he promised the people of Jackson that he would ‘attend to’ the Federals at Fort Pillow ‘in a day or two.’ In the meantime, he issued a proclamation labeling Hurst and his troopers outlaws and declaring that they were ‘not entitled to be treated as prisoners of war falling into the hands of the forces of the Confederate states.’ Instead, they would be shot down summarily whenever and wherever they were encountered. That was partly bluster on Forrest’s part, designed to strike fear into the hearts of wavering Confederate supporters and would-be deserters, but Union authorities took the threat seriously enough to warn Hurst ‘against allowing your men to straggle or pillage…as a deviation from this rule may prove fatal to yourself and [your] command.’

In a less than buoyant state of mind, Forrest and his men rode north toward Kentucky in late March. Part of the column, 500 horsemen under the command of Colonel William L. Duckworth, was detached to capture Union City, a crossroads village in northwestern Tennessee. Duckworth carried out his assignment with flair, posing as Forrest and sending a strongly worded surrender demand to the Federal garrison commander, Colonel Issac Hawkins, who had already surrendered to Forrest once before. Now Hawkins demanded to see Forrest in person before capitulating. Duckworth, thinking quickly, responded (as Forrest) that ‘I am not in the habit of meeting officers inferior to myself in rank…but I will send Col. Duckworth, who is your equal in rank, and who is authorized to arrange terms and conditions with you.’ The ruse worked and Hawkins, although holding a strong position, handed over himself and 500 other Union soldiers, as well as 300 horses and $60,000 in greenbacks that the garrison had recently received in pay. The Confederates joked afterward that they would be happy to parole Hawkins again in order to obtain more horses and equipment.

A similar ploy was not so successful at Paducah, Ky., which Forrest besieged the next day. There the Union colonel in command, Stephen G. Hicks, withdrew his forces into Fort Anderson, along the Ohio River, west of town. After hours of intermittent sniping, Forrest sent Hicks his standard surrender demand: ‘Having a force amply sufficient to carry your works and reduce the place, and in order to avoid the unnecessary effusion of blood, I demand the surrender of the fort and troops, with all public property. If you surrender, you shall be treated as prisoners of war; but if I have to storm your works, you may expect no quarter.’

Hicks, a Mexican War veteran, rejected the demand. He had a sizable force of between 700 and 1,000 men from the 16th Kentucky Cavalry, the 122nd Illinois Infantry and the 1st Kentucky Negro Artillery, as well as two nearby gunboats, Peosta and Paw-Paw, standing off in the Ohio River, ready to blast the attackers with grapeshot and canister if they came too near. Hicks was convinced he could hold out indefinitely.

Forrest was not particularly interested in capturing the fort or its occupants, anyway; he merely wanted to pin them down while his own men made off with the large supply of Union stores, ammunition and horses in Paducah. But while Forrest was directing the seizure of materiel, one of his newly acquired Kentucky officers, Colonel A.P. Thompson, took it upon himself to attack the fort. Thompson, a native of Paducah, felt honor-bound to free his hometown of Northern aggressors. Against orders, he led an assault force of 400 men from the 3rd and 7th Kentucky cavalry in a wild rush toward the fort. The attack was easily beaten back, and Thompson himself was killed–literally blown apart by a shell from one of the gunboats. (A report in the Northern press later claimed that ‘an ardent young African’ had fatally wounded Thompson with a musket ball to the forehead.)

As soon as he heard of the abortive attack, Forrest angrily forbade any further assaults. Meanwhile, the raiders completed their mission inside Paducah while the Union gunboats indiscriminately shelled the town. Hicks directed the captain of one of the vessels to ‘protect the fort and let the town go to hell.’ Later, Union Brig. Gen. Mason Brayman congratulated Hicks on his ruthless decision, noting with satisfaction that the town had been ‘made a ruin,’ which Brayman said was only right since the ‘rebel instincts’ of the residents had ‘rendered it quite certain that the town would not have been occupied [by Forrest] without their consent.’

Forrest withdrew from Paducah before midnight on March 25, having gathered 400 horses and mules, 50 prisoners and a large supply of clothing, saddles and supplies–the whole point of his mission. He could have held Paducah indefinitely, Forrest claimed, but he had found the town wracked by an outbreak of smallpox and so withdrew to avoid unnecessarily exposing his men to the disease.

Back in Tennessee, Forrest was irritated by reports coming out of the North that labeled his Paducah raid a failure. The Louisville Journal, for one, charged that the Rebels had been ‘gloriously drunk, and but little better than a mob.’ The newspaper said Forrest’s men had ‘commenced an indiscriminate pillage of the houses’ and then had made’several desperate charges…upon the fort. The Federals met them with a withering fire, and in each onset the rebel columns were broken and driven back in confusion.’

This was bad enough, but the Chicago Tribune, a staunchly abolitionist paper, also reported that the Confederates had’skedaddled, after killing as many negroes as they could, which seems to have been their primary object in coming to Paducah.’ Even worse, in Southern eyes, was the newspaper’s provocative claim that Forrest’s men had been ‘ignominiously beaten back by negro soldiers with clubbed muskets.’ The Confederates seethed at the bogus reporting.

Now Forrest turned his attention to Fort Pillow, ordering Brig. Gen. James Chalmers to bring up the rest of the cavalry corps from Mississippi. The first order of business was dealing with the much-hated Colonel Hurst and his command. Colonel James J. Neely struck Hurst’s trail between Somerville and Bolivar, Tenn., on March 29 and, in Chalmers’ retelling, ‘met the traitor Hurst at Bolivar, after a short conflict, in which we killed and captured 75 prisoners of the enemy, drove Hurst hatless into Memphis’ and captured ‘all his wagons, ambulances [and] papers,’ as well as ‘his mistresses, both black and white.’ As events at Fort Pillow would soon prove, Hurst had gotten off lightly with the mere loss of his hat and girlfriends.

To check Federal forces in the area while he advanced on Fort Pillow, Forrest sent Colonel Abraham Buford back to Paducah to seize the remaining 140 government horses that Northern newspapers had inadvisably bragged about the Rebels missing. At the same time, he directed Neely to threaten Memphis and pin down the Union garrison there. The Confederate commander, meanwhile, headed west toward Fort Pillow in a driving rainstorm with the main body of troops.

The fort, named after Confederate Brig. Gen. Gideon Pillow, had been constructed in 1861 on the east bank of the Mississippi River immediately below the intersection of the river with Coal (or Cold) Creek. The strongpoint had three lines of earthen entrenchments: a semicircular outer line of earthworks, a shorter second line of works atop a prominent hill and the fort itself, whose earthworks were 6 to 8 feet high and 4 to 6 feet across and were fronted by a 12-foot-wide, 6-foot-deep trench. The fort’s works extended in a 125-yard-wide semicircle, behind which the land rapidly fell away to the river. Deep ravines crisscrossed the landscape in front of the bastion, and four rows of barracks lay on the only open terrace of land, just to the southwest.

The Confederates had abandoned Fort Pillow after the fall of Corinth, Miss., in May 1862, and Union forces had occupied it intermittently ever since. On the morning of April 12, 1864, the fort was garrisoned by approximately 580 soldiers from three separate units: the 13th Tennessee Cavalry, under Major Bradford, which had been quartering at Fort Pillow for the past two months while recruiting new members and allegedly terrorizing Confederate sympathizers in the vicinity; and two black artillery units, the 6th U.S. Heavy Artillery and the 2nd U.S. Light Artillery, manning six pieces of artillery that had only been at the fort for two weeks. Major Lionel F. Booth, a veteran of the Regular Army, was overall commander of the Union forces. Standing ready to render assistance from offshore was the Union gunboat New Era, under the direction of Captain James Marshall.

Booth was either very confident or very careless. Although there had been numerous sightings of Forrest and his men in the area, the Union major airily reported that things were quiet for 30 or 40 miles around Fort Pillow. ‘I think it perfectly safe,’ he assured Maj. Gen. Stephen Hurlburt in Memphis. Furthermore, Booth believed that he could ‘hold the post against any force for forty-eight hours.’ Events would soon prove him wrong on both counts.

Tags: 19th Century, America's Civil War, American Civil War, Historical Conflicts

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