On the afternoon of April 11, Forrest met with Chalmers at Brownsville, 38 miles east of Fort Pillow. Forrest wanted the former Mississippi lawyer to head for the fort as early as possible the next morning. Chalmers quickly complied, and at 6 a.m. the next day his two brigades, under Colonels Robert McCulloch and Tyree Bell, made contact with the Federal pickets outside the fort. The advance guard, led by Captain Frank J. Smith of the 2nd Missouri Cavalry, managed to creep around behind the pickets and send them flying. Only a handful of pickets escaped back to the fort with the unwelcome news that the Rebels had suddenly arrived in force.

Forrest wasted no more time. He quickly signaled bugler Jacob Gaus to sound the charge, and retired to a hill 400 yards away to watch the assault. The bugler’s notes had scarcely drifted away before the Confederate sharpshooters opened another devastating fire on the fort’s parapets, making it impossible for the defenders to so much as raise their heads above the works. Meanwhile, other gray-clad troops sprang from their places of concealment in the ravines or behind the barracks huts, tore across the few remaining yards to the ditch surrounding the fort and bubbled into it like a swarm of angry hornets. Within seconds they were boosting one another onto the outer ledge below the fort’s wall. Lieutenant Leaming, who left behind the only official Union report of the battle, said the Confederates seemed to ‘rise from out of the very earth.’

Almost unopposed, the Confederates leaped onto the top of the wall and began blazing away at the cowering Federals, many of whom reportedly were drunk from barrels of whiskey put out prior to the final assault. Tennessee officer DeWitt Clinton Fort, one of Forrest’s men, was in the forefront of the attack. ‘As we charged over the ramparts,’ said Fort, ‘the enemy’s garrison of mixed complexion retreated over the bluff down to the water’s edge. Here was assembled one wild promiscuous mass rendered senseless and uncontrollable by the three causes–fright, drunkenness, and desperation.’

The Union defenders, black and white, soon broke and ran for the open rear of the fort. One black artilleryman, Private John Kennedy of the 2nd U.S. Colored Light Artillery, heard Bradford shout, ‘Boys, save your lives!’ Kennedy urged Bradford to ‘let us fight yet,’ but the major, seeing the Confederate attackers pouring in from all directions, said despairingly, ‘It is of no use anymore,’ and fled to the rear with the rest of his troops.

Inside the fort was a mass of confusion. Some of the Federals threw down their weapons and attempted to surrender, some continued firing, others simply ran away, spilling over the bluff’s brow and sliding down the vine-choked bank toward the river. Bradford and Marshall had worked out a prearranged signal for New Era to steam close to the bank at the first sign of trouble and ‘give the Rebels canister.’ Instead, no doubt to Bradford’s horrified consternation, Marshall swung the gunboat away from the shore. Meanwhile, Confederate marksmen stationed above and below the fort caught the retreating Federals at point-blank range and enfiladed the frantic fugitives. (Marshall later told a congressional committee that he had abandoned the plan because he was afraid the Confederates ‘might hail in a steamboat from below, capture her, put on four or five hundred men, and come after me.’)

Pandemonium reigned. The wrathful Confederates–most of whom had marched all night to the outskirts of the fort, run and sniped under enemy fire all morning, and then waited anxiously in the hot afternoon sun for the final assault to begin–were in no mood to be forgiving. To a man they believed that the Federals had been fools to refuse Forrest’s surrender demand. That refusal had cost them another 100 good men, dead or wounded. To their minds, the sight of black faces among the defenders was an added insult. The volatile mixture of racial animosity, long-simmering feuds with Tennessee Unionists, reports of atrocities committed against their own women and children, lingering embarrassment from the Paducah raid, physical exhaustion, battle excitement and fear for their own lives produced a brief but deadly spasm of vengefulness.

In the swirling confusion inside the fort the situation rapidly degenerated. Before Forrest could mount up and ride into the fort to restore order, an unknown number of Union troops reportedly were shot down while attempting to surrender. Meanwhile, the fort’s American flag still flew above the ramparts, and Confederates below the bluff had no way of knowing what was going on inside the fort. As DeWitt Clinton Fort noted in his diary after the battle: ‘The wildest confusion prevailed among those who had run down the bluff. Many of them had thrown down their arms while running and seemed desirous to surrender while many others had carried their guns with them and were loading and firing back up the bluff at us with a desperation which seemed worse than senseless. We could only stand there and fire until the last man of them was ready to surrender.’

Forrest himself, in a little-known postwar interview with fellow Confederate general Dabney H. Maury, supported Fort’s contention. ‘When we got into the fort the white flag was shown at once,’ Forrest said in an article published in the Philadelphia Weekly Times. ‘The negroes ran out down to the river; and although the [white] flag was flying, they kept on turning back and shooting at my men, who consequently continued to fire into them crowded on the brink of the river, and they killed a good many of them in spite of my efforts and those of their officers to stop them. But there was no deliberate intention nor effort to massacre the garrison as has been so generally reported by the Northern papers.’

Within half an hour the battle was over. Of the fort’s total garrison of 580 men, some 354 apparently were killed or wounded (final figures are still hotly disputed). Of these, a large number drowned while attempting to swim to the Union vessels that were steaming away without them. Another 226 were taken prisoner, including Bradford, who was shot and killed a few days later while attempting to escape.

After the battle, a congressional committee chaired by radical Republican Senator Benjamin F. Wade of Ohio issued a highly charged report accusing Forrest and his men of ‘an indiscriminate slaughter, sparing neither age nor sex, white or black, soldier or civilian.’ The fact that no women or children were killed at the fort, and only one civilian (who had taken up arms at the time of the attack), did not deter Wade’s committee, whose chief aim was not to determine the truth but to deliver a piece of wartime propaganda intended to incite the restive Northern public on the eve of Ulysses S. Grant’s long-awaited spring offensive. The report, virtually useless as an evidentiary document, did succeed in tarring Forrest and his men with the label of murderers, and the capture of Fort Pillow quickly became known as a ‘massacre.’ It remains so identified today, an explosive and imprecise term that sheds much heat–but little light–on one of the murkiest and most controversial episodes of the Civil War.

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This article was written by Roy Morris, Jr. and originally appeared in America’s Civil War magazine. For more great articles be sure to subscribe to America’s Civil War magazine today!

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