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The River Was Dyed With Blood: Nathan Bedford Forrest and Fort Pillow

 Brian Steel Wills, University of Oklahoma Press

At the conclusion of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, film director John Ford has a newspaper editor voice Ford’s definition of historical truth: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” No Civil War figure has been more bedeviled by that practice than Confederate cavalry commander Nathan Bedford Forrest. His legacy has forever been defined by the seizure of Fort Pillow on April 12, 1864, and the killing of many of the USCT troops who defended it. Brian Steel Wills has produced a nuanced, balanced investigation of just what happened at that isolated outpost on the banks of the Mississippi River.

In Tennessee and other areas where loyalties were divided, both sides indulged in “hard war” from the war’s earliest days. It’s within this unsettled environment, plus the South’s racial and cultural traditions, that Wills places the actions of Forrest and his men and examines the controversy that clouds their legacy to the present day. Wills seems to have winnowed the facts from the fictions and successfully separated the two. He concludes that events at Fort Pillow were “indicative of neither a policy of ‘massacre’ carried out ‘deliberately’ by the Confederates nor a wholesale Northern fabrication meant to discredit Nathan Bedford Forrest and the Confederate States of America.” The reality, it seems, lies somewhere in between.

The battle was fairly straightforward, but given the survivors’ widely differing impressions, it’s a story not easily told. Forrest and his raiders were recruiting men and gathering supplies, and Fort Pillow promised horses, fodder, ammunition and food. Forrest was unaware that most of the fort’s defenders were black artillerists and Tennessee Unionists who shouldn’t have been there at all; Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman had ordered the fort, and other small installations, abandoned months earlier. But when Forrest arrived, his troops had already invested the fort, whose layout, Wills observes, “favored the attackers,” and fire from Rebel sharpshooters “was having a galling effect on the Union defenders.” After the Federals ignored Forrest’s demand for surrender, his troops “raced across the narrow open plain and scrambled into the ditch fronting the earthworks.” It was an assault, Wills maintains, “he had tried to avoid.”

Forrest was not at his customary post at the front of his troops when the attack began. By the time he arrived within the fort’s ramparts, “the cohesion of the assault itself fell apart and the combat disintegrated into patches of men fighting and swarms of others running for their lives.” The casualty figures support the claim of a massacre. Of the fort’s 600 defenders, nearly half died. Tennessee Unionists suffered about 34 percent of the total; black troops accounted for 64 percent of the dead and mortally wounded. The attackers suffered 20 dead and 60 wounded.

Wills never attempts to excuse Forrest for his command and control failures or justify what happened inside Fort Pillow. He chronicles the events as they unfolded and shows how the battle came to be used and manipulated by both sides to further their political and military goals. An investigation by the House Committee on the Conduct of the War issued a very one-sided account—not surprising, since no Confederates testified. Fort Pillow also gave the Lincoln administration a ready-made election issue plus a morale-boosting recruiting tool among African Americans. Northern newspapers shouted it was an atrocity; Southern editorialists argued that using blacks as soldiers resulted in battlefield barbarity. Wills concludes, with ample justification, that “Nathan Bedford Forrest was obviously no saint, but his commonsense approach and the priorities of a battlefield offered no imperative for mass murder.”

Fort Pillow haunted Forrest to the end of his days, and it remains a contentious topic even now. Wills has brought erudition and empathy to an array of confusing and often contradictory information. What it all means is for the reader to decide.

 

Originally published in the October 2014 issue of Civil War Times. To subscribe, click here.