FORT PILLOW

Piecing together exactly what happened at Fort Pillow on that eventful day is anything but easy. There are four principal primary sources: the contemporary reports from both sides in The Official Records of the war of the Rebellion; the testimony collected by Messrs. Wade and Gooch of the U.S. Congressional Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War immediately after the engagement and published as The Fort Pillow Massacre; the Confederate rejoinder in Jordan and Pryor's 1868 book, The Campaigns of General Nathan Bedford Forest and of Forrest's Cavalry (in essence, Forrest's own military memoir); and Wyeth's 1899 biography, The Life of General Nathan Bedford Forrest, which is written from a Southern point of view and is generally sympathetic to Forrest and his men.

The problem is that reconciling events in the contemporary documents-particularly in The Fort Pillow Massacre-and those of the two accounts inclining more toward Bedford Forrest's viewpoint-is often next to impossible. Knowing whom to believe – or whether to believe anyone – gets tricky. The accounts of Forrest's backers are unabashedly racist. In them, that Negro troops are none too brave and that blacks are mentally inferior to whites are givens. They seem to imply that the insults the colored artillerymen hurled at Forrest's troopers from the earthworks of Fort Pillow justified a massacre in and of themselves.

This should leave The Fort Pillow Massacre as a more reliable source… except that it is a propaganda piece in its own right, designed to paint the Confederates in general and Bedford Forrest in particular in colors as dark as possible. Forrest's force of about 1,500 men was inflated to from 7,000 to 10,000. The account emphasizes the slaughter of soldiers white and (particularly) black after the surrender of Fort Pillow-but there was no surrender, not in any formal sense. Bradford, acting in the dead Major Booth's name, refused to give one, and the fort was taken by storm.

Trying to find out what happened to Major Bradford after the fighting ended is another case in point. Pro-Confederate sources say that he was well treated, was given dinner by Colonel McCulloch, and gave his parole not to escape so he could bury his brother, Theodorick, who was killed when Fort Pillow was stormed. Bradford broke his parole, was recaptured in civilian clothes, and was shot while being taken from Brownsville to Jackson, where Forrest was. Jordan and Pryor say (p.455, note), “On the way, he again attempted to escape, soon after which one of the men shot him… mainly due to private vengeance for well-authorized outrages committed by Bradford and his band upon the defenseless families of the men of Forrest's cavalry.

[While at Fort Pillow] [h]e was treated with the utmost consideration and civility.” Wyeth, writing a generation later (p.588, note), says, “There is nothing in the records to show that the men who murdered Major Bradford were ever brought to trial for this unwarrantable act”: he does recognize that it should not have been done. My account of Bradford's last moments is based on the testimony of trader W R. McLagan, as reported in The Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, which shows that he was shot in cold blood rather than after an escape attempt.

Meanwhile, though, what motivated Bradford to break his parole? An affidavit from two U.S. lieutenants (Fort Pillow Massacre, p.105) states, “Major William F. Bradford, commanding our forces, was fired upon after he had surrendered the garrison. [He never did so.] The rebels told him he could not surrender. He ran into the river and swam out some 50 yards, they all the time firing at him, but failing to hit him. He was hailed by an officer and told to return to the shore. He did so. But as he neared the shore the riflemen discharged their pieces at him again. Again they missed. He ran up the hillside among the enemy with a white handkerchief in his hand in token of his surrender, but still they continued to fire upon him… [W]hen they found they could not hit him, they allowed him to give himself up as a prisoner and paroled him to the limits of the camp.” Pro-Confederate sources say… nothing of any of this. If a tenth of it is true, Bradford had good reason to mistrust the Rebels' “consideration and civility.”

The same affidavit, composed only six days after the combat at Fort Pillow, also asserts, “They [the Confederates] immediately killed all the officers who were over the negro troops, excepting one who has since died from his wounds. They took out from Fort Pillow about one hundred and some odd prisoners (white,) and forty negroes. They hung and shot the negroes as they passed along toward Brownsville until they were rid of them all. Out of the six hundred troops (convalescents included) which were at the fort they have only about one hundred prisoners (all whites,) and we have about fifty wounded who are paroled.”