Fort Pillow

On April 12, 1864, Confederate and Union forces clashed at Fort Pillow, a fortification along the Mississippi River near Henning, Tennessee, in an engagement of the American Civil War that would later become known as the Fort Pillow Massacre. Troops under Major General Nathan Bedford Forrest overran the Union defenders and, as the fighting drew to a close, killed soldiers who were trying to give themselves up, a large number of whom belonged to the U.S. Colored Troops. Reflecting on the episode, historian David J. Eicher observed that Fort Pillow stood as one of the darkest and most tragic chapters in the nation's military past.

Background

The Confederacy reacted with fury to the United States's use of the Colored Troops and to Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, denouncing such measures as "uncivilized." This anger translated into policy in May 1863, when the Confederate government enacted a law declaring that any black soldier captured while serving against the Confederacy would be handed over to the state where he was taken, to face trial under that state's own laws.

Gideon Johnson Pillow, a Confederate Brigadier General, had constructed Fort Pillow in early 1862 along the Mississippi River, roughly 40 miles (64 km) above Memphis, and control of the position shifted between the two armies as the confl

Battle

At ten in the morning on April 12, Forrest reached Fort Pillow, finding that Chalmers had already ringed the position with his troops. Misfortune struck the general almost immediately when a stray round hit his mount, throwing him to the ground and leaving him bruised. It was the first of three horses that would fall beneath him before the day ended. Positioning marksmen along the elevated terrain that commanded a view into the fort, Forrest exposed numerous defenders to their aim. Major Booth fell dead when a sharpshooter's round struck him in the chest, and command passed to Bradford. Within the hour, by eleven o'clock, Confederate troops had seized two lines of barracks buildings standing roughly 150 yards, or 140 meters, from the fort's southern edge. Union troops had never managed to burn these structures before losing them, and the buildings now gave the attackers deadly cover from which to pour fire onto the garrison.

The exchange of small arms and cannon fire dragged on until half past three, when Forrest dispatched a written ultimatum calling for capitulation. He wrote that the garrison's officers and men had conducted themselves in a manner deserving treatment as prisoners of war, and demanded unconditional surrender of the whole force, pledging that they would receive such treatment. He noted that his troops had just obtained fresh ammunition and could readily storm and take the fort from their current positions, warning that if his demand were rejected he could not answer for what befell the command.

Bradford, hiding the fact that he had taken over after Booth's death since he did not want the Confederates to know, asked for a full hour to think it over. Forrest, convinced that Union reinforcements were on their way upriver, cut this down to just twenty minutes, warning that he would order an attack if the garrison had not surrendered by then. Bradford's answer came back flatly: he would not give up the fort. Forrest immediately had his bugler signal the charge.

What followed was a ferocious Confederate assault. Sharpshooters kept up steady fire into the fort while the attacking infantry moved in two waves, the first entering the ditch and standing still so the second wave could climb over their backs. Those in the second wave then pulled their comrades up onto a ledge along the embankment. The maneuver went smoothly, drawing little return fire apart from the ongoing sharpshooting and skirmishing on the flanks. Confederate fire directed at the New Era forced her crew to seal the gun ports and cease firing entirely. Once the order came for the sharpshooters to stop, the troops on the ledge surged over the top of the embankment, opening fire for the first time directly into the crowded defenders below.

The garrison put up only brief resistance before collapsing and fleeing toward the landing beneath the bluff, having been assured that a Navy gunboat waiting there would cover their retreat with grapeshot and canister. But the vessel's gun ports stayed shut, and not a single round was fired in the garrison's defense. Retreating soldiers found themselves caught in fire from behind and from the sides, and many fell where they ran. Others made it as far as the river, where they either drowned or were cut down in the water by sharpshooters positioned on the bluff above.

Military aftermath

Accounts of the death toll differ depending on who compiled them. Dyer's 1908 tally listed U.S. Army losses as 350 killed or mortally wounded, 60 wounded, and 164 taken prisoner or missing, for a combined total of 574.

By contrast, the Confederates suffered comparatively few losses, with 14 killed and 86 wounded, while the toll on the U.S. side ran much steeper. Out of somewhere between 585 and 605 U.S. troops on the field, estimates place the dead at 277 to 297. A mid-twentieth-century writer named Jordan argued that these numbers overstated actual U.S. fatalities. What historians largely concur on is that the fate of the defenders diverged sharply along racial lines. Roughly one in five black soldiers, 58 in total, ended up as prisoners, compared with about three in five white soldiers, or 168 men. Black troops were not the only ones executed after laying down their weapons; Major Bradford apparently met the same fate once he had surrendered.

That same evening, Confederate forces abandoned the fort, having achieved little beyond briefly interrupting U.S. military activity. In the months that followed, the phrase "Fort Pillow massacre" became a call to arms for U.S. troops, hardening many soldiers' determination to fight the war through to victory.

Grant responded to the events at Fort Pillow on April 17, 1864, by instructing General Benjamin F. Butler, then handling prisoner exchange talks with the Confederacy, to insist that captured black soldiers receive treatment equal to that given white prisoners. Grant warned that anything short of this equal treatment would count as a Confederate rejection of continued prisoner exchanges altogether, and would be met accordingly.

The Confederacy turned this demand down flat. Confederate Secretary of War James Seddon put it plainly in a June 1864 letter, expressing doubt that trading captured black soldiers for Confederate prisoners would ever be accepted, and adding that white officers who served alongside black troops deserved no special consideration as prisoners either.

Even before the massacre, the United States had already moved to deter the killing or enslavement of captured soldiers. On July 30, 1863, Lincoln issued his Order of Retaliation, declaring that a Confederate soldier would be put to death for every U.S. soldier killed contrary to the laws of war, and that a Confederate soldier would be sentenced to hard labor on public works for every U.S. soldier enslaved or sold into bondage, with that labor to continue until the captured man was freed and granted proper prisoner-of-war status.

Although this order was never actually carried out, its mere existence quietly pushed the Confederate military to acknowledge black U.S. soldiers as genuine combatants rather than as escaped or formerly enslaved people, at least for the war's remaining duration. Even so, this restraint proved short lived. During the Battle of the Crater in July 1864, Southern troops once again gunned down black U.S. soldiers who had already surrendered instead of taking them captive.