“What followed was straightforward butchery as the Confederate raiders set upon the surrendering Union troops with both carbine and sabre.”

By S.C. Gwynne

FEW AMERICANS TODAY have ever heard of Fort Pillow.

Even among readers of Civil War history, the events surrounding the capture of the remote stockade on the Mississippi River remain obscure.

Located 80 miles north of Memphis near Henning, Tennessee, in the spring of 1864, Pillow was a little-known outpost manned by a handful of Union soldiers.

It was so obscure and irrelevant, in fact, and so ineffective in its task of suppressing rebel guerrillas in the region, that the Federal army’s western commander, William Tecumseh Sherman, had tried unsuccessfully to shut it down.

But in April of 1864, Fort Pillow became the site of the war’s greatest atrocity. And although the sheer scale of violence would pale in comparison with the titanic battles in the east at places the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor and Petersburg, it would become both a rallying cry and a line of demarcation – a stark and brutal sign of the revolutionary change that had swept through the war and altered its nature.

In the early morning of April 12, a force of about 1,500 Confederate cavalry raiders appeared beyond the palisade of the Union-occupied fort as unexpectedly as if they had been dropped from the sky.

The Rebels were under the command of Nathan Bedford Forrest, one of the South’s most brilliant commanders and a tactical genius whom Sherman called “the most remarkable man our Civil War has produced on either side.”

Forrest, who was a master of hit and run warfare, made short work of Fort Pillow’s small garrison, driving the bluecoats back into their works and then forming a tight noose around perimeter.

At 2 p.m. he demanded unconditional surrender, promising to treat his captives “as prisoners of war.” Pillow’s commander, William Bradford, gallantly (albeit foolishly) refused.

It took the Rebels less than 10 minutes to carry the fort’s breastworks and rout the hapless Federals, many of whom fled in panic down a steep embankment to the Mississippi River, where they soon faced fire from three directions. With the water at their backs, there was with no avenue for escape.

With the battle all but won, Forrest’s men quickly realized that fully half of their trapped and helpless opponents were in fact black Union troops.

Rebel soldiers, on the whole, hated black soldiers. Most of them considered it an abomination that the U.S. government was putting Springfield rifles into the hands of former slaves.

What followed was straightforward butchery as the Confederate raiders set upon the surrendering Union troops with both carbine and sabre. Many of the victims were already disarmed and wounded when they were shot down or hacked apart.

By the end of the killings, nearly half of the 600 Union soldiers at Fort Pillow were dead. Two thirds of those who had fallen were black. Following the slaughter, the Confederates abandoned the fort. But that would not be the end of the story.

News of the massacre became a sensation in the North, with Forrest portrayed as the devil incarnate.

What was going on here? A racially motivated atrocity, certainly, but also a sign of how radically the war had changed.

When Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation had come into force in January 1863, the president had added a single clarifying paragraph to the already revolutionary, nation-transforming text: Former slaves, he declared, would be allowed to serve in the army, and to fight. Blacks were already in uniform, but did not carry weapons. Now Lincoln sought to raise an army of free blacks and runaway slaves. Such men would become instruments of their own deliverance.

With a stroke of the pen, the president had transformed the conflict from a morally unanchored effort to restore a divided nation into a crusade for the freedom of the nation’s four million slaves—a war of black liberation. It was a controversial idea in the North, but outright heresy in the South. Yet it was happening.

In the war’s final year, there was no ignoring the shift, even though by the time of the massacre at Fort Pillow, most Confederate soldiers had not yet faced African-Americans in battle.

Though Fort Pillow was the war’s most lurid atrocity—and the one that was most widely reported in newspapers of the day—it carried an even deeper significance. Black soldiers were already changing the meaning of the war itself. By the time of Appomattox, 180,000 African Americans had enlisted in the Union army, more than half of whom were former slaves. They made up more than 10 per cent of Federal forces, enough indeed to change the balance of power in the war in the North’s favour.

The illustrations of the massacre that graced the pages of Northern broadsheets showed white Rebels hacking wounded and surrendering black soldiers to pieces with sabres, clubbing them with musket butts and skewering them with bayonets. Northern readers saw Southern soldiers in a fury killing the very people they had subjugated, those who were now rising up against them. Yet Forrest’s men’s bloodlust did nothing to further the Confederate cause. In fact, it may have only served to speed the collapse of the South.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: S.C. Gwynne is the author of Hymns of the Republic: The Story of the Final Year of the American Civil War and the New York Times bestsellers Rebel Yell and Empire of the Summer Moon, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He spent most of his career as a journalist, including stints with Time as bureau chief, national correspondent, and senior editor, and with Texas Monthly as executive editor. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife. For more information, please visit https://scgwynne.com