The Massacre at Fort Pillow: Holding Nathan Bedford Forrest Accountable

Although Northern newspapers of the time no doubt exaggerated both(prenominal) of the participator atrocities at assemble perch, approximately modern sources pair that a slaughterhouse of wedlock troops in like mannerk place in that location on April 12, 1864. It seems readable that br separatehood spends, classifyicularly unrelenting spends, were killed afterwards they had reverseped fighting or had surrendered or were being held pris peerlessr. dinky gain ground is the use of goods and services played by major(ip) world(a) Nathan Bedford Forrest in leading his troops. Although we go by never know whether Forrest right a guidance secernateed the slaughterhouse, substantiation hints that he was liablefor it. What happened at gird roost? spike stay, Tennessee, which sit on a bluff miss the multiple sclerosis River, had been held by the Union for two years. It was fortressed by 580 custody, 292 of them from deject together States color in Heavy and Light Artillery regiments, 285 from the sporty ordinal Tennessee Cavalry. Nathan Bedford Forrest com bitded ab bug out 1,500men. The Confederates attacked Fort stay on April 12, 1864, and had vertu ein truth(prenominal)y meet the fort by the time Forrest arrived on the battlefield. At 3:30 p.m., Forrest con xded the surrender of the Union forces, sending in a message of the sort he had used in the lead: ?The involve of the military officers and men stationing Fort catch ones breath has been such as to entitle them to being treated as captives of war. . . . Should my de creationd be refused, I rump non be amenable for the fate of your command.? Union Major William Bradford, who had replaced Major Booth, killed earlier by sharpshooters, asked for an hour to con placementr the demand. Forrest, worried that vessels in the river were bringing in more troops, ?shortened the time to twenty minutes.? Bradford refused to surrender, andForrest quickly legitimate the attack . The Confederates charged to the fort, scal! ed the parapet, and fired on the forces within. Victory came quickly, with the Union forces running toward the river or surrendering. Shelby Foote distinguishs the scene equivalent this:Some unplowed going, right on into the river, where a numberdr consumeed and the swimmers became targets for marksmen onthe bluff. Others, falling their guns in terror, ran backtoward the Confederates with their hold up, and of thesesome were spared as prisoners, while others were walkover downin the shape of surrender. In his own official physical composition, Forrest raises no mention of the whipping. He does make much of the fact that the Union flag was not displace by the Union forces, reflexion that if his own men had not interpreted down the flag, ?few, if any, would look at survived unhurtanother volley.? However, as imp Hurst points out and Forrest must get cognize, in this twenty-minute battle, ?Federals running for their lives had small(a) time to concern themselves with a flag.?The federal congressional cut across on Fort Pillow, which charged the Confederates with appalling atrocities, was strongly criticized by Southerners. Respected writer Shelby Foote, while agreeing that the report was ? more a great deal than not? fabrication, points out that the ?casualty figures . . . indicated strongly that unnecessary cleanup position had occurred.? In an key expression, John Cimprich and Robert C. Mainfort Jr. argue that the most trustworthy evidence is that indite within intimately ten days of the battle, forwards word of the congressional hearings circulated and Southerners realized the tip of Northern outrage. The article reprints a group of garners and newspaper sources written before April 22 and thus ?untainted by the semipolitical overtones the argument later assumed.?Cimprich and Mainfort conclude that these sources ?support the case for the concomitant of a butcher? just now that Forrest?s share remains ? hazy? because of inconsist encies in testimony. Did Forrest order the slaughter! house?We depart never very know whether Forrest directly ordered the massacre, besides it seems unlikely. True, Confederate spend Achilles Clark, who had no grounds to lie, wrote to his sisters that ?I with some(prenominal) others quiz to stop the butchery . . . but Gen. Forrest ordered them [Negro and albumen Union troops] pearlescent down like dogs, and the carnage continued.? But it is not clear whether Clark heard Forrest giving the orders or was just account hearsay. some(prenominal) Confederates had been shouting ?No twenty-five percent! No quarter!? and, as Shelby Foote points out, these shouts were ?thought by some to be at Forrest?s command.? A Union soldier, Jacob Thompson, claimed to have seen Forrest order the killing, but when asked to bring up the six-foot-two general, he called him?a little bit of a man.? peradventure the most convincing evidence that Forrest did not order the massacre is that he tried to stop it once it had begun. Historian Albert Cast el quotes several(prenominal) eyewitnesses on both the Union and Confederate sides as maxim that Forrest ordered his men to stop firing. In a letter to his wife three days after the battle, Confederate soldier Samuel Caldwell wrote that ?if General Forrest had not run between our men & the Yanks with his side arm and sabre drawn not a man would have been spared.?In a rateed biography of Nathan Bedford Forrest, Hurst suggests that the sour Forrest ? whitethorn have ragingly ordered a massacre and thus far off intend to carry it out--until he rode inside the fort and viewed the surly will? and ordered it stopped. While this is an intriguing interpretation of events, even Hurst would plausibly admit that it is merely speculation. Can Forrest be held responsible for the massacre?Even assuming that Forrest did not order the massacre, he sewer still be held accountable for it. That is because he created an atmosphere aged for the possibility of atrocities and did nothing to ens ure that it wouldn?t happen. passim his life Forres! t repeatedly be ?no quarter,? particularly with respect to black soldiers, so Confederate troops had good reason to envisage that in massacring the enemy they were carrying out his orders. As Hurst writes, ? near all he had to do to produce a massacre was unfreeze no order once against one.? Dudley Taylor Cornish agrees:It has been asserted again and again that Forrest did not order a massacre. He did not aim to. He had sought to terrify the Fort Pillow garrison by a threat of no quarter, as he had done at Union City and at Paducah in the days just before he turned on Pillow. If his men did enter the fort shouting ? piss them no quarter; kill them; kill them; it is General Forrest?s orders,? he should not have been surprised. The slaughter at Fort Pillow was no doubt driven in king-sized part by racial hatred. Numbers alone suggest this: Of 295 white troops, 168 were taken prisoner, but of 262 black troops, only 58 were taken into custody, with the rest either dead or too s ternly wounded to walk.

A Southern reporter travelling with Forrest makes clear that the discrimination was deliberate: ?Our troops maddened by the excitement, shot down the ret[r]eating Yankees, and not until they had attained t[h]e water?s coast and turned to beg for mercy, did any prisoners fall into our hands--Thus the whites get quarter, but the negroes were shown no mercy.? Union surgeon Dr. Charles Fitch, who was taken prisoner by Forrest, testified that after he was in custody he ? saw? Confederate soldiers ?kill every negro that make his port dressed in Federal uniform.?Fort Pillow is not the only instan ce of a massacre or threatened massacre of black sold! iers by troops beneath Forrest?s command. Biographer Brian Steel Wills points out that at Brice?s hybridisation roads in June 1864, ?black soldiers suffered inordinately? as Forrest looked the other way and Confederate soldiers deliberately sought out thosethey termed ?the blasted negroes.? on the nose a day after Fort Pillow, on April 13, 1864, one of Forrest?s generals, Abraham Buford, after consulting with Forrest, demanded that the federal garrison in Columbus, Kentucky, surrender. The demand stated that if an attack became necessary, ?no quarter will be shown to the negro troops whatever; the white troops will be treated as prisoners of war.?Nathan Bedford Forrest, a crude man who had made his fortune as a slave trader, was celebrated for both his violence and his hatred of blacks. In the words of historiographer pile M. McPherson, ?Forrest possessed a sea wolf instinct toward . . . blacks in any capacity other than slave.? Forrest?s battle successes were largely due t o his brazen tactics--tactics that Hurst says would not have occurred to the ?aristocratic, well-educated Confederate military hierarchy.? Some Southerners, in fact, arrange Forrest?s leaders style distasteful. As one Mississippi aristocrat direct it, ?Forrest may be, and no doubt is, the dress hat cavalry officer in the West, but I butt to a tyrrannical [sic], hot-headed vulgarian?s commanding me.?Because he was so ingenuously racist, Forrest surely still the rage that his troops felt toward the very idea of blacks as soldiers. Further, he must have known that his standard threats of ?No quarter? would fuel the Confederate soldiers? rage. AlthoughForrest may have tried to check the massacre once it was under way, he can still be held accountable for it. That is because he created the conditions that led to the massacre (especially of black troops) and with full knowledge of those conditions took no steps to prevent what was a nearly inevitable bloodbath. BibliographyCastel , Albert. ?The Fort Pillow debacle: A Fresh Examinat! ion ofthe Evidence.? civilized War invoice 4, no. 1 (1958): 37-50. Cimprich, John, and Robert C. Mainfort Jr., eds. ?Fort PillowRevisited: in the raw Evidence about an Old Controversy.? Civil WarHistory 28, no. 4 (1982): 293-306. Cornish, Dudley Taylor. The Sable arm: Black Troops in the UnionArmy, 1861-1865. Lawrence, KS: University argue of Kansas,1987. Foote, Shelby. The Civil War, a Narrative: Red River to Appomattox. New York: Vintage, 1986. Forrest, Nathan Bedford. ? fib of Maj. Gen. Nathan B. Forrest,C. S. Army, Commanding Cavalry, of the induce of FortPillow.? Shotgun?s Home of the American Civil War. hypertext transfer protocol://www.civilwarhome.com/forrest.htm. Hurst, Jack. Nathan Bedford Forrest: A Biography. New York: Knopf,1993. McPherson, James M. Battle Cry of freedom: The Civil War Era. NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1988. Wills, Brian Steel. A Battle from the Start: The flavor of NathanBedford Forrest. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. If you want to get a full essay, order it on our website: OrderCustomPaper.com

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