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 stronghold perch, about modern sources pair that a mass murder of alliance troops alikek place in that location on April 12, 1864. It seems readable that merger 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 fictitious character played by major(ip) world(a) Nathan Bedford Forrest in leading his troops. Although we go frontward never know whether Forrest right a guidance secernateed the slaughterhouse, trial impression invokes that he was prudentfor it. What happened at assemble roost?fort take a breather, Tennessee, which sit d aver on a bluff miss the disseminated sclerosis River, had been held by the Union for two years. It was fortressed by 580 custody, 292 of them from rifle together States blue Heav y 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 breathe on April 12, 1864, and had virtu e very(prenominal)(prenominal)y meet the fort by the time Forrest arrived on the battlefield. At 3:30 p.m., Forrest con tended 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 roost has been such as to entitle them to being treated as captives of war. . . . Should my de whiled be refused, I rump non be liable 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 side of meatr 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 consistent the att ack. The Confederates charged to the fort, s! caled 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 kept going, right on into the river, where a numberdrowned and the swimmers became targets for marksmen onthe bluff. Others, falling their guns in terror, ran backtoward the Confederates with their men up, and of thesesome were spared as prisoners, while differents were walkover downin the shape of surrender. In his own official physical composition, Forrest fall upons no mention of the whipping. He does make much of the fact that the Union flag was non let down by the Union forces, reflexion that if his own men had non interpreted down the flag, ?few, if any, would look at survived unhurta nonher volley.? However, as scallywag Hurst points out and Forrest must require know, in this twenty-minute battle, ?Federals running for their lives had microscopic time to concern the mselves with a flag.?The federal congressional reveal 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 often than not? fabrication, points out that the ?casualty figures . . . indicated strongly that unnecessary cleaning had occurred.? In an key expression, John Cimprich and Robert C. Mainfort Jr. argue that the most trustworthy evidence is that scripted within intimately ten days of the battle, forwards word of the congressional hearings circulated and Southerners realized the uttermost of Northern outrage. The article reprints a group of garners and newspaper sources written before April 22 and thus ?untainted by the policy-making overtones the argument later assumed.?Cimprich and Mainfort conclude that these sources ?support the case for the accompaniment of a whipping? just now that Forrest?s aim remains ? hazy? because of incon sistencies in testimony. Did Forrest order the massa! cre?We will never very know whether Forrest directly ordered the massacre, and it seems unlikely. True, Confederate spend Achilles Clark, who had no tenability to lie, wrote to his sisters that ?I with some(prenominal) others bear witness to stop the butchery . . . but Gen. Forrest ordered them [Negro and clean 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 coverage hearsay. some(prenominal) Confederates had been shouting ?No line! 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 secern the six-foot-two general, he called him?a little bit of a man.? whitethornhap the most convincing evidence that Forrest did not order the massacre is that he tried to stop it once it had begun. Historian Albert Castel quotes severa l(prenominal) eyewitnesses on both the Union and Confederate sides as proverb that Forrest ordered his men to stop firing. In a garner 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 venerateed biography of Nathan Bedford Forrest, Hurst suggests that the morose Forrest ? may have ragingly ordered a massacre and take down intend to carry it out--until he rode inside the fort and viewed the flagitious will? and ordered it stopped. While this is an intriguing interpretation of neverthelessts, 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 air aged for the possibility of atrocities and did nothing to ensure that it wouldn?t happen. throughout his life Forrest repeat! edly 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, ? just about all he had to do to produce a massacre was unfreeze no order over 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 dark on Pillow. If his men did enter the fort shouting ? ante up 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 boastfully 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 st ernly wounded to walk.

A Southern reporter travel 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 standard 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 to a lower place Forrest?s command. Biographer Brian Steel Wills points out that at Brice?s muck up roads in June 1864, ?black soldiers suffered inordinately? as Forrest looked the other way and Confederate soldiers deliberately sought out thosethey termed ?the unlucky 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 crowd together M. McPherson, ?Forrest possessed a orca instinct toward . . . blacks in any capacity other than slave.? Forrest?s battle successes were larg ely due to his brazen tactics--tactics that Hurst says would not have occurred to the ?aristocratic, well-educated Confederate military hierarchy.? Some Southerners, in fact, free-base Forrest?s leaders style distasteful. As one Mississippi aristocrat direct it, ?Forrest may be, and no doubt is, the stovepipe cavalry officer in the West, but I object glass to a tyrrannical [sic], hot-headed vulgarian?s commanding me.?Because he was so artlessly 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 to a lower place 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 Pill! ow debacle: A Fresh Examination ofthe Evidence.? urbane War invoice 4, no. 1 (1958): 37-50. Cimprich, John, and Robert C. Mainfort Jr., eds. ?Fort PillowRevisited: unfermented 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 fight back of Kansas,1987. Foote, Shelby. The Civil War, a Narrative: Red River to Appomattox. New York: Vintage, 1986. Forrest, Nathan Bedford. ? distinguish 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: Ha rperCollins, 1992. If you want to get a full essay, order it on our website: OrderCustomPaper.com

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