APRIL 12, 1864:
The Fort
Pillow Massacre. Since the Confederate abandonment of Fort Pillow on June 4,
1862, Fort Pillow has been securely in the hands of the Union, and has helped
maintain Union hegemony along the Father of Waters. The area has been quiet for
many months, and the garrison, numbering 600 men (about half of which are
U.S.C.T. and half "green" white recruits), is on low alert.
On this day, General Nathan Bedford Forrest C.S.A. and 2,500 of his marauding
cavalrymen, fresh from their violent raid on Paducah, Kentucky, reach the
Tennessee fort and demand its surrender. The garrison refuses, and a brutal firefight
breaks out during which the Confederates breach the Union defenses. Outnumbered and inexperienced, the men of the
garrison are soon overborne.
It is the habit of the men of the U.S.C.T. to fight
valiantly and to avoid surrender. Surrender generally implies whippings,
beatings, brandings and other tortures both before and after a return to
slavery. Often, Confederate soldiers will simply execute any “darky” who has
been brazen enough to put on a blue uniform.
As the Confederates gain the upper hand at Fort Pillow, what
happens next is shrouded in the fog of war. Varying contemporary sources state
that the Federals surrender, that they are in the act of surrendering, that
they are fleeing, or that they continue to fight. In any event, the Confederate
troops begin selectively targeting black soldiers.
A Confederate account written after the war reports that:
The poor, deluded
negroes would run up to our men, fall upon their knees, and with uplifted hand
scream for mercy, but were ordered to their feet and then shot down.
A Northern account speaks of vicious bayonetings:
The blacks and their
officers were shot down, bayoneted and put to the sword in cold blood . . .
It is clear that there is no formal surrender of the fort.
It is also clear that of the 600 men of the fort, only 200 are taken prisoner,
all of them white. Some 290 of the 300 black soldiers are killed outright, as
are most of the white officers. Of the remaining men, most are wounded (and
white) and are left behind by Forrest’s men when they abandon the fort later
that day.
Forrest, the former slave trader and future leader of the Ku
Klux Klan himself writes:
The river was dyed
with the blood of the slaughtered for two hundred yards. The approximate loss
was upward of five hundred killed [sic] but few of the officers escaping. My
loss was about twenty killed. It is hoped that these facts will demonstrate to
the Northern people that negro soldiers cannot cope with Southerners.
Fort Pillow is the wedge upon which prisoner exchange splits apart for the remainder of the war. The Union demands that black prisoners have
to be treated (and exchanged) identically to whites. Failing this, the
Confederacy’s actions are to be construed “as
a refusal on their part to agree to the further exchange of prisoners."
The Confederate response is succinct:
[We] doubt, however,
whether the exchange of negroes at all for our soldiers would be tolerated. As
to the white officers serving with negro troops, we ought never to be
inconvenienced with such prisoners.
In the wake of the Fort Pillow Massacre, President Abraham
Lincoln publicly reiterates the Order of Retaliation first issued in July 1863:
It is therefore
ordered that for every soldier of the United States killed in violation of the
laws of war, a rebel soldier shall be executed; and for every one enslaved by
the enemy or sold into slavery a rebel soldier shall be placed at hard labor on
the public works, and continued at such labor until the other shall be released
and receive the treatment due to a prisoner of war.
The killing of Union prisoners --- whether General Forrest’s
massacre of blacks at Fort Pillow, General Pickett’s staged hangings at New
Bern, the targeted violence against “Colored” troops at the Battle of Olustee,
or Major Henry Wirz’s malignant neglect of POWs at Andersonville --- though not
universal, has become a pattern, and as a pattern it is indicative of
increasing Confederate rage, a recognition the South is becoming ever more
impotent on the battlefield.
Almost every Southern description of the slaughter of U.S.C.T. men speaks of them "surrendering" and "begging" for their lives before being put to the sword. It is very unlikely that the U.S.C.T., who were particularly fierce on the battlefield, simply gave up to the men in gray so utterly, but Southern "honor" could countenance the killing of "inferior" cowards more quickly than it could accept the idea of the cold-blooded murder of brave, battle-hardened soldiers who saw themselves as the equals of whites.
This Southern regression into brutality goes hand in hand
with the South’s violation of the ancient custom of Honor Parole, in which
repatriated prisoners of war were forbidden to take up arms again. First massively
violated after the Union victory at Vicksburg, the South, the self-proclaimed
bulwark of “traditionalism,” has decided to ignore the quaint custom in favor
of pragmatically addressing its desperate manpower needs.
Historically, Honor Parolees who fought again and recaptured
were customarily hanged by their captors. Although the North has little interest
in, or energy to spare, identifying and hanging Rebel violators, hangings of
suspected Yankee violators (whether confirmed or not) are not uncommon.
Given all these factors, the Union shortly thereafter halts
all prisoner exchanges. The quickly-overpopulated POW Camps, Northern and
Southern both, become pestilential death camps. Many men are doomed to die
because Nathan Bedford Forrest fails at Fort Pillow to act as a soldier should.
This fourth April of the war marks the end of the third last
full year of the conflict and the beginning of the fourth, foreshortened, year.
By April of 1864, even the most hardened Confederates have come to the realization
that the South cannot “win” the war. Although Confederate military units can
still defeat Union military units on any given day, the Confederate armies no
longer have the wherewithal in manpower or materiel to sustain the necessary
momentum in any offensive operation significant enough to end the war in their
favor. It is no longer the Confederate States of America’s war to win. It is
the United States of America’s war to lose.
And lose it the United States still might. Although the
decline of the Confederacy seems evident in retrospect, in 1864 it was far less
so. The Union has struggled through the third year of the war with the same lackluster
cast of senior commanders. Lieutenant General Grant, Lincoln’s latest choice to
lead, is really an unknown quantity, seemingly victorious when he fights, but
prone to disastrous bouts of drinking, or so it is said.
The Confederacy, both through immense battle casualties and
because of better Union military training, has lost its early advantage of having
men “born to the saddle” fighting in combat. Southern fighting men are no
longer the thrill-seeking plantation-bred cavaliers of 1861, they are mostly smallholding
farm boys and small townsmen from North Carolina, Mississippi and Alabama (most
of whom do not own slaves), who are as similar to the farm boys and small townsmen
of Michigan, Maine and upstate New York who now form the backbone of the Union
armies as no matter.
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| Two nice Jewish boys: Union soldier Edward Jonas and Confederate soldier Charles Jonas were brothers. |
Union victories come in ever-increasing numbers but at a
very high price. While the Union has the manufacturing capacity to replace
knapsacks, rifles, cannons and bullets without difficulty (and who knows how
many billions of bullets have been fired to this point?), and it has the
resources to replace horses and foodstuffs with ease, and although it now has a
2:1 advantage in manpower in the field, the sheer brutality of the war is
wearing the Union down. Too many young men are coming home broken in body; even
more are coming home broken in spirit; and a troubling number are not coming
home at all. If this human toll has been nightmarish through three years of
war, it is going to be horrific in the fourth, and bloodiest, year. Could the
Union have foreseen the next twelve months it is likely that most U.S. citizens
would have pressed for peace even at the cost of disunion.
And this is exactly what the South is hoping for. After a
long unsuccessful period of attempting to meet both military and civilian needs
in equal measure, the Confederacy has, without any formal declaration, chosen
to throw most of its resources into fighting the war. Civilian needs are
stinted. There are shortages of cloth, leather, coal, lamp oil, and other
necessaries. Crops grown are seized for military use. Livestock is rounded up
and driven off to become part of the supply trains of the armies. Most fit white
men are off fighting. Slaves are taken without recompense in order to
supplement the logistical needs of the field armies. Without slaves or strong
men to farm the big fields, and with insufficient seed stocks, new crops cannot
be sown in adequate numbers. In the meanwhile, the old, the sick, the wounded,
the ill, and women and children are left to subsist in their cabins and modest
homes on a few scrawny chickens and scraps. What can be sold is being sold on
the black market. The wealthy still have much, but their own houses are
becoming noticeably barer. Confederate currency has nearly no value. In April
1864, the Confederate inflation rate hits 700%.
Still, Rebel esprit de
corps remains surprisingly high. Desertions, a plague after Gettysburg,
have dropped off, and many men have returned to the fight under the numerous amnesties
granted by Richmond and the States. It is the Rebel understanding that if only
the boys in butternut and gray can bleed the boys in blue white for long enough
the Union will agree to terms.
The South is waiting for a sea change. No longer is Richmond
expecting international recognition --- Confederate foreign policy has been a
dismal failure from the moment South Carolina seceded --- but the Confederacy
awaits the Union’s Presidential election, scheduled for November. If the hand
of the South can maintain a caustic grip on the neck of the North for the
balance of 1864, the Union ballot box will decide the war.
Lincoln, with his fixation on “preserving the
Union” at all costs in blood and treasure will be out. “Emancipation” of the
slaves will be reversed. Independence will be won through negotiation with a
more tractable U.S. President. Or, even if the Southern States do re-enter the
Union they will do so on their own terms, not terms dictated by Yankee
abolitionists.
Jefferson Davis knows this, and it is his one great hope.
Abraham Lincoln also knows this. And it is his one great fear.
