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Reviews
| River Run Red: The Fort Pillow Massacre in the American Civil War, by Andrew Ward. New York: Penguin Books, 2006. 560 pages. $18.00, paper.
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| The Fort Pillow Massacre has had a troubled and contentious history almost from the moment that Major General Nathan Bedford Forrest's cavalry overran the small garrison on the Mississippi River north of Memphis on April 12, 1864. Union survivors claimed that Forrest's men slaughtered the fort's occupants, mostly newly recruited black soldiers, in an orgy of violence that ignored the fort's surrender and violated the rules of war and human conscience. Subsequent accounts further asserted that Forrest had approved the massacre at least, if he did not order it outright. Forrest denied the charges. During the war, "remember Fort Pillow" became a rallying cry for blacks, who realized that Confederates would give them no quarter, and Forrest's men, among other Confederates, used it as a warning to any southern Unionist or slave who would raise arms against them. After the war, the memory of Fort Pillow remained contested, especially because Forrest became the symbol of postwar white southern resistance to Reconstruction as a leader of the Ku Klux Klan and, well into the twentieth century, as a totem of the Lost Cause. Where one stood regarding the Fort Pillow massacre during and after the war usually staked off the position one held regarding emancipation and black rights, the meaning of "loyalty," the morality and conduct of a civil war, and the character of white southern manhood in arms. Until recently, Forrest's defenders controlled much of the narrative, variously denying any murders occurred, declaring the victims brought on the killings by resisting while under a white flag, and asserting that the Union soldiers were drunk and disorderly and plunged to their deaths in mad rushes to the river and other self-destructive actions. For many white southerners, the outrage was not that black and white Union soldiers might have been massacred, but that blacks had been armed at all and promised freedom. |
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Andrew Ward, in a deeply researched and riveting account, demonstrates that a massacre did occur at Fort Pillow. He shows clearly that Forrest's men were primed for such violence by Forrest's earlier practice of issuing "surrender-or-die" demands to besieged garrisons, by their embarrassment at a recent defeat at Paducah, Kentucky (when the Union garrison refused to surrender and won the day), by their anger at Tennessee "disloyalists" who had joined the Union army, and by their hatred of black soldiers and the cause of black freedom that threatened all they held dear. Ward adds important details to the story of Fort Pillow, especially regarding the place and use of "contrabands" in western Tennessee; the interests of "homegrown Yankees" in Tennessee; the physical layout of the fort and topography of the area; the Union commander's poor judgment in occupying the fort at all; the confused "battle" sequences; and the character and postwar lives of many individual soldiers, Union and Confederate, black and white, who fought there—many of whom never fully recovered emotionally from the experience. In the end, Ward confesses he cannot know if Forrest had ordered the slaughter, but he does insist that Forrest evinced no regrets about the massacre until the northern press and a United States congressional investigation blamed him for it and questioned his integrity, honor, and character. Forrest then began to craft his own account of the "battle." |
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Ward's book is not the last word on the Fort Pillow massacre. For one, it suffers from too many nagging minor errors that call into question the timing of some details of the day. He dismisses too readily as self-serving the United States congressional investigation of the massacre, which, in fact, gathered useful testimony. His arguments largely complement, but also contrast in emphasis those of John Cimprich, who in his fine book, Fort Pillow, a Civil War Massacre, and Public Memory (2005), argues that the massacre was caused by a combination of factors: the frustrations of a brutal civil war in western Tennessee, the Confederate soldiers' racial anger at black soldiers, and Forrest's loss of control over his men. He concludes that the Fort Pillow massacre fit a larger pattern of Confederate atrocities against black soldiers. Written with vigor, even passion, River Run Red cuts to the marrow of the war's emotions and gives soldiers their due. For teachers of history, it also shows the power of history as narrative that will pull students into the vortex of the Civil War. |
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| Saint Joseph's University, Philadelphia, PA |
Randall M. Miller |
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