THE CAPTURE OF FORT PILLOW, TENN.
April 12, 1864.
Fort Pillow was an earthwork, crescent-shaped, eight feet in height, surrounded by a ditch six feet deep and twelve feet in width. It was situated on a high bluff which descended precipitately to the river’s edge and on the other sides sloped to a deep ravine.
On the twelfth of April, just before sunrise, General Forrest’s command, consisting of McCulloch’s brigade of Chalmers’ division and Bell’s brigade of Buford’s division, under the command of Brigadier-General Chalmers, appeared in the neighborhood of Fort Pillow. The garrison of this fort comprised nineteen officers and five hundred and thirty-eight enlisted men, of whom two hundred and sixty-two were colored troops, including one battalion of the Sixth United States heavy artillery, commanded by Major L. F. Booth, and one section of the Second United States light artillery, together with one battalion of the Thirteenth Tennessee cavalry (white), under the command of Major W. F. Bradford. The pickets of the garrison were driven in and the fighting became general, about nine o’clock, A. M. Major Bradford, who commanded, withdrew all the forces, a portion of which had previously occupied exterior entrenchments, within the fort, and, as both the black and the white troops fought gallantly, he was sanguine of making a successful defence.
General Forrest having assumed the command, he ordered General Chalmers to advance his line so as to gain a position on the slope against which the cannon in the fort could not be directed, and where the garrison with small arms could not reach them without exposing themselves to the sharpshooters, who, under cover of stumps and logs, forced them to keep inside the works. This position, within one hundred yards of the fort, was, after much hard fighting and a severe loss to the rebels, gained by the assailants. The gunboat New Era shelled the latter continually but with little effect, although constantly instructed by signals from the fort of the whereabouts of the enemy. Her guns finally became overheated, her ammunition almost exhausted, and she was compelled to cease firing.
Forrest now demanded the unconditional surrender of the fort. Major Bradford asked to be allowed an hour to consult with his officers and those of the gunboat. Forrest, perceiving two Union gunboats approaching, the foremost apparently crowded with troops, refused to grant more than twenty minutes for the deliberation. There was some equivocal parleying in the interim, and the rebels are accused of unfairly gaining some approaches to the fort during the brief truce. The twenty minutes expired, and it was understood that Major Bradford refused to surrender.
Forrest, after exciting the rivalry and emulation of the rebel Missourians, Mississippians and Tennesseeans who surrounded the fort, ordered the bugle to sound the charge, which was made with a fierce yell, and the works were carried without a halt in the Confederate line. The rebels declare that the colored troops retreated toward the river, with their arms in their hands, firing back, and their colors flying. This assertion is stoutly denied by the few survivors of the massacre which followed. The latter affirm that the Federal troops, black and white, threw down their arms and sought to escape by running down the steep bank to the river. Some hid themselves behind trees and bushes, and others leaped into the river leaving only their heads above water, and were fired upon and slain by the victors as soon as discovered.
The Committee of Congress who made this slaughter the subject of special investigation, report many acts of barbarity on the part of the rebels, including the shooting in cold blood of Major Bradford, of entire groups and lines of prisoners, of the sick and wounded in the hospital, and even of women and children; the burning of the sick and the wounded in huts and tents from which escape had been rendered impossible—in a word, that “no cruelty which the most fiendish malignity could devise was omitted by them.” General Forrest himself, Lieutenant-General S. D. Lee, and other rebel officers who were implicated, denied these horrible charges.
General Forrest admits a loss in the engagement of twenty killed and sixty wounded. He captured two ten-pound Parrott guns, two howitzers, two brass cannon, three hundred and fifty stand of small arms, one hundred and sixty white and seventy-three negro troops and forty negro women and children. The rest of the garrison was slaughtered, and how many refugee citizens and negroes besides will perhaps never be known.