Fort Pillow Massacre

The Fort Pillow Massacre refers to the slaughter of African-American troops in service to the United States by Confederate soldiers following the Battle of Fort Pillow, Tennessee in 1864. The Civil War atrocity was rooted in Southern anger at the Union's use of black troops; the Confederate Congress subsequently decided to treat captured African-American soldiers as rebelling slaves rather than as prisoners of war. As a result, Confederate forces at Fort Pillow deemed their black prisoners as unworthy of honorable treatment and murdered them. The Confederates killed roughly 300 black soldiers and 100 white soldiers.Dyer, Frederick H., A Compendium of the War of Rebellion (Des Moines: The Dyer Publishing Company 1908), p. 590.
The event caused a major political uproar in the North and became a rallying cry to defeat the rebels once and for all.The Civil War: Fort Pillow Massacre Stephan Benzkofer, Chicago Tribune. 04.16.14 The commanding officer of the Confederates, General went on to help found the Ku Klux Klan.Nathan Beford Forrest Joins the Klan What a nice guy.
==Background==
==="Full and ample retaliation"===
The Union's use of black troops in the war, combined with President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation royally pissed off the Confederacy. The Confederate Congress officially declared that they viewed Lincoln's actions as an attempt to induce a "servile insurrection".Understanding Fort Pillow: “Full and Ample Retaliation” Hall, Andy. Dead Confederates: A Civil War Blog. 04.15.14. In 1863, the Congress of the Confederate States issued a joint resolution calling for this slave revolt to be met with "full and ample retaliation". In effect, any black soldier captured by the South could and would be punished without any form of due process; this could go as far as execution.
This policy quickly translated into action. During the Gettysburg campaign, the Army of Northern Virginia (Robert E. Lee's command) systematically kidnapped free blacks and escaped slaves as they invaded Maryland and Pennsylvania. Men, women and children were all captured and carried back into Virginia during the army’s retreat, potentially more than a thousand people."We have received provocation enough…" Hall, Andy. Dead Confederates: A Civil War Blog. 07.01.13. Once they had been forcibly taken south, the blacks were returned to their owners if possible or else sold at auction. These prisoners were referred to in Confederate communications as "captured contrabands."From: G. M. SORREL, Assistant Adjutant-Gen. July 1, 1863 Letter Reproduced from The War of The Rebellion: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series 1, Volume 51, Serial No. 108, Pages 733, Broadfoot Publishing Company, Wilmington, NC, 1997. 
In addition to this, there were other massacres of black soldiers conducted by Confederates. The Battle of the Crater ended with Robert E. Lee's soldiers killing surrendering blacks,Suderow, Bryce. “The Battle of the Crater: The Civil War’s Worst Massacre,” chap. 9 in Gregory J. W. Urwin, ed., Black Flag Over Dixie: Racial Atrocities and Reprisals in the Civil War. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005. while Ransom's brigade committed a similar atrocity in North Carolina with one of the officers later writing, “it is understood amongst us that we take no negro prisoners."McPherson, Battle Cry, 566-7; Ervin L. Jordan, Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 168.
Truly the Confederacy fought nobly for their bold cause!
===Forrest's raids===
In the later years of the Civil War, the North successfully occupied much of Tennessee and Kentucky; Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, operating as a semi-independent cavalry commander, launched a number of raids to disrupt Union operations there.Nathan Bedford Forrest] Britannica During these raids, Forrest attempted on occasion to bluff Union-held forts into surrender by declaring that he would offer no quarter once he began attacking.United States War Dept; Henry Martyn Lazelle; Leslie J. Perry (1891). The War of the Rebellion: v.1-53 [serial no. 1-111] Formal reports, both ... Washington: Government Printing Office. p. 547. He quickly became well-known among Union officers for these "surrender or die" ultimatums. Again, what a nice guy.
==Massacre==
Sticking to his MO, Forrest demanded the surrender of Fort Pillow under a flag of truce. However, his men violated that truce by sneakily placing themselves into an attack formation around the invested fort.Fort Pillow Massacre (1864) Black Past The Union commanding officer believed Forrest was bluffing and refused, prompting the Confederates to swarm the fort and overwhelm the garrison. 
At this point, the massacre began, with Union survivors reporting that they threw down their weapons only to be shot and bayoneted while Confederate officers ordered their subordinates to give no quarter.Bailey, Ronald H., and the Editors of Time-Life Books. Battles for Atlanta: Sherman Moves East. Alexandria, VA: Time-Life Books, 1985. ISBN 0-8094-4773-8. A subsequent inquiry by the United States Congress uncovered further details about the horrific scene:THE FORT PILLOW MASSACRE.; Report of the Committee on the Conduct of the War. All Previous Reports Fully Confirmed. The Horrors and Cruelties of the Scene Intensified. REPORT OF THE SUB-COMMITTEE. New York Times Archived. 05.06.1864
The Congressional report also discovered further atrocities such as torture committed during the massacre:
The morning after, the Confederate troops searched the corpses for any survivors, killing those they found and haphazardly heaving them into ditches after the job was finished. After that, a Union gunboat was permitted to collect the dead. The wounded who were successfully collected and were strong enough to speak all testified to the slaughter which had taken place, later prompting the Congressional investigation.What They Saw at Fort Pillow Dead Confederates: A Civil War Blog General Forrest himself later referred to the act as the "wholesale slaughter of the Garrison at Fort Pillow."U.S. Grant, Personal Memoirs (Library of America, 1990), p. 483.
Confederate forces completely evacuated the fort the next day, thus rendering the battle and massacre largely pointless.Fort Pillow National Park Service
==Aftermath==
Union outrage over the massacre came swiftly. Lincoln's Treasury Secretary wrote him a letter asking him to begin enforcing an executive order he had signed in 1863, declaring that every Union soldier extrajudicially executed would be avenged with the death of a Confederate prisoner.Chase, Salmon P. "Salmon P. Chase to Abraham Lincoln, Friday, May 06, 1864 (Opinion on Fort Pillow massacre)," The Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress. May 6, 1864. At the orders of General Ulysses S. Grant, Union generals negotiating prisoner exchanges demanded that the Confederates change their policy towards black prisoners or else risk a complete breakdown in prisoner negotiations with the Union as well as retaliatory violence.Fuchs, Richard L. An Unerring Fire: The Massacre at Fort Pillow. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2002. ISBN 978-0-8117-1824-0. p. 144. The Union's increasingly insistent voicing of this threat led most of the Confederacy's soldiers to reluctantly treat captured blacks as legitimate prisoners for the remainder of the war.Van Arragon, William (2012). "Fort Pillow, a Civil War Massacre, and Public Memory (review of the book of this title by John Cimprich)". Canadian Journal of History. 47 (2)
During a cabinet meeting with Lincoln, several cabinet officers pushed for an official resolution declaring that Forrest would be put on trial for his deeds at Fort Pillow should he ever be captured.Welles, Gideon. Diary of Gideon Welles. (Boston and New York: Houghton and Mifflin Company, 1911), p. 25. 
Lincoln allegedly began crafting orders for generals in the Union army to confront their Confederate officers about the massacre, but he became "distracted" by other matters.see Note 1, Lincoln, Abraham. "Abraham Lincoln to William H. Seward, Tuesday, May 03, 1864 (Fort Pillow massacre)." Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress. May 3, 1864. This is sad, but unsurprising considering Lincoln's heavy involvement in almost all affairs concerning the conduct of the war.
Meanwhile, newspapers in the United States reacted with extreme hostility and anger. The Chicago Tribune for instance, wrote that:
==Legacy and denialism==
The massacre is still mired in controversy with public denial of the events still a problem.Controversy still surrounds Battle of Fort Pillow 150 years later STEPHANIE SCURLOCK, WREG News. 02.05.15 Whitewashing efforts have targeted Forrest's history as a slave-trader and his history with the KKK along with the Fort Pillow Massacre in an effort to justify preserving statues of the man which had been erected across the South during the post-Reconstruction era.If Nathan Bedford Forrest Was a Friend to Black People, Why Don’t Black People Like Him? Betsy Phillips. Nashville Scene. 08.15.17 Meanwhile, the Fort Pillow State park treats the massacre softly in its official materials, referring only to the presence of a "controversy" surrounding the battle and that General Forrest may have "lost control over his troops."An Almost Forgotten Atrocity of the Civil War Fergus Bordewich. Wall Street Journal. 04.11.14 
Despite eyewitnesses among the Confederates pointing out that Forrest was present and was ordering the killings, his defenders claim that he wasn't responsible for the atrocities and that the atrocity shouldn't even be referred to as a "massacre" due to its relatively small body count,Fort Pillow Controversy Lingers, 150 Years Later even though fifty times more people were killed than in the Boston Massacre, and no one's suggesting changing the name of that incident. Meanwhile the massacre plays into the protests over the various statues of Forrest. This has also given it a place in national politics; the Republican-controlled Tennessee legislature imposed a financial penalty on the city of Memphis in retaliation for its local authorities tearing down a statue of Forrest, citing among other things his participation at Fort Pillow.Tennessee lawmakers punish Memphis for removing statue of Confederate and KKK leader Horton, Alex. Washington Post. 04.18.18
==See also==
*Confederate flag
*Reconstruction
*Red Summer
*Drapetomania
*Rape of Nanking
*Belgian Congo
*Scramble for Africa
*War crimes
*Tiananmen Square Massacre
*Tulsa race massacre
==External links==
*Fort Pillow State Park — the official site, which makes no mention of the massacre as of 2018
==References==
Category:War crimes
Category:Crimes against humanity
Category:United States history
Category:Racism
Category: Slavery
Category:Denialism
Category:History