Day 45. April 14, 1862. (page 2)
The Civil War The Final Year: Told by Those Who Lived It Edited by Aaron Sheehan-Dean P. 47-50
“INSATIATE AS FIENDS”: APRIL 1864
The New York Times:
The Black Flag
April 16, 1864
THE BLACK FLAG.
Horrible Massacre by the Rebels.
Fort Pillow Captured After a Desperate Fight.
Four Hundred of the Garrison Brutally Murdered.
Wounded and Unarmed Men Bayoneted and Their
Bodies Burned.
White and Black Indiscriminately Butchered.
Devilish Atrocities of the Insatiate Fiends.
FROM CAIRO.
Cairo, Thursday, April 14.
On Tuesday morning the rebel Gen. FORREST attacked Fort Pillow. Soon after the attack FORREST sent a flag of truce de-disposing of his force so as to gain the advantage. Our forces were under command of Major BOOTH, of the Thirteenth Tennessee (U.S.) Heavy Artillery, formerly of the First Alabama*** Cavalry.
The flag of truce was refused, and fighting resumed. Afterward a second flag came in, which was also refused.
Both flags gave the rebels advantage of gaining new positions.
The battle was kept up until 3 P.M., when Major BOOTH was killed, and Major BRADFORD took command.
The rebels now came in swarms over our troops, compelling them to surrender.
Immediately upon the surrender ensued a scene which utterly baffles description. Up to that time, comparatively few of our men had been killed; but, insatiate as fiends, bloodthirsty as devils incarnate, the Confederates commenced an indiscriminate butchery of the whites and blacks, including those of both colors who had been previously wounded.
The black soldiers, becoming demoralized, rushed to the rear, the white officers having thrown down their arms.
Both white and black were bayoneted, shot or sabred; even dead bodies were horribly mutilated, and children of seven and eight years and several negro women killed in cold blood. Soldiers unable to speak from wounds were shot dead, and their bodies rolled down the banks into the river. The dead and wounded negroes were piled in heaps and burned, and several citizens who had joined our forces for protection were killed or wounded.
Out of the garrison of six hundred, only two hundred remained alive.
Among our dead officers are Capt. BRADFORD, Lieuts. BARR, ACKERSSTROM, WILSON, REVEL, and Major BOOTH, all of the Thirteenth Tennessee Cavalry.
Capt. POSTON and Lieut. LYON, Thirteenth Tennessee Cavalry, and Capt. YOUNG, Twenty-fourth Missouri, Acting-Provost-Marshal, were taken prisoners.
Maj. BRADFORD was also captured, but is said to have escaped; it is feared, however, that he has been killed.
The steamer Platte Valley came up about half-past 3 o’clock, and was hailed by the rebels under a flag of truce. Men were sent ashore to bury the dead, and take aboard such of the wounded as the enemy had allowed to live. Fifty-seven were taken aboard, including seven or eight colored. Eight died on the way up. The steamer arrived here this evening, and was immediately sent to the Mound City Hospital, to discharge her suffering cargo.
Among our wounded officers of colored troops are Capt. PORTER, Lieut. LIBBERTS and Adjt. LEMMING.
Six guns were captured by the rebels, and carried off, including two ten-pound Parrotts and two twelve-pound howitzers. A large amount of stores was destroyed or carried away.
The intention of the rebels seemed to be to evacuate the place, and move on toward Memphis.
LATER
CAIRO, Thursday, April 15.
Two negro soldiers, wounded at Fort Pillow, were buried by the rebels, but afterward worked themselves out of their graves. They were among those brought up in the Platte Valley, and are now in hospital at Mound City.
The officers of the Platte Valley receive great credit from the military authorities for landing at Fort Pillow, at eminent risk, and taking our wounded on board, and for their kind attention on the way up.
REPORTS FROM ST. LOUIS.
ST. LOUIS, Friday, April 15.
The correspondent of the Union, who was on board the steamer Platte Valley at Fort Pillow, gives a more appalling description of the fiendishness of the rebels from our Cairo dispatches.
Many of our wounded were shot in the hospital. The remainder were driven out, and the hospital was burned.
On the morning after the battle the rebels went over the field, and shot the negroes who had not died from their wounds.
Several of the guns captured by FORREST at Fort Pillow were spiked before falling into his hands. Others were turned upon gunboat No. 7, which, having fired some 300 rounds and exhausted her ammunition, was compelled to withdraw. Although a tinclad, she received but slight injury.
Gen. LEE arrived and assumed the command at the beginning of the battle. Previous to which Gen. CHALMERS directed the movements. FORREST, with the main force, retired after the fight to Brownsville, taking with him the captured funds.
While the steamer Platte Valley lay under a flag of truce, taking on board our wounded, some of the rebel officers, and among them Gen. CHALMERS, went on board, and some of our officers showed them great deference, drinking with them, and showing them other marks of courtesy.
Many of those who had escaped from the works and hospital, who desired to be treated as prisoners of war, as the rebels said, were ordered to fall in line, and when they had formed, were inhumanely shot down.
Of 350 colored troops not more than 56 escaped the massacre, and not one officer that commanded them survives. Only four officers of the Thirteenth Tennessee escaped death.
The loss of the Thirteenth Tennessee is 800 killed. The remainder were wounded or captured.
Gen. CHALMER told this correspondent that, although it was against the policy of his government to spare negro soldiers or their officers, he had done all in his power to stop the carnage. At the same time he believed it was right.
Another officer said our white troops would have been protected had they not been found on duty with negroes.
While the rebels endeavored to conceal their loss, it was evident that they suffered severely. Col. REED, commanding a Tennessee regiment, was mortally wounded. There were two or three well filled hospitals at a short distance in the country.
The Civil War: The Final Year Told by Those Who Lived It Edited by Aaron Sheehan-Dean P. 43-44
THE FORT PILLOW MASSACRE: TENNESSEE, APRIL 1864
Achilles V. Clark to Judith Porter and Henrietta Ray
“Camp near Brownsville
April 14th 1864
Just here it would be proper to describe the fort which I shall attempt to do so. It is a very strong earthwork situated on a high bluff inside the works erected by Gen. Pillow in 1861. It is formed by an irregular trench being dug somewhat in the shape of a half circle the edge of the bluff being the diameter. The fort is quite small just about large enough to hold a thousand men in two ranks. The ditch is eight feet deep and six wide and the dirt thrown from the ditch on the inside formed a bank five feet high making from the bottom of the ditch to the top of the breast work thirteen feet up which we had to climb. By two o’clock P.M. We had approached within fifty yards of the fort on all sides. A part of our regiment was in twenty steps of it. Strange to say after five hours constant firing the Yankees had not killed a single one of our men and wounded only a very few among whom I am sorry to name the gallant Capt. Wilson of our regiment who fell in twenty steps of the fort shot through the lungs dangerously though tis greatly to be hoped not mortally wounded. At 2 P.M. Gen. Forrest demanded a surrender and gave twenty minutes to consider. The Yankees refused threatening that if we charged their breast works to show no quarter. The bugle sounded the charge and in less than ten minutes we were in the fort hurling the cowardly villains howling down the bluff. Our men were so exasperated by the Yankees’ threats of no quarter that they gave but little. The slaughter was awful. Words cannot describe the scene. The poor deluded negroes would run up to our men fall upon their knees and with uplifted hands scream for mercy but they were ordered to their feet and then shot down. The whitte men fared but little better. Their fort turned out to be a great slaughter pen. Blood, human blood stood about in pools and brains could have been gathered up in any quantity. I with several others tried to stop the butchery and at one time had partially succeeded. but [sic] Gen. Forrest ordered them shot down like dogs and the carnage continued. Finally our men became sick of blood and the firing ceased. The result. The report kept in the Post Adjutants office shows that there were seven hundred and ninty men for duty on the morning of the fight. We brought away about one hundred and sixty white men had about seventy five negroes. Two transports came down the morning after the fight and took off the badly wounded Yankees and negroes about thirty or forty in all. The remainder were thrown into the trench before which two hours previous they had stood and bade open defiance to Forrest and all his ragged hounds, and were covered up about two feet deep.”
Above: This is “The War in Tennessee,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, May 7, 1864. visitthecapitol.gov
Note: Accounts have Lee standing “a few hundred yards away” from the soldiers he had directed to massacre Black Union soldiers. I’m sure this is hard news to you Lee stans out there & if you don’t believe it, think of it this way: “A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury.” –John Stuart Mill.
200 yards is 600 feet. Granted, that isn’t “a few.” 600 feet is a small one bedroom apartment. And again, your hero directed the action. That’s 300 Black men fighting for their rights. Tortured, killed, gone. Shot, burned, drowned after they surrendered. Some got pinioned to the ground. How would you like to be pinioned in the dirt? Or go down on your knees begging a White man for your life, get ordered to stand, then get shot right down? See: YouTube, “Honoring the Fort Pillow Massacre” to hear a Black descendant of 35 ancestors killed there & how his great grandfather got shot in the arm & never could use that arm right again. See also: “Battle of Fort Pillow Massacre: Civil War|Nathan Bedford Forrest in Tennessee.” Then: Congress called it “indiscriminate slaughter” & “a scene of cruelty and murder without a parallel in civilized warfare.” Now: You still got your Forrest & Lee all the hell over Tennessee. They stand, they sit, they walk, they’re alive with the foreseeable future staying that way. None of them on knees 158 years after.
Note: 3 years from now. 4,000 former slaves watch the flag rehoisted over Fort Sumter. And Meade, as far as horses go, will ride Blacky past the stands May 23 hearing his men shout Gettysburg, Gettysburg, his horse in garlands stacked thick enough they weigh his neck down.
Note: I think about whether Lincoln sensed he’d be martyred that night. I think about how he said goodbye, not goodnight, to his guard then gave him the night off. And I think about if only he’d had this guard come along tonight. You could call Ford’s Theatre 511 10th St. NW 202-426-6924 & complain about their lack of security. Better late than never. They placed four U.S. Flags where he got executed, including a Treasury Department flag & a George Washington engraving placed in the middle. I think of Lincoln smiling, waving at the playgoers before the curtain rises. His long limbs, the tilt of his hand in the air, everyone looking up at him, smiling, some shyly, others full blown teeth, & maybe some shouts. The war. At last. Over. All good. The last photograph of him ever taken, where he has a slight almost twinkle.
It will be another hundred years before they try a play here again. That’ll be John Brown’s Body. 1968. That’ll have to wait until the next revolution of sorts.
In “Conan Zip Lines To Save Abraham Lincoln,” the set transforms to Ford’s Theatre, where Lincoln sits facing the play while Booth dances in back of him pointing a revolver. Conan ziplines over the heads of the studio audience, Led Zep screams over the speakers, & when he gets down over the stage, he kicks Booth roughly to the floor. Lincoln turns around to see what the disturbance was.
“This image was taken by Alexander Hessler in Chicago, Feb. 28, 1857. Hessler at first convinced Lincoln to go with smoothing down his hair, but Lincoln did not like the results, so he ran his fingers through his hair before the sitting.” Image & context courtesy of frontrank2 on Civil War Talk.
*Stones River: This battlefield is the site of the Hazen Brigade monument; it is the oldest Civil War monument still standing in its original location. This battle was on the last day of 1862 & of all major battles of the war, this saw the highest percentage of casualties. Inconclusive outcome. Stones River is where, on 12/30/62, both sides– 83,000– camped hundreds of yards from each other across the Rappahannock River, & on the eve of the Battle of Stones River, 12/30/62, the Confederate Army of Tennessee joined the Army of the Cumberland in a battle of brass bands. The North plays Yankee Doodle, then the South plays Dixie; the North does Hail Columbia, then the South The Bonnie Blue Flag. The last Yankee number is Home Sweet Home, at which point the South joins in too. After the song stops, both banks of men go nuts cheering for a solid 15 minutes, & men present said that had they been able to ford the water, everything would’ve ended right then. At daybreak Rebels attack, & by night, 24,645 casualties– the highest percentage of any major battle in the Civil War, even higher than at Antietam & Shiloh– no more from that cottage again will I roam, be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home. Of the battle, Lincoln writes to General Rosecrans, “You gave us a hard-earned victory, which had there been a defeat instead, the nation could scarcely have lived over.”
Note: Port Hudson 5/27/63; Goodrich’s Landing 6/29/63; Battery Wagner 7/18/63; Battle of Plymouth 4/17-4/20/64 were other Black soldier massacres. After the war, see massacres such as the Colfax Massacre, Easter Sunday, 1873, 150 Black people murdered. Don’t forget the 1985 Move Bombing, Philadelphia (if you go by Twitter, most Americans never heard of such a thing). See also: Wounded Knee (White soldiers awarded medals after murdering 300 Lakota 12/26/62, Mankato, MN.), the largest one-day mass execution in U.S. history (Lincoln ordered) during the Dakota War, or (eastern) the “Great Sioux Uprising” of 1862 (38 men), the Bear River Massacre of the Shoshone (“January of 1863 Conner and his California Volunteers marched north to the Bear River. There, Conner’s men brutally killed 400 Shoshoni men, women and children. More Native Americans died at Bear River than at any other battle in western history.” As opposed to not brutally killed. Terming these events “battles,” now that is quite a word, isn’t it. Like every other # in this manuscript, do your own research. I’m sure I missed things in each & every last one of these entries. I went to look this over before posting it, & realized to my horror I had MOVE happening in 1972. Holy crap. And that’s one I remember in real time, especially since I’m from 15 miles west.
Note: “Insatiate As Fiends”: how can you explain this away? Calling it murder is not enough. How can this possibly be justified? Fort Pillow was a hollow formed by the Devil’s hoof print. Sometimes the Devil will give you all you ask for. Black massacres in the war: Memphis, Corinth, Fort Pillow, New Orleans, Mobile, Athens, Memphis, Petersburg, Macon, Atlanta, Shreveport, Vicksburg, Savannah. These are just the known on Google massacres of Black men & women & children. Postwar: the Wilmington Massacre in 1898. Tulsa. The Draft Riots. See this manuscript’s postscript for more. And see: https://www.zinnedproject.org/collection/massacres-us/ and https://www.blackpast.org/special-features/racial-violence-united-states-1660/
Note: For some random trivia distraction: In 47 years: At 11:40p.m., April 14, 1912, the RMS Titanic makes a pit stop then goes out of service. It’s then just into the 15th, 12:15a.m., when the first distress signal is sent out, then right after, in the first class lounge, the ship’s band begins to play. 12:25, Captain Smith orders women & children into a lifeboat which gets lowered the same time the first distress rocket hits the black sky, then other lifeboats fill, lower into cold black ocean water, & at 2 the band plays Nearer, My God, to Thee, & about 2:10 the last distress calls are bleating out, the band’s on another song, or maybe the same one over & over, & at 2:17, the radio room loses all power, & at 2:18, those in the boats observe the lights blink once then go out for good, & the next minute the whole ship splits in half & begins its 12,500 foot descent to the ocean floor, not to been seen again until 1985. Meantime, the RMS Carpathia, under way 67 miles off, gets a distress signal over the airwaves at 12:11, makes a u-turn, reaches the icefield by 2:45 but has to take an hour & a half through the North Atlantic ice grinding loud into the hull plates as it makes its way. Who’s left by 4:00 sees the ship as it nears, slowly approaching the 16 lifeboats. Around 8:30a.m., the last survivor is pulled up on Carpathia’s deck. 705 alive, 1,517 drowned.
According to the 2012 Wired piece by Alasdair Wilkins “What Happened to the Iceberg That Sunk the Titanic?” the iceberg was likely photographed right after the hit by people on two different vessels, the obvious lines of indentations plus the red paint-looking color stretching across it gave it away. The iceberg “began its slow journey to the North Atlantic over three thousand years ago.” Snow over Greenland in about 1,000 BCE. sunk the Titanic that night, one of 1% that ever make it that far from Greenland. It was 5,000 miles from home the night it messed up the itinerary. The theory is that by 1913, latest, it had melted.
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the boys are all enjoying themselves very well….
Then tonight, April 14th, 1865: Before the play, alone with his reflection in the mirror until it severely distorts, like a FaceWarp app. Like he’s been acting out a caricature of himself, Lincoln, this whole time.
Gore Vidal: “He was vanishing…”
What can we say beyond these early American folks stood for something? Died for something? Their sense of duty to their new nation was astounding. Here we are, living above graves, frightening the ghosts by remembering history wrong in an ongoing process of mystification, like how an image can be made by combining multiple exposures so you don’t get a clear one. Spit on it and throw it over your shoulder. How long can it go on before it is completely fatal? It’s already fatal. A real ahistoricism. That’s how the con works, that’s the long game, the too-strenuous denials counting on the vision of a black velvet Jackson canting it up to that stone fence again while Jeff decides how many stars to sew into his flag in perpetuity. E Pluribus Unum the initial motto of the United States but spell check doesn’t recognize in 2022, like it’s something that will end you if you try to grab it with bare hands. Above all else, there is this fact: whatever its effects, it’s always there however you try the serial number on the gun with sand paper worn down because there was nothing to get back in the end. Sawed off. You might have thought many Americans would turn their back on the Confederacy at that point in ’65. You might have thought that they would come around. That the Union was more important than fish fry pride. That a Massachusetts band playing in the town square while Yankees burn Atlanta would say something. You wonder at the last line Lincoln hears before playgoers lift the doctor toward the box Lincoln slumps in.
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