RIVER RUN RED

A dark episode of the Civil War comes under scrutiny by an author who admits to having a fascination with 19th-century massacres.

Fort Pillow, Tenn., on the Mississippi River, housed some 650 federal troops in 1864. Among the soldiers, two types were locally hated with particular passion: “Tennessee Tories,” or homegrown unionists, and former slaves who had donned Yankee blue. On April 12, a force of some 2,300 veteran Confederate cavalrymen under Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest traveled across the western counties of Tennessee to attack Fort Pillow. Forrest, notes Ward (Dark Midnight When I Rise, 2000, etc.), had plenty of reason to despise both the Tories and the African-Americans in the Union ranks, for he had been a slave trader before the war, and unionist and abolitionist ideas were strong in much of the state. As Ward observes, Tennessee was the last of the Southern states to secede and enter the Confederacy, and was effectively the first to be reabsorbed into the Union. Not that that made life any easier for the former slaves; the unionists and the Union Army generals alike considered them to be well-suited for the heavy grunt work involved in being artillerists—“heaving shells and cannonballs, hauling cannon into place, pulling caissons, driving mules.” When Forrest’s troops arrived, they immediately set about butchering Yankees and former slaves: As Ward documents, scores were killed after they surrendered, as they did after a vigorous battle, one that the Confederates, by a contemporary account, considered “the hardest contested engagement that Forrest had ever been engaged in.” The battle remains surrounded in controversy: For their part, some Northern historians consider the attack on Fort Pillow to have been a premeditated massacre, whereas some Southern historians have ascribed the post-surrender killings to the confusion of battle, the alleged drunkenness of the artillerists and the like.

Probably won’t settle any arguments.