Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

Along the Mississippi River, 1863–1865 207
barracks. Ravines that creased the bluff’s entire front also exposed the position
to attack. 44
An assault was not long in coming. While Sherman made final preparations for
the Union advance into northern Georgia, the Confederate cavalry leader Forrest
undertook a raid into Tennessee and Kentucky. He planned to range west of the
Tennessee River to round up Confederate deserters and attract new recruits, and
to punish horse thieves who helped themselves to stock that otherwise might find
its way into the Confederate Army. His force of four brigades, about five thousand
men in all, left Columbus, Mississippi, on 16 March and covered the one hundred
seventy miles to Jackson, Tennessee, in four days. On 24 March, he was at Union
City, sixty miles farther north, where he compelled the surrender of the Union garrison.
At Nashville that day, Sherman told the local commander not to sidetrack
any troops on their way to his own army in order to deal with the raid. “The more
men Forrest has, and the longer he stays . . . , the better for us,” he wrote. Meanwhile,
the raiders reached the Ohio River, another sixty miles farther north, on 25
March. Federal troops at Paducah, Kentucky, repelled a charge on their fort, and
the attackers withdrew when they discovered smallpox cases in the town itself during
a search for medical supplies. In Jackson, Tennessee, again on 4 April, Forrest
told his department commander: “There is a Federal force of 500 or 600 at Fort
Pillow, which I shall attend to in a day or two, as they have horses and supplies
which we need.” 45
Not long after 5:00 a.m. on 12 April, two brigades of Forrest’s cavalry, perhaps
fifteen hundred strong, surprised the Union pickets at Fort Pillow. By 10:00, when
Forrest arrived on the scene, the federal troops had withdrawn to their earthworks.
The Confederates twice sent forward a flag of truce to demand that the garrison
surrender. Each time, the defenders refused. Forrest’s men used the intervals of
truce to move forward, occupying the cabins near the fort as well as nearby ravines
from which they fired into the Union position. Soon after the second truce, Forrest
ordered a dismounted charge that captured the fort. Some of the defenders died
where they stood; others ran for the river. The Confederates killed all they could.
The number of Union soldiers killed outright, according to the most careful reckoning,
was between 246 and 264. Another thirty-one died of wounds. Two-thirds
of the dead were black artillerymen. 46
The Confederates held Fort Pillow overnight. The Union gunboat Silver Cloud
arrived early on the morning of 13 April and took aboard twenty wounded soldiers
who had hidden along the riverbank. A Confederate flag of truce proposed admitting
sailors to the fort in order to bury the dead and carry off the wounded. The
boat’s master, William Ferguson, wrote his report the next day. It is the first official
record of what occurred, written the day the first newspaper account appeared in
44 OR, ser. 1, vol. 32, pt. 1, pp. 556, 621; Cimprich, Fort Pillow, pp. 48, 74. The adjutant of the
13th Tennessee Cavalry reported six guns; one of Forrest’s brigadiers reported five. OR, ser. 1, vol.
32, pt. 1, pp. 559, 621.
45 OR, ser. 1, vol. 32, pt. 1, pp. 509, 511 (“The more men”), 609 (“There is a”), 611–12, and pt. 3,
pp. 609, 616–17, 663–65. In a report dated 15 April 1864, Forrest wrote that he reached Jackson on
23 March, but according to a report dated 21 March, he arrived “yesterday morning at 11 o’clock”
(pt. 2, p. 663).
46 OR, ser. 1, vol. 32, pt. 1, pp. 559–70, 609–17, 620–22; Cimprich, Fort Pillow, p. 129.