The River Was Dyed with Blood: Nathan Bedford Forrest and Fort Pillow by Brian Steel Wills (review)

This volume is the seventh in recent times about a controversial incident on April 12, 1864, following a Confederate attack on Fort Pillow, an isolated Federal post in Tennessee. While Brian Steel Wills has consulted some sources not previously used, especially memoirs and newspapers, most of these do not add much to the discussion. His most notable contribution is his analysis of Nathan Bedford Forrest’s role in the affair, for which Wills is especially well equipped, as he wrote the best biography of the Confederate general.

The work fully covers relevant background regarding Forrest and the wartime slavery issue. Discussion of the incident and its wartime aftermath compose the book’s core. An insightful, though spotty, chapter analyzes Forrest’s reputation after the war through 1905. The volume’s flowing style clearly conveys the data. However, the work would have benefited from a little more on the black and white unionist Federals stationed at the fort.

The author makes several points that are found in most recent studies of the affair. He notes that the Confederate government and public were both divided over whether captured runaway slaves who enlisted on the enemy’s side should be executed as insurrectionaries or returned to owners as absconded property. Confederates obviously detested fellow southern whites who joined the Union army. It is no surprise, then, that most of the Confederates at Fort Pillow participated in massacring many black and white members of the garrison after winning the battle. Angry Confederates dehumanized their opponents to justify killing prisoners.

Wills contends that Forrest always sought complete victory. At Fort Pillow, as on several earlier occasions, he had tried to intimidate the enemy by threatening a massacre—by implication, in this case—if his surrender demand was refused. The author believes this tactic was nothing more than bluster, but the general was responsible for not making a more effective effort to control his men, despite the difficulty of doing so. Wills credits Forrest with not trying to inflame racial or antiunionist hostilities among his men that day, but a massacre quickly developed all the same. Due to bad injuries, Forrest had not joined the charge, and when he arrived inside the Federals’ fortification, instead of stopping the massacre, he focused first on personally directing the movement of a cannon for firing on a Union gunboat. When the commander later maintained that neither he nor his men had done anything wrong, Wills blames it on Forrest’s habit of dressing matters up to make himself look good; however, while the writer does not use the term or discuss others involved, the general participated in a cover-up.

Because Wills so strongly emphasizes explaining events, he sometimes sounds apologetic for Confederate misbehavior. He also appears to waffle on certain issues, such as the Confederate claim that Federals were drunk, by presenting pro and con arguments at different points in the narrative, instead of concentrating them in one complete analytic paragraph.

Some statements need qualification or correction. There is no prewar evidence to support the claim by Confederate writers and Wills that Forrest was a paternalistic slaveholder. Capt. Carl Lamburg was stationed at Memphis, not Fort Pillow. Several sources indicate that only one black regiment at Memphis, not all of them in the city, swore to avenge the massacre. The allegations that congressional investigators extensively used leading questions and thereby created much false testimony are debatable.

Even though most historians who write on Fort Pillow today agree that a massacre occurred, debate continues on various aspects of the event. Except for the later Confederate claim that the garrison committed numerous depredations, Wills weighs in on all the major issues. His main contribution, though, involves Forrest’s role and the personality traits shaping the general’s actions.