The battlefield reputation of Confederate general Nathan Bedford
Forrest, long recognized as a formidable warrior, has been shaped
by one infamous wartime incident. At Fort Pillow in 1864, the
attack by Confederate forces under Forrest's command left many of
the Tennessee Unionists and black soldiers garrisoned there dead in
a confrontation widely labeled as a "massacre." In "The River Was
Dyed with Blood," best-selling Forrest biographer Brian Steel Wills
argues that although atrocities did occur after the fall of the
fort, Forrest did not order or intend a systematic execution of its
defenders. Rather, the general's great failing was losing control
of his troops.
A prewar slave trader and owner, Forrest was a controversial
figure throughout his lifetime. Because the attack on Fort
Pillow--which, as Forrest wrote, left the nearby waters "dyed with
blood"--occurred in an election year, Republicans used him as a
convenient Confederate scapegoat to marshal support for the war.
After the war he also became closely associated with the spread of
the Ku Klux Klan. Consequently, the man himself, and the truth
about Fort Pillow, has remained buried beneath myths, legends,
popular depictions, and disputes about the events themselves.
Wills sets what took place at Fort Pillow in the context of
other wartime excesses from the American Revolution to World War II
and Vietnam, as well as the cultural transformations brought on by
the Civil War. Confederates viewed black Union soldiers as the
embodiment of slave rebellion and reacted accordingly.
Nevertheless, Wills concludes that the engagement was neither a
massacre carried out deliberately by Forrest, as charged by a
congressional committee, nor solely a northern fabrication meant to
discredit him and the Confederate States of America, as
pro-Southern apologists have suggested. The battle-scarred fighter
with his homespun aphorisms was neither an infallible warrior nor a
heartless butcher, but a product of his time and his heritage.
General
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