The Massacre at Fort Pillow: A New Song by Pablo Dylan
During the Civil War, the Mississippi River marked a main line of battlegrounds for the Western Theater of the war, with the Union and Confederate armies and navies fighting on both land and water. By April of 1864, major battles in the east and west, from Gettysburg to the siege of Vicksburg, had been won by the North. With complete defeat increasingly probable, the Confederacy, split in two after the fall of Vicksburg in 1863, was struggling to keep Northern troops from advancing ever further south. Early in that April of 1864, Confederate major-general Nathan Bedford Forrest decided to send some of his troops against Fort Pillow, a former Confederate fort on the Mississippi some 40 miles north of Memphis, now in Union hands. Half of the Union soldiers in control of Fort Pillow were African-Americans, many of them formerly enslaved, and recruited as Union soldiers in the South as the Northern army advanced.
Outnumbered, the Union soldiers held Fort Pillow as long as they could. Their commander, Lionel F. Booth (a/k/a/ George Lanning) was killed on the morning of April 12, not long after the Confederate attack began. By midafternoon, Forrest had demanded that the fort surrender. Its commander after Booth’s death, Tennessee-born Major William Bradford, refused. Forrest’s soldiers overran and captured Fort Pillow easily; the Union soldiers there lay down their arms and surrendered. Contemporary accounts in newspapers published in the North and South both agreed as to what happened next: The Massacre of Fort Pillow. Confederate troops slaughtered over three hundred African-American soldiers, and some African-American civilians who had sought protection in the fort. White Union troops who had tried to surrender were also butchered at the scene, though some, including Bradford, were taken prisoner. Bradford was shot while allegedly trying to escape a few days later.
The New York Times was reporting the Fort Pillow massacre within days; this is from the paper on April 19, 1864.
Added the Times’s editorial writers, “A fort is taken after no very severe assault or long siege, where hot blood has not been aroused, and at once the conquerors proceed to a general butchery of the prisoners. Three hundred black soldiers and fifty-six white are murdered in cold blood. Other atrocities are reported, such as bayoneting the sick and wounded, shooting women and children, and burying alive a number of wounded black prisoners. The sole pretence for this outbreak of cruelty, is the fact that slaves have been enlisted by our Government, and that these unhappy soldiers were mostly black.”
Some Southern newspapers published reports of the massacre while at first insisting that such an action must have been in retaliation for outrages committed on civilians by Union troops. However, before the end of the month eyewitness accounts led even the staunchest Confederate-supporting papers to condemn the horror. The Daily True Delta of New Orleans, Louisiana, published the editorial below on April 22:
Forrest and his officers, subject to not only the outraged denunciation of Americans in the North and South alike, but the wrath and disgust of his commanding general Robert E. Lee, claimed that the fault was not theirs but that of their drunken, angry army which they could not control. This was received with general derision. Upon the report of one of Forrest’s officers that “he had seen Forrest shoot one man and strike another in the head with his sabre, for not ceasing the carnage at his order,” the editor of the Daily True Delta scoffed “It is my decided opinion that the officers connived at the slaughter — if it was not the result of their orders.” Both the Times-Picayune of New Orleans and the Memphis Bulletin condemned the fact that Union soldiers had been “cowardly butchered after they had surrendered.” The horrific detailed accounts of the massacre, supplied by eyewitnesses to Congress’s Joint Committee on the Conduct and Expenditures of the War, were printed by The New York Times on May 6, 1864.
When he died in 1877, Forrest was quoted in his obituary in the Memphis Appeal complaining that “the Fort Pillow capture was ‘a bloody victory, only made a massacre by dastardly Yankee reporters.’” The Appeal also noted that Forrest had spent his last years “engaged in planting and operating mostly with convict labor” — that is to say running a prison farm on President’s Island, just south of Memphis. The paper did not mention his role as a founding member of, and Grand Wizard of, the Ku Klux Klan immediately after the Civil War ended. They did, however, print this statement Forrest had made to a Louisiana journalist in 1865 — which quite literally speaks for itself, as to the man whose actions on April 12, 1864 gave the Union armies the rallying cry of “Remember Fort Pillow!” until they won the war a year later, and who was known as “Fort Pillow Forrest” for the rest of his life.
The site of Fort Pillow was not established as a state park until 1971. The park’s website and brochure advertise camping, hiking, fishing, and more outdoor activities, and in reference to the fort, state that it “was abandoned in 1862 due to the Union Navy’s advancement along the Mississippi River.” “There is a 19 minute video on the 1864 Battle shown by request[.]”
In 2015, a memorial plaque was raised in Memphis at the cemetery in which the bodies of some of the Union soldiers killed in the Fort Pillow Massacre were buried.
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Pablo Dylan has today released a new album, Fortitude (Columbia), that contains a song, just over five minutes long, entitled “The Massacre at Fort Pillow.” The young singer-songwriter, who turned 26 yesterday, indicated last week that his forthcoming record, the second in a series of three EPs, would be deeply engaged with American history both past and present. “This record was written in the wake of the death of George Floyd. In such vivid depictions of the human heart in conflict with its own existence, I felt as I’m sure many of you did heartbroken and dismayed at the utter barbarity that took Mr. Floyd’s life. I am a deep believer in the promises laid out in the Declaration of Independence but unfortunately for most of the population those promises were never realized. It is this discrepancy that I feel my most sacred duty as an artist to comment on.” Dylan continued his statement with specific reference to his song about Fort Pillow. “[T]o take aim at a Confederate general and his legacy when half the country is petitioning for his sainthood, is outside of the bounds where most artists play. However, it is undoubtedly the right thing to do….[I]f I don’t do this how am I any better than the people who have reinforced these structures for millenia?”
The other songs on Fortitude have merit and strength — from the classically-influenced “I Descend My Western Course” to the savage old-style blues rap “Ward Number 9” to the beautiful “I Should’ve Known” to the lyric, bleak “Shadow of the Guard” — but “The Massacre at Fort Pillow” stands above the others. For any 26-year-old to know so much about Civil War history, and a particular battle that many sought for so long to downplay and disremember, is remarkable. For a young singer-songwriter to craft a good, strong long story-song — a ballad, really —is rarer than rare these days.
A skiffly, even frantic beat propels “The Massacre at Fort Pillow” from the first, with grim and apocalyptic words telling of such a terrible day and its aftermath: “Down at Fort Pillow destruction was imminent.” Not only was “the brutality of cruelty…most fearfully exhibited,” but indeed “the bell is now broke where freedom was ringing.” Fort Pillow and its outrages were “in addition to slavery’s stain” that had already soiled Southern ground. Dylan echoes the Confederates’ cry of “no quarter” in his condemnation of the massacre, and he celebrates by name Frank Shackleford, who fought for “a cause that seemed just from the bonds of affliction” and who was cut down by “the orders of Forrest” while trying to surrender. Shackleford’s name was spelled “Shacklefoot” in Union army records; this 22-year-old soldier who had once been enslaved in Mississippi died at Fort Pillow, and is buried in the Memphis National Cemetery.
Listen to the song for yourself, and remember that the importance of learning, and telling, our country’s history and its stories must never be forgotten. Dylan is young, but he knows that lesson well already, and he knows how to share it, powerfully and passionately.
musicians: Pablo Dylan, James Harte, Darren Boling
