An Unerring Fire: The Massacre at Fort Pillow

By Richard L. Fuchs

Book Overview

The Fort Pillow massacre, in which a Confederate cavalry force assaulted and captured an inadequately defended Union fortification in western Tennessee, is one of the most controversial episodes of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0811718247
• ISBN13: 9780811718240
• Release Date: January 2002
• Publisher: Stackpole Books
• Length: 2 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.2" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Nathan Bedford Forrest, the war criminal and cheater.

This is a nice expose of the crime of Fort Pillow in the Civil War. I have to agree with the previous reviewer, this book gets the goods on Forrest. Southerners revere Forrest, and he was one tough fighter and guerilla leader. He was also a cheater, racist, and murderer. First, the author does a great job detailing the essentials of what happened in April, 1864. Forrest surrounded a Northern fort, and overran some of the outer defences. A truce was called and an ultimatum was called by Forrest for the surrender of the fort. During this truce, Forrest cheated and moved soldiers into advantageous positions. When the commander of the fort refused surrender terms, Forrest overran the fort and most of his soldiers refused the surrender of Northern soldiers and killed them. One white officer was even nailed to a cabin. Black soldiers were placed in cabins and the cabins were set on fire. Soldiers were driven into the river and executed. The Northern commander was captured and later executed. Forrest's troops wanted to kill those because of their skin color and/or regional sympathy. After the war, many excuses were put forward by the criminals who did this. Essentially it was something like this. The Northern command should not have placed troops in this area. They were responsible. As the previous reviewer has already stated, this defense is much like that of a rapist. Well, that type of defense is not coherent. What happened was a crime, and something should have been done about it...such as hanging Forrest after the war because he was a criminal. He should not be made out to be anything but a war criminal. Yet his statue stands in Memphis today. I commend the author for writing a great expose of a little known crime of the Civil War. More needs to known about Fort Pillow, even if it inflames Southern pride.

An Unerring Accusation

As a survey of the previous reviews of this book on this site will show, the Civil War isn't even sort of over yet. Further, some of the issues involved haven't been resolved, and probably never will to everyone's satisfaction. This slender volume (160 pages of text) explores a particularly violent and controversial incident of the War, the Fort Pillow Massacre, or battle, if you will, which took place in 1864. Confederate cavalry General Nathan Bedford Forrest overran the Yankee-held fort after threatening to kill the occupants of said fort if they didn't surrender. In the aftermath of the fighting, Union soldiers who surrendered were summarily executed by Confederate soldiers in numerous incidents, according to Union survivors. Forrest, and his supporters then and after the war (and today, for that matter) insist angrily that nothing of the sort happened, or that if it did it was the fault of the defenders of the fort, who should have surrendered when they had the chance. There's a good deal of hinting that the defenders of the fort who were killed (mostly black soldiers, and Unionists from Tennessee) had it coming to them anyway. It's sort of like blaming a rape victim for the beating she got because she screamed.Much silliness like this has been repeated over the intervening years, and probably will continue to be. The *facts* of the matter, which author Fuchs repeats clearly, are simple. Soldiers in battle during the Civil War were typically killed and wounded at a rate of about one to five. In this particular battle, the killed among the black soldiers in the fort outnumbered those wounded by a large margin, which is almost unprecedented. Fuchs presents the testimony of a number of witnesses from the Yankee side who said they saw wounded shot, and unarmed prisoners killed also. He also presents evidence from the burial parties who reburied the dead after the area was retaken by the Yankees, and testified that many of the black soldiers were shot in the head, for instance. Further, he presents some accounts written by Confederate participants in which they say that they did kill blacks, and even cites General Forrest essentially bragging that this will "teach them." Forrest seems to have thought that he could intimidate blacks or Southern whites by killing large numbers of them this way. The author also discusses the various Confederate statements exonerating Forrest, and sometimes everyone else, from the killing of prisoners and wounded after the fighting, but points out that the statements were usually made long after the incident, and even when they weren't, the persons involved were themselves accused of crimes, and can hardly be trusted when they insisted in their innocence.The strange thing about a book like this is that it's considered biased. Forrest has been biographied numerous times, with no mention (in the books written in the forties or earlier, but still in print) of his association with the KKK in the late 1860's. He was the h