Fort Pillow, a Civil War Massacre, and Public Memory/River Run Red: The Fort Pillow Massacre in the American Civil War

Fort Pillow, a Civil War Massacre, and Public Memory. By John Cimprich. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005. Pp. ix, 193. Preface, maps, tables, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95.) River Run Red: The Fort Pillow Massacre in the American Civil War. By Andrew Ward. (New York: Viking, 2005. Pp. xxiii, 531. Preface, acknowledgments, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95.) Few subjects will raise the ire of Lost Cause traditionalists as much as the April 12, 1864, battle at Fort Pillow, Tennessee. Nathan Bedford Forrest's Confederate cavalry overwhelmed an outpost on bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River that was manned by unionist Tennesseans and black artillerists, many of them former slaves. What followed is probably the Civil War's best-known atrocity, eclipsing similar incidents such as the killing of black troops at Poison Spring, Arkansas, six days later. Fort Pillow remains a bone of contention between those who consider it a massacre and others who deny that interpretation. Were surrendered troops killed on Forrest's orders? Those questions and others are answered in two recent books that explore the events surrounding the fighting at Fort Pillow and its bloody aftermath. John Cimprich's Fort Pillow, a Civil War Massacre, and Public Memory is analytical in its approach, while Andrew Ward's passionate River Run Red: The Fort Pillow Massacre in the American Civil War is filled with small details, many of them culled from the statements of participants both immediately after the fight and years later when they were applying for veterans' pensions. While both books discuss the establishment of Fort Pillow, Cimprich's provides more details, including some that will be of particular interest to Arkansawyers. He notes, for instance, that the first garrison at Fort Pillow consisted of Arkansas troops commanded by Patrick Cleburne and that the buildings erected by the first Union garrison were constructed of wood taken from houses the soldiers had torn down in Osceola, Arkansas. Cimprich also devotes a chapter to the naval maneuvers that caused the Confederates to abandon the fort, which Ward does not cover at all. Cimprich, in a crisp, methodical style, scrutinizes the post-battle testimony of survivors of the garrison, the results of a congressional probe of the battle, and postwar southern efforts to portray the fighting at Fort Pillow in a softer light. He offers a detailed historiography that reaches into the 1980s, showing that both the massacre view and the apologist view still have often passionate proponents. …