Memphians honor the dead of Fort Pillow ahead of Juneteenth holiday
Tucked in the back of the Memphis National Cemetery is a piece of Tennessee and U.S. history that is often forgotten. Under two stately trees, more than 100 Black U.S. soldiers are buried.
Those soldiers, many of whose identities are unknown, are the victims of the Fort Pillow Massacre, the 1864 Civil War battle where hundreds of Union soldiers, largely Black freedmen, were killed while trying to surrender after Confederate soldiers, led by Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, captured the fort in Lauderdale County.
On Friday, as part of the celebration of Juneteenth, a group of Memphians honored the dead at Memphis National Cemetery with a color guard and wreath-laying.
The celebration is only a few years old and comes after years of dispute over what actually happened at Fort Pillow and how much responsibility Forrest, a Memphian, should bear.
Dr. Callie Herd, who helped start what has become the annual remembrance, noted that when the dead from Fort Pillow were reinterred at Memphis National Cemetery, it was more than 100 remains were buried and there could be more than 200 soldiers now buried in that section of the cemetery.
The remembrance has evolved over the past two years and has now settled on Juneteenth, Herd said. The fact that the soldiers from Fort Pillow are buried in Memphis remains a little-known fact in a city with so much history.
"This cemetery is historic just like [Elmwood Cemetery]. People just don't know it," Herd said.
State Rep. G.A . Hardaway honored the dead Friday by quoting President Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.
"The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced," Hardaway said Friday.
Massacre remains dark spot on Tennessee, U.S. history
Over the past half-decade, as the U.S. has undergone a reckoning with the racist parts of its history, Fort PIllow and Forrest, the founder of the Ku Klux Klan, have become more widely known. The battle, on April 12, 1864, involved about 600 Union soldiers defending the fort against 1,500 to 2,000 Confederate troops led by Forrest.
After their commanding officer was killed, the troops in the fort declined to surrender. A Confederate attack soon overwhelmed the defenders. Chaos ensued. A retrospective account from the highest-ranking Union officer, Lt. Mack Leaming, described the scene as such.
From where I fell wounded, I could plainly see this firing and note the bullets striking the water around the black heads of the soldiers, until suddenly the muddy current became red and I saw another life sacrificed in the cause of the Union. Here I noticed one soldier in the river, but in some way clinging to the bank. Two confederate soldiers pulled him out. He seemed to be wounded and crawled on his hands and knees. Finely one of the confederate soldiers placed his revolver to the head of the colored soldier and killed him.
A Confederate soldier, Sgt. Achilles Clark, wrote in a letter home: "I with several others tried to stop the butchery, and at one time had partially succeeded but Forrest ordered them shot down like dogs, and the carnage continued."
Forrest's role in the massacre was, for decades, the subject of some debate. The Commercial Appeal published a story in 1991 that quoted prominent Civil War historians James McPherson and Shelby Foote, a Memphian, debating Forrest's role in the battle.
Jack Hurst, a former Tennessean reporter who wrote a one-volume biography of Forrest, noted that Forrest himself wrote in detail of the killing afterward.
A Forrest report, three days after the battle, said he hoped the aftermath of the fight would "demonstrate to the Northern people that negro soldiers cannot cope with Southerners," and bragged that after the fleeing troops jumped into the Mississippi and were killed, the river was "dyed with the blood of the slaughtered for 200 yards."
Samuel Hardiman covers Memphis city government and politics for The Commercial Appeal. He can be reached by email at samuel.hardiman@commercialappeal.com or followed on Twitter at @samhar
This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: Memphians honor the deceased of Fort Pillow, ahead of Juneteenth
