River Run Red
The Fort Pillow Massacre in the American Civil War
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
On April 12, 1864, on the Tennessee banks of the Mississippi River, a force of more than 3,000 Confederate cavalrymen under General Nathan Bedford Forrest stormed Fort Pillow, overwhelming a garrison of some 350 Southern white Unionists and over 300 former slaves turned artillerymen. By the next day, hundreds of Federals were dead, over 60 black soldiers had been captured and re-enslaved, and over 100 white soldiers had been marched off to their doom at Andersonville. Confederates called this bloody battle and its aftermath a hard-won victory. Northerners deemed it premeditated slaughter. To this day, Fort Pillow remains one of the most controversial battles in American history.
River Run Red vividly depicts the incompetence and corruption of Union occupation in Tennessee, the horrors of guerrilla warfare, the legacy of slavery, and the pent-up bigotry and rage that found its release at Fort Pillow. Andrew Ward brings to life the garrison’s black soldiers and their ambivalent white comrades, and the former slave trader Nathan Bedford Forrest and his ferocious cavalry, in a fast-paced narrative that hurtles toward that fateful April day and beyond.
Destined to become as controversial as the battle itself, River Run Red establishes Fort Pillow’s true significance in the annals of American history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This massive narrative painstakingly recounts the notorious and much-disputed massacre of the Union garrison at Fort Pillow, Tenn., by Nathan Bedford Forrest's Confederate cavalry on April 12, 1864. The outnumbered garrison, containing an artillery regiment of 300 freed slaves and a cavalry regiment of 350 white Tennessee Unionists, asked for a truce but various errors on both sides led the Confederates to believe that the Union soldiers were refusing Forrest's call to surrender. The ensuing attack left approximately two-thirds of the garrison dead or taken prisoner. Ward (Dark Midnight When I Rise: The Story of the Jubilee Singers) details overwhelming evidence that many were killed while surrendering or wounded, and that the rebels slaughtered fleeing African-American civilians as well. A congressional investigation resulted, but Forrest returned to civilian life and reputedly went on to found the KKK. The author vividly builds his case, portraying a wide range of the actors in the drama as well as the broader context western Tennessee's unhappy history of slavery meant that the Union garrison was riven from within while assaulted from without. Ward's story of this notorious "collision of Southerners white and black" makes an outstanding addition to Civil War literature.
