On April 12, 1864, Confederate soldiers under the command of Nathan Bedford Forrest launched an attack on Fort Pillow, a Union redoubt located on a high bluff overlooking the Mississippi River about forty miles north of Memphis, Tennessee. Less a fort than a parapet overlooking a rough array of entrenchments, Fort Pillow was originally built by the Confederacy early in the war, and it had been occupied by various Union battalions since the summer of 1862. By 1864, troop changes led to the encampment of a Federal garrison at the fort, composed of a combination of black artillerymen and white cavalry troops. This biracial garrison sparked the outrage of Confederates in the area, and in the spring of 1864, Forrest, accompanied by approximately 2,000 troops, drove towards Fort Pillow. Forrest knew the area well. He had worked it extensively while working as a slave trader in the years before the war.

On the morning of April 12th, Confederate forces surrounded the fort, and sharpshooters began picking off Union soldiers, including Lionel Booth, the commander of the garrison. By mid-afternoon, Forrest—fearing Union reinforcements via the river—called for the surrender of the fort, a demand the Federal garrison refused. After receiving the rejection, Forrest ordered a final assault. The Confederate soldiers greatly outnumbered the Union forces and took control of the fort within minutes. They promptly killed about half of the Union garrison. The disproportionate number of black soldiers killed, including many rumored to have been executed after their surrender, led to charges of a massacre. Initially an inconsequential battle, Fort Pillow soon came to epitomize the racialized horrors enacted during the Civil War.

Fort Pillow represented a dramatic example of the mercilessness of the war in Tennessee and the contentious attitudes towards African Americans in uniform. The post-attack atrocities had an immediate impact on the conduct of the war as both sides reacted to the news. Wire reports carried stories of black soldiers killed after surrendering, at least one instance of a soldier burned to death, and various accounts of men buried alive. Though some of these accounts may have been exaggerated, the northern press ran with them, and Fort Pillow soon emerged as the prototypical example of Confederate racism and bloodlust. Within a week of the events at Fort Pillow, General Ulysses S. Grant demanded that all black soldiers captured by the Confederates be treated the same as white prisoners of war, but that demand ultimately led to breakdowns in prisoner exchanges when the Confederacy refused it. A congressional committee tasked with investigating the atrocities interviewed numerous survivors and eyewitnesses, and it came to the conclusion that a massacre had indeed occurred.

For black soldiers, the Fort Pillow massacre represented the dread and potential horror that resulted from donning a blue uniform. And yet they fought. In the weeks and months after the battle, most famously at the Battle of Brice’s Crossroads in Mississippi that June, black Union soldiers would fasten “Remember Fort Pillow” badges to their jackets. To many black soldiers, after Forrest’s actions at Fort Pillow, surrender equaled execution. The actual survivors of Fort Pillow had to contend with both the realities of a continued slog of an unyielding war as well as the brutal memories of that afternoon.

In the days after the battle, Fort Pillow was a broken landscape of partially buried corpses and hastily dug mass graves. Before the war ended, Union soldiers and others made various attempts at reburial, but it took several years before the federal government was able to commit to a concerted effort at reinterment. In 1867, most of what could be found of the remains was transferred to the just-consecrated Memphis National Cemetery, thanks in large part to the widow of Lionel Booth, the commander of the fort who had been killed by a Confederate sniper early on the day of the battle. Mary Booth fought relentlessly to retrieve her husband’s body from the fort, and she later worked to help African American widows of fallen soldiers to obtain pensions, as military widow’s benefits required legal marriage certificates that most former slaves did not have. Booth also oversaw the postwar transfer of the bodies to Memphis and invited surviving members of the battle to serve as honor guard for their reinterment.

“This is a White Man’s Government” by Thomas Nast, 1868 (Library of Congress)

After the war—and perhaps to the bewilderment of some southerners far removed from the Mississippi Valley, where Nathan Bedford Forrest’s name had the power of a folk tale—Union newspapers seized upon Forrest as the symbol of the unrepentant Confederate. In a series of cartoons for Harper’s Weekly in 1868, for example, Thomas Nast used Forrest as the avatar of a particularly violent form of white southern masculinity. In a string of cartoons drawn in the run-up to that year’s Democratic National Convention, to which Forrest was a delegate, Nast made Fort Pillow the signifier of Forrest himself. Nast’s most famous cartoon in the series, entitled “This is a White Man’s Government,” centers on Forrest wearing his old Confederate uniform and hoisting a dagger marked “Lost Cause.” And on his lapel: a skull-adorned pin marked “Fort Pillow.”

Now, more than 150 years after Fort Pillow, the massacre still resonates, as it connects to the most profound and tragic aspects of southern and American history. With its overtones of race, violence, politics, and masculine culture, the story of Fort Pillow underscores the cruel realities facing African Americans during the Civil War. But it is also a central element of the Nathan Bedford Forrest story, especially as the general’s detractors fought to remove his statue in Memphis, which finally came down in December 2017. As Memphis reckons with its post-Forrest landscape, the question remains of what to do with the Fort Pillow site itself, which has for too long served as an under-serviced reminder of the battle instead of a well-defined memorial to the black men who lost their lives in those trenches.