Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [150]
February 22: At daylight, Bedford Forrest and his escort charge Smith’s rear guard, chasing the Union troops northwest from Okolona. At Ivey’s Hill, Sooy Smith makes another stand and Forrest’s brother Jeffrey is killed by a ball in the throat during the action there. Bedford Forrest charges into the thick of the Union force (outrunning his hugely outnumbered escort) to kill three men in hand-to-hand combat, decapitating one Federal cavalryman. Forrest has two horses shot from under him in the course of this day; a third mount, King Philip, survives despite taking a bullet. At the end of the day, Forrest abandons pursuit of Smith, thanks to exhaustion and ammunition shortage.
February 26: Sooy Smith’s battered force reaches Memphis, having lost 388 men by the general’s report. Because of Smith’s failure to join him at Meridian, Sherman returns to Vicksburg, abandoning the advance toward Selma. Forrest quarters his troops in Columbus and Starkville, Mississippi, and prepares for another excursion into West Tennessee.
March 20: Forrest returns to Jackson in West Tennessee—a region now shredded by partisan warfare, full of deserters and preyed upon by scalawags and bushwhackers.
March 24: Colonel W. L. Duckworth bluffs a Union garrison at Union City, Tennessee, to surrender by sending in a note purportedly written by Forrest himself.
March 25: Forrest attacks and briefly occupies Paducah, Kentucky, but cannot reduce a fort there occupied by Union troops, who refuse to be bluffed into surrender by Forrest’s warnings and threats. The fighting at Paducah is Forrest’s first engagement with a force of freed slaves in Union service: 274 men of the First Kentucky Heavy Artillery.
April 3: Forrest reaches Trenton, Tennessee. James R. Chalmers, commanding some of Forrest’s troopers, defeats a force commanded by local Union sympathizer Colonel Fielding Hurst, near Bolivar.
April 4: Forrest writes to request that Morton’s artillery be sent to him from Mississippi to aid in attacking boats and the river forts. He begins to consider requests from West Tennessee Confederate loyalists that he reduce the Union garrison at Fort Pillow, at the junction of Coal Creek with the Mississippi River. Commanded for the Union by West Tennessean Major William Bradford, Fort Pillow had become a tinderbox of local partisan antagonism. Bradford’s men stood accused of wholesale looting, insult and rape; atrocity crimes, including mutilation, had also occurred. Many of Forrest’s own men were West Tennessee natives as well (some very recently recruited) and so took such matters personally. Local Confederates regarded Fort Pillow as a nest of outlaws which harbored a number of runaway slaves. Shortly before Forrest’s arrival in the area, the fort had been reinforced by 292 black Union troops sent north from Memphis, under command of Major Lionel Booth.
April 11: Forrest orders Chalmers to advance on Fort Pillow; Chalmers rides thirty-eight miles from Brownsville in the rain to reach the fort for a daybreak attack the next day. Also on April 11, Buford, en route to Paducah, sends a diversion to Columbus with a surrender demand saying “negroes now in arms” will be returned to their masters if they surrender but killed if they resist. White troops will be treated as prisoners in either case. Forrest returns to Jackson to find his brother Aaron dead of pneumonia.
April 12: Forrest reaches Fort Pillow in the mid-morning, following the first wave of the attack, having ridden seventy-two miles in twenty-seven hours. Booth has been killed inside the fort by one of Forrest’s sharpshooters, though the Confederate besiegers don’t know this. During his first reconnaissance Forrest is rolled on by a horse shot from under him. “They are not many, we must take them,” he concludes. Forrest’s demand for surrender