Lincoln’s Dilemma….Black Troop Massacres

Lincoln’s dilemma of how to address the enlistment of Black Troops, while at the same time ensuring their fair treatment, as POW’s by the South, was a monumental undertaking, greater than any Grant Migraine.

Bummer can’t begin to fathom the President’s frustration and outrage after learning of the carnage at Fort Pillow.

A reflection of commanding Confederate General Nathan B. Forrest at the battle states;

“The river was dyed, with the blood of the slaughtered for two hundred yards. The approximate loss was upward of five hundred killed, but few of the officers escaping. My loss was about twenty killed. It is hoped that these facts will demonstrate to the Northern people that negro soldiers cannot cope with Southerners.”

One of Forrest’s Cavalry Troopers wrote his sister shortly after the battle;

“The slaughter was awful. Words cannot describe the scene. The poor, deluded, negroes would run up to our men, fall upon their knees, and with uplifted hands scream for mercy but they were ordered to their feet and then shot down. I, with several others, tried to stop the butchery, and at one time had partially succeeded, but General Forrest ordered them shot down like dogs and the carnage continued. Finally our men became sick of blood and the firing ceased.”

Bummer cannot imagine a more qualified, first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, than Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Wizard of the Saddle.

The Union force at Fort Pillow numbered 600, of that, 300 were killed, 58 black prisoners and 168 white marched away as prisoners. These figures do not take into account the women and children sheltered with the Federal troops.

Lincoln began to contemplate executing Southern prisoners on a one to one basis. However, Jefferson Davis acknowledged that the Confederate States would respond in kind.

President Lincoln confided to Frederick Douglass; “if once begun, there was no telling where retaliation would end. Execution of innocent southern prisoners or even guilty ones  would produce Confederate retaliation against northern prisoners in a never-ending vicious cycle.”

Lincoln finally concluded that incidents of racial atrocities would only be stopped by a successful prosecution of the war, the Confederacy was based on the subjugation of the Negro and the only enduring remedy was the total defeat of all Southern forces and the elimination of the Planter Aristocracy mentality.

Bummer