May 6, 2017 - The Political Cesspool - James Edwards
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You're listening to the Liberty News Radio Network, and this is the Political Cesspool.
The Political Cesspool, known across the South and worldwide as the South's foremost populist conservative radio program.
And here to guide you through the murky waters of the political cesspool is your host, James Edwards.
I've been waiting a year for this, folks.
Welcome to Confederate History Month 2015 on the Political Cesspool.
Each year we dedicate the month of April to the celebration of Confederate history and heritage, and it is always a highlight of our calendar year.
Of course, the Political Cesspool is the only mainstream radio talk show in the country that dedicates a portion of each live broadcast during this special month to this special cause.
And we have used our media venue to celebrate Confederate History Month each year since 2004.
And a parade of Southern celebrities have found their way to our studio during that time.
And we encourage you to browse our broadcast archives in April, going back year after year after year to find out what I'm talking about.
But I am very excited to be kicking off Confederate History Month on the night before Easter.
So a convergence of our faith and our family coming together tonight in the final two hours.
Of course, we're going to be presenting you a very special Easter message in the third hour tonight.
But first, Confederate History Month has begun and it is kicking off in grand fashion tonight because we have our first guest for you right now.
And he spoke.
He gave an unforgettable speech at our 10-year anniversary celebration last October right here in Memphis.
He is the one and only Gene Andrews, who was born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee, about three hours east of where I'm sitting tonight in the radio studio.
Gene was born when it was still acceptable to be proud of your Confederate heritage.
He served as a lieutenant, 3rd Marine Division in Vietnam before becoming a high school history teacher and football and track coach.
Tonight, Mr. Andrews is going to help us set the record straight about Nathan Bedford Forrest and the Battle of Fort Pillow.
He's going to be breaking down that talk that he delivered to our event last fall, as I just mentioned.
And without further ado, Gene Andrews, welcome back to the show, my friend.
James, thank you very much.
It is great to be with you and a great opening to the program.
Always gets you fired up to hear Dixie.
And before we get started on our forest program tonight, we'd just like to wish a meaningful Easter celebration to all of our listeners tomorrow.
And I hope they take it to heart about why we are celebrating Easter as we should.
Well, Gene, I'm glad you mentioned that.
And we're going to let you break down.
I should explain to the audience that this interview with Gene Andrew is going to be a little bit different because basically the talk that he gave here in Memphis a few months ago was just the rave, one of the raves of the event.
And so he's going to be breaking it down over the course of the next three segments uninterrupted as if he is giving the presentation before a crowd in person.
So it's going to be very little interaction between Gene and I after this segment.
We're just going to let him start, and then I'll take him in and out of the breaks.
He's going to be talking about Forest and Fort Pillow.
And folks, I guarantee you, you're going to get something out of that.
But, Gene, to comment on something you said in passing just a moment ago, I couldn't agree with you more, of course.
I have heard Dixie thousands of times.
And every time I hear it, almost every time, but certainly tonight.
The hair on my arms just stand.
There's something in our very bone that causes you to have such a reaction.
And if you didn't feel something, you know, when you heard that song, you got to check your pulse because I'm telling you, it fires me up every time.
And certainly to be able to play it on the radio is a great honor.
But I also want to mention, I don't know if you were listening to the program a moment ago, Gene, in the last hour, but I mentioned that there is such an overlap between our faith and our family.
And certainly here in the South, Christianity with Easter being tomorrow.
And I saw some so-called leader in the Southern Baptist Convention say that the Confederate flag and the Christian flag could not exist together without one setting the other on fire.
Would you like to address that very quickly?
That is absolutely foolish.
And that's why we're losing so many church members.
We have no direction from our so-called religious leaders, not only in this country, but in Europe as well.
And that's why people are falling away from the church.
They just don't see any leadership there.
And the people that are in charge have no concept of history and why those two flags are tied so closely together.
Well, I said that and more in the last segment, but you basically said it all, and they are tied so closely together.
In fact, you can go so far as to say, and this is no exaggeration, that the Confederate flag is a Christian flag.
And of course, he was referring to the naval jack as the Confederate flag.
And I think we, you know, all can understand what he was getting at, but he was probably too ignorant to know the difference even in that.
But anyway, it's sad because certainly southerners and conservatives are the most likely to join the church.
But when you get this kind of stuff, you know, if I hadn't been raised in church and didn't have my first knowledge of the church until I read something like that, I certainly wouldn't be going tomorrow.
Easter or not.
It's interesting that you would bring that up.
It so happens about five or six years ago at my church.
I went out after the church service.
There was a note left on my windshield of my car.
And somebody, and I think it was a female's handwriting, and this was a whole legal page, went into a tirade about how can you call yourself a Christian with that flag on your car and yada, yada, yada, went through all this, the usual ignorance, and then closed with the zinger, what would Jesus do?
So I wrote a note back and left it under the windshield wiper for about three weeks.
Of course, they never came back and got it.
I said, let me answer your last question first.
What would Jesus do?
Well, I never considered Jesus to be a craven coward.
I never thought Jesus would write out the Sermon on the Mount, slip it under the door in the temple and run off and hide.
I think Jesus stuck by whatever he said.
And to answer your first question, how can you have that flag on your car and call yourself a Christian?
Were it not for that flag, I wouldn't be a Christian.
Because I got my introduction to the church and to Christianity through my parents and they through their grandparents and they through their grandparents.
Then that takes you back to my great-great-grandparent great-grandfather who was in the Confederate Army.
So that flag and my Christianity had a direct tie.
Here, here, here, here.
And there is no contradiction in the beliefs of a proud Confederate and a true Christian at all.
In fact, you'd have to wonder whether or not someone could hold the Confederacy in contempt and still be.
I'm not saying that you have to obviously agree with us on all things in order to be a Christian.
It's not a salvational issue.
But to say, as this guy did, who certainly doesn't speak for me, that the two would set each other on fire, that only one can exist and the other has to, that's just, it's just, as you said, it's foolish.
I didn't even want to get in on that, but when you doubled down on Easter, I figured that'd be right in your wheelhouse.
Yes, sir.
That leads into what we're getting ready.
Good way to segue into this.
Well, we got our first commercial break coming up any second now.
When we come back, we're going to let Gene go full force for the remaining of the hour, breaking down Forest and Fort Pillow.
You're going to learn something tonight, ladies and gentlemen.
But before we do, Gene, in just a matter of, I don't know, 15, 30 seconds, what does it mean to you to be a Southerner and a descendant of a Confederate veteran?
It means everything.
That's who we are.
That's our heritage.
That's our roots.
Our roots are in the South.
Our blood is in the South.
The type of people we are in the South.
And we, as Southerners, cannot cower when we are criticized on TV and the national news nerds and so forth.
Amen.
So-called intellectuals.
We got to take a break when we come back.
Forrest, Fort Pillow, and the one and only Gene Andrews, our guest, kicking off Confederate History Month 2015 on the political cesspool right after this.
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And now, back to tonight's show.
I'll tell you what, if they keep playing music like that, I'm going to start looking around the radio station for a bayonet somewhere.
It's got to be here somewhere.
Welcome back to the show, everybody.
James Edwards' special guest, Gene Andrews, who gave a stirring and most memorable speech on Nathan Bedford Forrest and the Battle of Fort Pillow.
And, Gene, I'm just going to let you take it over now.
So, basically how it's going to work, folks.
We got three more segments, this one and two more this hour, about eight to nine minutes apiece.
And we're going to let Gene try to work in his entire presentation in that time or as much of it as he can.
With that being said, Gene, take it away.
Forrest and Fort Pillow.
Very good.
I've just sat down.
I was standing at attention when they were playing our national anthem.
Amen.
What we need to do, we need to warn our listeners, we're going to engage in hate speech tonight.
Hate speech is defined by the liberals as when you tell the truth about Confederate history.
So we'll just warn everybody out front.
Also, want to warn them to sit down and be holding on to their chair.
We've got a couple of lightning bolts we're going to deliver right off the bat.
First of all, our government masters of deceit in the District of Crime will lie to you.
I know that's hard to believe, but that does happen.
And the second lightning bolt is the lamestream news nerds will also lie too, and they will help the government lie.
And we're going to see how that happened in the aftermath of the battle at Fort Pillow.
Fort Pillow was fought on April the 12th, 1864.
It's a small engagement, and it was blown completely out of proportion by the government propaganda.
And we're going to kind of split this down into three parts.
We're going to give you the events leading up to Fort Pillow, and it's not going to, hopefully won't be a boring history lesson, but our listeners need to know what the actual facts are.
And the actual facts are so far removed from what you hear in the media today, it's the difference between night and day.
Then we're going to talk about what actually happened at the battle from dawn that morning to five in the afternoon and in the aftermath and how this propaganda machine went into action.
And then hopefully we'll have time to give people a few short answers that they can fire back to knock out some of the lies and misinformation.
This program I called Forrest's second raid into West Tennessee March, April, 1864, not Fort Pillow, because Fort Pillow was never on the agenda.
His first raid in December of 1862 knocked out the Mobile and Ohio Railroad.
And this is his second raid behind enemy lines into West Tennessee.
The background was back in September, the year before, Forrest was fought on the battlefield at Chickamauga for three days.
He was incredulous at Bragg's indecision at not taking Chattanooga.
And Forrest and Bragg got into it.
And Forrest was transferred to the Department of Alabama, Mississippi, and East Louisiana with his third command and had to raise his third command.
His command from Chickamauga was taken away from him.
So all he had was his staff, his escort, and they came west to build a cavalry command.
Now, Forrest was assuming that he was building a cavalry command to go back into Tennessee and knock out the Nashville and Decatur and the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad that was supplying the Federal Army in Chattanooga.
Now, he didn't know whether Grant or Sherman was going to be in charge of this army, but he knew as soon as spring came, they were headed for Atlanta.
That was the target.
And he assumed that they were getting his cavalry command ready to take these two railroads out.
He was under the command of Stephen D. Lee, who commanded all the cavalry in the department.
He was assigned two cavalry divisions, one under James Chalmers, the second under Abraham Buford, but Buford's division was dismounted.
They had no horses.
In the Confederacy, you had to furnish your own horse.
And if your horse went lame or died, you were walking.
So the Confederate government couldn't supply the horses and the equipment he needed.
So Forrest knew where to go.
He highly recommended the United States Army Quartermaster Corps.
And in West Tennessee, there were horses, uniforms, food, wagons, supplies, everything he needed.
Forrest believed that as long as the Yankee Army kept coming to the south, he had an unlimited supply system.
So keep them coming.
Just to give you an example of Forrest's military skill, by 1864, he was the master of the raid behind enemy lines.
He left nothing to chance.
Before he even set foot out of Columbus, Mississippi, which was his winter headquarters, his scouts were already in West Tennessee.
They knew the enemy strengths, where the river fords were, where the bridges were, where the friendly civilians were, where horses and supplies were available.
So he knew exactly where he was going before he ever took a step out of Columbus, and Fort Pillow was never mentioned.
On March the 1st, he leaves Columbus, Mississippi.
Forrest and Chalburns are in the lead.
Buford's dismounted troops are following on foot.
Excuse me, by March the 20th, Forrest is at Jackson.
He splits up his command, leaves Colonel Wilson in Jackson to guard supplies and wait for Buford to catch up.
And this is another example of his military skill.
He sent Crewe's battalion to attack, in quotes, Memphis and keep the Federals bottled up in Memphis.
Now, he didn't pick them at random.
Crewe's men were from the Memphis area, so they knew the roads.
They knew the civilians, the escape routes, the creeks, everything.
Forrest sets up a recruiting station in Trenton.
He picks up deserters from the Confederate Army who want to serve under Forrest because he wins.
March the 23rd, he sends Colonels Duckworth and Faulkner to capture the Union force at Union City, Tennessee.
Colonel Faulkner had a rather famous grandson.
I believe he was a pretty good novelist, William Faulkner.
On March 24th, Colonel Duckworth, acting as Forrest, bluffs Union City into surrendering when reinforcements from Columbus, Kentucky were only six miles away.
March 26th, Forrest and the main column attack Paducah, Kentucky.
They drive the Federals back to the fort under the cover of a gunboat, and they pick up supplies, horses, and round up prisoners, and they burn the cotton on the docks.
This was not southern cotton, or it had been, but it wasn't anymore.
Yankees coming south with the army would steal cotton from southern farmers as contraband of war, sell it in the north for huge profit, and northern fortunes made from southern property all during the war, from cotton, jewelry, home furnishings, everything that they could take.
Part of Buford's command is sent to Mayfield to rest and recruit, and they're told to come back on a specific date.
And every single one of them returned.
Not only did they return, but they returned with extra recruits.
By 1864, everyone wanted to ride with Forrest.
By April the 4th, he's back in Trenton.
He sends a detailed report to his commanding officer, Stephen D. Lee.
Once again, this shows Forrest's military skill.
He keeps his commanding officer informed and tells him exactly what's happening.
And unlike Joseph E. Johnston, who got into it with President Davis over whether he was going to defend Atlanta or not, a good, sound military commander can lead any size unit, and Forrest proved his military skill.
Now, April the 6th, they've already gone four, five weeks into this raid.
Forrest sends another message to Stephen Lee.
I will attend to Fort Pillow.
And for the first time, Fort Pillow is mentioned.
And why?
Well, the civilians asked Forrest to do something about the U.S. troops coming out of Fort Pillow who attacked, rob, rape, and murder civilians and soldiers in West Tennessee.
Let me give you two examples of why Forrest went to Fort Pillow.
Colonel James Brownlow, son of Parson Brownlow, said he was giving no quarter to any Confederate soldier caught in West Tennessee.
They would be shot on site, not even talking about taking prisoners.
The other reason they went after Fort Pillow, and they were trying to get this man right here.
This was the one they were going for.
Colonel Fielding Hearst, he was the forerunner of Muslim extremists.
Civilians in West Tennessee were forced to take a loyalty oath to the U.S. government and/or pay heavy fines to live in U.S.-occupied West Tennessee.
And it gets even worse.
He captured seven Confederate soldiers that had gone home to see their parents and get supplies and then come back to the Confederate lines.
Six of those seven were executed.
They were shot dead on the spot, and they were the lucky ones.
Lieutenant Dobbs was tortured to death.
His face was beaten in.
His nose was cut off.
His private parts were cut off.
His mouth was slit open from ear to ear, and he was left out in the field to bleed out.
This is why Forrest went to Fort Pillow.
He has Buford demonstrate against Columbus and Paducah to keep the Union troops in Kentucky tied down.
There was a newspaper account with an officer at Paducah bragging about how he had hidden the horses from Fort Pillow.
Buford went back the next night and grabbed all the horses, got them all.
He sent another battalion to so-called attack Memphis and Bluff Memphis.
General Hulbert in Memphis holds the troops in Memphis and even called for reinforcements from Fort Pillow.
On April 1st, Gene, let's hold it up right there if we can push pause.
I hate to do this, but if we can, we're going to push pause right there.
When we come back, Gene's going to pick up exactly where he left off.
We're going to have to go at Fort Pillow the next day.
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So we're doing something a little different this hour, obviously, in that it's not a back-and-forth interview with our first guest of Confederate History Month 2015, Mr. Gene Andrews, but basically he is presenting his speech or a slightly abbreviated version of it concerning Forrest and Fort Pillow, which he calls America's first racial hate hoax.
Gene, why don't you remind the folks where you were before the break and continue on from there?
Yes, sir.
We'll pick it up.
Forrest left out of Columbus, Mississippi on March the 1st for a raid into West Tennessee to get horses.
Fort Pillow was never mentioned, and it wasn't mentioned all through March and wasn't even mentioned until April the 6th.
And the reason he was going to Fort Pillow is because the civilians in West Tennessee asked him to do something about the federal troops that were coming out from the stockade and robbing them and murdering them and murdering Confederate soldiers in West Tennessee.
They were not taking prisoners.
They were killing Confederate soldiers on site.
So by April 10th, Forrest sent General Chalmers ahead to attend to Fort Pillow.
By April the 11th, McCulloch and Bell's brigades move out from Brownsville through the Fort Deer River area and head west to Fort Pillow.
They're guided by a civilian, Mr. William J. Shaw, who escaped from Fort Pillow and ran into Forrest's troops that night and gave them the troop strength, disposition, layout of the fort, names of officers and guided them to the fort.
Now the topography is important to understand.
Fort Pillow is built on a bluff on the Mississippi River and it had an enclosure about 120 yards in circumference, 70 yards across to the river and openings for six cannons, but it had a ridge surrounding it out about 150, 200 yards around that.
And the ridge was higher than the fort and that's an important factor in the battle.
U.S. Army's troop strength was a total of 577.
295 white soldiers, many of them were Tennessee Unionists, or Forrest referred to them as Tennessee Tories, and 262 blacks.
There were approximately 25 civilian settlers and several, shall we say, professional women servicing the soldiers that were there.
The white troops were in cabins at the south end of the fort and the blacks, as the U.S. Army always did, segregated in tents on the parade ground inside the perimeter.
Now the tents were another important factor in the battle.
The commander was Major L.F. Booth.
The second in command was a Major W.F. Bradford, who was considered to be worthless, and this is from the U.S. Army officers.
Most of these troops had no combat experience.
Daylight of the 12th, Missouri cavalry under Colonel McCulloch surprises and drives in the pickets.
The Confederate attack is so swift and unexpected, they're unable to man the intermediate works and fall back into the main works.
Now, the Confederates have the high ground at sunup, and now they're firing downhill into the fort.
The Federal soldiers hear the shots, and they rush to the earthworks.
By 8 a.m., there's heavy sniper fire from behind stumps and logs.
The defenders are pinned down, and Major Booth, the only experienced officer in the fort, is killed by one of the first shots, and the incompetent Major Bradford now takes command.
By 11 a.m., Forrest arrives.
He asks Chalmers to take the cabins to the south end of the fort and have sharpshooters silence the cannons on the south side of the fort.
McCullough does, and he uses the cabins and ravines for shelters.
U.S. Commander Bradford orders the cabins nearest the fort burned to deny the Confederates cover.
Here is U.S. lie number one.
They claim that Forrest burned U.S. wounded alive.
Well, if they were burned alive, they were burned by U.S. soldiers firing the cabins, not the Confederates, because they were using the cabins for cover.
By noon, Forrest increases the snipers, personal reconnaissance along the ridge.
Two of his horses are hit, shot, and go down.
One of Forrest's staff officers advises him to dismount.
He's less of a target.
Oh, he says, well, I could get killed on foot, and I can see better when I'm mounted.
Okay, yes, sir.
Yes, sir.
You do whatever you want.
At 1 p.m., Forrest orders Bell and Bartow to move along Coal Creek and Coal Creek Ravine on the north side of the fort, and like McCullough on the south side, silence the guns on the north side.
The guns can't be depressed enough to hit the Confederates in the ravine.
Now, by 3 o'clock, Forrest has the fort completely surrounded.
A gunboat new era that was supposed to protect the fort is driven away by Confederate sniper fire along the riverbank.
Forrest knew how to handle gunboats.
When they opened the gun ports, his men just laid in a heavy volume of fire right through the open gun ports, and they took out.
So here's the situation.
The defenders are pinned down.
They can't raise their head over the earth wall to return fire.
They'll be shot.
There's no gunboat to protect them.
Forrest sends in a demand for surrender under a flag of troops.
Now, during this ceasefire, the blacks inside the fort had been given liquor that morning.
The Confederates found that out when they got inside the fort.
They found kegs of whiskey along the wall and gourds for dipping.
The blacks stood on the parapet during the truce.
They shouted insults and made obscene gestures at the Confederate.
Now, what we have to remember, this is the pre-trash talk days of the NFL and the NBA, and there was already bad feelings between the Confederates and the U.S. war criminals at the fort, and this didn't help.
None of these troops had combat experience, and they didn't understand their situation.
The only experienced federal officer had been killed during one of the first shots.
Major Bradford asked for one hour to discuss with his officers.
Forrest said, you've got 20 minutes.
Lie number two, the Confederates were accused of using the troops to move into ravines north and south of the fort.
The fact, the Confederates were already there before the flag of truce was ever sent in.
Now, they did warn two steamboats not to land at the fort, that there was a truce underway.
3.30 p.m., Forts reply, we will not surrender.
The cannons are loaded with double canister.
All weapons are loaded.
Extra rifles are placed along the wall.
They have an emergency plan.
If they're forced to fall back, they're going to drop down below the bluff, and the gunboat would blast the Confederates on the top of the bluff with canister.
The civilians were given weapons.
Here's U.S. lie number three.
Forrest shot poor, unarmed civilians.
The forts for civilians were armed, and they were shooting at the Confederates.
And I'll guarantee you, if somebody was shooting at me, I wouldn't care if they had a uniform on or not.
I'm going to return fire.
So Forest assault orders, rifles, shotguns, and four pistols per man are loaded, but no shots are fired until the assault troops clear inside the fort.
And the sharpshooters keep the enemy heads down while the attackers advance.
At 4 p.m., the bugle sounds charge, and 1,200 Confederates race downhill, jump into a moat around the fort, and the snipers keep up a constant fire downhill into the fort.
The defenders can't raise up and take an accurate shot.
And the defenders can't crawl out on top of the earthen wall to shoot down into the moat.
So here's an ironic situation.
The Confederate soldiers and U.S. soldiers are approximately eight feet apart.
About half the Confederates bend over.
The other half step up on their back to a ledge, then pull up the first half.
On the second bugle blast, they flop down on top of the wall, not stand up.
And all the Federal soldiers see then are rifle barrels and shotgun barrels coming over the wall and firing right into their face.
This is the original shock and awe.
The defenders break and run across the parade grounds.
They're channeled between these rows of tents that we'd mentioned earlier.
The Confederates are firing from 20 to 40 yards away.
They can't miss.
Federal soldiers that are running through these avenues of these tents are gunned down by the score.
Nearly 200 of the two U.S. 261 killed were killed between the tents, and they found bodies two to three deep stacked up in there.
The U.S. flag is still flying, which means the fort has not surrendered.
The Federals ran, fell, or jumped down the bluff to get out of the way for the New Era, which had been driven off, never fired one shot at the Confederates.
Now the Confederates are moving in north and south of the fort along the riverbank and down on top of them from the bluff.
Most of the whites had now surrendered.
The blacks kept firing and or jumped into the river where most of them were either killed or were drowned or shot while swimming away.
At approximately 4.20, 20 minutes after the attack started, Forrest rides into the fort, orders the flag cut down, the symbol that the fort has surrendered, and most of the firing has stopped.
They wheel around one of the parrot guns in the fort and fired at the New Era, which steamed off even further out of range.
Forrest orders McCullough to round up the prisoners, gather up the wounded, and McCulloch said, I ordered their survivors to bury their dead and gather up their wounded.
Here's U.S. line number four.
Forrest buried wounded U.S. soldiers alive.
Well, if U.S. soldiers were buried alive, they were buried by their own men.
By 5 p.m., Forrest and some of the troops ride off, McCullough with the prisoners, Bell with the wounded that could be moved.
130 wounded U.S. soldiers, too severely wounded to be moved out, were left overnight with the U.S. medical staff.
There were no Confederates in the fort after dark.
U.S. line number five.
Confederates robbed the wounded and dead that night.
No, the Confederates were not in the fort that night.
If they were robbed, they were probably robbed by the same thieves and murderers who'd been robbing the civilians.
On daylight on the 13th, Forrest sends Captain Anderson with some of Chalmer's men back to help the U.S. wounded, and they hailed a steamboat, the Silver Cloud, and helped the Federals load their own wounded onto this steamboat.
By 4 p.m., they were all loaded.
The steamboat was sent to Memphis.
The Confederates leave for good.
Casualty report from Captain Ferguson, United States Navy.
U.S. killed 221.
Prisoners, 206, and left behind were 130.
Confederate casualties, 14 killed, 86 wounded.
We had already talked about how Brownlow and Hearst were the targets of this raid.
Luckily for them, they were not there at the fort.
What we will do in our next segment, and if you have any questions, we'll try to answer those right now.
But in our next segment, we're going to explain the military situation in 1864 and why this small battle in West Tennessee was blown totally out of proportion and why today all we hear about Forrest is that he started the Ku Klux plant, which he didn't, and Fort Phillip.
With that, folks, what a perfect bit of timing by Gene Andrews.
We're taking a break right now, and we'll be back with the conclusion of his presentation right after this.
Let's hang on and come back to the political cesspool right after these messages here on the Liberty News Radio Network.
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The Thunders mutter.
Northern flags and southwinds flutter.
To arms is fly.
Two arms is five.
Two armies.
Send them back your fierce defiance.
Stamp upon the cursed alliance.
To arms is fire.
To arm is fire.
To arms.
That's the way we say it on our 10-year anniversary.
Celebration back last October in Memphis.
The esteemed guest that we have on the line with us, Gene Andrews, former lieutenant in the Marine Corps in Vietnam, history teacher.
And of course, here in the political cesspool during the month of April, we celebrate not only our faith and family as always, but also our past.
This is Confederate History Month as recognized throughout many of the southern states still to this day, although they call it Confederate Decoration Day here in Tennessee.
But we're learning a little bit more about the involvement of Nathan Bedford Forrest at the Battle of Fort Pillow and putting history into accord with the facts with the one and only Gene Andrews, who is a scholar on this very topic.
Gene, continue on, sir.
Yes, sir.
Well, just a brief review.
Daylight on April the 12th, Forrest's men attacked Fort Pillow.
They took the ridge, and we need to remember this.
They took the ridge around the fort on the land side.
And now the Confederates are firing down into the fort.
The Federal soldiers were pinned down.
And when Forrest, about 3.30 that afternoon or 4 o'clock that afternoon, ordered they at 3 o'clock, they sent in a flag of truce.
So Forrest didn't go there to just massacre people.
He gave them a chance to surrender.
Every single one of them would have been taken out just like the Federal soldiers at Union City.
Nothing happened to them.
They surrendered.
They were taken south and turned over to the Confederate authorities.
Same thing would have happened at Fort Pillow.
But an inexperienced officer there decided to fight it out in an untenable position, and the results were predictable.
So at 4 o'clock, the charge sweeps down the hill, gets into the fort.
The Federals retreat, drop over a bluff down by the river.
Now they're pinned down.
They've got Confederates shooting at them coming up the river road from the north, coming up the river road from the south.
And now Confederates have swept through the fort.
They're firing down on top of them from the bluff.
Once again, the casualty report, and these numbers are taken from the United States Navy, not the Confederacy.
There were 221 killed.
There were 206 prisoners taken out of there.
But the Confederates left behind 130 U.S. soldiers who were too severely wounded to be moved.
So if Forrest ordered a massacre, as they say, he didn't do a very good job of it.
Took out 206 prisoners and left behind another 130.
So that's the military situations.
The Confederates cleared out, returned back to Mississippi.
Forrest sends in his report, and then it turns into a propaganda meal for the U.S. government.
What we have to understand is we know how the war came out.
But in the spring of 1864, it wasn't a done deal yet.
Grant had taken over in the East.
Sherman had taken over the Federal Armies in the Western Theater, and there was no guarantee that they were going to do any better than some of the commanders that preceded them.
So they had to whip up the anti-South, anti-Confederate, anti-Confederate personal attacks in the North.
And this is typical of liberals, typical of the Northeast, what they do.
They attack you personally.
This is U.S. war propaganda, just like U.S. war propaganda in World War I, World War II, the lies about the Gulf of Tonkin, Serbia, Bosnia, and weapons of mass destruction, the invisible weapons of mass destruction.
Also, in 1864, you have to remember Confederate commerce raiders were ripping and roaring across every ocean on the planet.
There was war opposition in the north, 30,000 arrests of northern citizens by Lincoln with no writ of habeas corpus.
Over 200 newspapers and magazines were shut down.
The editors jailed, their presses destroyed.
Congressman Clement Villandingham of Ohio was banished from the United States.
So the U.S. war propaganda needed the Fort Pillow massacre.
They relied on an eyewitness account who was there at Fort Pillow.
The only problem was the eyewitness account was written in Knoxville, Tennessee.
Knoxville, Tennessee is a mere 395 miles from Fort Pillow as the crow flies.
Now, whoever wrote that eyewitness account has one heck of a pair of eyes to see that.
But going on that, there was a congressional report written.
40,000 copies were printed up and sent out.
This was the largest printing of a congressional report up to that time.
And as we said before, Nathan Bedford Forrest was the victim of America's first racial hope.
Now, we're used to that today with Twana Brawley and the Duke La Crosse team, the Genesis 6 and Trayvon Martin and on and on and on.
But it was new in 1864.
So the question arises, then why didn't the Confederates answer back and do something about it?
Well, here's what happened.
Forrest sent his preliminary report to Stephen D. Lee, as we said, on April the 4th.
Then April the 6th, he said, I'm going to take care of Fort Pillow.
When he got back to Columbus, he finished his report on this operation into West Tennessee.
He turned it into Stephen D. Lee, who forwarded on to the commander of the department, General Leonidas Polk.
At that time, Polk had been transferred to the Army of Tennessee, who was fighting Sherman between Chattanooga and Atlanta.
On June the 27th, Polk was killed.
It wasn't until almost three weeks later that they went through Polk's personal correspondence and found Forrest's report on Fort Pillow.
By now, it was too late.
The Fort Pillow massacre had caught hold, and now anything the Confederates said would just be late, you know, late information, trying to worm their way out of it, and nobody would believe it.
So they didn't have a chance to counter the charges until almost two to three months after the fact.
Now, how do we answer today?
Well, the best tactic I've found is to use Forrest tactic, attack.
As Forrest said, never stand to receive the attack of the enemy.
Always take the initiative.
Get there first with the most men.
You can never defend with a negative.
And that is, well, as we said, if he ordered a massacre, he didn't do a very good job of it.
And you can tell them about the prisoners taken out and the 130 who were too severely wounded.
And the Confederates were sent back by Forrest the next day to help load the U.S. wounded on steamboat.
And why did Forrest go to Fort Pillow in the first place?
It was a north-south raid from Mississippi up through Grand Junction, Jackson, Union City, Paducah, and then coming around and going back.
Why would he take his men 60 miles out of the way to attack a fort that everyone knew that cavalry can't attack a fort?
Nobody told Forrest that, but that was the standard philosophy of the day.
And even if they captured it, they couldn't hold it because the Federal Navy could come along and blast them out of it.
Once again, it was the civilians in West Tennessee that begged Forrest to do something about the U.S. slash Nazi war criminals coming out of Fort Pilla, robbing, looting, and murdering the civilians, then running back to Fort Pilla and hiding under the Yankee flag.
And we talked about Brownlow and Hearst and how they declared no quarter on any Confederate caught in West Tennessee and were shooting Confederates down on site.
Make the people who attacked Forrest in our southern history, make them defend the criminal activity of Mr. Lincoln's glorious U.S. Army.
Now, James, that's pretty much concludes our program.
If you have any questions or any points that we need to reiterate, we'll be glad to do that.
Or maybe even if you have someone on the line that has a question, we'd be glad to take that from them.
Well, we had enschewed calls this hour because I wasn't for sure how much time we would have.
But I'm going to put the word out right now.
Very quick.
And see, if we would like to have a caller, 1-866-986-News is the number, 1-866-986-6397.
If you have a quick question for Gene Andrews, because I know we only have a couple of minutes remaining before we get into our special Easter message, which will be forthcoming and will dominate, of course, the third and final hour of tonight's broadcast.
But before questions, Gene, which I know will be coming in, and we'll get to as many as we can.
I doubt we'll have time to get to much.
But I want to thank you again for making yourself available tonight on Easter Eve to bring back to the audience the speech that those who were not in attendance missed.
It was very important that once we got to April, and this was going to be a topic for conversation on the program as it is every year, that we bring you back to share with the entire family of listeners that which they missed in Memphis if they weren't part of this.
Well, this is one of the most blatant examples of U.S. lies and misinformation and just plain war propaganda that we have in the country.
Well, a precedent.
A precedent was set, in other words.
And it's a blueprint that has been used time and time again.
One question coming in from our chat room.
Where did you get your information?
Obviously, this is different than the story told by the victors.
Where did you, what sources did you draw from when doing your research?
Quite a few books.
One of the better ones, I think, is by Dr. Weiss, That Devil Forrest.
Another one is one that was published recently by actually an ancestor of Fielding Hearst, Jack Hearst, wrote a biography on Forrest, and he goes into quite a bit of detail about Fort Pilla and what actually happened there.
And I've tried to go to original sources that were there at the fort, not eyewitnesses 300, 400 miles away that wrote these and go by what they said went on there.
And so that's where I based my information.
There are quite a few books on Forrest that Jordan and prior campaigns of Nathan Bedford Forrest, which was written while he was alive, and he actually checked the facts on that one.
That would be a good one I would recommend going to.
Don't go to Glenn Beck.
He had some clown on his program one night that claimed that he was a historian and claimed that he had the sword that Forrest used to skin blacks alive at Fort Pillar.
Well, nobody at the time came up with that story.
North, South, black, white, Confederate, whoever.
Where this guy came up with that story, we don't know, but it got him on TV.
So there you go.
That's right.
There you go.
And it was another way to denigrate the memory of the Southerners, which is always the whole point.
That's the whole point.
I just would say that we're aliens, you know, anything.
Out of time, and a great one just came in.
I'll give you a quick yes or no answer.
Do you think the war would have turned out differently if Forrest had been put in command?
Absolutely.
It'd been over in about six weeks.
There you have it, folks.
Gene Andrews kicking off our Confederate History Month series this year in grand fashion.
Thank you, sir.
Appreciate it.
All right.
Thank you, James.
Always a pleasure.
Indeed.
We'll be back with my pastor right after this with a very special Easter message.