April 14, 2018 - The Political Cesspool - James Edwards
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You're listening to the Liberty News Radio Network, and this is the political cesspool.
15 years after the Mexican War, many of those same West Point officers would answer the call of duty once again.
Political differences so divided our nation that a war between the states was inevitable.
Brother against brother, North against South.
One of the greatest military geniuses of all times had no formal training, yet he rose from the rank of a private to lieutenant general.
His name was Nathan Bedford Forrest.
That devil Forrest must be hunted down and killed if it costs 10,000 lives and bankrupts the federal treasury.
Welcome back, everybody.
Welcome back to tonight's live broadcast of the Political Cesspool Radio Program.
James Edwards.
And Gene Andrews, our guest, this third and final hour.
And we continue to cover the life of Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Now, Nathan Bedford Forrest, as we mentioned last week, is the only individual that is going to get an extended profile in our Confederate History Month series.
Time doesn't permit us to cover everything, every battle, every hero.
We talked about this last week.
Now, if you want to remember why we are profiling Forrest extensively, go back to the third hour of last week's show.
We can't cover everything, every show, but mainly because as a show based in Memphis, Tennessee, and as Forrest is such a hero of Memphis and of Tennessee, that's one of the reasons, but it's not the only reason.
But to help us better understand why, Gene Andrews, a former commander of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, Gene served as a combat officer with the 3rd Marine Division in Vietnam.
A retired history teacher, Gene now works as the caretaker of the Nathan Bedford Forrest home near Chapel Hill, Tennessee.
And he's back on the show tonight, back-to-back weeks, to wrap up his two-part series on the life of General Forrest.
Gene, two weeks in a row, I could get used to this.
Well, thank you, James.
I appreciate that.
I hope we still have some listeners out there after last week.
Hey, as a matter of fact, if anything, our audience only grew after your appearance last week.
We got some very good feedback from that particular hour of radio.
And what we did last week, it was a two-part series.
So the first part was going to be the life of Nathan Bedford Forrest.
And to the best of our abilities, with the time that we had, we covered Nathan Bedford Forrest's life from childhood through the war and then after the war.
And tonight, the topic is going to be the lies that have been told about Nathan Bedford Forrest, the life of Forrest and the lies about Forrest.
Well, that was the plan, but it is commercial talk radio, and you don't always get through everything.
I think we made it through about half of the war last week, Gene.
Why don't you give us a...
Let me emphasize Shiloh because that was the anniversary of the Battle of Shiloh last week, Shiloh and Fallen Timbers.
And we can just briefly sum up some of the rest of the war from after 1862, the spring of 1862 on, and then we'll come back to the politically correct nonsense that you hear about Forrest.
And, you know, we're not just ignoring all of our other Confederate leaders.
There's insanity about everything Confederate today.
So, you know, you're going to be able to get a lot of people.
Well, that's exactly right.
Somewhere.
Well, what I would ask you to do is this.
We have about three minutes remaining this segment, three or four minutes remaining.
When we come back at the top of the next segment, I want to focus exclusively on the lies that have been told about Nathan Bedford Forrest.
And certainly that's going to include the lies about Fort Pillow, the infamous Battle of Fort Pillow, which was a great Confederate victory.
Victory this week also, 12th of April.
Yeah, as a matter of fact, that's why when we were planning Confederate History Month, why we wanted to have you on for a two-part series on the particular two weeks that we chose last week, 156 years ago last week, Nathan Bedford Forrest was fighting at Shiloh.
154 years ago this week, he was fighting Fort Pillow.
And we're broadcasting almost to the day that those battles took place.
In fact, last week, he was at Shiloh while we were on the air, 156 years ago prior.
Now it was four years ago this week.
He was a political cesspool that night while he was at Shiloh.
Well, he was certainly listening from heaven last week.
Surely, surely.
But let me ask you this, G, before we get to the lies about Forrest.
In three minutes or less, sum up Nathan Bedford, the final years of the war, and again, it would take hours to do this justly.
The final years of the war and his post-war life in three minutes or less, please.
The thing that's always impressed me the most about Forrest is how he was so far ahead of the curve.
He recognized the strategy that the Confederate government should be fighting against the North.
We couldn't swap a man-for-man in a bloodbath on these monster-sized battlefields like Chickamauga and Gettysburg.
We had to fight a hit-and-run type of war, make it so costly for the Federal Army to invade the South they'd eventually give up and drag the war on and on and on.
We just didn't have the manpower to swap them one for one, and he realized that.
But the Confederate government couldn't see that until it was too late.
After the war, he tried, as most Southerners did, to live a peaceful life, but we weren't allowed because of the Reconstruction government.
And many organizations in the South sprang up to fight the corrupt government that was put upon us.
There were a lot of vigilante groups that sprung up in the South to protect the Southern people.
It was Red Shirts in South Carolina, the Knights of the White Chameleon, Texas and Louisiana, and southern Middle Tennessee and Northern Alabama is the Ku Klux Klan.
And we'll get into that after our break and get in a little bit more detail on that then and set that record straight.
Well, talk to us then, Gene.
We're post-bellum now.
We're post-bellum.
Nathan Bedford Forrest lived many years after the war, died in Memphis, is buried in Memphis.
And of course, the last official speech that was given at his grave before the monument was removed illegally was given by none other than Gene Andrews.
And the group there to listen to him was none other than the political cesspools anniversary crew at our sold-out conference last fall.
So a little bit of Confederate history right here by the man who made it, Gene Andrews.
So you're accusing me now of having the Forrest statue removed.
Is that it?
Not hardly.
But I am glad that if that was the last pro-Forest gathering at that grave site, that it could be you and that it could be us.
But I would ask you this.
He did live years after the war.
Tell us about his post-war years.
Well, his department was surrendered.
He never officially surrendered himself, but his department was surrendered by Richard Taylor, his commanding officer for that department of Mississippi, Alabama, and eastern Louisiana.
And he returned back to Memphis, the Memphis area, and tried to put a life back together for his family and his former slaves.
He took care of them.
They were freed, but they had nowhere to go.
They had no incentive from the federal government to work anywhere else except to where they'd worked before the war.
And he took care of the widows and orphans of his soldiers.
So he had a lot thrown on his shoulders of responsibility after the war that he really didn't ask for, but he was the type of person where he saw a need and these people were destitute and they needed help.
And so they turned to Forrest, and like he had done through the war, when the civilians turned to him and asked for help, he took care of them.
So this is the type of person he was.
Well, and then, of course, you know about his funeral.
Again, we're just trying to give you a snapshot, but his funeral was just a magnificent affair.
And in fact, one of his former slaves had a position of honor in that funeral, and so many people from around the South came to that, shed a little more life, a little more light on the funeral and the reception that he so rightly received.
Well, it was quite an event there in Memphis, and President Davis was there, former President Davis.
There were hundreds of blacks that were in the funeral procession and were really legitimately grieved by the death of Forrest.
He had done so much for them during the war.
They served with him during the war.
He tried to help them take care of them after the war.
And a footnote here, there were no blacks allowed at Abraham Lincoln's funeral.
There is Forrest right there.
There is a little bit of history for you folks that you might not have heard about anywhere else here but on TPC.
We'll be back right after this.
We're going to get into the lies about Nathan Bedford Forrest, and boy, are they plentiful.
We're going to set them straight when we come back.
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Daddy, gold is a bad investment.
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On the day after the Battle of Shiloh, the rebels were falling back real slow.
And old William the Conservan, with the three Brigades men, thought he might attack those rebels once again.
You know he wants to fight, and he's about to get one.
There's one man who stood in Sherman's way.
He said, Yankee, this just ain't your day.
Old Nathan Bedford Forrest, 300 by his side.
He said, boys, it's time to ride.
Come alive, ride with the devil, for yes, Yankee Ukraine.
Come alive, ride with the devil.
The devil is running Ukraine.
Ladies and gentlemen, that song, Ride with the Devil, is from Rick Revels CD and DVD by the same title, An American Journey.
General Grant and Sherman both refer to Nathan Bedford Forrest as that devil Forrest.
Revel, Rick Revel, that is, the singer of that song you just heard, had four ancestors who rode with General Forrest, two on his father's side and two on his mother's side.
And Rick Revel has previously appeared as our guest on TPC's annual Confederate History Month series, as Gene Andrews is doing right now.
Gene, last week, again, we're talking about the life of Forrest, and that included his participation, to say the least, in the April 6th through the 8th Battle of Shiloh in 1862.
154 years ago this week, April 12th, 1864, he was at the Battle of Fort Pillow, where he protected the civilian population of western Tennessee from the Union menace.
And that, I'm sure, will be a topic of this week's series with you, Gene, the lies about General Forrest.
Take it in any direction you'd like to go.
Well, if you want to upset the established media, the prestitutes, whatever you want to call them, the mainstream historians and the experts from the Northeast on Southern history.
They've never been to the South, but they're experts about the Southern history and the culture of the South.
Just mention riding with the Devil with Forrest, as Rick mentioned in his song, and it will set them off like a whole box full of bottle rockets, just every which way they can go.
And the three things that they always throw at Forrest, they say, well, yes, you know, but his statue needs to be taken down, his name taken, stricken from the history books, everything like that, just like we were living in the old Soviet Union, is number one, he was a slave trader.
Well, okay, so what?
There were thousands of people in the United States and all over the world that were slave traders.
When he was living in Memphis, it was a legal profession.
And if you want to throw stones at somebody, how about throwing stones at the Northeast?
The wealth of New England was built on the slave trade.
And the ports of New York and Boston and New Bedford and Providence, Rhode Island was the biggest slave port in the United States.
Philadelphia, all of those dealt in the slave trade.
And the money that they made was then in the endowments that was given to start a lot of these Ivy League schools like Harvard and Yale and Brown and Princeton.
So that was all right with them in the Northeast to take the money, but Southerners were evil because they had slaves working on these huge farms and plantations in the South.
So the hypocrisy of the lunatic left never ceases to amaze me.
And they turn a blind eye on what they were doing and point their craggy fingers at the Southern people for what we were doing down here in a legal business is what Forrest was in.
But eventually he got out of that.
There was even in the South a certain stigma about people that bought and sold slaves and for his family's future and their reputation he got out of that.
So that's one of the things that they always throw at Forrest.
The other two big things are the so-called massacre at Fort Pillow.
Not to be confused with the Alice's restaurant massacre with five-part harmony and full orchestration.
That's a totally different subject altogether.
But here's what actually happened for Fort Pillow.
And we need to understand this and know this so we can refute a lot of this misinformation that's being spread out there.
Forrest was transferred from Bragg's Army at Tennessee to the Department of Mississippi, Alabama, and eastern Louisiana.
And he was given command of all the cavalry in that department under Stephen D. Lee and General Leonidas Polk, who was the overall department commander.
So Forrest was given James Chalmers' cavalry division.
He was also given Abraham Buford's dismounted cavalry division.
Now, a dismounted cavalry division means that's a glorified infantry division.
They don't have any horses.
They're on foot.
So he knew that the place to go to get horses was West Tennessee and Western Kentucky, occupied by the U.S. Army.
And Forrest was very recommended very, very highly the United States Army Quartermaster Department.
He thought they were outstanding in bringing supplies to the South for his Army.
And the Federal Army did all the work.
They collected supplies in Chicago and Cleveland and all over the Midwest and Indianapolis and St. Louis and sent them downriver by railroad into the South.
And then all Forrest had to do was cover the last 50 or 60 miles, raid in behind Union lines and pick up whatever supplies he needed from all of their efforts of bringing all this horses, materials, weapons, ammunition to the South.
And that's what he proposed to do in the spring of 1864.
He left out of Columbus, Mississippi with the intent of remounting Buford's cavalry division, plus picking up recruits and supplies and weapons and doing as much damage to the federal supply system in West Tennessee and western Kentucky as he could.
So they left Columbus, Mississippi on March the 1st.
They got into Jackson, Tennessee, moved up to Trenton about the toward the end of March, and had advanced all the way up to Paducah, Kentucky, where they attacked the federal garrison at Paducah.
They had raided supplies around there, captured some horses.
But the one thing they did, they burned cotton that was stored on the docks in Paducah.
And it was cotton that was raised by southern farmers.
But as the Union Army came through the south, they had all these speculators that followed along behind the army at a safe distance behind the army.
I want to put that to make that point, a very safe distance behind the army.
And then they would go in and steal cotton or home furnishings or gold or silver or whatever they can get from the civilian homes and take it back north with them and sell the cotton at huge profits.
And that's where a lot of the rich northern industrialists during the Gilded Age after the war made their money initially was from what they stole from the South during the war and during Reconstruction.
So you talk about the Carnegies and the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts and all of these people that made money.
Their fathers or someone in their family had made their money by stealing land, cotton, or whatever from the South.
So when Fiorest burned the cotton on the docks in Paducah, he was burning up a lot of the profits that the Yankees had stolen from Southerners.
He returned back.
He had remounted Buford's Calvary Division, had turned back south and was back down near Trenton and sent in a preliminary report to Stephen D. Lee, his immediate commanding officer, on April the 4th.
So now they'd been on this raid for almost five weeks.
And he sent in a preliminary report reporting how many soldiers he'd captured, the horses they'd captured, the number of bridges and trestles they'd burned on the federal supply line, all of the things that they'd done.
Never once, never once during this five weeks was Fort Pillow ever mentioned.
That was not the point of this raid.
On April the 6th, two days later, he sent a supplementary report to Stephen D. Lee saying, we will attend to Fort Pillow.
Now, what was the change in those two days?
Well, the change was that the civilians in West Tennessee were begging Forrest to please do something about Fort Pillow, which is a fort that was originally built by Confederates on a bluff on the Mississippi River up above Memphis.
And it was built as part of the defensive line along the Mississippi River, but never completed.
Hold on.
Yep.
Jeep, hold on right there, brother.
We got to take a break.
That's a good stopping point.
We're getting to what really happened at Fort Pillow and why it had to happen.
Gene will answer that question and give you more information, historically accurate information that you would only be privy to here on TPC.
We'll be right back.
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Now, Forest, he shouted from over here.
Said, boys, give him hot lead and cold steel.
And he gave his level, then he led a charge.
And that's when Old Sherman, he swole.
You look real close.
I think he broke out a cold shred.
Said, man, run that devil down.
He's coming after me, Mr. Standy Ground.
But fear to control.
Then Yankees did run.
The devil's work on this day is done.
Yeah, come right.
Ride with the devil.
Well, you're seeing Jankee.
Come right, ride with the devil.
Devil is lending you.
All right, folks.
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Gene, we're talking about Fort Pillow right before the break.
And before we get back to Fort Pillow, I would ask you, your thoughts on the song.
Had you heard that song before?
No, sir, I hadn't.
That's excellent.
And that's Rick Revere.
You know, a song of Rick Revel.
And the song is Rod with the Devil about Nathan Bedford Forrest.
And for the benefit of those of you who had not heard that song before, we're going to repost it at our website tomorrow, thepoliticalspool.org.
But there does exist a song honoring Nathan Bedford Forrest.
So you learned something new tonight, ladies and gentlemen.
Absolutely.
There should be a bunch of songs about him.
And to be clear, the North, the North was the ones calling him that devil, Forrest.
Well, tell us, Gene, very quickly, because I don't want to interrupt your talk here.
But very quickly, why was he referred to as that Devil Forest by his Northern Commission?
Well, he caused so much problems for Sherman and the Union High Command.
And that quote actually came from Sherman after Forrest had destroyed the Federal Supply Depot at Johnsonville, Tennessee.
And Sherman said, that Devil Forrest is down there wreaking havoc among the gunboats and supplies at Johnsonville.
And he referred to him as that Devil Forest.
And that's the title of that book that Dr. Weiss wrote about Forrest.
It's probably one of the best biographies on Forrest is Dr. Weiss's book, That Devil Forest.
So that name stuck with us down through the last century.
And we view it, of course, affectionately as that Devil Forrest, our hero as that devil.
Ironically, the true devil was Sherman, who is most certainly with the devil this evening.
Yes.
While I doubt the same is true for Nathan Bedford Forrest, who was a Christian.
But so very quickly, Nathan Bedford Forrest, of course, spent a great deal of his life, lived a great deal of his life in Memphis, died in Memphis, is buried in Memphis.
Memphis, like any major city, has a natural science and history museum.
Here in Memphis, it's called the Pink Palace.
It's called the Pink Palace.
That was Clarence Saunders' home, the founder of the Piggly Wiggly grocery store chain.
And they converted his home, his mansion, into our city museum.
It is the biggest and most notable museum in the city of Memphis.
It is undergoing a renovation at present.
It's open, but they are refurbishing it.
And I'm sure when it is refurbished, this exhibit will go because this exhibit is actually quite good.
They have a very historically accurate Civil War, if you want to use that term, to refer to the war between the states, a Civil War exhibit.
And they have an exhibit on Forrest that is quite flattering, if you can believe it, in the current year.
I'll read this very quickly, Gene, then back to Fort Pillow.
The following is a first-hand account of one Confederate Veterans Reunion.
And this is a picture.
I just posted it to our Twitter account at James Edwards TPC.
And it is a picture I took at the museum here in Memphis.
And this is what a part of the Nathan Bedford Forrest exhibit reads.
First-hand accounting of someone who was there at the time.
I was up early, the last day of the reunion, eager to see the parade.
Main Street was cleared.
The sidewalks, the doors, the windows, and the roofs were covered.
But I imagined to find a seat on the curb.
This is talking about Nathan Bedford Forrest's funeral, by the way.
The crowd went wild with joy and frenzy when Forrest's cavalry came into view.
Flanked on each side by the handsome horseman was the riderless horse of the late general.
Then came his little grandson, who was seated gracefully on a spirited pony.
Following the horse and the grandson came the faithful slave of General Forrest.
He was on foot and carried a live chicken in one hand and a skillet in the other.
The people roared, and the rebel yells were louder than ever.
It soon became evident that the former slave could not continue his march.
Then a marshal blew his whistle and the parade came to a standstill.
The feeble colored man was put into a luxurious carriage.
The old raiders sat gracefully on their steeds.
Even those with white beards looked like knights of old and radiated an air of mystery and glamour.
That is a history, ladies and gentlemen, that you will not find in any book in this day and age, but those come from the West Tennessee Historical Society Papers, Volume 20, pages 48 through 49, and it just goes to show.
It's as true as it gets, and that goes to show, hey, Gene, the fact of the matter is there is what really happened, and there's what we are told that happened, and that is a great example of putting history into accord with the facts.
Oh, that's true.
We live in George Oral's 1984, and history is being sent down the memory hole and rewritten.
And factual history has no place in America today.
It's what's politically correct and what's going to appease the lower class population and keep them from rioting in the streets and let them hear what they want to hear.
So first-hand accounts like that just don't count anymore.
Yeah, what really happened doesn't count.
Well, I would say this.
We spent far too much time on that.
I guess this segment is live radio.
It slips away from us.
Gene, just a couple of minutes before the break, and then I'm going to give you the entire last segment just to run wild with this because we really need to get into why I say Nathan Dunford Forrest protected the civilians of western Tennessee during his battle at Fort Pillow.
Continue on.
Set us up for the final segment where you're going to go full blast on this.
Okay.
So Forrest was asked by the civilians in West Tennessee to do something about Fort Pillow, which had actually been built by the Confederates early in the war and is named for Gideon Pilla.
And the Yankees, when they occupied the fort after the Confederates pulled out of the river defenses, they just kept the name of the fort as Fort Pilla.
So what was going on, the Union soldiers in this fort, both black and white, and it was about a total of about 577, 295 white and 262 black, and then approximately 25 civilian settlers and several, shall we say, professional women that were servicing the soldiers, were coming out of the fort and robbing the civilians in West Tennessee.
They were looting their homes.
They were stealing their personal property.
They were raping the women.
And Colonel Brownlow, son of Parson Brownlow, and Fielding Hurst were two of the worst federal officers in West Tennessee.
They declared that no Confederate soldier caught in West Tennessee would be taken as a prisoner of war.
They were just to be executed on the site, on site.
And that's never brought out about the atrocities committed by the U.S. Army.
It's always the Confederates that were the evil person and did terrible things.
But this is why Forrest went to Fort Pillow to clean out this nest of garbage that was over there and committing all these crimes against civilians and Confederate soldiers that were coming behind the lines to visit their family or get back and see their family in West Tennessee and get food and clothing and then return to the Confederate Army.
But if they were caught in West Tennessee, they were executed.
And actually, some of the ones that were executed were the lucky ones.
The ones that got caught and tortured were the ones that were really put through hell and had their bodies mutilated and were finally had their throats slit and just left out in the field to bleed out.
So this is the type of U.S. Army that we had in West Tennessee in the spring of 1864.
And that's why Forrest decided to go after Fort Pillow and clean that out to protect the civilians and people there.
That is never, never brought up by the mainstream media or the expert historians when they start talking running down Forrest and what the so-called massacre at Fort Pillow.
So April the 6th, he sends his supplementary report that he'll take care of Fort Pillow.
From around Jackson, he sends General Chalmers' division west, about 60 miles or so over to Fort Pillow on April the 11th.
They are met there by our Mr. Shaw, one of the civilians that had been captured and taken there.
He was running away from Fort Pillow, heading east as Forrest men were headed west, and they ran into each other on the road that night.
And he turned around and led them back to the fort and told them the disposition of the Federal soldiers, where the The earthworks work, the layout of the fort, everything gave him invaluable information.
And then at dawn on April the 12th, a part of Chalmers' division rode down the picket and took the high ground up above the fort.
So by the time the sun came up on April the 12th, the battle technically was over.
Well, that's where we're going to pick up.
That's where we're going to pick this conversation up at the top of the next break.
We're going to give Gene the entire last segment to talk a little bit more about this and take it really anywhere he wants to go.
Stay tuned.
Gene Andrews forrest the story and our guest right now.
The outlook wasn't brilliant for the Mudville nine that day.
The score stood four to two, one inning more to play.
Then all 5,000 throats recoiled upon the flat for Casey, mighty Casey, was advancing to the bat.
Close by the sturdy batsman, the ball unheeded, sped.
That ain't my style, said Casey.
Right what?
The umpire said.
She signaled to the pitcher.
Once more the spheroid flew.
I think I'll just ignore it.
And the umpire said, right two.
Now, something different than we read about in the poem.
Casey thought of mom and dad and time she spent at home.
She relaxed, she smiled, her confidence, it grew, and above the roar of the crowd, she heard her dad shout, follow through!
Somewhere, men are laughing and children having fun.
And tonight there's joy in Mudville, where mighty Casey hit a home run.
Family, isn't it about time?
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Welcome back.
To get on the show, call us on James' Dime at 1-866-986-6397.
Ladies and gentlemen,
if you were a member of the Union Army, you did not want to see the Bedford Forest riding your way in any capacity at any time.
And the inscription on Forrest's tomb reads, Those hoofbeats die not upon fame's crimson sod, but will ring through her song and her story.
He fought like a titan and struck like a god, and his dust is our actions of glory.
Well, that's for sure.
Ladies and gentlemen, Nathan Bedford Forrest, that's who we're talking about tonight.
That's who we're honoring tonight as our series on Confederate History Month continues.
And be sure that that war, Lincoln's War of Northern Aggression, was fought over money, land, and power.
No war has ever been fought in the history of the world to free slaves.
And nor was that one fought to do that.
We're back with Gene Andrews.
Gene Andrews, for the last two weeks, has been our guest.
He was a speaker at each of the last two political Cesspool anniversary conferences.
And two conferences ago, he was there to talk about Fort Pillow exclusively at our last conference last fall.
He talked about Nathan Bedford Forrest in a more autobiographical capacity.
But tonight we're talking about the lies about Forrest and Fort Pillow features large in that.
Gene, take it away.
Yes, sir.
So the Confederates overran the Federal pickets at daylight on April the 12th, took the high ground around Fort Pillow, and their sharpshooters and snipers were actually firing down into the fort.
They were up on a ridge above the fort and firing down into the earthen walls around the fort.
One of the first casualties was Major Booth, the fort's commander.
And the command then evolved to a Major Bradford, who even fellow U.S. almany officers said was absolutely worthless.
As we said, the total strength of the fort was about 577.
Confederates had about 1,200 men surrounding the fort.
And they worked into the ravine north of the fort and into the cabin south of the fort and were picking off any federal soldiers that stuck their head up over the wall of the fort and where there were six artillery pieces that fired through the embrasures in the walls around the fort and anybody that tried to fire any of the guns, they were picked off.
So the fort was pretty much pinned down.
And Forrest got there about 10 o'clock in the morning, made some adjustments to the lines.
And this is another thing about Forrest.
He didn't just send his men rushing in there, helter-skelter, and scrambling over the wall.
He worked from about 10 in the morning to 3 o'clock in the afternoon, making sure that this fort was cut off, there was no escape, that his men were in a safe position, that if they did have to assault the fort, they were going to be in the best possible position that they could to make a rush to the wall.
So at 3 o'clock, he sends in a demand for the surrender.
And this Major Bradford asked for an hour to confer with his officers.
And what he was waiting for, he was thinking that steamboats were going to be bringing reinforcements upriver from Memphis.
Forrest told him he had 20 minutes and make a decision.
So after 20 minutes, he said, no, we're not going to surrender the fort.
And so then at about 4 o'clock, the Confederates made the assault down the hill into a moat that ran around the earthen wall of the fort.
Now, the Federals, the Confederates were only about 10 feet away from them, but on the other side of this earthen wall.
But the Federals couldn't stand up and lean down on this wall and shoot down into the moat because if they laid out on this earth wall of the fort, the Confederate snipers up on this ridge were going to pick them off.
So on the second blast of the bugle, the Confederates came storming over the wall.
And they caught the Federals right in the face with shotgun blasts, pistols, rifles, and the Federals broke and ran across the open parade ground of the fort and jumped or fell down the bluff to the Mississippi River, which is their plan of retreat.
And they were supposed to have a gunboat out in the river of the new era that was going to cover them.
Well, Forrest knew how to take care of gunboats.
When they opened the ports to slide the artillery pieces out to fire, his men posted along the riverbank just unleashed a tremendous volume of rifle fire that came through these open gun ports and ricocheting bullets off the metal barrels of the guns and killing the gunners and sailors on board the ship.
They closed up the gun ports and steamed off upstream and never were a factor in the battle.
So now that is pretty much taken for granted that up to about 4:30, both sides, both Union and Confederate, agree on what happened to that.
It's after that that the accusations of so-called massacre begin.
Now, Forrest didn't get into the fort until about 20 minutes after the initial assault.
And when he rode in, came up the river road and up into the fort itself, he saw that the U.S. flag was still flying, which was a symbol that the fort had not been surrendered.
So when he got there, he ordered the flag cut down, which it was, and most of the fighting stopped after that.
Now, down on the river road, there was still a lot of fighting going on, and I would not be one to tell you that there were not, there were none of the U.S. white or black soldiers were shot after they surrendered.
That probably happened by individuals.
It was not an order of Forrest to do that because those soldiers that were coming into that fort to attack it were, many of them were from West Tennessee.
And they had heard the stories from their family about what these defenders of Fort Pillow had been doing to their family.
And if they had done that to my family, I wouldn't be in too big of a hurry to hold hands with them and sing kumbaya or something like that, if that's what they'd been doing to my family or neighbors in West Tennessee.
So finally, the fighting stopped.
That night, the Confederates left.
There were accusations that Confederates were there in the fort at night and murdered wounded federal soldiers.
That's a lie.
There were no Confederates in the fort after dark.
The next morning, they did come back, part of General Chalber's men, and helped load about 130 wounded U.S. soldiers on a steamboat, the Silver Cloud, to be sent down to Memphis.
Now, the casualty report on Fort Pillow was from a U.S. Navy officer, Captain Ferguson.
And his report was the U.S. had 221 killed.
Forrest took out 206 as prisoners.
There were another 130 that were too severely wounded to be moved, and they were left behind.
And like they said, the next morning on the 13th, the Confederates actually helped load them on a steamboat and get them sent down to Memphis.
So if the politically correct accusers of Forrest claim that this was a massacre, he didn't do a very good job of it because a massacre is supposed to be a total annihilation.
He took out 206 prisoners and left another 130 behind that he could have easily taken out because they were wounded.
They couldn't move.
So the massacre story is a lie.
Now, why did that happen?
Well, because this is United States government and military propaganda aided by the lame stream media, the prestitutes.
Now, I know our listeners find this hard to believe that the media will lie to you, but even back in 1864, they did.
They had fake news back in 1864.
And the war wasn't really going that well for Dishonest Abe in 1864, in the spring of 1864.
They didn't know how Grant was going to fare against Robert E. Lee in Virginia.
Grant may have wound up as just a footnote in history, like some of the other U.S. commanders.
There had been draft riots all across the North in the previous summer.
Of course, the New York City draft riot in July of 1863 was the worst race riot that we've ever had in this country.
And the Confederacy was beaten back, but it wasn't finished.
So there was no guarantee on how the outcome of the war was going to go.
So they needed some propaganda story to rev up anti-South sentiment in the North and help their lagging recruits, recruiting efforts.
And so they set on this Fort Pilla massacre story, sent it out to all the newspapers.
Congress even came up with about 40,000 copies of the Fort Pilla Massacre out of the United States Congress and sent it out to newspapers all over the North.
Up to that time, that was the largest congressional report that had ever been printed.
And so this was why they were trying to stir up all of this hatred towards not only Forrest, but the entire South to help boost up their lagging war efforts.
A lot of the facts that kind of get skipped over in this.
In 1864, the United States government, one-fourth of the government's military expenditure was for bounties to pay recruits to join the U.S. Army.
So one-fourth of their military budget, they had to go out and hire people to join the U.S. Army.
And plus they were bringing boatloads of Germans and Irish over here to fill the ranks of the U.S. Army.
The white soldiers in the North had had enough.
They decided early on, those boys down south can shoot, and not only can they shoot, they can shoot pretty darn straight.
And after a couple of years of war, they'd had enough of that.
So they had to get other recruits to fill the ranks.
So as we always say to our audience when the Fort Pillow so-called massacre comes up, well, how do you answer these slurs and accusations today?
Well, to use forest tactics, never stand still to receive the attack of the enemy.
Take the initiative and get there first with the most men.
And ask him, why did he go to Fort Pillow in the first place?
It was a raid into West Tennessee and Western Kentucky.
He had no business going there except the civilians asked him to do something about the war crimes being committed by the United States Army coming out of Fort Pillow.
And the second thing is, if it was a massacre, why did he take out over half, almost half of the soldiers as prisoners and leave another 130 behind to be turned off?
Gene, we'll have to leave the audience with that thought in mind.
My goodness, we didn't even begin to scratch the surface of Gene Andrews tonight.
An hour with Gene is never enough.
What a fantastic guest.
I wish we had more time.
Gene, I'm going to call you this week.
I'm going to call you this week.
We may have to continue this.
Fantastic content from Gene Andrews.
I hope you're enjoying our Confederate History Month series.
We're halfway through it, but we'll be back with another week right after this next Saturday night.