April 6, 2019 - 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, 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 forest must be hunted down and killed if it costs 10,000 lives and bankrupts the federal treasury.
On the day after the Battle of Shiloh, the rebels were falling back real slow.
And old William the Clumps of Sherman, with three begins of 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.
Said, boys, it's time to ride.
Come alive, ride with the devil.
Yes, he is Yankee Dupan.
Welcome back.
Welcome back.
Ride with the devil.
To our third and final hour of our opening week of Confederate History Month 2019.
I love playing that song.
That song is Ride with the Devil, performed by Rick Revell.
Now, both Generals Grant and Sherman refer to Nathan Bedford Forrest as that Devil Forrest.
The singer of that song, Rick Revelle, had four ancestors who rode with General Forrest, two on his father's side and two on his mother's side.
He has previously appeared on our Confederate History Month series in the past.
Joining us now to profile Nathan Bedford Forrest, especially his involvement in the Battle of Fort Pillow, which has really been sort of like, well, the Holocaust for the South.
That is the one thing that they use to try to make us feel guilty for.
But we're going to tell you the truth about Fort Pillow, and we're going to do it with Gene Andrews.
Gene Andrews is a great friend of ours here at TPC.
He is a man's man and a good man, a retired history teacher, a former Marine, and the current caretaker of the Nathan Bedford Forrehood Home in Chapel Hill, Tennessee.
Gene also was an athlete.
He made it all the way up to the NFL training camp of the Cincinnati Bengals.
But as Gene put it, why play in the NFL when you could teach history?
So that's what he did.
No, whoa, whoa.
Somebody misspoke there.
Well, Gene, it's great to have you back in any capacity that you wish.
Always a pleasure.
Always a pleasure and an honor to be on Political Cesspool.
I tell you what.
We are so proud of what you do in getting the truth out and fighting against the worthless rats in the mainstream media and their lies and propaganda.
Well, ain't that the truth?
And we are going to put truth to power this hour.
We are going to talk about Fort Pillow.
Basically, going to give a speech made for radio over the course of the next three segments, but we're going to do that after the first break.
Before we get to that, Gene, I want to talk to you about this.
As you know, and we've talked about it earlier tonight in the program, you appear on a very special night.
This is the 157th anniversary of the Battle of Shiloh.
We actually won the weekend.
It was tomorrow, it was the day that we lost.
And, of course, they said that the South never smiled again after Shiloh.
That was today, at that point in the war, the bloodiest battle of the war and more casualties.
Well, in history, up till the Battle of Shiloh, we had never fought in a battle that brought that many casualties.
That was something that the American public just had never seen.
And it was a shock to the people that something like this could occur in this country.
So it was an eye-opener, both North and South, to what this war was going to be about and how long and bloody it really would be.
Well, as I've said, I got to say it one more time.
I've said it every hour.
I might as well say it for a third time here in the third hour.
My great-great-great-grandfather was there 157 years ago tonight, and I hope in some way he's smiling down on me tonight, 157 years later, trying to preserve and protect his dignity and the dignity of all those brave men who wore gray thing.
And I've heard people say that, and I certainly agree with you, and we should all be proud of our Confederate ancestors.
I almost wonder who had a tougher battle, those boys in the army back then, or what we're trying to fight today against this communist takeover of this country, destruction of our monuments, the vilification of everything Southern.
At least back then, all the people of the South were on their side and supporting the military.
Well, 90% of them were.
But today, we're being stabbed in the back by our own politicians, our own good, quote, Christian church folks.
You know, the South.
Don't get me started.
I know, I know.
I don't have to tell you about that, what the good church folks, churchy folks have done to you, or tried to anyway.
So I wonder, you know, it's a different war.
We're not taking the deaths and dismemberments that those boys suffered back then, but Lord of mercy, the way this thing's going today, it is like we're on the front line.
Well, we're fighting the battle in the way that we can.
I talked about this in the last hour.
I mean, we can't go up and join the critter company, but we can do what we're doing, and you're doing what you do, and I do what I do.
And hopefully, that there is some honor in that that will reflect well on our patrimony.
But, Gene, when we come back, we've got about two minutes before our first break, and then we're just going to let you completely take over the show and tell us about Fort Pillow, the history there, and put history into accord with the facts, as the Barnes Review likes to say.
But first, tell us about your Southern heritage and your ancestors.
What were they doing during those war years?
Who were they?
My father's family and ancestors were from over in West Tennessee, Paris, Henry County, Stewart County, up around Dover in there.
And then my mother's family was from Middle Tennessee, around Shelbyville, War Trace, Petersburg, in that area.
So we were kind of split up in two different areas of the Army of Tennessee, but had quite a few that served.
And my father was very fortunate that when he was a young man, there were still Confederate veterans that were alive.
So he talked to our ancestors, Corporal Henry McGee and Captain Albert Sexton.
So he actually got to talk to them as old gentlemen there in the Paris area.
So we have an advantage that the nerds and the media and the snowflakes and all of the anti-South millennials can't understand.
We had family that actually talked to Confederate veterans.
And Corporal McGee flat out said, I didn't go to war to fight for some rich man's darkies.
And he said, I didn't want them around.
I could farm my farm by myself.
I didn't need slaves.
And so there you have it, basically from a veteran, from a person that was there.
And yet today, they turn this on its head and say, oh, the whole thing was about slavery and that's all it was.
And here was a poor young man that left his wife and three daughters and went off and joined the Confederate Army, had no slaves, had no intention ever getting slaves, and there aren't that many blacks today in Stewart County.
Well, that's right.
I mean, what you're saying is he didn't fight so some rich guy could benefit from slave labor.
Absolutely.
And that's true of mine and so many ancestors of our current people who fought for the South and honorably so.
Well, when we come back, Gene Andrews is going to take over and we're going to talk about Nathan Bedford Forrest, who was at the Battle of Shiloh himself on this day in 1862 in the Battle of Fort Pillow, which came later.
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All right, welcome back, everybody, with former Marine, former athlete, retired history professor, and Nathan Bedford Forest historian Gene Andrews.
Gene, we have you do a speech on the Battle of Fort Pillow that really should be a special on the History Channel, if they dealt in real history there.
I have had the honor of watching you deliver it.
That's what they do.
That's right.
But I have had the honor of watching you deliver this speech twice, and then we've presented it on the radio at least once, if not twice before, in our Confederate History Month series.
So I thought about it, and I was like, you know, do we want to do it again?
I mean, because we always have new listeners, and even if you've heard it before, believe me, it doesn't hurt to hear this again.
Well, we are left for punishment, James.
You certainly are if you heard it twice.
No, come on.
Hey, let me tell you this, though.
I'll tell you why I wanted to do it again this year with you, is that when we were promoting the coming of the Confederate History Month series this year, one of our fans sent me two pictures from a history book.
Now, you're a history teacher, and you know that there was a time when history books actually had truth and facts in them.
And so this is a very old book, to be sure.
Very old book.
But listen to this, Gene.
I don't know if you've ever read this book or heard of this passage, but I'm going to read it, and then I'm going to let you take off, and you're going to have the rest of the show pretty much solo.
But this is leading up to the Battle of Fort Pillow.
And the book reads thusly.
To date, during his third West Tennessee raid, Forrest had lost 15 men killed and 42 wounded, as opposed to a Union loss of 79 killed, 102 wounded, and 612 captured.
Meanwhile, he dispatched recruiting officers to various locations in western Tennessee and Kentucky, in part because of the romance and adventure of riding with Forrest and in part to avenge the depredations committed by Hearst and other Unionists, dozens of young men flocked to the Starry Cross.
Strengthened by new recruits, fresh horses, and the best equipment and supplies Uncle Sam could buy, Forrest decided to return to Mississippi.
En route, he halted at Eaton, Tennessee, where a number of ladies met with him and tearfully begged him to take Fort Pillow before he left the state.
The troops here were primarily ex-slaves who had previously belonged to the residents of this area and were now terrorizing the families of their former masters.
Several robberies had taken place, and a number of women in the area had been raped by blacks and or Tennessee Unionists.
Some of the blacks had made a special point of insulting the wives and sisters, widows, and orphans of Confederate soldiers, and some they had also physically abused.
The former slaves had also inflicted many indignities on Dr. Harris, the Methodist preacher in the area.
General Forrest was a man of great sympathy, and when he heard the pathetic stories told by the ladies, he changed his plans and decided to capture Fort Pillow.
Theodore F. Brewer, one of Forrest's soldiers who fought at Fort Pillow, recalled, always the self-appointed protector of Southern womanhood, the ladies' accounts threw him into a cold rage.
You may go home and rest assured that I will take the fort if it costs me my life, he said to the women.
Nor was Eaton the only place where Forrest heard tales of outrages.
When he left Paducah, Kentucky, the wizard was distressed by, quote, well-authenticated instances repeatedly brought to his notice about the raping and atrocious outrages upon non-combatants of the country by the garrison at Fort Pillow, end quote.
The Union soldiers, General Jordan wrote, were also accused of venting upon the wives and daughters of Southern soldiers the most obscene epiteths with more than one extreme outrage upon the persons of these victims of their hatred and lust.
It is clear that Nathan Bedford Forrest had one major motivation for attacking Fort Pillow, chivalry.
Gene?
Well, of course, we all know that's hate speech.
You can't have facts today.
That's outlawed by the Ministry of Propaganda.
But to our listeners, that is 100% correct.
That's the only reason Forrest went after Fort Pillow.
To back it up just a little bit and give our listeners a little bit of the military history of that.
Forrest was on a raid into West Tennessee and Western Kentucky to get horses for Abraham Buford's dismounted cavalry division.
Now, a dismounted Calvert Division is basically infantry.
They don't have horses.
They're walking.
So he had been assigned James Chalmers' cavalry division and Abraham Buford's dismounted cavalry division.
So with Chalmers, he left out of Columbus, Mississippi on March the 1st, headed north, crossed the Tennessee state line up into Jackson, Trenton.
They took the garrison at Trenton.
Colonel Duckworth went in there and captured the garrison and sent in a message that Forrest was there and demanded the surrender, and it bluffed him into surrendering without firing a shot, and reinforcements from Columbus, Kentucky were only six miles away.
Then they headed on up into Kentucky, to Murray, Kentucky, and then went after quite a few horses that were at Paducah.
And they were driven away, captured a few supplies and some prisoners and a few horses there, but they were driven away by a gunboat and a fort there at Paducah.
And they had pulled back away from that area.
And then the Confederates there got a newspaper account that the Yankee commander had been bragging about the big corral of horses that the Confederates had missed.
I guess he was assuming that Confederates couldn't, Southerners couldn't read a newspaper.
So they read the newspaper and found out the address, went back the next night and got all the horses.
So they were on top of things.
So Buford's cavalry division was remounted.
They were coming back into Tennessee.
Now, on April the 4th, the raid had been five weeks long.
And on April the 4th, Forrest sends a report to his commanding officer back down in Mississippi, Stephen D. Lee, gives him the number of prisoners that were taken, the miles of railroad track that were torn up, trestles burned, recruits had come in, everything.
So it had gone from March the 1st till April the 4th.
Fort Pillow was never mentioned.
On April the 6th, two days later, he sends a supplementary report to Stephen Lee Lee, again saying, I will attend to Fort Pillow.
And the reason he did is just because of what you had read, James, about the attacks against civilians and Confederate soldiers in West Tennessee.
James Brownlow, a colonel in the U.S. Army, he was the son of Parson William Brownlow, that horrible Reconstruction governor of Tennessee after the war.
And he issued an order that any Confederate soldier caught in West Tennessee was to be executed on site, not treated as a prisoner of war.
And then you'd mention Fielding Hurst, and he was probably the worst for torturing prisoners of war and murdering them.
And this is never brought up.
They whine and mine and cry about Fort Pilla, but nobody ever brings up the fact except what you did tonight about why Forrest went to Fort Pillow in the first place.
So April the 6th, then Forrest says, I will attend to Fort Pilla.
They're coming back out of the state.
They're down near Jackson again.
And he turns west with Chalmers' division.
Buford is coming from Kentucky and guarding the rear, making sure their troops at Paducah and Columbus don't come after him and attack them from the rear.
And Forrest and Chalmers head west.
They run in that night.
They run into a W.J. Shaw, who was a civilian who had been captured and held at Fort Pillar.
He escapes.
He's running east as fast as he can.
He runs into the Confederates headed west, and he tells them, well, I can take you there.
I know exactly what the layout is, where the troops are, and show you exactly where it is.
They march through the night of the 11th.
At dawn on April the 12th, they overrun the pickets and drive the pickets in and they take a ridge.
And I guess to understand Fort Pilla, you have to understand the topography of the land around there.
Fort Pilla was actually built by the Confederates early in the war and named for Gideon Pilla.
It's on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River.
At that time, the river cut a channel right up next to this bluff up against the Tennessee side of the river.
Now, if you go there today, the Mississippi has changed course.
It's about 200 yards away from the fort, and there's just weeds and trees and everything below the fort today.
But, okay, we'll pick it up after the break and give you the rest of the story of General Forrest at Fort Pillow.
We'll be right back, folks, with Gene Andrews.
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And old William the Constitution, with three beginning men, thought he might attack old 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, said, boys, it's turning.
Come alive.
Ride with the devil.
For your series, Yankee Jupiter.
All right, now, I know we played, we played that clip at the top of this hour.
I wanted to play it again because it was, again, 157 years ago today that Nathan Bedford Forrest himself was at Shiloh, but much more than that.
Very interesting episode that happened right after the Battle of Shiloh, which ended on April 7th of 1862.
It was a two-day battle.
Nathan Bedford Forrest was sort of overseeing the Confederate retreat to Corinth, Mississippi, and you had the Fallen Timbers episode.
Now, this is an instance where, as so often happened, Nathan Bedford Forrest was surrounded and he literally grabbed a Union soldier and used him as a human shield as he made a hasty retreat.
He was wounded and recuperated after the skirmish at Fallen Timbers at a home in Nashville.
That home was years later bought by one of the Everly brothers.
I don't remember if it was Phil or Don Everly, but they said how wonderful it was to have owned the home that General Forrest recuperated in.
The inscription on Forrest's tomb, of course, 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 ashes of glory.
Isn't that so true, Gene Andrews?
And of course, I say this, I've said this before.
The exploits of General Forrest really do rival the stories we hear about mythological gods.
That was the kind of warrior he was.
Now, we're talking with you tonight, Gene, about Fort Pillow.
This is an episode in the war that has been so misconstrued, so many lies surrounding this particular battle.
And we established in the previous segment why Nathan Bedford Forrest went to Fort Pillow.
What was going on there?
Now, what we hear now today is that it was just they were genocidal racists, and there was this poorly trained detachment of black troops at Fort Pillow, and they just went in there to terrorize them and to kill them after they surrendered and so on and so forth.
Now, Gene's going to put history into accord with the facts on that, but we know now why he went to Fort Pillow.
Gene, what happened after Nathan Bedford Forrest arrived at Fort Pillow?
Well, what happened was, and we were talking about it before the break, they were headed west to go after Fort Pillow.
Now, if you kind of look at a map of West Tennessee, the raid that they were on was on almost a due north-south route, and they were coming south out of Tennessee.
Now, why would a cavalry unit on a fast-moving raid behind enemy lines take a detour 60 miles out of their way and go over to attack a fort that, well, everybody knows cavalry can't attack a fort.
And even if they captured it, what are they going to do with it?
They're sitting on a bluff on the Mississippi River.
They'd be trapped with their back against the river.
The Federal Navy could come either upriver or downriver and blast them out of there.
So why even go there in the first place?
Well, as you had mentioned in that account that you had read, the civilians in West Tennessee asked Forrest to do something about these murdering war criminals that were coming out of Fort Pillow and attacking the civilian population and unarmed Confederate prisoners of war in West Tennessee.
So through the night of April the 11th, they're riding west.
Dawn on April the 12th, they hit the pickets on the ridge around Fort Pillow.
Now, Fort Pillow was built on a bluff right down on the Mississippi River.
But in the semicircle around the fort, on the east side of the fort, there's a ridge.
And there were actually three lines of works.
There were the fort itself, sort of intermediate works, and earthworks around this ridge that was never finished by the Confederates, and then it fell to the Union Army, and they took it over.
But once the Confederates took that ridge by about 8 o'clock in the morning, basically the battle was over because now they held the high ground.
And they were firing right down into Fort Pillow on the bluff on the river.
And one of the few officers that had any experience at all, Major Booth, was picked off by one of the Confederate snipers.
They put a round right between his running lights, and he was gone.
And the command then fell to a Major Bradford, who even the Union officers said was worthless.
So a lot of these troops, both black and white, at Fort Pillow, Union troops at Fort Pillow, had no combat experience.
Neither did their officers.
So they didn't realize what a bad situation they were in.
Now, here's something that always impressed me about Forrest.
Forrest really didn't get on the ground until about 10 o'clock that morning.
And by that time, General Chalmers' men had closed in on the south side of the fort.
They were firing at the fort and the openings for the cannons from cabins that the Union soldiers had used that were right outside the fort.
And Confederates had also closed in on the north side of the fort using Coal Creek and Coal Creek Ravine as cover to get up close to the fort.
So anytime that somebody stuck their head up over the earthen wall of the fort or tried to fire one of the cannons through these openings in the earthen wall of the fort, they were pretty much picked off by Confederate snipers.
Now, one of the lies that is told about Forrest at Fort Pillow was that he burned wounded Union soldiers alive, and that's a lie.
There were cabins that were burned, but they were burned under the orders of the federal commander because they didn't want the Confederates using these wooden cabins as cover.
So he ordered the cabins burned, and if Union soldiers were burned alive, they were burned by their own men.
Well, I'll tell you what, there was a general in the war that burned civilians and burned structures and burned people, but it wasn't on the good guy's side.
No, sir.
No, sir.
And why would they do it?
They were using the cabins for cover.
So they weren't going to get rid of it.
Farris gets there about 10.
He makes some adjustments to his men, increases the snipers, gets closer to the fort.
And so this goes on from like dawn till about 3 o'clock in the afternoon.
He sends in a flag of truce to demand the surrender of the fort.
Now, Forrest didn't just go rushing in there and run his men across open ground, Helter, Skelter, and get them killed.
He went from about 10 in the morning when he arrived till 3 in the afternoon to make sure everything was set perfectly if he had to make an assault.
So at 3 o'clock, he sends in a flag of truce, demands the surrender.
Major Bradford asked for an hour, and he's stalling.
He knows troops are coming upriver on steamboats from Memphis.
He asked for an hour to confer with his officers.
Parr said, you've got 20 minutes.
Make up your mind.
And so at 3.30, they return the surrender demand and tell him that they're not going to surrender.
They think that a gunboat, the new era that's out in the Mississippi River, is going to protect the federal soldiers if the fort falls.
But Forrest knew how to take care of gunboats.
When they opened up those gunports, he had men posted up and down the riverbank, and they opened up with such a heavy volume of fire that bullets were flying all through that gunboat, ricocheting off the cannon barrels and nailing the gunners and sailors on there.
They closed up the gunports and steamed off upriver out of range.
They said they'd had enough of that.
So the gunboat wasn't there.
So the surrender demand, and this is something else they never tell you.
Forrest gave them a chance to surrender.
It wasn't like he was riding in there just to slaughter people wholesale.
He gave them a chance to surrender.
It was refused.
So the plan was the snipers were going to keep up a heavy volume of fire.
The Confederates are going to rush down this hill off this ridge line and jump into a moat that was around the earthen wall of the fort.
On the second blast of the bugle, they were going to come over the wall.
And that's exactly what happened.
And they didn't stand up and make targets out of themselves on this earthen wall of the fort.
They got up on there and lay down.
And the first thing the federal soldiers saw were the barrels of double-barrel shotguns and pistols right in their faces that were coming over the wall.
So they got a full blast.
You talk about shock and awe.
This was the original shock and awe right there.
And the federal fort, Fort Pillow, was attacked from three directions at one time.
Confederates were coming from the north side, over the wall, headed south.
They were coming from the south side, over the wall, headed north.
And then, of course, the main body was coming down off that ridge line and headed west toward the Mississippi River and up and over the wall of the fort.
So the survivors, the defenders of the fort, as they began to retreat back across this parade ground, they were caught not in a crossfire, but a triple fire from three directions of Confederates coming over the wall of the fort.
And most of the casualties were up on this parade ground inside the walls of the fort.
And even more were between these rows of tents that funneled them into these narrow openings as they were running away trying to get down the bluff and down to the riverbank.
So both sides said this as far as casualties.
Most of them were piled up two and three deep in rows between these tents.
So they jumped down the bluff.
A lot of them broke their leg.
We're seriously injured jumping off of this bluff.
Some of them tried to escape.
And we'll finish up the Battle of Fort Pillar right after the break.
Thank you, Gene.
I could go 10 hours with Gene Andrews.
I love this history.
I love honoring our people.
I love the work we do here on this radio.
Thanks to you, ladies and gentlemen, in the listening audience.
We'll be right back to wrap up the first installment of our Confederate History Month series right after this.
Okay, girls, about finished with your lesson on money.
Daddy, what is a buy-sell spread for gold coins?
Well, when you sell a gold coin to a coin shop that's worth, say, $1,200, you don't actually get $1,200.
But don't worry, we're members of UPMA now, so we don't have to worry about that.
Daddy, why somebody seals that gold?
We don't have any gold at the house.
It's stored safely in the UPMA vault, securely and insured.
But the SP 500 outperformed gold.
Daddy, gold is a bad investment.
Some people do think of it that way, but actually, gold is money.
And as members of the United Precious Metals Association, we can use our gold at any store, just like a credit card.
Or I can ask them to drop it right into Mommy and Daddy's bank account because we're a UPMA member family.
Find out more at UPMA.org.
That's upma.org.
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two zero five six seven two two thousand And again, he led the charge.
That's when old Sherman, he swolled home.
You look real close.
I think he broke out in a cornstarch.
He said, man, let the devil down.
He's coming after me to stand your ground.
But fear took control.
The Yankees did run.
The devil's work on this day is done.
Yeah, come rock, rock with the devil.
You're seeing Yankees will pay.
Come rock, rock with the devil.
Ladies and gentlemen, we're wrapping up our first installment of this year's Confederate History Month series, which we'll be featuring throughout the month of April here on TPC and then back to business as usual in May.
We've talked a little bit tonight about the Confederate ancestry of yours truly.
Gene Andrews, our featured guest tonight, a retired history professor, former athlete, former Marine, Keith Alexander, in the first part of the show.
Focusing, though, profiling Nathan Bedford Forrest, especially General Forrest's actions at Fort Pillow, but just a little quick sketch biography of this man and what a man.
Became a self-made millionaire despite being born into poverty, having no formal education, invested the vast majority of his personal fortune to aid the Confederate cause.
And even though he was one of the wealthiest men in the South, he enlisted as a soldier of the lowest rank in order to further serve his country.
As a major planter, Forrest was legally exempting from having to serve at all, but he chose to serve anyway.
And in spite of no formal military training, he went on to become the greatest tactician in the history of mobile warfare.
He retired as a lieutenant general.
His maneuvers are still studied today.
Personally killed over 30 enemy combatants.
That is the living embodiment of what is a man's man.
And we would always compare the character and heroism embodied by General Forrest to that which can be found in today's business and political heavyweights.
Nathan Bedford Forrest, Gene, makes me proud to be a Memphian, proud to be a Southerner, and proud to say that my ancestor rode with him at Shiloh 157 years ago tonight.
That's something you should be proud of.
Absolutely.
Nothing to apologize for there.
Quite the opposite.
Quite the opposite indeed.
And I know you feel the same way.
And I know you share and you have the blood of those fighting men in your veins and that DNA.
And that is why we are here doing what we're doing tonight.
But Fort Pillow, this has been probably the greatest lie that has been told about the South.
And of course, you talk, you talk, this speech runs about an hour long when you give it from start to finish.
So we're certainly paring it down for the purposes of commercial talk radio tonight, trying to cram in maybe 20 minutes into what would have been an hour presentation.
But you talk about how the lie was propagated about Fort Pillow and how it became popularized.
But first, before we get to that, let's finish with what happened there on that fateful day.
Okay, so we talked about the Confederate assault coming over the wall.
Federal soldiers are caught in a crossfire from three directions.
They're scrambling down this bluff trying to get away.
Forrest gets in at about 4.20.
The initial attack, like I said, came in, well, maybe a little bit after 4, about 3.30.
He gets into the fort just a little bit after 4.
The fighting's still going on, and he rides up the river road and by the wharf and right up into the fort while the firing is still going on, which is not unusual for him.
He went to the hottest spot of the battlefield.
He orders the flag, the U.S. flag, to be cut down.
As long as the flag was flying, that was a symbol that the fort hadn't surrendered.
So he ordered the flag cut down.
It was cut down.
And most of the fighting stopped by this time.
And most historians up to this point pretty much agree.
It's after this time that the accusations of soldiers being shot after they had surrendered and so forth go on.
But it was totally a chaotic mob scene down along the river road.
There were black troops that had surrendered.
They were pulled out of the way and thrown to the rear as the Confederates are going after the pockets of resistance that were still fighting.
Blacks would pick up their rifles and start shooting at the Confederates from behind.
And of course, they'd turn around and shoot them if they were shooting at them.
There's no doubt about that.
Anybody would.
And Gene, and Gene, as you've said in your presentation before, sorry to interrupt, but the shouting profanities.
And in that day and age, it wasn't the NFL NBA culture we have today.
It was the truce.
When he sent in a flag of truce to get them to surrender, the blacks were standing up on the wall, making all these obscene gestures and shouting all these obscene verbal attacks against the Confederate soldiers.
And like you said, it wasn't like the Tennessee Grand Titans of the NFL or anything like that.
So, no, that didn't go over very well at all.
It was already bad blood between a lot of the white soldiers in the fort that were Tennessee Tories that were Tennessee Unionists and these blacks and what they had done.
So it was not a good situation.
So there probably were some that were shot after they surrendered.
There was a lot of bad feelings because if they'd been attacking my family and had attacked my mother or sister or harmed my family, I wouldn't be too careful to go over and pat them on the head and say, shake them.
And we had talked about that earlier, how the women in the area had begged Forrest to do something about Fort Pillow because the troops were coming out and raping them.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
So by about 5 o'clock that night, everything is over with.
Forrest takes out 201 prisoners from the fort.
There are another 130 that are too severely wounded to be moved.
He leaves them there with the U.S. medical staff.
226 were killed during the battle.
14 Confederates were killed, 86 wounded.
And they claim that because of that discrepancy in numbers, that's why it was a, quote, massacry.
Well, no, as the Confederates are smart, they were combat veterans.
They didn't do something stupid.
And the Federal soldiers had no combat experience, and they were stupid.
And they found barrels of whiskey along the walls of the fort with gourds for dippers.
And a lot of these black troops were just drunk as could be.
And they've been giving them whiskey to boost up their morale and their courage.
And, of course, you know, whiskey makes you, alcohol makes you make a lot of stupid decisions.
We all know that.
So that added to the chaos.
So the Confederates are gone by 5 o'clock that night.
They're out of there.
And that's another lie.
The Confederates stayed around and murdered wounded prisoners of war at night.
And that's a lie.
There weren't any Confederates in the fort after nightfall.
The next morning, one company from General Chalmers' division is sent back, and the Confederates actually help load the wounded federal soldiers on the steamboat, the Silver Cloud, and then they're taken down to the federal hospitals in Memphis.
I haven't read anything about that in history books, Gene.
I haven't read anything about that.
You can't do that.
Hey, we can't have the truth.
That's hate speech.
Can't do that.
So if Forrest ordered a massacre, he didn't do a very good job of it.
He took out 201 prisoners.
Another 130 would have been easy to kill because they were already wounded, and he'd sent his own men back to help take care of them.
So where did the Fort Pillow lie come from?
Well, the so-called reporter, and fake news is not a new phenomenon.
It's been going on for a long time.
The so-called eyewitness reporter that wrote the first report of Fort Pillar wrote it from Knoxville, Tennessee, a mere 395 miles away.
Now, that guy had one heck of a pair of eyes for an eyewitness report.
And then they used the story of the Fort and Pillow Massacre all over the North to whip up anti-war sentiment against the South and boost lagging recruiting across the North to try to finish off the last two or three years of the war.
The North was in pretty bad shape by 1864.
The country was bankrupt.
Confederate commerce raiders had pretty much shut down the U.S. Merchant Marine all over the globe.
There was no guarantee that Grant was going to have any more luck against Robert E. Lee than Erwin McDowell or fighting Joe Hooker or Ambrose P. Burnside or any of the other Union generals that had come up against Lee.
So we know how the war turned out, but in the spring of 1864, there's no guarantee.
So they had to have some kind of fake news story to whip up anti-war sentiment in the South, and Forrest was the scapegoat.
So Forrest really was America's first victim of a racial hoax.
And I'm surprised that Jesse Smollett wasn't at Fort Pillan saying that two guys come over the wall and read Make America Great Again caps and beat him up inside Fort Pillow.
I think Jesse was there.
We got to ask you about that.
Yeah, he may have been.
He may have been.
Or maybe some of the ⁇ he paid a couple of Union soldiers there at Fort Pillar to beat him up so he could say he'd been attacked.
But yeah, basically, this was the first racial hoax in American history.
And we're used to it today.
It seems like it happens about every six months, whether it's the Duke LaCrosse team or Twin of Brawley or the Jenna 6 or Ferguson, Missouri or whatever.
But, you know, people hadn't been bombarded with all this nonsense back in the 1800s.
So a lot of people took the Fort Pillow Massacre lie as factual information and ran with it.
Well, Gene, you've done.
Well, I know we're coming up.
We're coming up with a minute to go.
And I just want, I mean, it is, again, everything that we've done tonight is impossible to give the full history of anything.
This battle, the entire cause and effects of the war, you can't do it at commercial radio.
We do the best we can.
But I want to say this.
I want to correct a meaningful error or fact.
We do that here.
The fake news doesn't.
I said Nathan Bedford Forrest recuperated in Nashville after his wounds at Fallen Timbers.
It was actually in Columbia, Tennessee.
And that was where the Everly brothers bought the home while the rest of the world was.
Yeah, that house is still standing there in Columbia.
Yeah, Columbia, not Nashville, though.
I said Nashville.
So we want to be sure to correct it, even if it seems insignificant.
We do want to correct that here on TPC.
It's the other side that makes up.
Well, that's right.
Well, Gene, I wanted to ask you how we can support the Nathan Bedford Forrest Boyhood Home.
You are its caretaker.
We'll get that information.
We'll put it up on the website this week.
I want to thank you, Gene, for helping us kick off Confederate History Month 2019 in such grand fashion.
We love you.
God bless you, dear friend.
Always an honor to be here.
Always an honor.
Talk to you again soon, brother.
Good night, everybody.
We'll talk to you next week as Confederate History Month continues.