April 22, 2023 - 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, going 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.
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.
Ladies and gentlemen, sometimes when we do these special series, whether it be March Around the World or Confederate History Month, there are guests making first-time appearances, and there are guests that are there every single year we do it.
And Gene Andrews is amongst, can be found among the latter company.
He is a mainstay during Confederate History Month.
It is always great to talk to Gene Andrews, who is a retired combat officer and history teacher who now serves as the caretaker of the Nathan Bedford Forrest boyhood home.
And he's back with us once again this year and this night to talk with us about the South's greatest warrior, Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Gene, always good to talk to you.
How are you?
James, great to talk to you.
Hey, that wasn't the call you gave me last week.
You said it was Transgender Month and I got a new dress.
What am I going to do with that?
Take off those high heels.
I didn't know you had any expertise in transgenderism.
Believe me, he doesn't.
Gene is the man today.
Gene the Marine.
You got to get a CD or something to figure that one out.
Anyway, no, glad to be talking about all our Confederate history and our great Tennessean General Forrest.
We had mentioned earlier maybe about putting to rest a lot of the lies that come up and they keep repeating them over and over and over again about Fort Pillow and the Fort Pillow Massacre.
I want to say this.
It is so refreshing to talk about a wholesome, genuine hero like Forrest after what we've had to report on during the first hour of this, you know, sexual depravity on parade.
Oh, gosh.
Well, that's why they're tearing down all these monuments.
They don't want people to know about real men and real heroes that led this country during our war for independence.
And so they can't lie enough to cover it all up, so they try to tear down all the monuments.
You know, that's what they said in Rhodesian, South Africa, when they destroyed the governments there.
The first thing they did, they tore down the monuments.
Sure thing they did with the season too.
Yep, they're following the playbook of genocide.
That's for sure.
Come for the fabric, come for the monuments, and then they'll get your flesh and blood and your spirit.
Now, Gene, we are going to talk about one of those great libels against the South, the so-called Fort Pillow Massacre.
But before we do that, just give us a minute or two on, as I put it, Forrest as a mythological figure in terms of his military prowess.
Do you consider him to be not just one of the greatest military minds in American history, but in the history of warfare itself?
Absolutely.
And his tactics are still studied in military schools today, although he never went to a military school.
He didn't go to West Point or the Citadel or VMI or Tennessee Military Institute.
And yet he wrote the book, basically, that they study today.
He did a lot of fighting in barrooms and in the streets and everything.
He was self-taught.
Yeah.
Give us some of the examples.
Go ahead.
He grew up on the frontier and from a very poor beginning.
His father died when he was 16 years old.
And at 16, he was the head of a household of a widowed mother and five younger children or siblings.
So he had to take care of them and had to learn how to live where they were in northern Mississippi, literally on the frontier.
There were panthers and bears out in the woods.
And so it was a tough life growing up.
And he learned to either get tough or die.
That was basically it.
Tell him exactly about that situation in Hernando that was basically the first indication of his fighting metal.
Well, he got into his uncle, he was in business with his uncle in Hernando, and his uncle had a feud with the Matlock brothers.
And they were walking up the main street in Hernando one Saturday afternoon, and the Matlock brothers were coming toward them with their overseer.
And one of the brothers just pulled out a revolver and shot his uncle dead right there.
And then Bedford pulled out his pistol and shot him, and the other brother was reaching for his gun to shoot Bedford.
And Bedford's gun jammed, and the crowd was just standing around watching, you know, a dull afternoon in Hernando, and there wasn't a football game on or anything to watch, I guess.
So somebody in the crowd threw him a bully knife, and he went after that second brother with a bully knife and started slashing at him, and he took off running, and then the overseer took off running.
I think he figured, these guys aren't paying me enough money to fight this wild, crazy teenager.
So, you know, that was the type of life he grew up with.
So almost going into a war was kind of an easy thing, really, in a way, after ways.
I've spent most of my professional life practicing law in DeSoto County and in the Hernando courthouse.
So that particular story really resonates with me.
And then, of course, in Memphis, where we live and where Forrest spent most of his life, obviously there's that.
And then, of course, Gene, you are the caretaker of his boyhood home.
And I had the opportunity to come up there, thanks to you, Gene, of course, to come up there.
And I brought my wife and my kids.
And we had a chance to pay respect to Nathan Bedford Forrest and Mrs. Forrest as they laid in state in advance of his reinternment after the city of Memphis did their business down here with that.
And I was about as far away from the casket that held the remains of Nathan Bedford Forrest as I am from Keith Alexander right now.
And I'll never forget that, Gene.
And let me say this before we get off the subject.
If you're ever here in Memphis again, get in contact with me and I'll give you a really, you know, rare tour of Hernando and let you see where things happened and let you see the courthouse, which has wonderful murals of Hernando DeSoto.
All right.
Great.
Yes.
I'll try to take you up on that.
Love to see that.
Thank you.
Try to avoid Memphis.
But if you have to be here, we can make that happen anyway.
All right.
So back to Forrest.
Now, we're going to get into Fort Pillow after the break.
We've got about two minutes left.
Give us one Forrest story that sort of encapsulates.
This is the thing that always interested me about Forrest, having been an officer.
He knew what he didn't know.
And so he got on his staff a friend of his in Memphis that operated a hotel.
So he would go to his friend there and say, okay, we're going on a raid.
It's going to last two weeks.
We've got 3,000 men going on this raid.
How much food do we need to take to cover them for two weeks?
He also had a friend of his that ran a livery stable in Memphis.
And he said, okay, we've got a raid going two weeks, 3,000 men.
That means about 5,000 horses.
By the time you count the remounts and wagons and artillery and everything, how much grain do we need to carry with us to feed these horses for two weeks?
So he knew where he could delegate and not just try to micromanage every single thing.
Now, when it got on the battlefield, he was totally in charge of what was going on there.
And he didn't sit back in the rear with the gear.
He was up front.
He could tell exactly when he needed to shift troops from one part of the line to the other or bring up reinforcements or tell the horse holders.
You know, when the cavalry goes in to a fight, every fourth man's a horse holder.
And he takes the reins of his horse and three other horses and gets them out of the way.
And sometimes the battle was so desperate, he just told the horse holders, tie them off to a tree and get on line up here.
We need you right now.
So he was there in the middle of the fight.
He could tell what was going on, sense the emotions and the morale of his troops and be right there when he needed him at the critical spot.
Had no formal military training, but went on to become the greatest tactician in the history of mobile warfare.
Retired as a lieutenant general.
His maneuvers, as Gene Andrews just mentioned, still study today.
He personally killed 30 enemy combatants, 30 to 1.
We'll be back.
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And old William the Constitution, three brigades of 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 that stood in Sherman's way.
He said, Yankee, this just ain't your day.
One Nathan Benton promised 300 by his side.
I said, boys, it's turned around.
Come ride, ride with her.
Yes, it will be.
Back with Gene Andrews, caretaker of the Nathan Bedford Forest Boyhood Home.
I first met Gene probably about 15 years ago, if it was the day, and he was giving a speech at a Council of Conservative Citizens Conference about the history of Fort Pillow.
This was a presentation that was so impressive to me.
It would have been right at home on the History Channel if they allowed history to be broadcast on that particular channel.
And it's one of the great libels against the South.
And we are here with the historian himself to set the record straight.
So Gene, Keith, and I are going to peel off here.
We're going to let you have the floor to tell the truth about Fort Pillow.
Take it away, Gene.
All right, sir.
Well, I hope all of our listeners are seated because I have some shocking information for them right off the bat.
Number one, the government will lie, and then they attack those who tell the truth.
The second shocker is that the prostitutes in the so-called mainstream media will also lie and repeat the government lies, and they will also attack those who tell the truth.
And Nathan Bedford Forrest was a victim of America's first racial hoax.
Now, we're used to racial hoaxes now with George Floyd, who died of a drug overdose in Minneapolis.
It wasn't a policeman that killed him.
And Bubble Wallace in NASCAR and the so-called nooses that were in the garage area, or Jesse Smollett in Chicago, or the Duke La Crosse team, and on and on and on.
So the Fort Pillow massacre was Yankee war propaganda, a huge lie.
And they needed something to stir up animosity and help recruiting in the North.
Here's the situation in 1864 when Fort Pillow was fought in the spring of 1864.
Grant was going east to face Robert E. Lee, but there was no guarantee that he would do any better than just a footnote in history like Erwin McDowell or Ambrose P. Burnside or fighting Joe Hooker.
Out here in the West, Sherman was commanding the main Federal Army in the West, but he had a dismal record as an independent commander.
You remember Forrest rode right over him at Fallen Timbers the day after the battle at Shiloh.
Sherman tried to take Vicksburg from the north and got hammered at the Chickasaw Bayou.
He was marching on Selma and Forrest destroyed his cavalry and Sherman turned around and ran back to Vicksburg.
And then at Tunnel Hill on Missionary Ridge, Sherman ran into Patrick Clayburn and really got hammered.
Now in 1863, they had draft rights all across the north, not just in New York City.
In 63 and 64, these Confederate commerce raiders were sailing all over the seven seas.
And by 1864, no country would ship a cargo on a U.S. ship because it was too dangerous.
They couldn't get insurance.
They knew the Alabama and the Florida and the Shenandoah and the Nashville were all out there hunting for anything with the U.S. flag.
And in November of 1864, you had the presidential election coming up.
So they had to stir up hatred for the North or hatred for the South by the North, boost recruiting efforts, but mainly, and the Lincoln government even admitted this, they wanted to incite black troops to show no quarter to Confederate troops or Southern civilians.
And they were bragging about this was their chance to finish off John Brown's slave uprising against the whites.
And they wanted a massacre of whites on a larger scale than what happened in Haiti.
So most of the blacks, though, didn't buy into that in the South.
And I guess it's because blacks in the 1800s were a lot smarter than they are today.
So there were a lot of lies concocted about the so-called Fort Pillow massacre.
Now, if you look at it, first of all, the dictionary definition of a massacre is a total annihilation, no survivors.
Well, that's wrong right there.
Here's the facts.
And I know facts are hate speech.
And we have to apologize to some of our listeners with gentle ears, but we're going to delve into facts tonight and hope it doesn't hurt their feelings too much.
Here's the fact.
There were 557 U.S. troops at Fort Pillow.
226 were killed.
201 were taken out as prisoners.
And 130 were too severely wounded to be moved.
And they were left there overnight.
for the United States Army medical staff.
Now these figures come from the United States Navy.
This is not something the Confederates made up.
And then the Confederates actually came back to Fort Pillow on the next morning and helped load the wounded U.S. soldiers on steamboats to be sent down to Memphis.
Another lie that they came up with was that the Confederates violated the truce.
And that afternoon, after Forrest and his men had the fort surrounded, and just a brief description for our listeners that haven't been there, Fort Pillow is down on a bluff on the Mississippi River.
Now today the Mississippi's changed course and it's moved out away from the Tennessee shore and it's all woods and swamp down there.
But back then it was right on the river.
But a ridge ran parallel to the fort up above the fort back to the east.
So once you took that ridge you were firing down into the fort and that's exactly what happens.
The Confederates surprised the defenders of Fort Pillow at dawn.
They overran the outpost.
They had that ridge and now they were shooting basically down into the fort.
So the battle was really over by about 8 o'clock that morning, but it went on until late that afternoon.
So Forrest got there about 10.
He changed a lot of the positions of his men, made improvements.
At 3 o'clock, he sent in a white flag and sent in an offer of surrender to the fort.
And while they were negotiating this, a lot of the black troops that were there at the fort, it was about half and half, half white, half black.
None of the troops had had any combat experience.
The only officer that had any combat experience at the fort was a Major Booth, and he got shot.
The Confederate sniper put a round right between his running lights.
And he was one of the first casualties.
And the command went to a Major Bradford, who even the federal officers said was worthless.
This character had some financial shenanigans going on up in the Midwest.
I think it was Iowa, where he was originally from.
And he ducked out of town to join the Army to get away from all the financial deals he was pulling.
And they made him an officer.
So that's not really somebody you want as a commanding officer.
So he wasn't much help.
So anyway, Forrest sent in an offer for surrender.
And a lot of the black troops had been given whiskey to boost their courage.
And Confederates found barrels of whiskey along the wall of the fort after they got in there.
They were standing up on the wall and shouting all sorts of insults to the Confederates during this truce, which was not really a good idea.
Now, we want to go back, first of all, and tell why Forrest even went to Fort Pillow.
That was not on his agenda.
The Confederates were in a raid into West Tennessee and western Kentucky for horses.
He was given, when he was transferred west, away from Bragg's army, he was given two cavalry divisions, James Chalmers and Abraham Buford.
And Buford's men were dismounted.
So basically, they were infantry.
So they were going up through West Tennessee and into western Kentucky, like we said, to get horses.
They left Columbus, Mississippi on March the 1st, went through Tennessee, captured a garrison at Union City.
There was no Union City massacre because they surrendered.
They went all the way up to Baduca, Kentucky, then back through Mayfield, back down to Trenton, Tennessee.
And then he sent a preliminary report to his commanding officer, Stephen D. Lee, down in Mississippi, and never mentioned Fort Pillow.
So he went from March the 1st till April the 4th, and Fort Pillow was never mentioned at all.
And then on April the 6th, he sent a supplementary order and said, we will attend to Fort Pillow.
So what happened?
In those two days, the civilians in West Tennessee begged him to do something about Fort Pillow.
These troops that were there, a lot of them were what Forrest called Tennessee Tories, Tennessee Unionists.
A lot of them were deserters from the Confederate Army that had picked up a rifle and Union Army uniform, and they were robbing the civilians in West Tennessee.
They were attacking the women, and that was a no-no with Forrest.
You did not go after women.
You know, combat on the battlefield was one thing, but when you attack civilians and especially women, that is uncalled for.
So he said, I will attend to Fort Pillow.
And they headed over that way the next week and got there at dawn on April the 12th.
And then we pick up our story again where we said that he offered them a chance to surrender, and it was refused.
Now, here's one of the lies.
They said that the Confederates violated the truce.
Well, the Confederates were already in position along the riverbank before the truce, before the surrender offer.
They went down to the landing and warned a U.S. steamboat bringing reinforcements not to land, that there was a truce on.
The second lie was that the Confederates burned U.S. troops that were wounded.
Well, the fact is these cabins down below the fort were set on fire by the order of the U.S., the Yankee commander, so they could deny cover to the Confederates.
So if they got burned, they were burned by their own people, setting the buildings on fire.
And we'll pick that up right after the break and continue with the lies about Fort Pillow.
The one and only Gene Andrews breaking it down as only he can, folks.
This is true history presented in a way that would be right at home on network television.
Stay tuned.
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The Republican field of presidential hopefuls could get more crowded in the coming weeks.
As more and more people look to challenge frontrunner, former President Trump, more candidates are officially entering the race.
Former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson will launch his campaign this week.
Former VP Mike Pence says he will finalize his plans in weeks, not months.
Come June, Senator Tim Scott is expected to officially join the race.
And former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie held a town hall meeting in New Hampshire, saying tonight is the beginning of the case against Donald Trump.
His decision to run will come in the next few weeks.
I'm John Schaefer.
On the Democratic side of the ledger, President Biden is expected to announce his bid for re-election as soon as next week.
White House aides suggest it could happen as early as Tuesday on the four-year anniversary of his 2020 announcement.
Biden is already the oldest serving president in U.S. history and would be 82 just days after the election.
A messy Earth Day in Southern California thanks to a sewage spill.
Some popular beaches in the Los Angeles area remain off limits as the cleanup is underway.
A quarter of a million gallons of sewage got into the Los Angeles River and backed up into the Pacific.
This Long Beach resident is bummed out by the environmental issue.
Would love to go in the water.
This is a huge touristic attraction.
You've got people from all over the world coming out to Long Beach.
Health officials are monitoring the water quality.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is seeking federal aid for flood victims in Fort Lauderdale.
DeSantis today said he plans to ask the Biden administration to declare Broward County a disaster area.
The declaration would make residents eligible for loans and federal assistance for damaged property.
More than two feet of rain fell in some areas in the county earlier this month, and around a thousand homes were severely damaged.
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Now, Forest is shouting from over here.
Said, boys, give him a hot little cold steel.
And they gave his ready air.
Then he led a charge.
That's when old Sherman, he swollen.
You look real close.
I think he broke out my cold strip.
Sitting in, I'll let the devil down.
He's coming after me just to stand your ground.
What fear to control when the Yankees did not?
The devil's work on this day is done.
You come right.
Ride with the devil.
We got San Jane.
We don't want to confuse you, ladies and gentlemen.
That song, Rad with the Devil, which was performed by Rick Revel, who has also been a guest on Confederate History Month on TPC in years past.
He's talking about the Battle of Shiloh in that particular song, The History of the Retreat at Shiloh.
Correct, correct, right after Shiloh.
Not Fort Pillow, which is what Gene Andrews is here to talk about right now.
And I've heard Gene give this speech at conferences on the radio, this presentation, rather, and at Fort Pillow itself.
You know, Keith, we chartered a bus for TPC donors a couple years ago.
And we had the opportunity to hear Gene give this speech, or this presentation, rather, at Fort Pillow itself.
Just, and I'll never forget that.
I'll never forget being at the boyhood home, being able to pay respects to Forrest, and Gene's presentation of this at the battlesite itself.
At the Tennessee River Museum in Savannah, they've got an exhibit on Forrest, and I'm going to read just two quick things there from the exhibit.
And this is what you'll find there.
Confederate States General Nathan Bedford Forrest was the most respected and feared cavalry commander of the war.
The Wizard of the Saddle was wounded four times and famous for having 30 horses shot out from under him.
He was a master of the lightning raid and an expert at winning against long odds.
At the exhibit, you can also read this fact that General Sherman recognized that Forrest was a major threat to his supply lines.
Sherman had said Forrest must be hunted down and killed if it cost 10,000 lives and bankrupts the federal treasury.
Sherman repeatedly committed key federal troops from West Tennessee into northern Mississippi to pursue Forrest.
Outmaneuvering and outwitting every adversary, Forrest thwarted all of Sherman's attempts.
After the war, Sherman would describe his former foe as, quote, the most remarkable man our Civil War produced on either side, unquote.
And back to Fort Pillow we go with Gene Andrews.
Well, that was true about Forrest.
And you see, what happened was that the federal soldiers, the U.S. soldiers, had more respect for Forrest and his ability than the Confederate government did.
That spring and summer of 1864, just like you said, James, there were four separate armies sent out from Memphis into northern Mississippi to keep Forrest busy.
Because what Sherman was afraid of, when he was getting ready to start his campaign from Chattanooga down to take Atlanta, he was afraid that Forrest would get out of Mississippi and break the two railroads in Tennessee that were supplying him.
One was the Nashville and Decatur that ran south, due south out of Nashville, down to Decatur, Alabama, and then across to Chattanooga.
And the other railroad ran southeast out of Nashville to Chattanooga, the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad.
And those were the only supply lines that Sherman could use in the summertime.
They could not use the Tennessee River to supply an army of over 100,000 plus horses and all the other equipment they needed to carry out a military campaign.
Couldn't use the Tennessee River because of Muscle Shoals, Alabama.
And in the summertime, the water was too low there to get over the shoals.
Wheeler Dam hadn't been built yet.
And so these steamboats that would carry supplies to an army couldn't come by the Tennessee River, come upriver there.
So he had to depend on these two railroads.
And if Forrest took out the Nashville and Decatur and the Nashville and Chattanooga, Sherman was stuck in North Georgia with no supplies, no reinforcements, no ways to get his wounded back out of there to federal hospitals in Nashville or Louisville.
And so we would not hear any about Sherman's march to the sea or anything else like that.
Gene, let me ask you this.
I heard that General Forrest asked Braxton Bragg or whoever was commanding at that time, I don't know if it's John Bell Hood or what, to harass Sherman on the March to the sea.
And it was turned down.
And I just wonder what a different history we would have about Sherman's March to the sea if had Forrest gone after him.
Yeah, it would have been a short march.
I will guarantee you that.
But at that time, Forrest was attached to John Bell Hood for his campaign into Tennessee to try to recapture Nashville.
And they thought that Wheeler, Joseph Wheeler, was the cavalry in Georgia and South Carolina and finally North Carolina that was trying to oppose Sherman.
And they felt like that was the best they could do there and keep Forrest with Hood's army.
Because really, if you look at the map, Forrest, by the time Sherman was getting ready to start his turn from Savannah all the way up through the Carolinas, Forrest was all the way over in West Tennessee at Johnsonville.
In fact, he was on the west side of the Tennessee River, firing his artillery across the river at Johnsonville on the east side.
And then he got word that he was ordered to join John Bell Hood and the Army of Tennessee when they were getting ready to cross the Tennessee River at Florence, Alabama, and get into Middle Tennessee and try to recapture Nashville.
So now he had to come down the west side of the Tennessee River across that little corner of Mississippi and then across northern Alabama and cross at Florence and catch up to the Army of Tennessee and spread out in front of the Army of Tennessee because they had no cavalry coverage and they needed Forrest there.
And he beat the living daylights out of Wilson's federal cavalry all the way from down south, about at the Tennessee-Alabama state line, all the way up to Franklin.
So I guess that's, yeah, in theory, you're right.
That would have probably worked better to turn Forrest loose on Sherman, but he would have an awfully long way to go from western Tennessee down across northern Alabama, across Georgia, and then try to get into the Carolinas to oppose Sherman.
So I think you're right.
It's so hard to determine and to focus on one element of a man like Forrest's history in the war alone, and not even to mention his entire biography, as we were talking about a little bit last week with John Hill, the descendant of A.P. Hill.
But we've got about two or three minutes before the break.
We've got one more segment with you after that.
Let's get back to Fort Pillow.
I think Fort Pillow was a decisive Confederate victory, which we love, but it's used as a great libel against the side.
The one other thing about it.
We've got to go back to Fort Pillow.
Yeah, the thing about Lincoln.
He's not a good military strategist, but he certainly was a political strategist, and he needed something to stir people up to vote.
That's right.
And you talk about that in your presentation.
So they just concocted one lie after the other, and we were talking about those who violated the truce.
No, burned wounded U.S. troops.
No, they set the cabins on fire.
It wasn't Forrest men that did that.
Then they say, well, the Confederates shot poor unarmed civilians that were there at the fort as settlers.
And they had quite a few women there that were serving as, shall we say, professional women for the U.S. soldiers.
And no, because Major Bradford, the Yankee Army commander, had armed the civilians.
And he told them to fight the Confederates.
And then the last lie they came up with was that the Confederates buried U.S. wounded alive.
No, the fact is, and this is a policy in the Confederate Army and the U.S. Army, that your prisoners had to bury their own dead so that they couldn't be any buried alive accusations.
And that's exactly what the Confederates did.
They used the federal prisoners that they had, prisoners of war that they had after the battle, to bury their own dead.
And then that way you couldn't say what they had buried them alive.
Now, the casualties were very disproportionate, especially among the blacks.
The fact is, the Confederates had 14 killed and 86 wounded.
And the reason is that, well, the Confederates were veterans of four years of war.
They were fighting inexperienced troops with no combat experience.
Many of them were drunk.
And like we said, the Confederates found barrels of whiskey along the Fort Wall.
And the blacks were told before they left Memphis by General Holbert, who was the Yankee commander in Memphis, not to surrender.
He told them the Confederates would give no quarter to blacks.
So do not surrender to the Confederates.
So the blacks were told ahead of time not to surrender and keep fighting the Confederates.
Now, as we mentioned, they'd given him a truce.
Forrest sent in a flag of truce about 3 o'clock.
General Bradford asked for an hour.
He said, Forrest told him he got 20 minutes because he knew that he was stalling, trying to get reinforcements to come upriver from Memphis.
He said, you've got 20 minutes.
Bradford refused the offer to surrender.
At 3.30, the bugle sounded, and about 1,200 Confederates came rushing down off of that ridge.
There's a moat around the fort.
Fort Pillow was an earthen wall fort, not like a fort you see in the cowboy and Indian movies, big high wooden walls like a stockade.
Had an earthen wall about six feet high and four or excuse me, five openings in it for artillery.
The Confederates had already silenced the artillery or their sharpshooters.
When they rolled a cannon into one of those openings, the Confederate sharpshooters and snipers were picking off the gunners.
So they pretty much neutralized the artillery they had there.
So the Confederates came rushing down this hill, jumped into this moat right below the fort.
Now you had the Confederates and the Federal soldiers about eight feet apart and a wall, earth wall in between them.
On the second blast of the bugle, the Confederates came up and over the wall, but they didn't jump up on top of the wall and stand up there.
They jumped, they scrambled up this dirt bank and flopped down on the wall so that it was a harder target to hit.
And we'll tell you what happened at the last of that, right after the break.
The Honorable Cause of the Free South is a collection of 12 essays written by Southern National Talk.
The book explores topics such as what is the Southern nation?
What is Southern nationalism?
And how can we achieve a free and independent diction?
The Honorable Cause answers questions on our own terms.
The book invites readers to understand for themselves why a free and independent diction is both preferable and possible.
The book pulls in some of the biggest producers of pro-South content, including James Edwards, the host and creator of the political cesspool, and Wilson Smith, author of Charlottesville Untoed, Arkansas congressional candidate and activist Neil Kumar,
host and creator of the dissident mama podcast, Rebecca Dillingham, author of A Walk in the Park, My Charlottesville Story, Identity Dictionary Patrick Martin, and yours truly, Michael Hill, founder and president of the League of the South, as well as several other authors.
The Honorable Cause is available now at Amazon.com.
True Passover versus Easter.
The Catholic Church and most denominations follow the Jewish Passover.
Here is the Jewish tradition.
The Passover takes place 14 days after the new moon, after the equinox.
But what does God say?
In Isaiah 1, verse 14, quote, Your new moon feasts and your appointed festivals I hate with all my being.
Unquote.
Now notice God's word versus Jewish tradition.
Quote, In the first month, on the 14th day of the month, at twilight is the Lord's Passover.
Unquote.
That's from Leviticus 23, verse 5.
God's year begins on the spring equinox.
Passover is always on the 14th day of God's year, the 14th day after the equinox.
The Sunday after the Passover is Resurrection Sunday.
None of this is about fertility, which is exactly what Easter is all about.
Easter bunny and eggs, fertility rites, are paganism.
Nathan Bedford Forrest.
You know, the thing about Forrest that makes his exploits all the more remarkable is that he was one of the wealthiest men in the South when the war broke out.
He is still enlisted as a soldier of the lowest rank in order to further serve his country.
He was a major planner.
He didn't have to serve at all.
He was legally exempted from service, but he chose to serve anyway.
And the rest is our history.
As a matter of fact, on that beautiful equestrian monument to Nathan Bedford Forrest, the inscription so beautifully reads, Those hoof beats 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.
And I'll tell you one more thing about when Forrest died.
This was the account from his funeral.
Listen to this, ladies and gentlemen, and listen closely.
We're going to toss it back to Gene for one more segment on the history of the Battle of Fort Pillow.
Main Street was cleared.
This is in downtown Memphis.
Main Street was cleared.
The sidewalks, the doors, windows, and roofs were crowded, but I managed to find a seat on the curb.
The crowd went wild with joy and frenzy when Forrest's cavalry came into view.
Flanked on each side by handsome horsemen 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 and personal servant 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.
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.
Ladies and gentlemen, if you appreciate the work that we do here and the guests that we present to you and the history that we give you, thanks to people like Gene Andrews, please support this show.
There is no other show like it.
Keith, quick word to you.
And then to Gene.
You know, I think there are a lot of people, particularly Yankees, that wonder why they haven't heard more about Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Well, it's obvious after hearing that that James just said, and also Gene's presentation.
He would give too much fame and acclaim and glory to the South if his story were widely known.
Gene, what is the inscription at the Boyhood Home on the gate outside about him leaving this property and riding into history?
Well, that quotation came from a painting by Jack Knox, who used to be the editorial cartoonist on the Nashville Banner when we had a conservative paper in Nashville.
And he did a whole series of paintings of historic sites on Middle Tennessee, and he did one of the Forest Home.
And across the top of the painting, and we copied, we got permission from the Knox family to use that.
It's on the entrance gate to the Forest Boyhood home.
It says, he rode from here into the legend of the land.
And so that's, I think, pretty well sums it up right there.
That sure does.
I will attend to Fort Pillow, he said.
Gene, tell us the rest of the story.
All right, we kind of left our listeners anticipating what happened.
The Confederates had just gone over the wall at the fort.
They didn't stand up and start shooting away.
They flopped down on that earthen wall.
And the first thing the Union soldiers saw when the Confederate boys came over, they saw the business end of double-barrel shotguns and rifles right in their face.
There was a huge volley from that.
They dropped those weapons.
Forrest men carried at least four pistols with them, four revolvers.
They pulled out the revolvers, one in each hand, and started blasting away.
Now, this is close.
You know, you're shooting people that are three or four feet away from you.
This is the original shock and awe, right there.
The Federal soldiers broke.
They ran across the parade ground of the fort to about, you know, 40 yards away was a bluff that dropped down to the river road down along the Mississippi River.
And they were funneled through these rows of tents.
And so the Confederates were shooting from 20 and 30 yards away to this mass of blue, and they couldn't miss.
And most of the casualties at Fort Pillow came from these bodies that were piled up, they said two or three deep, between these rows of tents.
And to say that they waited until it was all over, then massacred the troops is a lot of nonsense.
And, you know, I always ask these people in these debates, have you ever been under fire in combat?
And 99.9% of them say, no, they haven't.
They just, I heard this, and I heard that.
Yeah, well, you know, you're not an expert on a combat situation.
Forrest almost got hit at Fort Pillow, didn't he, Gene?
Yes, he did.
He had two horses killed.
He was riding around that ridge up on that ridge and checking the positions of where he was.
Where the Yankees were.
You and I and Keith, we all stood there with the group that day.
And if you're getting, if bullets are getting near enough to you to kill your horse, they're getting pretty close.
Oh, pretty close enough.
It's pretty some random shots, but they were good enough to hit two of the horses.
And his staff said, well, sir, you need to dismount.
You're too good of a target.
And he said, well, I could get killed on foot, but I can see better up on a horse's back on horseback.
If he was a big guy, he was bigger than most men of the time.
Oh, yeah.
He was about 6'2 ⁇ , weighed about 200 pounds, very muscular.
You know, he looked like a linebacker in the National Football League type.
So tough individual.
So anyway, the federal soldiers broke, ran for that bluff.
There was only one small path down to the river road.
They jumping down that bluff, falling, breaking legs and arms.
And then Forrest, about 15 to 20 minutes after the initial assault went over the wall, he got down to the river road and rode up into the fort, and he ordered the flag cut down.
The U.S. flag was still flying, and as long as the flag was flying, that meant the fort hadn't surrendered.
So he ordered the flag cut down, and even the most anti-South, anti-forest historians will say they agree with the account of Fort Pillow up to that point.
Now, the mayhem and what was going on down on that river road, you had Confederates firing from north to south that had come over the wall.
The other Confederates had come from south to the north.
They were firing up and down that river road.
And plus you had the ones that had come over the wall.
They were up on the bluff firing straight down on the federal soldiers down there.
So they were not only caught in a crossfire, they were caught in kind of a triple fire down there.
And the problem they ran into, a lot of the blacks and whites would surrender.
The Confederates would take their weapons, throw them out of the way, and then go after another group that hadn't surrendered and were still fighting.
The ones that had been surrendered were back behind the Confederates.
They'd pick up weapons and started shooting at them in the back.
So yeah, they turned around and said, well, heck with this.
They just shot them right there.
So that's where a lot of this story about the massacre took place.
So eventually it all died down.
They got the prisoners out of there, the wounded that they could take with them.
Like I said, they left about 130 that were too seriously wounded, and the Confederates were gone out of there by sundown.
And to say that the Confederates had robbed the wounded soldiers at night is another lie because there weren't any Confederates in the fort at night.
There were some under Captain Anderson that came back the next morning and helped load the wounded federal soldiers on a steamboat, the Silver Cloud, if they want to check it.
And they were sent down to the hospitals in Memphis.
And then Forrest headed on back down to northern Mississippi.
He caught up.
That was James Chalmers' division that did that.
Abraham Buford was still coming down out of Kentucky.
And so he met up with Buford's division, and Chalmers went with him, and they went on back down to northern Mississippi.
And then that's when all the propaganda broke loose about the Fort Pillow Massacre.
And the congressional investigation, they printed 40,000 copies of the Fort Pillow Massacre to send to newspapers all over the north.
That was the largest printing of any congressional hearing or committee up to that time was 40,000 copies of the Fort Pillow Massacre and sent out to all the newspapers across the north to get this anti-South hatred built up and whip up this fire against the South.
For the election.
Let me ask you this, if I could, Gene.
Yes, sir.
Tell us about, I understand there was some federal gunboat and black troops sliding down the hill trying to get to the river.
Yep.
Well, they had a plan.
They had a plan.
There was a gunboat, the New Era, out in the Mississippi River.
And they were saying if the fort fell, they were going to slide down this bluff and the gunboat was going to fire a canister over their heads and across the parade ground of the fort and catch the Confederates out in the open.
Well, Forrest knew how to take care of gunboats.
That wasn't a problem with him.
that even before the assault came, he had men posted, sharpshooters posted up and down the riverbank.
And when that gunboat would open the ports to slide the artillery out and fire us, As soon as they opened those gun ports, the confederates would pour a huge volume of rifle fire right in those open gun ports and they had bullets hitting the gunners.
They had bullets ricocheting off the barrels.
They tried that two or three times and finally they closed up the gun ports and just steamed off upriver.
They were never a factor in the battle.
So without artillery was able to drive a gunboat out of the battle?
Well, were there um troops, in particular Black Union troops, that drowned yeah, you know sliding, they were in such a panic they just jumped into the river and drowned there.
So it was at that off of that bluff and down on that river road there was a wharf, down there, steamboat landing and these settlers that had the civilian stores that were selling, you know, supplies like whiskey and and tobacco and you know things that the soldiers wanted at these settler stores.
And uh, down there on that road, that was down right on the water's edge and that's where all the confusion and and you know, scrambling around and everything went on down there and and I I would never deny that some soldiers were Yankee soldiers were shot after they surrendered.
If they had been attacking my family in west Tennessee and they had murdered somebody in my family or attacked my mother or sister, somebody like that, I don't think I would would hesitate to take one or two of them, shooting them.
Well, because the local, the local population, the local citizens were claiming this.
They were claiming there was probably forest whole reason for being there because of the complaints.
That's why he went.
This was, you know, like about 50 miles out of his way.
If you draw a north-south line, the the route they were taking back to Mississippi, there was no need for him to go to Fort Pillow.
I mean, you know, everybody knows that, for that cavalry can't capture a fort, oh no, can't do that.
Even if they captured it, they couldn't hold it because because the Federal NAVY would come along and just blast them right out of there.
So really he had no need for Fort Pillow at all.
Um, but it was the civilians that asked him to do something about it, about the war criminals that they had, so that, in order, of course, they don't tell you that, you know, they don't tell you why he went to Fort Pillow, all they tell you on CNN or you know the History Channel or something, is that that he went there just so we could murder black troops, which is, you know, horrendous lie.
But that's what we get from the government.
Thankfully you don't get it here and you don't get it from Um former history teacher, former combat marine, current caretaker of the Forest Boyhood Home, Gene Andrews.
You don't get it here, you don't get it from Gene, and thank you, as our friends at the Barns Review put it gene, for putting history into accord with the facts here about the South's greatest warrior and his participation in that fort Pillow.
We love you, Gene.
Can't wait to see you again.
Have had some great mental health.
yeah and also let me show you around hernandez great He invited us to go to the boyhood home of Forrest.