April 20, 2024 - 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.
Fifteen years after the Mexican War, many of those same West Point officers will 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 form of training, yet he rose from the rank of a private to lieutenant general.
His name was Nathan Bedford Forrest.
I always love this particular hour during Confederate History Month because we always make sure to have Gene Andrews, the retired combat officer and history teacher who now serves and the longtime caretaker of the Nathan Bedford Forrehood Home in Chapel Hill, Tennessee.
I'll always love this hour because we get to talk about nothing but Nathan Bedford Forrest.
And as I said, one of America's greatest warriors, Keith corrected me and rightly so, one of the world's greatest warriors.
And Gene Andrews is back with us to talk about him right now.
Gene, how are you tonight?
And happy Confederate History and Heritage Month.
Well, thank you very much.
I misunderstood.
I thought you wanted to talk about my vacation at Disney World.
But okay, we can shift gears.
We can shift gears.
You know what I really want to talk about is your time with the Cincinnati Bengals.
And folks, he really did make it to the Cincinnati Bengals.
Well, what happened when I came back to the States, I played football for the Quantico Marines football team.
And at the end of that season in 71, I got an invitation to the Bengals rookie and free agent camp.
It wasn't their regular training camp where they brought everybody in.
But it didn't take them long to figure out that I wasn't quite cut out for that level of football.
And the only reason I stayed as long as I did, they had a rookie quarterback, Kenny Anderson, that later took them to the Super Bowl when they did play in the Super Bowl.
And he was at the back of the quarterback line and I was at the back of the receiver line.
So we'd come up to the front of the line pretty much at the same time.
And he had such a good touch on the ball, he could make that chair over in the corner of the room there look like a good receiver.
But it didn't take the Bengals coaches long to figure out, oh, no, no, no.
We want to keep number 14.
Tell number 86 to bring his playbook in, and we wish him good luck and whatever.
Hey, but you can.
You can say that as much as you'd like, but you still made it a lot further than an old Miss fan.
Gene, I was going to say that before I became an old Miss fan back in the early 60s, I remember Memphis State, who I followed at that time, always played the Quantico Marines every year.
I'm sure Gene Beal.
I'm sure Gene took him out.
All right.
No, but what really was a great thing, when I started coaching in high school, I wrote to Paul Brown, who was coach of the Bengals then, and asked him if I could come up there to training camp and just see how they set up practice, how they set up the drills and everything.
And he said, sure, that's fine.
Glad for you to come by.
So that was like taking a graduate course in football.
And those coaches were so nice to me as a little high school coach there.
And they had coaches from Penn State, Notre Dame, Ohio State, all these big colleges.
And I'd ask somebody something after they were walking off the practice field after the morning or afternoon practice.
And they'd grab my notebook and say, well, this is the way we line it up against Pittsburgh.
Well, this is the way we did it against the Giants.
And this way we did.
So, like I said, it's like a graduate course in football.
So they were very hospitable, very, very nice.
You mentioned Gene's tenure with the Cincinnati Bengals, and the hour that we had planned goes in a whole different direction.
But hey, he's an interesting guy, though, folks.
This is what I've got to say.
He's an interesting guy for so many reasons.
And I actually would like to continue that conversation.
But tonight, he is, I think, you have to be, Gene.
America, you've got to be the world's foremost authority on Forrest history.
And I would just say very quickly, quick thumbnail on Forrest.
First of all, I think it's one of the most beautiful inscriptions on any tomb that has ever been put.
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.
He is our hero here in the South, but especially in Tennessee.
He's a very hero at that.
Especially in Tennessee.
I'll always liken him to a mythological type of figure.
And the inscription on his tomb reads as such.
Just some quick facts about Forrest that we always like to recite.
We're a self-made millionaire.
He's a big here in a little frontier town called Chapel Hill in Middle Tennessee.
His father was a blacksmith and very poor growing up.
When he was 12 years old, they moved down to northern Mississippi.
And when he was 16, his father died.
And all I know is he died of a fever.
It could have been malaria, yellow fever, whatever.
But at 16, he was the oldest male in the household with a widowed mother and five other children.
So he had to take over taking care of the children, the house, farming, trying to keep food on the table, everything, and had a rough life growing up.
So going into a war really wasn't all that bad compared to what it had to go through.
And went into business with his uncle, finally made enough money to start buying some land, livestock, different business ventures in northern Mississippi and around the Memphis area.
By the time the war came along, he was worth approximately a million and a half dollars, which today would be about 40 to 45 million.
Or with Bidenomics, he was probably worth 80 to 90 million.
Anyway, so he was a very prominent citizen.
He served as an alderman in Memphis, was friends with Governor Isam G. Harris, known throughout the Southeast.
And he enlisted as a private.
He didn't expect a high rank or a big political office like most people with that kind of money would expect and enlisted as a private.
Didn't stay a private long.
Governor Harris asked him to raise a mounted battalion of cavalry, promoted him from private to lieutenant colonel.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
His career took off from there.
Gene, what you said, just, of course, it was a thumbnail, so it barely scratches the surface.
But yes, just to reiterate, a self-made millionaire, despite being born into abject poverty and having no formal education, he invested a great deal of his personal fortune to aid the Confederate cause.
So this would be like, you know, Fred Smith here in Memphis or any major Fortune 500 company owner donating the majority of their wealth to aid a cause that would never happen.
And then in addition to doing that, 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.
He was a major planner.
He was legally exempted from having to serve, but he chose to serve anyway.
And he didn't go in like John McCain.
He didn't get some sort of honorary position.
He went in as a private, and he had no formal military training, but he went on to become the greatest tactician in the history of mobile warfare, retired as a lieutenant general.
His maneuvers are still studied today, and he killed over 30 enemy combatants.
That is mythological, Keith Alexander.
Well, I've got a personal family relationship or angle to this.
One of my wife's ancestors was Major Ed Porter.
Major Ed Porter was the pastor of Third Presbyterian Church in Memphis, and he enlisted, and he also sent off to Judah Benjamin, who was Secretary of War at that time, a request for authority to raise troops.
That's what he did.
He raised a regiment or a battalion or something like this.
I forget what size it was, but he became a major under Forrest and fought the rest of the war.
He died in 1867 of wounds he received in the war.
See, and that's the kind of men we had back then.
We're talking about Forrest, self-made millionaire, dedicated, devoted, donated his money to the Confederate cause, then enlisted as a soldier at the lowest rate.
You mentioned Isham Harris, Governor Isham Harris, the governor of Tennessee during the war.
He fought at Shiloh.
Can you imagine a governor of any state going and fighting on the front lines today?
For God's sake, they were there together at Shiloh.
I mean, this is the kind of men the South produced during that time.
Very quickly, can you?
My great-grandfather was IES Alexander.
He was a sergeant in the infantry.
He was badly injured at Shiloh and basically sent on medical leave to his home.
Forrest rode through, and rather than go back to the infantry as a sergeant, he went, rode with Forrest as a private for the rest of the war.
Well, and you're honoring him tonight because you came in here.
You just had hip replacement surgery.
You came in here on a walker tonight just so you guys should be on medical leave.
Big Barnes Review issue coming up.
The next issue of the Barnes Review is an all-southern issue.
I've got an essay in there.
I've got also a QA with Sam Dixon in there.
And you've got a big article on Nathan Bedford Forrest in the next issue of the Barnes Review.
Give us a one-minute preview of that, and then we're going to get into Fort Pillow.
Okay, well, first of all, I want to compliment you on your interview with Sam Dixon.
He is one of the premier speakers, Southern speakers.
And I urge our listening audience, everybody out there needs to subscribe to the Barnes Review.
If you want to get the facts on history and something to counter the garbage that we get off of television, the lamestream media, you need to read the Barnes Review and the history in that.
And the cut line under the title is The Incorrect Guide to History.
And so it's a great publication.
It comes out of Maryland.
Paul Angel is the editor.
So that's great.
And that was a great interview you did with Sam Dixon.
And if you want to hear a great speaker, that's somebody you need to go see.
If you have to drive 200 miles to hear Sam Dixon, it's well worth the trip.
He has a great sense of humor, and the facts he gives just counter everything that you hear in the lamestream media.
Even Fox News doesn't get it right a lot of the times, but Sam Dixon does.
So the article we had in there is taken from a speech that I've given to a lot of different sons of Confederate veterans camps.
It's called Forrest Strategy If They'd Only Listen.
And I point out how many times Forrest, even as a lieutenant colonel fighting in his first battle in the war, advised the commanding officers what he thought they needed to do on the field to win the battle.
They didn't listen to him, and we wound up losing.
And then as he came up through the ranks, he even wrote to Richmond, to Adjutant General Samuel Cooper, and then finally to President Davis himself, advising how to stop these Yankee armies that were invading the South.
And it wasn't theory.
He had done it.
He had stopped Grant.
He had stopped Sherman.
He had stopped Buell.
He had stopped Rosecrans and forced them to turn around and head back to their base of supplies.
And he never fought one of those armies face to face, head to head.
He knew he had the overall strategy that the South needed.
He knew the South could not fight these huge bloodbaths.
Even if they won, they couldn't replace the losses that they were taking.
So his strategy was you don't go roaring in there head-to-head with a huge army.
You cut around behind them, cut their supply lines, cut their communications, and force them to fall back.
So that was what his strategy was.
The Confederate government never followed it, turned him down.
The Yankee army, though, was terrified of Forrest, especially Sherman.
When he was starting that campaign against Atlanta, he was worried to death that Forrest would come roaring out of northern Mississippi and cut the railroad lines that he was depending on for his supplies and reinforcements on the campaign from Chattanooga down to take Atlanta and northern Georgia.
And he'd be stuck almost like Napoleon in Russia in the wintertime.
Sherman was afraid he'd be stuck in North Georgia with zero supplies coming in, zero reinforcements, no way to send his wounded back to Nashville to the hospitals there.
So Forrest had a better concept of the type of war the South needed to fight than the authorities in Richmond.
And of course, they had a prejudice against him.
He was not a West Point graduate, so how could he know how to fight the war when all the experts knew better?
So that's the article.
Yeah, well, you know, I've – Bill Bragg hated him.
I know.
Well, I think one of the turning points of the war was when Bragg was replaced as the guy in charge of the Confederate armies in the West.
If they had appointed Forrest at that point rather than John Bell Hood, who was the type of guy that was going to, you know, sacrifice the blood of all of his soldiers if possible or if necessary, and instead fought it the way that Forrest wanted to, I think the South may have won in the war.
Thank you, Keith.
That's what I wanted to ask Gene next.
And this is, I mean, this is it.
Outmanned, outsupplied.
The North had the manufacturing base.
The North had the industrial immigrants coming in.
Yeah, they were conscripting them.
Conscripting them right off the boats.
But even with all of those disadvantages, we had a lot going for us in terms of our tacticians and in terms of the moral high ground.
We were fighting to preserve our homes and our way of life, no less than the Comanche were, you know, in some of those wars.
But was the war winnable, Gene?
Had they followed Stonewall Jackson and raised the black flag?
Had they fought as Forrest fought?
Was that war actually winnable?
Oh, I think there were many instances where it could have.
And what you have to remember, we know how the war turned out.
But by 1864, well, 1863 originally, initially, there was a lot of anti-war sentiment in the North.
And in 1863, they had draft riots in the northern cities.
The worst one, of course, was in New York.
If you ever saw that movie, Gangs in New York, that wasn't made up about those draft riots at the end of the movie there.
That really happened.
And the mobs took over Manhattan, the police stations, the armory, and they controlled the island of Manhattan.
And it took bringing Yankee regiments that had just fought in the Battle of Gettysburg, New York regiments, bringing them back to New York, and they just had to sweep through the streets and shoot people down in the streets.
They say that the draft riots in New York was one of the most costly battles as far as loss of life is concerned.
One of the most costly battles during the entire war.
Do you think that's why Lincoln cooked up the Emancipation Proclamation to shore up popular support?
Yeah, so that, and there were several reasons for it.
Number one, it was to try to keep England out of the war.
Because if he said, which he wasn't, but if he said he was fighting to free the slaves, that would keep England out of the war because England had already banned slavery in their colonies.
And what they'd done, they'd paid the colonial owners of the slaves for the value that they had.
And they said, well, okay, we get the money back for our investment.
We'll give it up.
And so they'd already done that.
And, of course, the South offered to do that too to the North, but they wouldn't pony up with the money.
So, yeah, that was one reason to keep England out.
Number two, they were hoping it would have slave revolts in the South.
And like Haiti, the blacks would start murdering the white women and children, and Confederate soldiers would desert to come back to protect their family.
You know, and there was some of that.
You go back to the Nat Turner murderous rebellion where these black slaves killed women and children, 60 man, woman, and child.
They killed their children as they slept.
So there was some of that going on.
But let me ask you this: that was not during the war, and it was not emancipation.
That was several years before the war.
But there was that possibility that they could have stoked some more of that.
All right.
But this is a little bit off force.
We're going to get back to force.
We're certainly going to get to Fort Pillow.
But the Corwin Amendment.
Why didn't the South take that?
Was it because it just wasn't about slavery as much as we've been led to believe, or because they didn't trust Lincoln?
The Corwin Amendment was presented by a representative from Ohio.
It passed the United States Congress.
And there were seven states that were out of the Union, but this amendment to make protect slavery in the Constitution, which meant it would have taken a constitutional amendment to get rid of it, but it passed.
But the South said, that's not why we left.
You can pass all the slavery amendments you want to to the Constitution.
That's not why we left is because of money.
We're being screwed.
We pay anything.
The South is being treated like an agricultural colony of the North.
Exactly.
That was it.
And that's what Lincoln said.
He said, the southern states can stay out of the Union.
They can keep their slaves as long as they pay their tariffs or taxes to the United States government.
And we're going, wait a minute, wait a minute.
We're supposed to pay a foreign government?
I don't think that's going to happen.
And that's why he sent that fleet to Charleston to try and provoke a war and make the South fire the first shot.
And he didn't care if they opened fire on that fleet.
In fact, he was hoping that's what they were going to do.
And they even joked in the North and called it the Termite Fleet because they took these old rotten ships that weren't worth anything.
They were going to sacrifice their Navy ships and sent them to Charleston to try to bluff their way into Charleston Harbor and get the South to fire on them.
And they found out that Fort Sumter, when they sent Stephen D. Lee and a delegation out there about 2 o'clock in the morning on April the 12th, that Major Anderson said, if you open fire on the fleet, we'll have to open fire on you.
And so Lincoln had it win both ways.
Either the South was going to fire on this fleet or they were going to fire on Fort Sumter, and he would get the war and he would get it with the South firing the first shot.
But that English military historian said it's not necessarily who fires the first shot that is the aggressor.
The aggressor is the one who causes the first shot to be fired, which was the Yankee Empire.
Ah, very interesting.
Well, you mentioned Sam Dixon earlier.
He is related somehow.
He's told me the story before.
I don't remember exactly, but he is related to the gentleman who fired that first shot.
So I guess maybe that shouldn't come to any surprise to you, dude.
I think probably Sam did it.
He's almost that old.
I think you're older than him.
He would have.
If he were there, he would have touched the pitt hole in the cannon there and fired it.
Yeah.
All right.
Let me ask you a couple of things before we take the one break we've got to take this hour, and then we're going to come back.
I told you, Gene, you'd have 45 minutes to give us the treatment on Fort Pillow.
What I meant to say was 30 minutes.
So that's all we've got.
And I know you normally give an hour.
I'm leaving.
I got to tell you one thing, folks, coming up after the break is this.
The first time I ever saw Gene's Fort Pillow speech was at a Council of Conservative Citizens meeting.
About 2015.
At the latest.
It could have been even earlier than that.
But I watched that and I stood in awe watching this historical and historically accurate presentation.
And I said, this should be on the History Channel.
This is that good.
If the History Channel did anything other than air programming on UFOs and lumberjacks, this would be something that they'd be interested in.
And it was fantastic.
And since then, Gene has given this presentation at TPC conferences.
He has actually given it at Fort Pillow itself.
We had the opportunity to charter a bus and have a private VIP gathering for some of our donors and special friends a few years back.
And we all traveled up to Fort Pillow.
And on the battlefield, on the very field where Nathan Bedford Forrest led this great Confederate victory, Gene gave the true history of Fort Pillow.
That's what we've got coming up in the next segment after the bottom of the hour break.
But first, I just want to thank Gene again for his dedication to the cause and to the history of the South and to the history of Nathan Bedford Forrest.
I had the opportunity, an opportunity that I will never, ever, ever forget.
Gene is the caretaker of the Forrest Boyhood home, as we've mentioned many times on this show and including tonight.
And I had the opportunity when Forrest was dug up in ghoulish fashion and reinterred.
He had to be reinterred because the city of Memphis circumvented state law and they dug up a general and Mrs. Forrest.
He had to be reburied.
His casket, the earthly remains, the mortal remains of General Forrest, laid in state at the boyhood home.
And I and my wife and my three children stood about as far as I am from Keith Alexander, just three feet away from the casket that held the remains of Nathan Bedford Forrest.
And Gene Andrews was overseeing Forrest's remains that day.
And Gene, I'll never forget that.
It was a terrible thing.
It was a terrible thing to have to have done, but you helped.
It was a necessary thing that had to be done.
Okay, all right.
Well, go with us.
Save it from the heathens in Memphis.
Yeah.
I see what you're saying.
They would have done something to destroy that grave site.
And, you know, God works in mysterious ways.
I cussed Memphis up one side and down the other back in 2017 when they took that statue down.
I thought that was the lowest thing that ever happened.
I swore I'd never buy a nickel's worth of gas or anything in the world.
It was right before Christmas, too, in the middle of the night when everybody was asleep.
17th of December.
But that was the best thing that could have happened.
Had that statue been standing there in 2021 or whatever it was when the riots were going on to honor St. George Floyd all over the country, they would have done that statue to pieces.
They would have melted it down like the Lee statue in Richmond.
Gene, I've never thought of it in that way, but you are so right.
You are right.
But I'm just now just in the nick of time.
I mean, in the grand scheme of things, the fact that they're digging up the remains of our betters is a terrible thing.
But yes, necessary in that regard.
And thank you for bringing that to the point.
And not that it matters much, but by the way, I should add that Confederate soldiers, sailors, and Marines who fought in the War of Northern Aggression, they were made U.S. veterans by an act of Congress in 1957 that was U.S. Public Law 85-425, Section 410, which was approved on May 23rd, 1958.
This made all Confederate veterans equal to all U.S. military veterans under law.
But I digress.
I don't guess that matters much to me.
Don't bring that out to him, or else they'll do like the Royalists did after Oliver, after they had the restoration, after the Oliver Cromwell Revolution, they dug up his corpse, tried him in abstentia for treason, and sentenced him to death and chopped off the head of the corpse.
Well, in any event, I'm sure that's what I'm doing to me, but that's it.
All right.
Anyway, Gene, it was a day I'll never forget.
A day that shouldn't have happened, but I'm glad it did for the reasons you pointed out.
But to stand three feet away from Nathan Bedford Forrest, I'll never forget a story about that after that.
We'll be right back to Quickie.
All right, set tight, everybody.
We're going to come back.
We're going to talk about Fort Miller.
Thanks so land.
You're listening to Liberty News Radio.
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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 charlotte rebels were falling back real slow
And old William the Conservancy men thought he might attack old rebels once again.
You know he wants to fight.
And he's about to get there stood in Sherman's way.
He said, Yankee, this just ain't your day.
Old Nathan Betton Frost, 300 by his side.
He said, boys, it's turned around.
Come right in.
Ride with the devil.
For what's the end of Jane's pain?
Come right in.
Ride with the devil.
The devil is dying in green.
There he was, ladies and gentlemen, our hero, Nathan Bedford Forrest.
I was talking before the break, Gene Andrews, who could normally give an hour-plus dissertation on the Battle of Fort Pillow, which was one of the first examples in modern history of wartime propaganda to disparage an enemy.
We're having to condense that down to the Cliffs Notes version, about 20 minutes.
But I said a moment ago how awesome it was, how all-inspiring, how unforgettable, how once in a lifetime to stand two or three feet away from the casket that held the mortal remains of General Nathan Bedford Forrest, as I did a couple of years ago at the boyhood home there in Chapel Hill.
Gene Andrews carried that casket.
Gene, tell us what that was like and then go into your Fort Pillow.
Well, I'll tell you, James, it was a, I don't mind admitting this, it was a very, very emotional experience for me.
There were quite a few of us that were able to carry the casket part of the way up the driveway from the hearth and then into the house and have it placed for you all to come by and pay respects to General Forrest and his wife.
And we appreciate your time and effort to come up from Memphis and do that.
But to carry that casket, and it came back to me all the times I'd worked out at the Forrest home and been stung by wasps, fell off the roof and had to have a dust off come off in a helicopter medevac, take me to the hospital in Nashville, breaking out rock with a sledgehammer and have a big splinter come off and hit you in the leg and been sunburned, I don't know how many times, and go through all of that.
But then to stand there and hold that casket and be about eight inches away from General Forrest, that was very, very emotional.
So with that being said, and thank you for the extra time, we want to get into Fort Pillow.
And I hope our listening audience is sitting down.
I don't want somebody to faint from this and fall over and hit their head, but the Yankee government will lie to you.
And not only will they lie to you, the prestitutes and the fake news media will lie to back up the government.
And the Fort Pillow massacre, as you alluded to, was nothing but war propaganda.
And Winston Churchill one time said, the first casualty in war is the truth.
And then on the other side, the German minister of propaganda, yeah, he should know.
He did enough.
The German minister of propaganda, Dr. Gerbel, said, a lie told once is always a lie, but a lie told a thousand times becomes history.
And this lie about the Fort Pillow Massacre.
That's it.
Yeah, it was.
It was a lie.
It was war propaganda, just like you said, but it's been repeated so many times that the American sheeple who never study history hear this and they hear it on The View or CNN or something like that.
And that's where they get their history and they think, well, this is what happened.
So let's tell our audience, and maybe it'll filter on up to somebody else in the power structure.
Forrest was not going after Fort Pillow.
He was on a raid into West Tennessee.
They needed horses for Abraham Buford's dismounted cavalry division.
Now, dismounted cavalry division's infantry.
That's a nice way of saying they don't have any horses.
So he was taking Chalmers' division, Buford's division.
They were headed on a raid into West Tennessee and western Kentucky for horses.
And they left Columbus, Mississippi, where they wintered, headed north, and Fort Pillow was not even mentioned in their operational orders.
They had no intention of going to Fort Pillow.
They were going after horses.
And so Forrest was a master of the raid behind enemy lines.
West Tennessee and Western Kentucky were controlled by the Union Army and had been since 1862.
And this is March the 1st, 1864.
So they're going behind enemy lines to get horses.
And Forrest was master of planning a raid, carrying it out.
He sent his scouts in first to West Tennessee.
So he knew exactly where the strong points were, the defenses of the Federal Army in West Tennessee, in Memphis, in Jackson, up at Columbus, Kentucky, Paducah.
And so he knew where he was going to have to avoid certain strong points and where the route he needed to carry his men, where they could forge streams that the Yankees were guarding the bridges.
So he didn't go taking off Hilt or Skelter and say, oh, well, we'll figure it out when we get there.
No, no.
He figured it out before he left Columbus.
And so the point we're trying to make, though, they weren't going after Fort Pillow.
They were going after horses.
So they left on March the 1st, headed up, went through Jackson, Trenton, up to captured the Union garrison at Union City.
There wasn't a massacre at Union City.
You've never heard about that because they surrendered and they took them out as prisoners.
Colonel Duckworth was the one that led it.
He signed the surrender demand as Forrest.
So that's why they surrendered.
Interesting side note here, one of the other colonels that went with him was a Colonel Faulkner.
And this Colonel Faulkner had a rather famous grandson by the name of William that I understand was a pretty good novelist.
So they caught the army.
Sure.
Continued on up into Kentucky through Mayfield up to Paducah.
And Buford had caught up by then, and most of his men were from Kentucky.
So that's why they sent them up into Kentucky.
They got to Paducah.
They couldn't take the city of Paducah because there was a fort there and a gunboat.
They did round up some of the horses out around the perimeter and got those, got away.
And the Yankee commander in Paducah, oh, they burned cotton on the docks.
And it wasn't southern cotton.
Well, it was originally, but the Yankee speculators that followed the army would steal cotton and anything else they'd get their hands on, take it back north and sell it for a huge profit.
So they burned the cotton and they lost their profit in that.
Came back out, and the next day they saw an article in the newspaper that the Yankee commander there was bragging about how he had whipped that coward Forrest and driven him from the field.
And they showed that he was nothing but a braggart and a coward.
And they had missed the whole warehouse full of horses down by the river on Front Street and I guess they assumed the Confederates couldn't read.
So now they knew where to go back.
They went back the next night to the huge warehouse down by the river on Front Street, overpowered the guards and took all the horses out with them so that they were coming back, got back down to Trenton Tennessee, and he sent a preliminary order to his commanding officer back down in Mississippi.
Stephen D. Lee gave him a report of how many prisoners they'd captured, how many horses, how many miles of railroad track they'd torn up.
Never once mission mentioned Fort Pillow.
So they've been on this raid now for five weeks and Fort Pillow was not mentioned at all.
So on April the 6th, two days later, he sends a supplementary order saying we will attend to Fort Pillow.
Now what happened in those two days?
Well, the civilians in West Tennessee had asked him to do something about the, the Yankee war criminals that were coming out of Fort Pillow and were robbing the people in West Tennessee.
They were raping the women, attacking people, murdering them.
Two characters in particular, Colonel Brownlow, who was the son of Parson Brownlow that was the Reconstruction governor in Tennessee after the war, and Fielding Hearst.
And they were murdering Confederate prisoners of war that they captured in West Tennessee and torturing them.
Hearst had seven of them captured.
They shot six of them without a trial.
Didn't treat them as prisoners of war.
They just shot them.
They were the lucky ones.
The seventh one was an officer, Lieutenant Dobbs, and they tortured him, cut his face open, cut his throat from ear to ear, and left him out in the field to bleed out after they mutilated his body.
So this was why they were going after Fort Pillow.
White and black soldiers were coming out of Fort Pillow that had actually been built by the Confederates early in the war, and then it was abandoned when the Tennessee River fell to the Yankees.
And the Yankees, all the way down to Pittsburgh landing, now had a huge army at the back of these people that were defending these forts up and down the Mississippi.
Fort Wright, Fort Pillow, and then up at Island No. 10 up there at the northwest corner of Tennessee.
So their position was untenable, so they had to abandon all of that.
And then the Yankees took over Fort Pillow that was named for Gideon Pillow, who was a Confederate officer at the early part of the war and took it over.
But now they were just using it as a base for a bunch of criminals to come out and attack the civilians in West Tennessee.
So it was the civilians that asked Forrest to do something about Fort Pillow.
Why would a cavalry unit on a fast-moving raid behind deep, I mean deep behind enemy lines, go 60 or 70 miles out of their way to attack a fort on the Mississippi River that everybody knew cavalry can't attack a fort.
You need siege operations.
You need big guns.
They can't do that.
Even if they captured it, they couldn't hold it because they're way behind enemy lines.
They didn't have Forrest.
They didn't have Forest.
They could come down the Mississippi and blast them out of there.
But Forrest took up for civilians and especially women that were being brutalized and assaulted and sexually assaulted by the Yankee Army.
So he sent Chalmers' division over there on the night of April the 11th.
At dawn, they overran the pickets at Fort Pillow.
They had no idea that Confederates were that close to them.
They overran the pickets, and Fort Pillow, as we said, was built on a bluff right on the Mississippi River.
And now, and James will remember this, and you go up there now, it's not on the river.
The river's changed course and moved out about a half a mile away from the Tennessee bank.
It's moved over more towards Arkansas.
But right then, back then, it was right on the river, had a wharf there, and steamboats were landing there and so forth.
But out, there was a semicircle that paralleled the fort out about 600 yards or so.
That was built by the Confederates in case the fort was attacked from the landside.
And so when the Confederates got up there and got over the pickets, got them out of the way and took that ridge.
Now the inner works where they were, they were firing right down into Fort Pillow.
And the only officer with any combat experience, Major Booth, he took a round right between his running lights, Powell, from one of those snipers.
He was one of the first casualties.
So they lost the officer that had any combat experience.
And the next in command was the command fell to a Major Bradford that even the other Yankee officers said he was worthless.
And he had snuck out of some bad business deals and joined the army to get out of town.
And so this was the type of commander that they now had in charge of the federal troops at Fort Pillow.
So Forrest gets there about 10 o'clock in the morning.
He makes a lot of adjustments to his men all the way around the fort.
They got closer and closer and closer.
They were using the cabins, and the Yankees had segregated the troops there, the black troops and the white troops.
The white troops got cabins outside the fort and the black troops were putting tents inside the earthworks.
It was an earthen wall around the fort, not a fort like Fort Apache or something you see in the westerns, but earthworks around this semicircle right on the river bluff.
And so the Confederates were getting closer and closer in there.
Major Bradford ordered the cabins to be burned.
And that's one of the lies.
They said that Forrest burned wounded federal soldiers alive.
Well, if they were burned, they were burned by their own people because they were the ones that set the cabins on fire.
The Confederates didn't burn the cabins because they were using them for cover.
And then they worked their way down around the north side of the fort in the Coal Creek Ravine.
The Yankees couldn't depress the barrel of the cannons enough to fire down at those Confederates.
So by 3 o'clock in the afternoon, and notice how Forrest went from 8 o'clock in the morning till 3 o'clock in the afternoon, working to get his men in position around this fort where they couldn't escape, where he was protecting his men.
And at 3 o'clock, he sent in a flag of truce and demanded the surrender of the fort.
And Major Bradford wanted an hour to discuss it with his officers.
And Forrest said, you have 20 minutes.
And so after 20 minutes, they said, nope, we're not surrendering.
So the Fort Pillow so-called massacre, they gave them a chance to surrender and come out of there without losing any more than what the snipers had picked off early in the morning.
And after that early morning barrage that was coming down on them from up above there on that ridge, they hunkered down behind the walls of that fort.
Nobody stuck their head up over the wall, earthen wall of the fort anymore.
So they surrendered.
They refused to surrender.
And at 4 o'clock, the bugler sounded the charge.
About 1,200 Confederates came storming down off the ridge, jumped into a moat that ran right around the fort.
And on the second bugle blast, they came up and over the wall.
And this was the original shock and all.
Because when they came up that earthen bank, they just flopped down on top of it.
They didn't stand up.
And the first thing the Yankee soldiers saw was two barrels of a double barrel shotgun right in their face or an infield rifle and got the volley of the rifles and the shotguns.
They dropped those and then they started pulling out pistols and blasting away at the federal soldiers that didn't get taken down in the first volley, you know, from like 10 or 15 yards away from it.
The white NLAX troops broke and ran.
They ran across the parade ground through the rows of tents.
Well, now that packed everybody together.
And Confederates from 20 and 30 yards away couldn't miss.
They were firing into these blue masses in between these tents.
They said that's where most of the casualties were.
They were piled up bodies two or three deep there.
They got to the bluff and they jumped or fell down the bluff.
The idea was that a federal gunboat was going to protect them down there.
Well, Forrest knew how to take care of gunboats.
When every time they opened a gunport, his rifleman would fire a volley of bullets coming sailing through there and bullets were ricocheting off the cannon barrels, hitting the gunners.
They closed up their gunports and steamed off upriver.
They never took part in the Battle of Fort Pillow.
They got out of there.
Well, now the Federal soldiers that were left were down below this bluff on the river road, right along the river.
A lot of them jumped in the river to try to escape.
We're either shot, trying to swim away or drown.
Now you had Confederates coming down the river road from the north down to the south.
The Confederates on the other side of the fort were coming up this river road from the south up to the north.
And then you had the Confederates that came over the wall and they were sitting on top of the bluff firing right down on top of them.
So they were not just a crossfire, I guess you'd call it a triple fire that were caught in.
A lot of the federal soldiers, especially the whites, were surrendering, throwing down their weapons.
They're getting them out of the way.
The blacks, a lot of them, kept firing.
And what they found out, the Confederates found out after they came over the wall, there were barrels of whiskey all along the wall.
And the white officers had given the blacks whiskey to drink.
They had gourds for dippers because they didn't think the blacks would fight unless they were pumped full of whiskey.
And so to paraphrase Dean Wormer in Animal House, black, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.
So that was why they had so many casualties.
A lot of them were drunk.
And they would surrender.
The Confederates would throw them out of the way, get out of the way.
They're going after the ones that are still fighting.
When they got them out of the way, they'd pick up their rifles, start shooting the Confederates in the back.
I'm sure they turned around and finished those guys off.
And I would not, and Forrest finally got in about 20 minutes after the first wave came over the wall.
He ordered the flag at the fort cut down because as long as the flag was flying, that meant the fort hadn't surrendered.
So we ordered the flag cut down.
Most of the fighting, even the anti-South bigots will admit, most of the fighting stopped once that flag was cut down.
But everything that was going down below, going on down below the bluff along that river road, went on for 30 or 40 minutes after the initial assault came over the wall.
And that's where probably a lot of troops in the Yankee side, or some for sure, were shot after they surrendered.
Because there was bad blood between the Confederates and the Yankee soldiers in the fort.
A lot of the Yankee soldiers in the fort were deserters from the Confederate Army.
And then these blacks were drunk.
And during that truce, when Forrest was giving them a chance to surrender, the blacks were standing up on the wall, hollering all kind of insults and making obscene gestures at the Confederates.
This, James, we have to remember, this was in the days before the NBA and the NFL.
So trash talks didn't go over real well back then.
And so that caused a lot of bad blood between the Confederate attackers and the Yankee defenders.
So there probably were some that were shot after they surrendered.
I wouldn't say that they weren't.
Well, anyway, the battle is over.
Because God knows the North never engaged in any sort of activity like that.
They were.
No, no, no, no.
They didn't like murdering Sam Davis or DeWitt Smith Job or torturing those people and murdering them or anything like that or torturing people at Point Lookout or Camp Douglas or Johnson's Island or any of the concentration camps.
Elmira, it was known as Helmyra, New York.
Burning down man, woman, and child in city after city in the march of the sea.
No, no.
They were fine.
Anyway, I digress.
Because they won the war and the winners write the history books.
So anyway, Forrest, if it's a massacre, Forrest did an extremely poor job of it.
The definition of a massacre in any dictionary is a total annihilation.
So Forrest didn't do a very good job at the massacre and business.
He took out over 200 prisoners.
There were another 130 that were too seriously wounded to be moved.
He left them behind that night with the U.S. medical staff, and he got his prisoners, got his men.
They got out of there that night.
Another lie.
Forrest's men robbed the wounded Federal soldiers at night.
Nope, they were gone.
If they were robbed, they were robbed by the same fella Yankees that were stealing everything from the people around West Tennessee.
So where did the Fort Pilla massacre myth come from?
Well, 1864, they weren't really sure how the outcome of the war was going to go.
This was in the spring.
Grant had gone east to fight against Richmond and Robert E. Lee in the east.
There's no guarantee that he was going to have any more success than Ambrose P. Burnside or fighting Joe Hooker or Irwing McDowell or any of those.
And Sherman was going to have to take on the Confederate Army of Tennessee and try to take Atlanta.
And Sherman had been a disaster every time he had independent command.
As long as he was under Grant, he did okay.
But when he went after Patrick Claver on Missionary Ridge, he got his rear end handed to him.
When he tried to come across the Chickasaw Bayous and take Vicksburg from the north, he got his rear end handed to him.
And, you know, he just was incompetent as an independent commander.
And the only reason he was able to take on Joe Johnston, he outnumbered Joe Johnston about two to one.
He had over 100,000 men in his army by then, and Johnston had between 50 and 60,000.
So there was no guarantee the way the war was going to turn out.
So they had to have something to whip out, whip up anti-South sentiment in the North.
And Congress had an investigation of the Fort Pillow Massacre.
And the people that were there, some of them weren't even there.
They gave contradictory stories, but they printed up 40,000 copies of the Fort Pillow Massacre from Congress, this congressional report, and distributed these to newspapers all over the North.
And so, of course, they had something there.
They could run headlines.
Our boys were massacred at Fort Pillar.
The evil Confederates slaughtered the black troops.
And Harper's Weekly, they always show this thing of Confederates bayoneting black troops and bayonetting women holding little black babies and all of this nonsense like that.
Well, number one, cavalry doesn't carry rifles with bayonets on them.
That's a lie.
There were civilians there, but they were settlers and the black women and children weren't there.
So once again, the media lies and they back up the lie of the federal government.
And by the time the Confederates had heard about this and what all was going on, well, it was too late.
They couldn't counter the lies in the North.
They had no representation in the North.
So the Fort Pillow massacre comes down to us today as a fact in history when in fact, as you said earlier, James, it was nothing but propaganda, a lie that was made up by the federal government to try to whip up this anti-South sentiment in the North and try to get recruits.
By this time, the Yankee boys were saying, dead gum, these rebels can shoot, and they can shoot straight.
So we're not going down there.
That's why they had to bring in boatloads of Irish.
They had to recruit blacks, which they paid less than the white Yankee soldiers.
The white Yankee soldiers got $11 a month, blacks got $9 a month.
And they used the blacks pretty much just as cannon fodder.
You look at some of the battles, like at Nashville, the blacks got slaughtered both days of the Battle of Nashville.
And they would take white officers.
Number one, they were not going to commission a black officer because some Irish NCO was going to have to salute a black officer.
Never happened.
So they took bust out white officers that were sorry and no white soldier would serve under them.
They made them commanders over the black units that they put into the field.
So they had to have some way of, like I said, cranking out this propaganda to maintain the war fever in the North to try to crush the evil rebels that were going to destroy the country.
So that's, in a nutshell, pretty much what the Fort Pillow massacre hoax was all about.
And I pointed out in my program, I give, Bedford Forrest was the first victim of a racial hoax in this country.
There you go.
Yes.
Yeah.
All the other ones were the first victim of a racial hoax.
Justice Smollett, yes, Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first victim.
What did Forrest and Derek Sheldon have in common?
Gene, I didn't know if you could do it, my friend.
After listening to this talk on Fort Pillow for so long, you can diss the 30 minutes, and what a bang-up job, folks.
Not only have I had the opportunity to stand a couple of feet away from the remains of General Forrest, thanks to Gene Andrews, I've had the opportunity to tour Fort Pillow with Gene Andrews and hear this presentation at length with a lot of VIPs and donors from TPC.
Donate to TPC.
You don't know what you'll get invited to, but I guarantee it'll be great.