W
HENCONFEDERATEMAJ. GEN.
Nathan Bedford Forrest and his
3,000 battle-hardened troopers
rode back into their homeland
of West Tennessee in late March
1864, they were not in the best of moods.
A horse-gathering raid into Kentucky
had netted a haul of 400 horses and
mules for a new division of Bluegrass
cavalry, but it had also seen the death of
Colonel A.P. Thompson during an unsuc-
cessful—and unordered—attack on
Union-held Fort Anderson on the Ohio
River near Paducah.
Forrest had already withdrawn from the
smallpox-ravaged town before the attack,
but that did not prevent pro-Northern
newspapers from crowing about the com-
paratively minor skirmish at Forrest’s
expense. The Louisville Journal,labeling
the Paducah raid an abject failure, charged
that Forrest’s men had been “gloriously
drunk, and but little better than a mob.”
The paper accused the raiders of “com-
mencing an indiscriminate pillage of the
houses” before making “several desperate
charges” upon the fort. “The Federals met
them with a withering fire, and in each
onset the rebel columns were broken and
driven back in confusion.”
That was bad enough, but the
staunchly abolitionist Chicago Tribune
leveled the explosive accusation that For-
rest’s men had “skedaddled, after killing
as many Negroes as they could, which
seems to have been their primary object
in coming to Paducah.” Even worse in
Southern eyes was the newspaper’s
provocative claim that Forrest and his
men had been “ignominiously beaten
back by Negro soldiers with clubbed
muskets.” Further rubbing salt into the
wound were false reports that Colonel
Thompson, a well-liked young officer,
had been killed by a musket ball to the
forehead fired by “an ardent young
African.” (Actually, Thompson was
killed by a shell from a Union gunboat.)
To a man, Forrest’s soldiers seethed at
the bogus reporting, which neglected to
mention the surrender of a Federal
detachment at Union City, a crossroads68THE Fort
Furious Confederates ignore a white
flag (far left) as they shoot and stab
defenseless women, children, and
unarmed soldiers in this lurid and inac-
curate 1892 Kurz & Allison illustration
of the Fort Pillow incident. No women or
children were injured in the attack.All images: Library of CongressQ-Spr16 Fort Pillow *SILO_Layout 1 1/14/16 3:04 PM Page 68