Fort Pillow Research Articles

Wellfield optimization to minimize contaminant migration from a surficial to a semi‐confined aquifer using numerical modeling

AbstractThe shallow, Memphis, and Fort Pillow aquifers are the three major water‐bearing strata beneath Memphis, Tennessee, where the Memphis aquifer serves as the primary groundwater source. The upper Claiborne confining unit (UCCU) separates shallow and Memphis aquifers across the majority of Shelby County, acting as an upper protective layer for the Memphis aquifer. However, hydrogeologic breaches within the UCCU create a hydraulic connection and provide an avenue for potential contaminant migration from the shallow to the Memphis aquifer. This research aims to minimize contaminant migration, mitigate risks, extend existing wells' life that may face water contamination, and find suitable locations for future well construction. Several strategies are developed addressing well depth, seasonal well operation, and mapping no‐drilling or red zones to provide practical solutions. A numerical groundwater modeling technique is developed for each strategy that includes stochastic simulation–optimization and customized simulation models depending on the strategy. The models result in thousands of numerical simulations for each scenario to identify recurring patterns of contaminant movement to and through the Memphis aquifer. The results indicate that optimum well positions (spatially and vertically) and modification to pumping can increase the life expectancy of wellfields, offer sustainable management of the Memphis aquifer, and reduce contaminant migration through 2050.

True Blue: White Unionists in the Deep South During the Civil War and Reconstruction By Clayton J. Butler

Reviewed by: True Blue: White Unionists in the Deep South During the Civil War and Reconstruction By Clayton J. Butler Wendy Hamand Venet True Blue: White Unionists in the Deep South During the Civil War and Reconstruction. By Clayton J. Butler. Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2022. Pp. x, 228. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-7662-7.) In True Blue: White Unionists in the Deep South During the Civil War and Reconstruction, Clayton J. Butler makes an important contribution to our understanding of Unionists in the Deep South during and after the Civil War. Butler asks several key questions. Who were these white men? Why did they remain loyal to the Union? How were they viewed in the North and the South? What roles did they play during and after the war? He seeks answers to these questions by focusing individual chapters on three Unionist military units: the First Louisiana Cavalry, the First Alabama Cavalry, and the Thirteenth Tennessee Union Cavalry. While acknowledging that his approach undervalues the important role played by Unionist women during the war, Butler notes that “donning a blue Federal uniform represented the most unambiguous expression of national allegiance one could make” (p. 2). Butler finds that white Unionists came from many backgrounds and professed a variety of motivations for their unconditional loyalty. Some were slave owners, while others were laborers motivated by class resentment. In New Orleans, many Unionists were German or Irish immigrants. Although some were former Whigs, many Unionists were Democrats who had voted for Stephen A. Douglas in the presidential contest of 1860. While some Unionists disliked slavery, most did not express sympathy for slaves as a motivation to enlist. Instead, they professed a strong dedication to the United States as a nation. For these men, secession represented a violation of the Constitution and the legacy of the Founders. Butler does not make a case that Unionist soldiers influenced the outcome of the war, but he does argue that these units had a respectable military record, fighting at Port Hudson, Louisiana, in the Red River campaign, and during William T. Sherman’s March to the Sea. Sherman, Butler shows, understood the public relations value of having Unionists serve in his ranks. Of greater [End Page 368] interest to Butler is the role of newspapers’ support of the Union or the Confederacy through the dissemination of information about soldiers’ allegedly heroic or traitorous efforts. Butler’s impressive newspaper research encompasses big city dailies and small-town papers, and it helps broaden the relatively narrow focus of his book. Another strength of this book is Butler’s discussion of the 1864 Fort Pillow massacre, in which Confederate soldiers under the command of General Nathan Bedford Forrest killed close to half the garrison of 585 U.S. soldiers rather than allowing them to surrender. While not taking attention away from the massacre’s Black victims, Butler notes that Forrest’s men also killed nearly one hundred white Unionists, as well as the commander of the Thirteenth Tennessee Cavalry, Major William F. Bradford. Bradford initially escaped the bloodshed but was executed by Forrest’s men several days after the massacre. Butler argues convincingly that the episode should be understood both as an expression of Confederates’ racial hatred and as their reaction to the presence of white and Black defenders of Union. In a volume of fewer than two hundred pages of text, the book’s coverage of Reconstruction is understandably brief and largely focused on Louisiana and Alabama. Although many white Unionists ultimately endorsed emancipation during the war, in the postwar period their diverse political views reemerged. Unionists played roles during both Presidential and Radical Reconstruction, but Butler joins other scholars in emphasizing that their failure to form a long-term alliance with African Americans contributed to Reconstruction’s broader failure. In his conclusion, Butler discusses the “relatively small place” unconditional Unionists occupy in both national Civil War memory and current historiography. Small in number but consequential nonetheless, these Deep South Unionists found “their voices drowned out by the chorus of returning Confederates and their descendants” (p. 166). Clayton Butler’s book reminds us of...

True Blue: White Unionists in the Deep South during the Civil War and Reconstruction by Clayton J. Butler

Reviewed by: True Blue: White Unionists in the Deep South during the Civil War and Reconstruction by Clayton J. Butler Jonathan A. Noyalas (bio) True Blue: White Unionists in the Deep South during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Clayton J. Butler. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2022. ISBN 978-0-8071-7662-7. 248 pp., cloth, $45.00. On August 29, 1866, a newspaper correspondent in Madison, Wisconsin, reflected on the critical role Southern unionists played and the sacrifices they endured to ensure [End Page 110] the Union’s restoration. “What men merit more the esteem . . . of the country than these tried Unionists of the South,” the journalist pondered in the Wisconsin State Journal. While the experiences of Southern unionists largely fell into obscurity for more than a century after the Civil War’s guns fell silent, historians since the turn of the twenty-first century have made significant strides in chronicling the experiences and contributions of those who resided in the Confederacy, but ardently supported the Union. Clayton Butler’s recent volume, prodigiously researched and eloquently crafted, adds significantly to that historiography. Butler’s study explores the lives of unconditional white unionists in the Deep South, primarily through the service and experiences of three US regiments organized in the Confederacy—the First Louisiana Cavalry, First Alabama Cavalry, and Thirteenth Tennessee Cavalry. The author freely admits that while this methodology excludes certain groups, namely white Southern unionist women, a close examination of the troops who served in these regiments reveals much about what fueled unconditional unionists’ allegiance, how they asserted themselves, how they were perceived in the Confederacy, and how Northerners regarded them. While the author addresses the complex factors that prompted individuals to unconditional unionism—class resentment, disagreement with secession’s legitimacy, economic factors, political considerations, and the belief that loyalty to the Union presented the best opportunity to safeguard slavery—much of this study’s core focuses on the challenges those unconditional unionists confronted. Butler cogently chronicles how some white unconditional unionists, such as those in New Orleans, maintained a low profile while Confederates occupied the city—out of a fear of reprisals. Others, particularly after Confederate conscription went into effect in the spring of 1862, believed the only way they could protect themselves and their families was to report for duty, thus creating the illusion of Confederate loyalty. The author rightly contends that this proved not only a useful mode of survival but offered unionists who resided in more remote parts of the Deep South an opportunity to get closer to Union lines, desert, and then offer their services to the United States. Other unionists, such as a contingent that resided in Texas and enlisted in the First Louisiana Cavalry, took a circuitous route through Mexico to reach New Orleans to join the regiment. Butler’s analysis of how unionists prior to enlistment balanced survival with allegiance is quite powerful. Hindrances, as the author clearly asserts, did not diminish once in the United States’ service. Union soldiers, such as those in the Thirteenth Tennessee Cavalry, were massacred because of their unconditional unionism, along with US Colored Troops, at Fort Pillow in the spring of 1864. While Butler vividly recounts the many ways Confederates violently lashed out against Southern unionist soldiers, he states that although much admired by Northerners, at times Southern [End Page 111] unionists became the target of scorn from white Northern soldiers. For instance, when veterans of the Second Rhode Island Cavalry were ordered to merge with the First Louisiana Cavalry in the summer of 1863, some Rhode Islanders protested: they despised the idea of belonging to a regiment from a state that contributed so much to the Confederacy. Numerous trials, as the author notes in the book’s final two chapters, faced unconditional white unionists in the Civil War’s immediate aftermath. Some confronted attacks and destruction of property from former Confederates. On various occasions these reprehensible activities compelled some to move west and begin life anew. Butler also explores the divisions that formed among white unconditional unionists as to the merits of disenfranchising former Confederates and the necessity of suffrage for African Americans. Additionally, the author investigates how unionists in the period...

Taking Profits, Making Myths: The Slave Trading Career of Nathan Bedford Forrest

Taking Profits, Making MythsThe Slave Trading Career of Nathan Bedford Forrest Timothy S. Huebner (bio) The men engaged in the slave-trade between the states pass without condemnation, and their business is deemed honorable. —Frederick Douglass, 1852 Although best known as a Confederate general and early leader of the Ku Klux Klan, Nathan Bedford Forrest first made a name for himself during the 1850s, buying and selling enslaved African Americans in Memphis, Tennessee.1 Conforming to one scholar’s definition of “the most important type of [End Page 42] slave trader,” Forrest “bought slaves in the exporting states, transported them to the importing states, and sold them for a profit.” Existing studies of the trade focus mostly on earlier decades or rely heavily on sources from the much larger New Orleans market. An examination of a single prominent trader in late antebellum Memphis, a smaller urban center, yields further insights into the men who actually engaged in slave trading, as well as the pervasive hold that slavery’s capitalism had on the American South. Building on the innovative business practices established by an earlier generation of Southern traders, Forrest proved ruthlessly adept in running a profitable slave-dealing operation in the heart of the Lower Mississippi Valley.2 [End Page 43] The myths associated with Forrest’s biography obscure this part of his life, for during the postwar years the former Confederate general personally crafted a narrative to justify his antebellum business enterprises. In the immediate aftermath of accusations that Forrest had massacred Black Union soldiers at the April 1864 Battle of Fort Pillow, Forrest’s prewar slave trading emerged as an issue of particular interest in the North. A May 1864 article in the Chicago Daily Tribune described Forrest’s Memphis slave pen as “a perfect horror to all negroes far and near.” According to the Tribune, Forrest and his brother John disciplined “refractory slaves” with “long heavy bull whips,” which “cut up their victims until the blood trickled to the ground.” Forrest whipped one enslaved man to death, according to the article, after which “the slave was secretly buried, and the circumstance was only known to the slaves of the prison, who only dared to refer to the circumstance in whispers.”3 In 1868, after the war had ended, Forrest sought to rehabilitate his reputation by collaborating with Gen. Thomas Jordan, a Confederate veteran, and J. P. Pryor, a journalist, in producing an authorized biography. In the book’s introductory biographical sketch, Jordan and Pryor noted that Forrest moved to Memphis to establish himself “as a broker in real estate and a dealer in slaves,” and observed that Forrest “accumulated a considerable fortune.” Not content with this factual description, the authors—surely at Forrest’s urging—included a lengthy footnote arguing that Forrest “carried on his business with admitted probity and humanity.” The authors claimed that as a slave dealer Forrest “never sold separately the members of a family, and made it a rule, as far as practicable, after acquiring heads of a family, to purchase the others, howsoever widely scattered, and this, indeed, proved profitable in the end.”4 These words set the tone for later generations of [End Page 44] Forrest admirers, who offered similar justifications for his extensive trafficking in human beings. In 1898, one enthusiast went so far as to claim that Forrest gained such a reputation for kindness among the prewar enslaved community that he “was overwhelmed with applications from a great many [slaves], who begged him to purchase them.”5 Such arguments about Forrest’s benevolent motivations and actions—despite betraying a fundamental misunderstanding [End Page 45] of how the trade actually worked—endure even today in popular biographies and on neo-Confederate websites.6 Click for larger view View full resolution After the war, Forrest sought to rehabilitate his reputation by collaborating with General Thomas Jordan and J. P. Pryor in producing an authorized biography. This was the first source to portray Forrest as a benevolent trader. Myths have persisted as well due to the relative dearth of source material from this period in Forrest’s life. No records from his slave-trading business survive, so one must piece together...

A Curse Upon the Nation: Race, Freedom, and Extermination in America and the Atlantic World by Kay Wright Lewis

Reviewed by: A Curse Upon the Nation: Race, Freedom, and Extermination in America and the Atlantic World by Kay Wright Lewis Douglas R. Egerton (bio) A Curse Upon the Nation: Race, Freedom, and Extermination in America and the Atlantic World. By Kay Wright Lewis. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018. Pp. 281. $64.95 cloth; $28.95 paper; $27.50 ebook) Even before the arrival of large numbers of enslaved Africans into the British mainland colonies, English colonists were experienced in the tactics of exterminatory warfare. In battles against Irish Catholics and Indigenous Americans, settlers learned how to eradicate some enemies while enslaving others. By the dawn of the nineteenth century, Kay Wright Lewis argues in this provocative study, Americans mastered the rhetoric of race war, and a good many of both races, she convincingly demonstrates, regarded it as a serious threat. Even after emancipation, African American fears of racial extermination continued, reemerging in the writings and speeches of W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Malcolm X. Southern whites and Caribbean masters learned that racially based conflicts often cut in both directions. As French refugees fled the revolt in Saint Domingue and settled in Charleston, they carried with them stories of the formidable capacity of Black soldiers. Those fears [End Page 341] nearly became reality in South Carolina in 1822 when former bondman Denmark Vesey orchestrated a plot to liberate the enslaved through bloodshed before sailing for Haiti. When questioned by one of his lieutenants over the necessity of wholesale slaughter, Lewis observes, Vesey replied by remarking that "nits make lice," a term earlier used by white settlers regarding southern Indians. These mainland revolts were initially isolated and quickly failed, the author notes, but thanks to the internal slave trade, stories of Vesey and Nat Turner traveled across the South and were passed from one generation to the next, keeping alive ideas of a war to the death. On occasion, Lewis's determination to fit all of her data into her larger theory appears forced. When discussing the late antebellum efforts of lower South fire-eaters to reopen the Atlantic slave trade, the author suggests that the debates—which in fact divided Carolina planters from their Virginia brethren, who wished to sell their surplus laborers to the fresh lands of the frontier South—"set the stage for future ideas about Black labor and Black disposability" (p. 141). Although it was true enough that white southerners united in claiming that abolition would result in a race war and the extermination of freedmen, advocates of the traffic in Africans insisted that it would reduce the price of enslaved labor enough for middle-class farmers to buy and carry bondmen into the western territories. Far from thinking in terms of "disposability," writers such as Louisianan James De Bow argued that modern steamships could quickly ferry captured Africans to the South with little loss of life. De Bow's editorials embraced the language of paternalism and insisted that Africans were better off enslaved by Christian masters than left on their own in the old world, a ghastly argument shared by a good many white Americans regardless of section. Lewis returns to form in her final chapters, however, as the Civil War years witnessed a rebirth of the language of extermination. Northern Democrats, who worried that Black military service would lead to demands for citizenship and voting rights, warned their Black neighbors that Confederates planned to chop captured African [End Page 342] American soldiers into "mincemeat, or [be] quartered and pickled" (p. 179). Conservative Democrats had their agenda, of course, but they were right enough in thinking that Jefferson Davis and his Congress threatened to enslave or execute Black prisoners of war. Even without orders from Richmond, Confederates at Fort Pillow in Tennessee and Marks Mills in Arkansas slaughtered both Black combatants and civilians. Lewis's prose is clear and strong and only rarely lapses into jargon. Although most of her sources are published rather than archival, her dense footnotes reveal both secondary literature and often obscure pamphlets and newspaper editorials. Wisely, Lewis lets these past voices speak for themselves through ample quotations, demonstrating the centrality of fears of mass extermination among both...

The mint julep consensus: An analysis of late 19th century Southern and Northern textbooks and their Impact on the history curriculum

In the decades after the Civil War, Southerners wrote and published their own history textbooks for secondary schools. These “mint julep textbooks,” as the Southern all-white editions were called by the 1960s, reinforced a Lost Cause narrative of the war for Southern audiences while competing with Northern versions of events. In this study, we employ both historical narrative and content analysis of six textbooks’ portrayals of John Brown, John Wilkes Booth, and Nathan Bedford Forrest. The textbooks that are compared– three Southern and three Northern – were written from the 1870s through the 1910s. While subtle but important differences emerge between the Northern and Southern depiction of these three figures, an even more important trend developed when analyzing change over time. In this article we conclude that, as time progressed, Southern versions of events increasingly impacted Northern textbooks. By the 1930s, the mint julep version of these three figures became the national consensus, as reflected in the work of historian David Saville Muzzey. This consensus around events like the raid at Harpers Ferry, the assassination of Lincoln, and the massacre at Fort Pillow lasted for much of the 20th century. By the early 20th century, Northerners appeased Southern interests in the writing of history textbooks.

Application of Numerical Tools to Investigate a Leaky Aquitard beneath Urban Well Fields

Memphis aquifer is the primary drinking water source in Shelby County (Tennessee, USA), and it supplies industrial, commercial, and residential water. Memphis aquifer is separated from the Shallow aquifer by a clayey layer known as the Upper Claiborne confining unit (UCCU). All of the production wells in the Memphis area are screened in the Memphis aquifer, or even deeper in the Fort Pillow aquifer. Traditionally, it was assumed that the UCCU could fully protect the Memphis aquifer from the contaminated Shallow aquifer groundwater. However, recent studies show that at some locations, the UCCU is thin or absent, which possibly leads to the contribution of Shallow aquifer to the Memphis aquifer. Accurately locating the breaches demands expensive and difficult geological or geochemical investigations, especially within an urban area. Hence, a pre-field investigation to identify the locations where the presence of breaches is likely can significantly reduce the cost of field investigations and improve their results. In this study, to identify the locations where the presence of breaches in the UCCU is likely, we develop a reliable MODFLOW-based numerical model, and use three different analyses: (1) pilot-point calibration (PPC), (2) velocity and flow budget (VFB), and (3) particle tracking (PT), to post-process the developed groundwater model results. These pre-field numerical investigations provide relevant and defensible explanations for groundwater flow anomalies in an aquifer system for informed decision-making and future field investigations. In this study, we identify five specific zones within the broad study area which are reasonable candidates for the future field investigations. Finally, we test the results of each analysis against other evidence for breaches, to demonstrate that the results of the numerical analyses are reliable and supported by previous studies.

The River Was Dyed with Blood: Nathan Bedford Forrest and Fort Pillow by Brian Steel Wills (review)

Reviewed by: The River Was Dyed with Blood: Nathan Bedford Forrest and Fort Pillow by Brian Steel Wills John Cimprich The River Was Dyed with Blood: Nathan Bedford Forrest and Fort Pillow. Brian Steel Wills. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014. ISBN 978-0-8061-4453-5, 288 pp., cloth, $29.95. This volume is the seventh in recent times about a controversial incident on April 12, 1864, following a Confederate attack on Fort Pillow, an isolated Federal post in Tennessee. While Brian Steel Wills has consulted some sources not previously used, especially memoirs and newspapers, most of these do not add much to the discussion. His most notable contribution is his analysis of Nathan Bedford Forrest’s role in the affair, for which Wills is especially well equipped, as he wrote the best biography of the Confederate general. The work fully covers relevant background regarding Forrest and the wartime slavery issue. Discussion of the incident and its wartime aftermath compose the book’s core. An insightful, though spotty, chapter analyzes Forrest’s reputation after the war through 1905. The volume’s flowing style clearly conveys the data. However, the work would have benefited from a little more on the black and white unionist Federals stationed at the fort. The author makes several points that are found in most recent studies of the affair. He notes that the Confederate government and public were both divided over whether captured runaway slaves who enlisted on the enemy’s side should be executed as insurrectionaries or returned to owners as absconded property. Confederates obviously detested fellow southern whites who joined the Union army. It is no surprise, [End Page 458] then, that most of the Confederates at Fort Pillow participated in massacring many black and white members of the garrison after winning the battle. Angry Confederates dehumanized their opponents to justify killing prisoners. Wills contends that Forrest always sought complete victory. At Fort Pillow, as on several earlier occasions, he had tried to intimidate the enemy by threatening a massacre—by implication, in this case—if his surrender demand was refused. The author believes this tactic was nothing more than bluster, but the general was responsible for not making a more effective effort to control his men, despite the difficulty of doing so. Wills credits Forrest with not trying to inflame racial or antiunionist hostilities among his men that day, but a massacre quickly developed all the same. Due to bad injuries, Forrest had not joined the charge, and when he arrived inside the Federals’ fortification, instead of stopping the massacre, he focused first on personally directing the movement of a cannon for firing on a Union gunboat. When the commander later maintained that neither he nor his men had done anything wrong, Wills blames it on Forrest’s habit of dressing matters up to make himself look good; however, while the writer does not use the term or discuss others involved, the general participated in a cover-up. Because Wills so strongly emphasizes explaining events, he sometimes sounds apologetic for Confederate misbehavior. He also appears to waffle on certain issues, such as the Confederate claim that Federals were drunk, by presenting pro and con arguments at different points in the narrative, instead of concentrating them in one complete analytic paragraph. Some statements need qualification or correction. There is no prewar evidence to support the claim by Confederate writers and Wills that Forrest was a paternalistic slaveholder. Capt. Carl Lamburg was stationed at Memphis, not Fort Pillow. Several sources indicate that only one black regiment at Memphis, not all of them in the city, swore to avenge the massacre. The allegations that congressional investigators extensively used leading questions and thereby created much false testimony are debatable. Even though most historians who write on Fort Pillow today agree that a massacre occurred, debate continues on various aspects of the event. Except for the later Confederate claim that the garrison committed numerous depredations, Wills weighs in on all the major issues. His main contribution, though, involves Forrest’s role and the personality traits shaping the general’s actions. John Cimprich Tomas More College Copyright © 2015 The Kent State University Press

Fort Pillow, a Civil War Massacre, and Public Memory, by John Cimprich.

<i>Fort Pillow, a Civil War Massacre, and Public Memory</i>, by John Cimprich.

A Refutation of Yankee Slanders

As with any war, the American Civil War had numerous atrocities and gory battles. Fort Pillow was just one of countless battles fought during the war, but it caught the attention of both the North and the South in 1864. Union newspapers ripped into the Confederacy and Major-General Nathan Bedford Forrest, claiming that he and his cavalry had massacred the Union garrison at Fort Pillow in western Tennessee. Northern newspapers used the Battle of Fort Pillow as just another example of the depravity of the South and its military leaders. Although the North reviled Nathan Bedford Forrest, to much of the Confederacy he was the “Wizard of the Saddle.” The Union garrison stationed on the Mississippi River represented all that the South abhorred, so Northern threats of revenge or retribution for the massacre did not cow the South. Instead Southern citizens and soldiers alike lauded this Confederate victory. Even those Confederates who were not overjoyed at the news did not express fear of reprisal. However, few today remember Fort Pillow and Forrest’s involvement. As Jack Hurst wrote, “Fort Pillow, for better or for worst, is all but forgotten.”^{<a href="https://philologiavt.org/index.php/philologia/article/view/97/63#note1">1</a>}

To the Battles of Franklin and Nashville and Beyond: Stabilization and Reconstruction in Tennessee and Kentucky, 1864-1866 (review)

Reviewed by: To the Battles of Franklin and Nashville and Beyond: Stabilization and Reconstruction in Tennessee and Kentucky, 1864-1866 John Cimprich (bio) To the Battles of Franklin and Nashville and Beyond: Stabilization and Reconstruction in Tennessee and Kentucky, 1864-1866. By Benjamin Franklin Cooling. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2011. Pp. xvii, 526. $45.95 cloth) Benjamin Franklin Cooling completes his military, political, social, and economic study of the Civil War in Kentucky and Tennessee with this book. Unlike the preceding volumes, this one emphasizes synthesis of the historical literature (much larger for this part of the story), rather than breaking new ground. It starts with two chapters usefully reviewing the earlier war experiences of the region, covers most of 1864 in five chapters, climaxes in two chapters on General John B. Hood's invasion of Tennessee, and concludes with the subsequent stabilization efforts. Despite the dates in the title, the work essentially runs from late 1863 to the end of 1865. Obviously, the secondary-source research is very extensive. While the author consulted a number of memoirs and letters mostly for color, he mined the printed official records of the army and navy for his innovative segments. He did not use military records in the National Archives. Overall the writing is very clear, smooth, interesting, and graceful. The organization is basically chronological, then topical. A little lack of polish appears in a few too many typos, errors on maps, and unnecessary repetition of quotations. In late 1863, the Confederate army occupied only the northeastern corner of Tennessee, but Federals in both states had a growing problem with Confederate guerrillas. This led circularly to more Federal repression, more hostility among civilians, and more guerrilla recruits. The trend was especially significant in Kentucky, which, [End Page 469] unlike Tennessee, had a unionist civil government that had blocked some Federal actions. The main sore points for most whites were infringements of their rights and interference with slavery. Both states suffered from intensifying conflicts within their societies: slaves v. masters, unionists v. secessionists, and bandits v. the law-abiding. While dealers in the black market made big profits, many others saw their livelihood decline to a subsistence level or lower. Wherever either army camped or operated, troops stripped away supplies from and caused suffering for civilians. Cooling pays laudable attention to logistics. The Federals had to divert some troops to guarding long supply lines, which ran back to the Ohio River. General William T. Sherman helped by detaching the largest western army for his march to the sea. However, inexperienced garrisons and poorly mounted cavalry behind the lines could not cope with enemy veterans. Confederate raiders or invaders could only draw supplies before they left their strongholds. Cooling agrees with historians who view cavalry raids as a waste of scarce Confederate resources. He contends that General George H. Thomas primarily defeated Hood's invaders because he gained two battle-worn corps and winter weather worsened. Besides logistical analysis, the study innovates in examining the aftermath of the Nashville battle. Having eliminated the Confederate army from the area, the Federals in 1865 gradually ended the guerrilla menace through manhunts and amnesty deadlines. Following the end of the war came demobilization, the end of military restrictions, and reduced aid to black and white war refugees. Although the postwar economy struggled with the end of slavery and wartime damage, Memphis rapidly grew into a center of cotton-trading. A seething anger toward the United States government and a pattern of much lawlessness remained to create trouble during the Reconstruction period. To Civil War buffs and specialists, much in the book will be familiar, yet Cooling tells it well and with new insights. His analysis of Federal efforts at stabilization in 1865 is especially revealing. [End Page 470] John Cimprich John Cimprich teaches history at Thomas More College in Crestview Hills, Kentucky. His works include Fort Pillow, A Civil War Massacre, and Public Memory (2005) and Slavery's End in Tennessee, 1861-1865 (1985). Copyright © 2011 Kentucky Historical Society

Lightning Rod Scalawag: The Unlikely Political Career of Thomas Minott Peters

Lightning Rod Scalawag: The Unlikely Political Career of Thomas Minott Peters One of the state Supreme Court justices who became a lightning rod for the political and legal issues of the Reconstruction period , Thomas Minott Peters, presided over the court for only one year (1873–1874) and yet became one of the most hated jurists in Alabama history.1 A notorious scalawag, Peters was routinely vilified in the press for both his “Radical Republican” politics and his decisions that denied the right of secession as a basis for Alabama statute. The events of one hot summer evening in 1878 may help us begin to understand the source of Peters’s unpopularity. On Saturday July 13 Peters delivered a stirring speech at a meeting of Lawrence County’s “colored” Republican convention at Mountain Home. The meeting was observed by a reporter from a Democratic paper with a long record of keeping track of one of the state’s most notorious scalawags. The Moulton Advertiser’s reporter, “Eye-Witness,” paraphrased Peters’s talk to raise the alarm one more time: He made a black republican speech and told them that he was a radical and intended to do a great many radical tricks before he died. He dwelt at length upon Paul Horton Paul Horton teaches history at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. He is indebted to Robert H. McClain Jr., a direct descendant of Thomas M. Peters, for sharing e-mail correspondence and much of his family research. The author would like to thank Colin Rennert-May, Amy Smith-Horton, Mike Fitzgerald, Ed Ayers, Eric Foner, Ed Bridges, and the most kind editors and readers of the Alabama Review for their encouragement and assistance on drafts of this article. 1 Peters plays a pivotal role in two books that are based on oral histories of Unionist northwest Alabama: Donald Dodd and Wynelle S. Dodd, Winston: An Antebellum and Civil War History of a Hill County of North Alabama (Jasper, 1972), 78–123; and Wesley S. Thompson, The Free State of Winston: A History of Winston County, Alabama (Winfield, 1968). According to one local historian, tradition has it that Peters’s library and papers were dumped in a ditch near his home after his house was sold. April 2011 117 the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments and said that the 16th Amendment would be the right of suffrage to women. The colored ladies . . . whose modesty he extolled, he said would vote. Seeming to admit, that white ladies would shrink from mingling with a crowd of negroes at the polls. A good Democrat, Eye-Witness had difficulty maintaining even feigned objectivity: “And here the unnatural monster seemed to gloat over the idea of defeating us with women votes, and forever fastening upon the white people of the South the radical yoke.” Peters spoke with “touching pathos” about civil rights and compared civil rights legislation to the “Lord’s prayer.” When “he spoke of Fort Pillow,” where hundreds of African American Federal soldiers from the First Regiment Alabama Siege Artillery had been massacred by troops under the command of Nathan Bedford Forrest in 1864, “his remarks were enough to have raised a riot.” Although other African American and white Republicans made credible speeches that day, “none seemed to sanction the demon-like violence of judge Peters.”2 In the minds of Eye-Witness and his Democratic readers, Peters’s threatening rhetoric had to be self-serving. He would compromise all political principles to seek and maintain power. From this perspective the former Unionist was the worst sort of opportunist who betrayed his friends, country, and social class to become Alabama’s highestranking judge. In the words of Bourbon historian John Witherspoon Dubose, “he always avowed intense Union sentiments. He fell into the ranks of the scalawags without a jolt. His attainments as a lawyer were mediocre, insufficient to justify his promotion. When the invading enemy came into the counties along the Tennessee River, he went into their lines to stay, and his conduct naturally increased his claims upon the recognition of the carpetbag element.” Similarly William Garrett, writing in 1872, attributes Peters’s rise to the state supreme court to opportunism: “He was...

“We Are No Grumblers”: Negotiating State and Federal Military Service in the Pennsylvania Reserve Division

For Sergeant John I. Faller, Company A, Seventh Pennsylvania Reserve Infantry, the month of April 1864 passed splendidly. The twenty-three-year-old Philadelphia machinist began serving out the final weeks of his three-year term of service inside the defenses of Washington. In March, he wrote to his sister that he liked his duty “very well,” and he assured her that, “I am well over from head to feet and from the right hand to the left.” Because he chose not to re-enlist in December, Faller looked forward to returning to his parents’ house in Carlisle and instructed his sister “to have a room fixed up for me when I get home next summer.” As spring began, two important items escaped Sergeant Faller’s attention. First, he made no mention of Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant’s April 17 order to suspend prisoner exchanges. A few days earlier, at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, Confederate troops had refused to accept the surrender of defeated African American soldiers, killing or massacring 231 officers and men. Grant reasoned that if Confederate troops would not offer quarters to surrendering black soldiers, then it was the Union army’s obligation to hold Confederates taken in battle indefinitely to ensure the safety of African American prisoners of war. Second, Faller failed to detect the uproar in his regiment’s parent unit—the Pennsylvania Reserve Division—regarding the War Department’s proposal to extend its term of service beyond three years. While in winter encampment at Brandy Station, Virginia, the other regiments of the Pennsylvania Reserve Division had staged a near mutiny, protesting a War Department directive that proposed to retain the Keystone soldiers two to three months beyond their expected muster-out date. Perhaps Faller disregarded this disturbance simply because it did not matter to him whether he mustered out in May—the month designated by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania—or July—the month designated by the War Department. As long as Faller remained in Washington, he could avoid the enemy’s bullets and merely count down the days until he went home. However, on April 18, orders came from Major General George G. Meade directing Faller’s regiment, the Seventh Reserves, and another regiment, the Eighth Reserves, to join the Army of the Potomac at Brandy Station. Fourteen days later, Faller found himself marching into the Wilderness as part of Grant’s historic—and costly—Overland Campaign....

The development of an artefactual language ideology: Utterance, event, and agency in the metadiscourse of the excited utterance exception to hearsay

In this paper I argue that a particular type of Anglo-American legal discourse treats spoken language as a text artifact and discuss the effects on the person to whom the text artifact is attributed. I do this by historicizing the language ideology that generally prohibits the use of hearsay in in-court testimony, but admits ‘excited utterances,’ or declarations made spontaneously in response to an event ‘startling enough to cause nervous excitement’ ( Haggins vs. Warden, Fort Pillow State Farm, 1984, p. 1057). The language ideology mobilized and circulated in this discourse assumes that some utterances are by their very nature artefactual, and as artifacts, they are the property of the event, not the speaker. This rule and language ideology have roots in early modern English common law. I trace the history of this language ideology back through the definitions of the excited utterance exception to hearsay, historically called the spontaneous exclamation exception. This particular discourse highlights the ways ideas about language are historically saturated, the ways that history is embedded in metadiscourses, and the effects of metadiscursive evaluation on the people whose utterances are in question.

Fort Pillow: A Civil War Massacre and Public Memory, and: River Run Red: The Fort Pillow Massacre in the American Civil War (review)

Fort Pillow: A Civil War Massacre and Public Memory, and: River Run Red: The Fort Pillow Massacre in the American Civil War (review)

Fort Pillow, a Civil War Massacre, and Public Memory

Fort Pillow, a Civil War Massacre, and Public Memory

Letters to the Editor

To the Editor: I have just received your October 2006 edition and find it lacking in balance as usual. Your book review section always contains slams at the South and southern history. Attention is especially called to the review of The Myth of Nathan Bedford Forrest. First of all the very title of the book is in a way scurrilous enough, but then your reviewer goes far beyond in suggesting there is a great debate as to whether any celebration of the Confederacy is appropriate. Let me tell you, we in the Confederate community will decide what is appropriate regarding our history and heritage. General Forrest was one of the most significant figures and yes heroes of the War for Southern Independence. No denigration of the man will ever diminish his status in history. By the way, the claptrap about a massacre at Fort Pillow is utter nonsense . All of Lincoln’s war could be so categorized, but it is a false charge against Forrest to say that he conducted a massacre when in fact he took numerous black prisoners at the fort. It seems to me that The Alabama Review should say good things about our state and the South. LEONARD WILSON Commander, Alabama Division Sons of Confederate Veterans To the Editor: I appreciate The Alabama Review giving me the opportunity to respond to Mr. Wilson’s letter. Let me start off by saying that I have no control over the title of the books I am asked to review. One would have to contact the authors for their reasoning in the naming the volume. However, The Myth of Nathan Bedford Forrest is an apt title since the book is a history not of Forrest himself but of the legends, myths, and popular images of the man over the years. Letters to the Editor T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 160 As for Confederate memorialization and celebration, a close reading of my actual words and the book in question will reveal that I am not suggesting that the Sons of Confederate Veterans, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, or any southern heritage group cannot or should not celebrate the Confederate past. I am instead pointing out the obvious truth that there is a regional and indeed nationwide debate concerning the appropriateness of such celebrations. Mr. Wilson has surely noticed that all across the South there are challenges to the display of Confederate battle flags, Confederate holidays, and Confederate monuments . I agree with him that southern heritage groups have the right to advocate their position on how the Confederacy is to be remembered. However, other groups such as the NAACP have an equal right to advocate their position as well. Finally, in regard to the Fort Pillow affair, a careful examination of the facts leads virtually every scholar of the Civil War to the obvious conclusion that, although Forrest may not have ordered his men to refuse to take black prisoners, many of them did indeed execute black soldiers attempting to surrender. To say otherwise is to ignore the huge body of evidence which is available to anyone interested enough to sift through it. In conclusion, I would like to add that I applaud Mr. Wilson for his love of the South. I, too, am a southerner, and I am very proud of my region and sensitive to unfair portrayals often found in the media. However, I am open to honest and constructive criticism of my home, its past, and the Confederacy’s place in that past, especially if it aids in a better understanding of our history. John D. Fowler Kennesaw State University Editorial note: Except for corrections of spelling and other purely formal matters, letters to the editor are printed as received. ...

Fort Pillow, a Civil War massacre, and public memory

Fort Pillow, a Civil War massacre, and public memory

Fort Pillow, a Civil War Massacre, and Public Memory

Fort Pillow, a Civil War Massacre, and Public Memory

River Run Red: The Fort Pillow Massacre in the American Civil War

River Run Red: The Fort Pillow Massacre in the American Civil War