I am not a Lost Causer but the link has his biographer's opinions on the topic of Ft. Pillow. They tend to give Forrest a pass but I argue that he was the commanding officer on site(which he was) and is responsible for what his men did. He gets no pass because he did not even try to hold his men back. Nathan is clever and he knows the following:
Among the tons of articles on the subject, my favorite is still Albert Castel’s in Civil War History (March 1958). In it he quotes Dudley Cornish’s The Sable Arm (1956),in which the historian declares, “It has been asserted again and again that Forrest did not order a massacre.” Given the enemy garrison he faced—half Tennesseans-turned-traitor, the other half ex-slaves fighting their former masters—Cornish dismisses the whole thing by concluding, “he did not need to.”41
It was the first time Forrest's men fought and captured Color Troops so all the fears of slave uprising were there before them, slaves with guns and fellow turncoat Southerners working with them. I do dismiss Forrest's complicity in the event. He chose not to stop it. I could argue he wanted to send a message to all colored troops this would happen if you faced him. Forrest is clever and likes to play with the psychology of people. It is what Genghis
Khan would have done...
I like this "lost them"...
Truer was the statement that Forrest’s men had “lost them.” “Lost them” was a euphemistic phrase used by Confederate when they executed Union prisoners. In The War-Time Journal of a Georgia Girl (1908), Eliza Frances Andrews describes her conversation in late 1864 with a Southern soldier, Sam Weller, who told her how, after capturing some of Sherman’s men, they “just took ‘em out in the woods and lost ‘em.”
“It is not strange that negro prisoners were “lost,” the Appeal judged, and suggested that the black troops had been egged on by white officers, who deserved the same fate.
There's a lot I can agree with there, and there is a little more on Forrest's side as to why he was at Ft Pillow in the first place. Sherman had ordered the fort closed as it was not needed but the commander of the district, Hurlbut, kept it open. There is a lot of dispute about why - many believe Hurlbut was profiting from smuggled goods and cotton which he denied. He had given orders, however, that this area of Tennessee be 'grubbed up', meaning hard times on the civilians there. Neither the Union or the Confederates could control outlaw elements of their armies, nor depredations by outlaw civilians. There was little law and order. Forrest had received several reams of complaints from various communities about the situation and had written to Union authorities about what was happening. One of these instances was the incredibly brutal murder of seven of his scouts and their lieutenant. The scouts were buried up to their heads and died like that, and the officer was tortured to death at his father's home. One of the units that was particularly hated was Hurst's Worst. Fielding Hurst used Ft Pillow as a launching base for his raids (as did Bradford), and had so far overstepped his authority that a court-martial was being set up for him. That didn't happen. Belle Edmonson's diary (she was a lady spy for Forrest and her brother one of his scouts) notes that nearly every day the locals would find a dead Union soldier, almost always colored. It was pretty sketchy around there for sure. If Confederate renegades didn't harass you, Union ones would! In fact, it was so bad the people in the area were begging Forrest to leave a brigade there to protect them. He couldn't possibly do that, of course. Forrest's mom had a plantation just above Ft Pillow, and the area was full of his kith and kin. This was a main reason for the orders to 'grub up' the place, to let Forrest's family know helping the rebels, particularly him, would gain little survival value. Sherman had made it a point to target Forrest's family, by the way. That made things very personal indeed.
Turning a blind eye may well have been what Forrest did. I don't think he ordered it but he certainly knew it might happen, and that he might well not be able to stop it if it did. The final charge took place without him, which was uncharacteristic, but he was in the rear being tended to by medics for broken ribs from his horse falling on him some time earlier. It's an unanswerable question as to the timing of his visit to the medics. Did his ribs finally cause too much pain and he couldn't lead the charge, or was it a convenient and perfectly legitimate reason to absent himself from something he knew might be very bad? Sherman, in his investigations, commented that Forrest was too far in the rear to hear what was going on inside the fort and considered that to be exonerating. When a messenger arrived, Forrest did mount up and go into the fort, arriving after a considerable amount of killing had already been done and had a very hard time stopping it from continuing. He drew both his sword and his pistol and promised to kill the next man who fired a shot. As the men knew by experience he would certainly do this, they stopped. He was totally unaware of what had happened at the bluffs, where most of the killing had happened. The commander directly on the field was Chalmers. Chalmers was the one who lost control of the men and did not stop it before it began. He doesn't get much mention as to blame, but being as he was the officer in command while his commander was absent, he should be given a solid share of the blame.
One of the big reasons Forrest was never charged with war crimes, and never had his day in court although he wanted it, was simple. Sherman had a lot of explaining to do!
None of this, however, changes the fact that a massacre took place within the battle and that it was thoroughly race motivated. Civilians took part in some of the grimmest atrocities that took place outside the fort, and this was activity that was outside Forrest's control. The foregoing is meant to explain, not exonerate Forrest. He was the general who planned and carried out the assault, and he did know it would be more than nasty.