Civil War History - The South & Western TheatersCheck this forum for all South and Western Theater Questions. Included are the Western, Pacific, Trans-Mississippi, & Lower Seaboard and Gulf Approach Theaters.
So, do *YOU* have a list, or are *YOU* merely moaning about something *YOU* cannot produce YOURSELF?
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Originally Posted by Battalion
Who said I had a list?...
No one said you have a list. You were asked if you did, and as usual you refuse to provide a simple answer. Why all the evasions? What is it you fear? Why not just say yes or no?
Once again: do *YOU* have a "list" or not?
Tim
__________________ "Let us, then, consider all attempts to weaken this Union, by maintaining that each state is separately and individually independent, as a species of political heresy, which can never benefit us, but may bring on us the most serious distresses."
Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina, 1740-1824, Revolutionary War soldier, one of the authors of the US Constitution in 1787, speaking at the South Carolina Ratifying Convention in 1788.
No one said you have a list. You were asked if you did, and as usual you refuse to provide a simple answer. Why all the evasions? What is it you fear? Why not just say yes or no?
Once again: do *YOU* have a "list" or not?
Tim
Gentlemen. At 500 posts, this one becomes too valuable to move into limbo. Can we just haul it back a little?
__________________ I never knew a man who wished to be himself a slave. Consider if you know any good thing that no man desires for himself. A. Lincoln
According to historian James M. McPherson: "Black prisoners who survived the initial rage of their captors sometimes found themselves returned as slaves to their old masters or, occasionally, sold to a new one. While awaiting this fate, they were often placed at hard labor on Confederate fortifications."15 However, an even worse fate awaited soldiers who attempted to surrender after an Confederates led by General Nathan Bedford Forrest on Fort Pillow in Tennessee on April 12, 1864. Major Lionell F. Booth commanded the black Union soldiers at Fort Pillow. The garrison's 570 soldiers were half white and half black Noah Andre Trudeau wrote in Like Men of War: Black Troops in the Civil War that when the Confederate attacked, "Panic spread among the Union troops, with blacks and whites each later blaming the other for breaking first. What is clear is that while a few Federals stood their ground, most threw down their guns, some to run for the presumed safety of the bluff, others to raise their hands in surrender. No one had lowered the U.S. flag."16 Although Union soldiers attempted to surrender, many were instead killed. According to Trudeau, "What came next was a massacre, pure and simple. Corporal William A. Dickey, 13th Tennessee Cavalry, ran from the wall when Forest's men breasted it. 'The rebels followed closely,' he recalled, 'shooting down all who came in the way, white and black....One rebel came to me and took my percussion caps, saying he had been killing negroes so fast that his own had been exhausted; he added that he was going to shot some more.'"17
Confederate General Forrest himself prepared a report which stated "A demand was made for the surrender, which was refused. The victory was complete, and the loss of the enemy will never be known from the fact that large numbers ran into the river and were shot and drowned. The force was composed of about 500 negroes and 200 white soldiers (Tennessee Tories). The river was dyed with the blood of the slaughtered for 200 yards. There was in the fort a large number of citizens who had fled there to escape the conscript law."18
According to Lincoln chronicler Ronald C. White, Jr., "Lincoln was besieged with calls for retribution."19 The Fort Pillow massacre horrified alarmed whites and blacks in the North. Historian T. Harry Williams wrote: "The newspapers supplied the public with sensational and, in some respects, exaggerated accounts. The great illustrated weeklies dramatized the scenes at Pillow with vivid sketches. Immediately the Jacobins set up a clamor for measures of retaliation upon Confederate prisoners. They charged that Abraham Lincoln was the real murderer of the Negro garrison. If he had threatened reprisals when the Confederacy first announced that it would not grant colored soldiers the protection of the laws of war, the Fort Pillow tragedy would never have occurred."20
Please excuse the inflammatory nature of the illustrations but they are what this thread is all about. The incident is not made up. It happened. Battalion, I'm anxiously awaiting the sophistry at which you are so adept, in your denial that this incident ever occurred.
Respectfully,
Leland
__________________ "What armies and how much of war I have seen, what thousands of marching troops, what fields of slain, what prisons, what hospitals, what ruins, what cities in ashes, what hunger and nakedness, what orphanages, what widowhood, what wrongs and what vengeance."
Clara Barton
Last edited by Glorybound; 10-02-2008 at 07:48 PM.
Please excuse the inflammatory nature of the illustrations but they are what this thread is all about.
What's amazing is that you do not recognize or acknowlege what those illustrations are- pure propaganda.
Inflammatory? Of course. That was their purpose.
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The incident is not made up. It happened. Battalion, I'm anxiously awaiting the sophistry at which you are so adept, in your denial that this incident ever occurred.
There is no debate that there was a fight at Fort Pillow. The debate is about what happened from 4 pm on.
__________________ POWER & MONEY
"Your New-York bankers and merchants are shrewd people, but I never gave them credit for so much sagacity as when they took the Government Loan. It was not merely patriotism, it was a high stroke of policy. It has saved the Government, and what they will regard as equally important, saved them from a great financial disaster."
There was murder, how much? We will never know. The KIA vs WIA & POW rates prove something out of the ordinary happened there.
__________________ Few take the trouble to understand or to view the American scene with perspective. And we Americans love to find ourselves guilty of something. However, it is never I who am guilty, but those other Americans, the past or present government or the other political party. Americans almost never find other countries guilty. It is always ourselves or our fancied influence in other countries. Louis L'amour