Blue: 5fish likes to stir the pot.
Back on the subject, if Shernan's "commission"
Sherman had no such "commission." He assigned a single officer to investigate.
couldn't find Forrest at fault, that pretty much ends it for me. Sherman had every reason to command his people to find Forrest a criminal sunavaseacook.But he didn't. That means something.
To me, it means that Sherman knew that Forrest's actions, however having been beyond his control, were well within the slide given a commander. It happens. And Sherman knew and believed that. He simply left it with the USCT. That they would exact justice and retribution.
ole
Actually, Sherman didn't exonerate Forrest at all. The "investigation" was never finished by the military.
"Four days after the massacre, Stanton ordered Sherman to 'direct a competent officer to investigate and report minutely, and as early as possible, the facts in relation to the alleged butchery of our troops at Fort Pillow.' Sherman promptly passed the task on to Brayman, who began collecting affidavits from the patients at Mound City. But no doubt to Grant and Sherman's enormous relief,
the investigation was soon turned over to the Joint Subcommittee on the Conduct of the War, whose recommendations they would not be obliged to follow.
"One of the arguments Forrest's defenders would make to prove that even the Union command did not believe the reports of a massacre at Fort Pillow was the fact that even such harsh and remorseless generals as Grant and Sherman never ordered reprisals. But
by April 23, Sherman had concluded that Northern threats and condemnations would prove entirely useless and so proposed that the question of reprisals be quietly left up to 'the negroes themselves.' The Confederate army 'cares no more for our clamor than the idle wind,' he wrote Stanton, 'but they will heed the slaughter that will follow as the natural consequence of their own inhuman acts.' The truth, he said, was that the rebels' savage hatred of black troops 'cannot be restrained.' Thus far black troops had been 'comparatively well behaved, and have not committeed the horrid excesses and barbarities which the Southern papers so much dreaded.' But eventually 'the effect will be of course to make the negroes desperate, and when in turn they commit horrid acts of retaliation,' he wrote with characteristically brutal pragmatism, 'we will be relieved of the responsibility.' He doubted the wisdom 'of any fixed rule by our Government, but let soldiers affected make their rules as we progress. We will use their own logic against them, as we have from the beginning of the war.'" [Andrew Ward, _River Run Red: The Fort Pillow Massacre in the American Civil War,_ pp. 311-312]
"On May 3 Lincoln informed his cabinet that the fact of a massacre 'is now quite certain' and asked for their recommendations as to an appropriate response; the one ultimately adopted recommended that no 'extreme' action be taken until the result of Grant's Wilderness offensive in Virginia became evident. Some observers have assumed that the fact that no Union reprisal was ever ordered by Lincoln or taken by Sherman is proof that neither was convinced a massacre really had taken place;
the reality, however, probably was that Sherman was one of the least sensitive toward blacks of all the supreme Federal commanders, and Lincoln was facing a tough November election in which many voters seemed to feel as much as Sherman did." [Jack Hurst, _Nathan Bedford Forrest: A Biography,_ p. 180]
This was all pointed out in the other Fort Pillow thread, but the misconceptions remain. Sherman formed no commission. He didn't conduct the investigation, he assigned a single officer to the task. The investigation was never completed by the military, it was taken over by the Congress. They found Forrest to be culpable. Sherman never proposed not punishing Forrest. He proposed letting black troops take vengeance on rebels for it. Sherman never showed any vindictiveness toward anyone after the war. He said several times during the war that once the war was over he'd extend his hand toward every southerner in friendship. Sherman's role in the affair has been mischaracterized time after time by the SCV types and people have been swallowing that line without actually bothering to look into it to see that it's nothing but a pack of lies.
Regards,
Cash
Firstly- his troops were particularly hated by USCT and were promised to be given no quarter. Secondly- it change Forrest's life forever, because since then he had to answer countless charges of various newspapers and "witnesses". As the New York Times noted in his obituary: " his principal occupation seems to have been to try and explain away the F.P. affair". 
Bringing the