Fort Pillow Read online

  “Well, you can sing that in church.” Ward was slimmer and darker than Bartlett, and envied the other trooper his scar. He didn't want to get cut or shot himself. He'd seen wounded men, and dead men, too. He knew bullets and knives hurt. But he wanted a mark to show the world — and maybe show himself — he'd been to war.

  All over the Confederacy, whites believed Negroes couldn't fight. They believed the Federals were a pack of monsters for putting Negroes in uniform, giving them guns, and letting them fight. And they maintained elaborate organizations designed to crush slave uprisings before they really got started.

  Those organizations worked. Rebellions were suppressed so ruthlessly, they didn't happen very often. But having plans to put down revolts said Negroes might fight after all if they ever got the chance.

  Matt Ward didn't recognize the contradiction, not with the top part of his mind. Hardly any white Southerners did. But it was there, inescapably there, and it nagged at him the way a tooth will when it hasn't started to ache yet but isn't quite right, either. He sensed it was there, and he wished he didn't.

  McCulloch's brigade got into Brownsville a little past noon, riding in from the west. Brigadier General Bell's brigade had just come into town from the northwest. Between them, the two forces stretched Brownsville to overflowing.

  Quite a few Negroes were on the muddy streets. There seemed to be more slaves in this part of Tennessee than anywhere else in the state — and there must have been more still before it started slipping back and forth between the C.S.A. and the U.S.A.

  “Brunswick stew?” a white woman called, lifting a ladle out of a covered pot.

  Ward's stomach was rubbing against his backbone. “Thank you kindly, ma' am.” He took the ladle and got his mouth around it like a snake engulfing a gopher. The stew was full of potatoes and mushrooms and some kind of meat. “Mighty fine,” he said when he'd swallowed some of it. “What's in there with the vegetables?”

  “Squirrel,” the woman answered. “Reckon we've got the best Brunswick stew anywhere right here in Brownsville. If it wasn't rainin' like this, I'd give you a biscuit to dip in the gravy.”

  “I'll take anything I can get.” Ward eyed her. She was older than he was — she had to be close to thirty — but she wasn't bad looking. He tried a smile. She smiled back, but not that way. She'd already stuck the ladle into the pot again, and was offering it to somebody behind him. She'd give out Brunswick stew. She didn't seem inclined to give herself away.

  With a shrug, Matt Ward rode on. Finding out didn't cost him anything. She might have been interested in a quick poke. Could he have got off his horse, mounted her, and then saddled up again fast enough not to land in trouble? He thought so; he'd gone without for quite a while.

  More ladies with pots of stew and rhubarb pie and other good things to eat stood at the edge of the street. Brownsville seemed strongly pro — Confederate. Ward wasn't surprised. Any place where there were lots of blacks and not very many whites, the whites would want to keep them in line, and that meant backing the C.S.A.

  He wondered what these nice women thought of the idea of nigger bucks with guns in their hands. Wouldn't they use those guns to outrage Southern womanhood? He'd wanted to outrage Southern womanhood himself only a couple of minutes earlier, but that was different. And he knew exactly how it was different, too: he wasn't a black.

  Up ahead, Black Bob McCulloch was shouting, “A guide! We need a guide to Fort Pillow!” His thick, dark beard, with luxuriant mustaches that almost swallowed his mouth, helped give him his nickname.

  “I should say you do,” a woman told him. “All the swamps and bogs and marshes and I don't know what all between here and the Mississippi, you'd get lost faster'n greased lightning if you tried to go without one.”

  “Yes, ma'am.” The brigade commander lowered his voice to answer her, then raised it again to a bellow that could carry across a battlefield: “A guide! We need a guide!”

  Other officers took up the call, till Brownsville seemed to echo with it. Mter what the local woman said, Ward hoped they found one. If they bogged down… He didn't want to think about what General Forrest would do to them then. He was far more afraid of his own commanding officer than of the damnyankees, and he wasn't ashamed to admit it.

  “I can get you there.” The answer came almost from Matt Ward's elbow. The man who made it looked as if he'd been through the mill. He wore a collarless shirt with no jacket and a ragged pair of homespun trousers. His eyes were wild in a pale face; his hair stuck out in all directions.

  “Who the devil are you?” Ward said.

  “My name is Shaw, WJ. Shaw,” the wild — eyed man replied. “That Bradford son of a bitch had me shut up in Fort Pillow till yesterday. I managed to sneak off, and I just got here this morning. You bet I can take you back there. Give me a rifle and I'll shoot some of those bastards myself. “

  He wanted to do it. The eagerness all but blazed off him. It was so hot, Matt Ward was surprised Shaw didn't steam in the rain. The trooper raised his voice: “Colonel! Hey, Colonel! Here's your man, I reckon! “

  Black Bob McCulloch had to fight his way back against the tide of cavalrymen moving west. Even when he shouted at the men to get out of his way, they couldn't always. And quite a few of them weren't inclined to, either. Confederate soldiers were always convinced they were just as good and just as smart as the officers who led them.

  When McCulloch finally did get to talk with W.]. Shaw, he didn't need long to decide that Shaw was the man they needed. “Give this man some food!” he yelled. “Get him a horse — get him a good horse, goddammit! Get him a rifle and some cartridges! “

  “Much obliged, sir,” Shaw said with his mouth full — one of the ladies on the street was feeding him Brunswick stew. “I'll pay you back for your kindness. And I'll pay that Bradford shitheel back, too, only the other way. Oh, you bet I will.”

  “Mr. Shaw, we aim to be at Fort Pillow by sunup tomorrow morning,” McCulloch said. “You lead us there on time and we'll be in your debt, sir, not the other way around.”

  “I can do it, but you'll have to ride through the night,” Shaw said. “You're damn near forty miles away, you know.”

  McCulloch nodded. “Oh, yes, Mr. Shaw, I know that very well. But wherever you go, we'll go with you. You don't need to worry about that, not one bit. Some of us rode all through last night. If we have to do it again to clear those niggers and homemade Yankees out of Fort Pillow, we will.”

  “Colonel, we have a bargain.” W.J. Shaw stuck out his hand. Robert McCulloch leaned down in the saddle to clasp it. Shaw went on, “I'd be honored to join this force, not just to guide it.”

  “And we'd be honored to have you,” McCulloch replied. “You do what you say you can do and you won't join as a soldier, either — you'll be an officer straight from the start.”

  “That's right kind of you,” Shaw said. “Right kind.” Somebody led up one of the remounts — not a great horse, but not an old screw, either. He swung up into the saddle. Colonel McCulloch nodded. So did Matt Ward. A glance was plenty to show that Shaw knew what to do on horseback.

  Black Bob thumped Ward on the shoulder. “Reckon you found us a good one, Matt.” Before Ward could answer, the colonel cocked his head to one side. He looked east. “Something going on back there. You make out what?”

  Ward looked back the way he'd come, too. Somebody was… A broad grin spread across his face. “General Forrest's here, sir!”

  Nathan Bedford Forrest stayed happy about sending someone else off to deal with Fort Pillow while he stayed behind in Jackson for about ten minutes. After that, he started to fume. After that, he started another round of restless pacing. And after that…

  He could feel that he was wearing himself down. “If you want something done right, do it yourself,” he muttered, there in the parlor of the house that had held General Grant and now held him.

  He'd lived by that notion his whole life long. He'd had to, since his father died young and lef
t him the man of a large family. He'd farmed that way, he'd bought and sold slaves that way — and he'd got rich doing it, too — and he'd used the same rule when he was on the Memphis city council not long before the war.

  And he'd used that rule when he fought. He'd enlisted as a private. Now, less than three years later, he was a major general. He had no formal military training. He had next to no formal education of any sort, which was why he so disliked picking up a pen. He couldn't hold a train of thought when he wrote, and he spelled by ear. He knew no other way to do it, but he also knew educated men laughed when someone spelled that way. If he hated anything, it was being laughed at.

  But regardless of whether he could spell, he could damn well fight. He'd whipped uncounted officers trained at West Point. They all thought the same way. They all did the same things. They all looked for their foes to do the same things. When somebody did something different, they didn't know how to cope with it.

  He had nothing against Jim Chalmers except his — Forrest-like problem with subordination. The Virginian made as good a division commander as he had. In the end, though, Forrest lost the struggle with himself. If you want something done right, do it yourself

  He shouted for Captain Anderson and Dr. Cowan and the rest of his staff officers. “What the devil are we sitting around here for?” he shouted. “We need to get them damnyankees and our runaway niggers out of Fort Pillow.”

  The surgeon held out his hand to Forrest's chief of staff. “Told you so,” he said. Anderson ruefully passed him a brown Confederate banknote.

  Forrest turned away so they wouldn't see him smile. So Cowan had expected he wouldn't be able to stay away from a fight, had he? Well, they'd all served with him for a while now, surgeon and chief of staff, paymaster and engineering officer, and the more junior men as well. They had a pretty good notion of how he thought.

  He swung back toward them. “What are you waiting for?” he said. “Get your horses saddled up. We've got some powerful riding to do if we're going to catch up with McCulloch's brigade.”

  Dr. J. B. Cowan gave him a courtly bow. “Sir, most of us have our horses ready. We've been waiting on you.”

  “Well… shit,” Forrest said, and the officers laughed. He went on, “While I'm saddling my beast, gather up as much of the Nineteenth Tennessee Cavalry as you can. We'll take some of Colonel Wisdom's regiment along with us so nobody can say we just came along for the fight. “

  “Even if we did.” Dr. Cowan enjoyed poking fun at him, and probably did it more than anyone else had the nerve to.

  “Even if we did,” Forrest agreed good-naturedly. “Come on. Let's move.”

  Riding hurt. It had for some time now, and he feared it would till the end of his days. He'd taken several wounds, including one at Shiloh the doctors had thought would kill him and one from the pistol of a junior officer of his. He'd thought that one had killed him, and he'd given the lieutenant a knife wound in the belly that brought his end from blood poisoning. Forrest himself, meanwhile, went on.

  He went on, and no one but he knew the price he paid. John Bell Hood had lost an arm at Gettysburg and a leg at Chickamauga, and was a slave to laudanum to hold the pain at bay. Forrest, a stranger to whiskey and tobacco, had no more to do with opium in any form. If he hurt, he hurt — and he went on.

  On days when he hurt badly, he was apt to be meaner than usual.

  If he met the Federals on those days, he took it out on them. He'd lost track of how many U.S. soldiers he'd killed himself; something on the order of a couple of dozen. He didn't think any other general officer on either side could come close to matching his score. If no Yankees were close by when the pain got bad, his own men had to walk soft.

  Forrest patted his horse's neck as he rode west. McCulloch's troopers had left the road a chewed — up ribbon of mud. Like any good cavalryman, Forrest took care of his mount before he took care of himself… when he wasn't in combat. When he was… He wasn't sure whether he'd had more horses shot out from under him than he'd killed damnyankees. It was close, one way or the other.

  Bullets that hit the horses were mostly meant for him. He didn't intend to let himself get killed till he whipped the invaders from the north out of the Confederate States. Too bad for the animals, but the country needed him more than it needed them.

  “Invaders,” he said, and then something more sulfurous still. The garrison in Fort Pillow wasn't even made up of invaders. Yankees at least fought for their own side. You could respect that, even if you thought they'd chosen a bad cause. But the men of the Thirteen Tennessee Cavalry (U.S.)…

  What could you call them but traitors? They sold out their own land to join the enemy. Some of them had fought for him in earlier campaigns. Maybe they thought they could lord it over their friends and neighbors and kin if they switched sides. Maybe they just thought they'd get easier duty and better rations if they wore blue instead of butternut.

  Whatever they thought, he aimed to show them just how big a mistake they were making.

  As for the rest of the soldiers in Fort Pillow… Forrest muttered again, loud enough to make Captain Anderson send him a curious glance. Angrily, Nathan Bedford Forrest shook his head. Negroes had no business being soldiers, and the damnyankees had no business trying to turn them into soldiers.

  Negroes were property, like horses and mules and cattle. If any man believed that to the bottom of his soul, Bedford Forrest did. How not, when he'd got rich trading in them? If you put horses and mules and cattle into blue uniforms and gave them rifles, could they fight? Of course not — the idea was ridiculous. Nigger soldiers were just as ridiculous to Forrest.

  He hated the Yankees who armed Negroes and tried to train them to fight, not the blacks themselves. He wouldn't have been surprised if some of the bucks in Fort Pillow had been through his slave pens in Memphis one time or another. He had no trouble with blacks — as long as they worked in the fields or in the kitchen or somewhere like that. Deep down in his belly, he was convinced Northerners didn't know anything about Negroes, or they wouldn't try to put weapons in their hands. How could they know, when they didn't live side by side with them the way Southern whites did?

  His own slaves had gone to war with him, as teamsters and jacks of- all- trades. He'd promised to free them when the fighting was over, which no doubt went a long way toward keeping them quiet. In three years of warfare, only a handful had seized any of the countless chances to run off. He took that to mean they were satisfied with their lot.

  If it also meant they were scared to death of him, well, that wasn't so bad. And why shouldn't they be? Most of the Federal soldiers who ran up against his dragoons (oh, the Confederates called them cavalry, but they mostly fought on foot; they used horses to get where they were going in a hurry) were scared to death of them, and of him, too.

  He got into Brownsville about two in the afternoon. Brigadier General Chalmers greeted him with a half — sour, “Might have known you couldn't stay away.”

  “Might have known it myself,” Forrest allowed. The first word came out mought; he was a rich and famous backwoodsman, but a backwoodsman all the same. He said fit when he meant fought, too, and had several other turns of phrase that marked him for what he was. He lost no sleep over it. To his way of thinking, a man could be a gentleman without sounding as if he had a mouth full of butter. He got straight to business: “You find a guide to take us through the swamps and such?”

  “Sure did,” Chalmers answered. “Shaw!” he shouted.

  When Forrest found out Major Bradford had held W. J. Shaw in

  Fort Pillow, he sharply questioned the man. The last thing he wanted was a homemade Yankee deliberately turned loose to lead his men astray and bog them down. He didn't need long to decide Shaw was nothing of the sort. What the guide felt toward Bill Bradford was… what any good Tennessean should feel for the traitors who wore blue, as far as Forrest was concerned.

  “Good enough, Mr. Shaw,” he said, setting his left hand — the one he counted
of higher worth, for he was left — handed — on the guide's shoulder. “Let's go catch us some Federals.”

  “I'll get you there, General.” Shaw's eyes glowed with pride. So did Nathan Bedford Forrest's — with hunger.

  Jack Jenkins yawned as his horse pushed on through the darkness. He'd been in the saddle for twenty — four hours, more or less. He didn't think he'd ever been so weary. He hoped the horse didn't founder. It had carried him for a whole day, and they still had hours to go before they reached Fort Pillow.

  Somebody in front of him said, “Reckon we'll surprise the damnyankees when we hit 'em?”

  “Jesus Christ, we better,” Jenkins said. “Nobody'd reckon we could

  come so far so fast. Wouldn't believe it myself if I wasn't doin' it.”

  “Hope that Shaw fella knows where he's goin',” the other trooper said. Jenkins had no idea who he was. He couldn't see the man at all, and made out his horse only as a vague blur. Splashes and drips and hoofbeats did a good job of disguising the other man's voice — and, no doubt, Jenkins's, too.

  Not knowing who he was didn't mean disagreeing with him, not when he spoke such plain good sense. “If he doesn't, we're up the creek,” Jenkins said. In this part of western Tennessee, that might be literally true.

  The Hatchie River bottoms, people called the country between Brownsville and Fort Pillow. Mississippi had some swamps and sloughs and marshes that seemed to go on forever. This country struck Jack Jenkins as being as bad as any farther south, and all the worse at black, black midnight.

  “One thing,” said the talkative trooper up ahead of Jenkins. “Don't reckon we got to worry about any niggers gettin' ahead of us and warnin' the garrison.”

  “I should hope not,” Jenkins agreed. “Nobody could go faster'n we are. Hell, I don't see how we're goin' as quick as we are.” As if to underscore that, a wet branch smacked him in the face.

  As he spluttered, the other soldier said, “Not likely, no, but you never can tell what some crazy coon might try an' do. But I don't figure any nigger'd go around after dark in these parts. He'd be sure a hant'd get him.”