April 12, 1864 Tuesday
Nathan Bedford Forrest’s Confederate cavalry struck at Fort Pillow in an assault whose repercussions are still heard (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Fort_Pillow ). Opinion varied then and now as to whether it was simply a successful attack on a military objective or a massacre of Negro and white soldiers after the surrender. Fort Pillow, on the Mississippi River, was held by 557 Federal troops, including 262 Negro soldiers. Gen Forrest, on his active raid against important Federal communications and posts in west Kentucky and Tennessee, sent 1500 men against Fort Pillow. Forrest demanded surrender of the fort but Maj William F. Bradford refused and Forrest’s Confederates attacked. With little difficulty they poured into the large earthwork on the bluff. According to Forrest and other Southern sources, the Federal casualties of about 231 killed, 100 wounded, and 226 captured or missing resulted from fighting before surrender. According to extensive testimony taken afterward by the Federals, the Union troops surrendered almost at once and the soldiers were shot down afterward in what amounted to a “massacre,” especially of the Negroes. Confederate losses were put at 14 killed and 86 wounded. Later the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War heard purported evidence of numerous atrocities including the killing of many of the garrison after the surrender. Confederate military and civil authorities hotly denied these charges and called them hysterical propaganda. Perhaps a reasonable conclusion is that much confusion existed during the attack and that there were some unnecessary acts of violence by the Confederates, but that the majority of the casualties were the result of legitimate, though hardly humane, warfare. Nevertheless, “Fort Pillow” echoed infamously throughout the war and long remained an emotional issue with reliable evidence hard to come by.
The Fort Pillow affair dwarfed all the other fighting: skirmishes at Florence, Alabama; Pleasant Hill Landing, Tennessee; Van Buren, Arkansas; Fort Bisland, Louisiana; and Fremont’s Orchard, Colorado Territory. Expeditions by Federals moved up Matagorda Bay, Texas and from Point Lookout, Maryland. A Federal reconnaissance probed for a couple of days from Bridgeport down the Tennessee River to Triana, Alabama. Maj Gen Simon Bolivar Buckner (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Bolivar_Buckner ) assumed command of the Confederate Department of East Tennessee. Brigadier General Thomas Green (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Green_(general) ), CSA, is killed by an exploding artillery shell from Federal gunboats during the Battle of Blair's Landing, Louisiana.
Gen Robert E. Lee told his President, “I cannot see how we can operate with our present supplies. Any derangement in their arrival, or disaster t the R.R. would render it impossible for me to keep the army together….”
As Rear Admiral Porter's gunboats and Brigadier General T. K. Smith's transports retraced their course down the Red River from Springfield Landing, Louisiana, Confederate guns took them under heavy fire from the high bluffs overlooking the river. At Blair's Landing, dismounted cavalry supported by artillery, engaged the Union fleet. The 450-ton wooden side-wheeler U.S.S. Lexington, commanded by Lieutenant Bache, silenced the shore battery but the Confederate cavalry poured a hail of musket fire into the rest of the squadron. Lieutenant Commander Selfridge reported: "I waited till they got into easy shelling range, and opened upon them a heavy fire of shrapnel and canister. The rebels fought with unusual pertinacity for over an hour, delivering the heaviest and most concentrated fire of musketry that I have ever witnessed." What Porter described as "this curious affair, . . . a fight between infantry and gunboats", was finally decided by the gunboats' fire, which inflicted heavy losses on the Confederates, including the death of their commander, General Thomas Green. This engagement featured the use of a unique instrument, developed by Chief Engineer Thomas Doughty of U.S.S. Osage and later described by Selfridge as "a method of sighting the turret from the outside, by means of what would now be called a periscope. . . ." The high banks of the Red River posed a great difficulty for the ships' gunners in aiming their cannon from water level. Doughty's ingenious apparatus helped to solve that problem. Selfridge wrote that: "On first sounding to general quarters, . . . [I] went inside the turret to direct its fire, but the restricted vision from the peep holes rendered it impossible to see what was going on in the threatened quarter, whenever the turret was trained in the loading position. In this extremity I thought of the periscope, and hastily took up station there, well protected by the turret, yet able to survey the whole scene and to direct an accurate fire." Thus was the periscope, a familiar sight on gun turrets and on submarines of this century, brought into Civil War use on the Western waters.
Boats from U.S.S. South Carolina, commanded by Acting Lieutenant William W. Kennison, and U.S.S. T. A. Ward, commanded by Acting Master William L. Babcock, seized blockade running British steamer Alliance, which had run aground on Daufuskie Island, South Carolina, with cargo including glass, liquor, and soap.
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