Union Fort, and Battle of Fort Pillow
Because of its strategic location, controlling traffic on the Mississippi River, the fort was attacked and captured by the Union Army, which controlled it during most of the war. An exception to this control occurred for less than one day immediately after the Battle of Fort Pillow in 1864.
June 4, 1862 – American Civil War: Confederate troops evacuated Fort Pillow on the Mississippi River, leaving the way clear for Union troops to take Memphis, Tennessee.
The Confederate victory at the Battle of Fort Pillow (April 1864) ended in the killing of 229 black and white Union soldiers out of 262 engaged in the battle. This slaughter by the Southern troops under Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest has been labeled a massacre; Confederate apologists still debate how much "slaughter" actually took place, and some believe the reports were exaggerated. While the Union casualty count for the battle does not indicate that the Confederate forces took many prisoners, Confederate records show about 200 prisoners were shipped south. In any case, "Remember Fort Pillow!" became a battle cry among Black soldiers for the remainder of the Civil War.
In 1866, the Union Army created a cemetery for both Confederate and Union soldiers south of the battle site. In 1867, they moved about 250 bodies of Confederate and Union soldiers from that cemetery to the Memphis National Cemetery.
Read more about this topic: Fort Pillow State Park
Famous quotes containing the words union, battle, fort and/or pillow:
“The rage for road building is beneficent for America, where vast distance is so main a consideration in our domestic politics and trade, inasmuch as the great political promise of the invention is to hold the Union staunch, whose days already seem numbered by the mere inconvenience of transporting representatives, judges and officers across such tedious distances of land and water.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“How good bad music and bad reasons sound when we are marching into battle against an enemy.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“‘Tis said of love that it sometimes goes, sometimes flies; runs with one, walks gravely with another; turns a third into ice, and sets a fourth in a flame: it wounds one, another it kills: like lightning it begins and ends in the same moment: it makes that fort yield at night which it besieged but in the morning; for there is no force able to resist it.”
—Miguel De Cervantes (1547–1616)
“With the half of a broken hope for a pillow at night
That somehow the right is the right
And the smooth shall bloom from the rough:
Lord, if that were enough?”
—Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894)