Listening to these two knuckleheads talk Civil War history on a recent show is both entertaining and disturbing at the same time. By the way, David Barton’s new book on Thomas Jefferson was recently voted “Least Credible Book in Print” at the History News Network. I have no doubt that the recognition is well deserved.
A Massacre of Biblical Proportions
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Does anyoone talk about atrocities committed during Shernan’s march to the sea or how Southern soldiers were treated at prison camps in New York or Chicago? If they are going to tell a story, tell the whole story.
Yes, plenty of historians have addressed those subjects.
There was a massacre of the surrendering troops at Fort Pillow and the “massacre” was not an invention of Yankee propaganda. Forrest was responsible, both as the commanding officer and because the blood-lust that got out of control was an expression of his own personality. “[It] was brutal slaughter beyond what should have occurred. People died who were attempting to surrender to surrender and should have been spared. … Although he lost control over the fighting at Fort Pillow, the Confederate cavalry commander clearly did not disapprove of the results.” (Wills, p. 196)
There are four well written and, more importantly, well-researched accounts of the massacre at Fort Pillow: the oldest was Albert Casteel’s first published work, “The Fort Pillow Massacre: A Fresh Examination of the Evidence,” _Civil War History_ March 1958. The second is an article by John Cimprich and Robert C. Mainfort, Jr published also in _Civil War History_ (December 1982), “Fort Pillow Revisited: New Evidence about an Old Controversy,”. See also Cimprich’s book, _Fort Pillow: A Civil War Massacre and Public Memory_ (Baton Rogue, 2005). The fourth is _An Unerring Fire: The Massacre at Fort Pillow_ by Richard Fuchs (Stackpole, $22.95) (See the review at http://www.civilwarnews.com/reviews/bookreviews.cfm?ID=341 ). To quote the reviewer, “this tragic episode could have easily been avoided, but that racial hatred prevailed and that the demons that drove Nathan Bedford Forrest all his life were unleashed in a climactic feeding frenzy hitherto not seen on an American battlefield.”
If you are interested, I can post several of the Confederate letters written home shortly after the “battle,” which John Cimprich and Robert C. Mainfort, Jr reprinted in their article. The essence of their arguments is that the historian should be cautious about anything written after the allegations of massacre began, but that we can learn a lot by seeing what participants wrote before those charges were made.
That’s why, to me, Ferguson’s account is so powerful. He was a naval officer, not directly involved in either the defense or assault on Fort Pillow, but spent a full day dealing with the immediate aftermath, and wrote about it within 24 hours in his report to his superiors. This was before the event became common public knowledge, before it became a topic of heated debate. Ferguson’s account was, I believe, later incorporated into the congressional investigation of the event, but at the time he was only writing it with the intent that it be read by his superiors in the chain of command.
What is even more disturbing is the lack of knowledge by the audience and the fact that they will believe what he is telling them.
People who descecrate Nathan Bedford Forrest are knuckleheads?
Ha ha! 😉
This is the report of Acting Master William Ferguson, commanding officer of U.S.S. Silver Cloud, the first Union officer on the scene after the massacre. His report is dated April 14, two days after the assault on the fort, long before the incident became widely known.
What happened at Fort Pillow was horrific enough without Beck and Barton’s hyperbole.
http://www.armchairgeneral.com/nathan-bedford-forrest-and-the-battle-of-fort-pillow-1864.htm
This fits a larger historical narrative that Beck, et. al., are pushing, that is ironic, amusing, and horrifying, all at the same time. That is, that slaveholders and southerners, because of their autocratic…and, um, slaveholding…tendencies, represent the “socialistic” desire to run people’s lives through overpowering government. Abolitionists, on the other hand, represent true conservative values because they stood up for individual rights, against that slaveholding/socialist power.
Ironic, because not a generation ago…hell, within my own memory…conservative types defended slavery, condemned abolitionists, and did things like deny Fort Pillow and equivocate on Forest’s legacy. (Many of my conservative friends, who aren’t as plugged in to Beck/Barton as we are, still hold this line. I tell them they need to get caught up with their revisionist compatriots.)
Amusing, because these conservative revisionists stumble over themselves to express moral outrage about slavery. The cartoonish indignation is hilarious, and leads them to say dumb things like “a massacre of Biblical proportions.”
Horrifying, because, well… that cartoonish indignation is not actually hilarious. The faulty logic on top of the real bad history and historical reasoning represents a sensibility of irrationality that is not helpful (to say the least) to healthy civic discourse in general. (Man, talk about cartoonish indignation…I am learning from the best!)
Then again, much of that irony might be self-generated. Beck’s particularly Utah-based historical inspirations (Skousen, etc.) are from outside the south and outside the conservative-history tradition that most of us here are accustomed to hearing about. They are not freighted with the baggage of having to defend slavery, and so slipping over to the abolitionist perspective might not be as great a leap as it seems to us.
Skinned alive? I’m not an expert on Fort Pillow but I’ve never seen that brought up. Are we seeing more Beck sensationalism for the purpose of teaching his distorted history? Barton and Beck are both shining examples of how psuedo-historians really mess up what happened in history.