Franklin Repository

An official investigation of the rebel butcheries at Fort Pillow has been made by a committee of Congress, and they more than confirm the first reports of the fiendish atrocity of the rebel victors. After referring to their shameless violation of a flag-of-truce and the capture of the Fort, the report says:

Then followed a scene of cruelty and murder without a parallel in civilized war, which needed but the tomahawk and scalping-knife to exceed the worst atrocities ever committed by savages. The Rebels commenced an indiscriminate slaughter, sparing neither age nor sex, white or black, soldier or civilian. The officers and men seemed to vie with each other in the dev[i]lish work. Men, women and children, wherever found, were indiscriminately shot down, beaten and hacked with sabres. Some of the children, not more than ten years old, were forced to stand up and face their mothers while being shot. The sick and wounded were butche[re]d without mercy, the Rebels even entering the hospital buildings and dragging them out to be shot, or killing them as they lay there unable to offer the least resistance. All over the hillside the work of murder was going on.

Numbers of our men were gathered together in lines or groups, and deliberately shot. Some were shot while in the riber, while others on the bank were shot and their bodies kicked into the water, many of them still living, but unable to make any exertion to save themselves from drowning. Some of the Rebels stood upon the top of the hill, or a short distance down its side, and called to our soldiers to come up to them, and as they approached shot them down in cold blood, if their guns or pistolds [sic] missed fire forcing them to stand there until they were again prepared to fire. All around were cries of "No quarter, no quarter!" "kill the --negroes!" "shoot them down!" All who asked for mercy were answered by the most cruel taunts and sneers.

Some were spared for a time only to be murdered under circumstances of greater cruelty. No cruelty which the most fiendish maligmity [sic] could devise was omitted by their murderers. One white soldier, who was wounded in the leg so as to be unable to walk, was made to stand up while his tormentors shot him. Others who were wounded and unable to stand up, were held up and again shot. one negro who had been ordered by a Rebel officer to hold his horse, was killed by him when he remonstrated. Another, a mere child, whom an officer had taken up behind him on his horse, was seen by Chalmers who at once ordered the officer to put him down and shoot him, which was done. The huts and tents in which many of the wounded had sought shelter were set on fire both that night and the next morning, while the wounded were still in them, those only escaping who were able to get themselves out, or who could prevail on others less injured than themselves to help them out, and even some of them thus seeking to escape the flames were met by these ruffians and brutally shot down, or had their brains beaten out. One man was deliberately fastened down to the floor of a tent, face upwards, by means of nails driven through his clothing and into the boards under him so that he could not possibly escape, and then the tent set on fire. Another was nailed to the side of a building, outside of the fort, and then the building set on fire and burned. The charred remains of five or six bodies were afterwards found, all but one so much disfigured and consumed by the flames that they could not be identified, and the identification of that one is not absolutely certain, although there can hardly be a doubt that it was the body of Lieut. Akerstrom, Quartermaster of the Thirteenth Virginia Cavalry, and a native Tennesseean. Several witnesses who saw the remains, and who were personally acquainted with him while living here, testified that it is their firm belief that it was his body that was thus treated. These deeds of murder and cruelty closed when night came on, only to be renewed the next morning, when the demons carefully sought among the dead lying about in all directions for any other wounded yet alive and those they killed.

Scores of the dead and wounded were found there the day of the massacre by the men from some of our gun-boats, who were permitted to go on shore and collect the wounded and bury the dead. The Rebels themselves had made a pretense of burying a great many of their victims, but they had merely thrown them, without the least regard for care or decency, into trenches and ditches about the fort, or the little hollows and ravines on the hillside, covering them but partially with earth. Portions of heads and faces, hands and feet, were found pro-truding through the earth in every direction even when your committee visited the spot two weeks afterwards, although parties of men had been sent on shore from time to time to bury the bodies unburied, and rebury the others and were even then engaged in the same work. We found the evidences of this murder and cruelty still most painfully. We saw bodies still unburied, at some distance from the fort, of some sick men, who had been fleeing from the hospital, and beaten down and brutally murdered, and their bodies left where they had fallen. We could still see the faces, and hands and feet of men, white and black, protruding out of the ground whose graves had not been reached by those engaged in reinterring the victims of the massacre, and although a great deal of rain had fallen within the preceding two weeks the ground, more especially on the side at the foot of the bluff where the most of the murders had been committed, was still discolored by the blood of our brave but unfortunate men, and the logs and trees showed but too plainly the evidences of the atrocities perpetrated there. Many other instances of equally atrocious cruelty might be enumerated, but your committee feel compelled to refrain from giving here more of the heart-sickening details, and refer to the statements contained in the voluminous testimony herewith submitted. Those statements were obtained by them from eyewitnesses and sufferers. Many of them, as they were examined by your Committee, were lying upon beds of pain and suffering; some so feeble that their lips could with difficulty frame the words by which they endeavored to convey some idea of the cruelty which had been inflicted on them, and which they had seen inflicted on others. In reference to the fate of Maj. Bradford, who was in command of the fort when it was captured, and who had, up to that time, received no injury, there seems to be no doubt. The general understanding ever[y]where seemed to be that he had been brutally murdered the day after he was taken prisoner.

How many of our troops thus fell victims to the malignity and barbarity of Forrest and his followers cannot yet be definitely ascertained. Two officers belonging to the garrison were absent at the time of the capture and massacre. Of the remaining officers but two are known to be living, and they are wounded, and now in the Hospital at Mound City. One of them (Capt. Porter) may even now be dead, as the Surgeons, when your Committee were there, expressed no hope of his recovery. Of the men, from three hundred to four hundred are known to have been killed at Fort Pillow, of whom at least three hundred were murdered in cold blood, after the fort was in possession of the Rebels, and our men had thrown down their arms and ceased to offer resistance. Of the survivors, except the sounded in the hospital, at Mound City, and the few who succeeded in making their escape unhurt, nothing definite is known, and is to be feared that many have been murdered after being taken away from the fort. When your committee arrived at Memphis, Tenn., they found and examined a man, (Mr. McLogan,) who had been conscripted by some of Forrest's force, but who, with other conscripts, had succeeded in making his escape.

He testifies that while two companies of Rebel troops, with Maj. Bradford and many other prisoners, were on their march from Browsville and Jackson, Tenn., Maj. Bradford was taken by five Rebels, one an officer, led about fifty yards from the line of march, and deliberately murdered in view of all those assembled. He fell, killed instantly by three musket balls, and while asking that his life might be spared, as he had fought them manfully and was deserving of a better fate. The motive for the murder of Maj. Bradford seems to have been the simple fact that, although a native of the South he remained loyal to his Government.