It would be helpful were you to give a citation to these accounts.
To: stand watie
Forrest either ordered his men to accept no surrender or his Confederates lost control but in either case, they began to slaughter black soldiers. The casualty list confirms a massacre. Confederates suffered 14 killed and 86 wounded, while the Union force lost 231 killed and 100 wounded; only 58 of the 226 surviving Union prisoners were black soldiers.
The U.S. Congresss Committee on the Conduct of the War investigated, and after much testimony from survivorsincluding horrifying accounts of black soldiers being buried aliveit denounced the Confederate actions as murder and atrocity. Forrests most complimentary biographer, Brian Steel Wills, concluded that the committees findings were valid and that Forrest was responsible for the slaughter.
Check it out:
Brian Steel Wills, A Battle from the Start: The Life of Nathan Bedford Forrest, 1992
See also:
Albert Castel, The Fort Pillow Massacre: A Fresh Examination of the Evidence, Civil War History, 1958
I accept that Forrest was a capable officer and certainly his bravery is unquestioned. The fly in the buttermilk is that Forrest fought in the west, the Confederacy surrendered in the east.
65 posted on 07/21/2007 10:16:56 PM PDT by gandalftb (Blessed be the Lord that teaches my hands for the war, and my fingers to fight. (Sniper Jackson))
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