Fact: Forrest was in command at Ft. Pillow, period, 100% his responsibility.
Fact: The attacking Confederates suffered 14 killed and 86 wounded.
Fact: The defending, fortified, Union force lost 231 killed and 100 wounded.
14 attackers killed, 231 defenders killed yet the number of wounded is nearly the same on both sides.
FACT: Forrest tried to stop it.
Read Shelby Foote’s account of this battle.
Bottom line, if his officers or enlisted were out of control to the degree that the kill ratio was 14:231, he had to be aware of the continued firing after the battle was over.
Foote is a great story-teller but not noted as a forensic historian. Check out: Albert Castel, The Fort Pillow Massacre: A Fresh Examination of the Evidence, Civil War History, 1958. Castel is a retired professor of History at Western Michigan University.
But let's go ahead and see what Foote has to say: Shelby Foote, The Civil War, a Narrative: Red River to Appomattox (New York: Vintage, 1986), 110
"Some kept going, right into the river, where a number drowned and the swimmers became targets for marksmen on the bluff. Others, dropping their guns in terror, ran back toward the Confederates with their hands up, and of these some were spared as prisoners, while others were shot down in the act of surrender."
How about Confederate soldier Achilles Clark, who wrote to his wife that “I with several others tried to stop the butchery. . . , but Gen. Forrest ordered them [Negro and white Union troops] shot down like dogs, and the carnage continued.”
Union surgeon Dr. Charles Fitch, who was taken prisoner by General Forrest, testified that he saw Confederate soldiers “kill every Negro who made his appearance in Federal uniform.” There is no question that Forrest demanded surrender twice threatening no quarter. When that was refused, Forrest's men carried out the No Quarter orders, Forrest probably saw the carnage and tried to stop it, too late for 231 black prisoners.
Forrest was responsible.