Free This Republic of Suffering by Drew Gilpin Faust Page A

surrendered, was only the most notorious of such incidents. Others were perhaps even more grisly. At a battle at Poison Springs, Arkansas, which occurred in the same month as Fort Pillow, the First Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry lost 117 dead and only about half as many wounded. This was a suspicious ratio in itself, as numbers of wounded almost always far exceed numbers of slain. A Confederate officer described bodies “scalped …nearly all stripped…No black prisoners were taken.” A Union soldier confirmed “that the inhuman and blood thirsty enemy…was engaged in killing the wounded wherever found.” But a local newspaper defended the Confederate actions as entirely consistent with the larger purposes of the war, “We cannot treat negroes…as prisoners of war without a destruction of the social system for which we contend…We must claim the full control of all negroes who may fall into our hands, to punish with death, or any other penalty.” Slavery required subordination and control, and arming men elevated and empowered them. 22
    It was not just African American soldiers who were at risk of southern retribution. A Texas officer described with some amazement his unit’s engagement with a black regiment near Monroe, Louisiana: “I never saw so many dead negroes in my life. We took no prisoners, except the white officers, fourteen in number; these were lined up and shot after the negroes were finished. Next day they were thrown into a wagon, hauled to the Ouchita river and thrown in. Some were hardly dead—that made no difference—in they went.” 23
    Even black teamsters or servants working for the federals were at risk, and male slaves suspected of fleeing to join the Union army were more than fair game for Confederate rage. A Confederate major described an incident in which black civilians accompanying Union troops were slaughtered. “The battle-field was sickening…no orders, threats or commands could restrain the men from vengeance on the negroes, and they were piled in great heaps about the wagons, in the tangled brushwood, and upon the muddy and trampled road.” All too often, however, orders and commanders encouraged rather than restrained such atrocities. Private Harry Bird reported that Confederates after the Battle of the Crater in 1864 quieted wounded black soldiers begging for water “by a bayonet thrust.” Bird welcomed the subsequent order “to kill them all” it was a command “well and willingly…obeyed.” General Robert E. Lee, only a few hundred yards away, did nothing to intervene. 24

    â€œThe War in Tennessee—Rebel Massacre of the Union Troops After the Surrender at Fort Pillow, April 12.”
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper,
May 7, 1864
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    Jefferson Davis himself had approved the execution of four captured black soldiers in the fall of 1862, and Secretary of War James Seddon declared in April 1863 that “the Department has determined that negroes captured will not be regarded as prisoners of war.” General Kirby Smith, commander of the Trans Mississippi Department, even admonished an officer who had shown himself too merciful to black combatants. “I have been unofficially informed,” he wrote, “that some of your troops have captured negroes in arms. I hope this may not be so, and that your subordinates who may have been in command of capturing parties may have recognized the propriety of giving no quarter to armed negroes and their officers.” 25
    In the case of black soldiers and the officers who surrendered the privileges of whiteness by consenting to lead them, “propriety” seemed all too often to dictate murder. Killing was not simply justified but almost required, even when such action demanded suspension of fundamental rules of war and humanity. In practice, it would prove impossible for Confederates to maintain a policy of killing all