Abraham Lincoln, as sixteenth president

Manuscript letter written in a neat secretarial hand, 1 page (252 x 203 mm) on a bifolium of blue-ruled Executive Mansion letterhead, Washington, 3 May 1864, salutation in Lincoln's hand, "Hon. Secretary of the Navy"; very light discoloration at left margin and small mounting remnant on verso of integral blank from earlier framing.

Sotheby's New York, 26 June 2000, lot 73 (undesignated consignor)

The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler, 7:328–29. See also John Cimprich, Fort Pillow, a Civil War Massacre, and Public Memory (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005); Bruce Tap, The Fort Pillow Massacre: North, South, and the Status of African-Americans in the Civil War Era (New York and London: Routledge, 2014); Andrew Ward. River Run Red: The Fort Pillow Massacre in the American Civil War (New York: Viking, 2005)

Please note: The Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/alhtml/malhome.html) contain about fifteen letters and documents discussing how the government should respond to the Fort Pillow Massacre, including the opinions of cabinet secretaries Edwin M. Stanton (War), William H. Seward (State), Gideon Welles (Navy), Salmon P. Chase (Treasury), John P. Usher (Interior), Edward Bates (Attorney General), and Montgomery Blair (Postmaster General).

Manuscript letter written in a neat secretarial hand, 1 page (252 x 203 mm) on a bifolium of blue-ruled Executive Mansion letterhead, Washington, 3 May 1864, salutation in Lincoln's hand, "Hon. Secretary of the Navy"; very light discoloration at left margin and small mounting remnant on verso of integral blank from earlier framing.
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"[O]UR COLORED SOLDIERS, WITH THEIR WHITE OFFICERS, WERE … MASSACRED AFTER THEY HAD SURRENDERED." The brutal massacre of Black Union soldiers at Fort Pillow may well have influenced President Lincoln’s implementation of a more radical abolition policy. Gideon Johnson Pillow, a brigadier general in the Confederate Army, oversaw the construction of the eponymous fort in early 1862, on the Mississippi River, about forty miles north of Memphis, Tennessee. By June of that year, the Confederates had to abandon the fort, and it was occupied by Union forces, who used it, in coordination with the Union gunboat New Era, to protect the Federal navigation on the Mississippi.

Fort Pillow might have remained a little-known footnote to the Civil War had not Nathan Bedford Forrest launched a massive cavalry raid into western Kentucky and Tennessee in the spring of 1864. Forrest was a Confederate major general, a former slave trader, and a future founder of the Ku Klux Klan. Bedford was a proponent of guerilla warfare, and civilians on both sides of the conflict, as well as the Union Army, feared his approach. Bedford rode at the head of some 7,000 cavalry troopers, planning to disrupt Union operations from Paducah, Kentucky, to Memphis, capturing troops and supplies and destroying forts and posts. On 12 April 1864, Forrest arrived at Fort Pillow.

At this time, Fort Pillow was held by about 600 Union troops. The garrison was divided almost equally between black troopers (the 1st Alabama Siege Regiment Colored Heavy Artillery and the 2nd Colored Light Infantry) commanded by Major Lionel F. Booth and white soldiers (the 13th West Tennessee Cavalry) commanded by Major William F. Bradford. Forrest was able to surround the fort with about 2,000 cavalrymen, positioning his troops so that they could not be targeted by either the artillery guns of the fort or the cannons on the New Era.

At about 3:30 pm, Forrest demanded the unconditional surrender of Fort Pillow. Since Major Booth has been killed by a rebel sniper, Forrest’s ultimatum was delivered to Major Bradford, who requested an hour to make his decision. Forrest replied that he would delay his assault for only twenty minutes, and Bradford responded with the message, "I will not surrender."

The Confederate attack quickly overwhelmed the outmanned Union garrison. Bradford attempted to surrender, but Forrest’s troops maintained their fire, and the Battle of Fort Pillow devolved into a massacre that the military historian David J. Eicher characterized as "one of the bleakest, saddest events of American military history." The 600 Union troops suffered 574 casualties, with nearly 300 killed; the Confederates, by contrast, had fourteen men killed and 86 wounded.

A New York Times report from 16 April gives a vivid description of the carnage: "Immediately upon the surrender ensued a scene which utterly baffles description. Up to that time, comparatively few of our men had been killed; but, insatiate as fiends, bloodthirsty as devils incarnate, the Confederates commenced an indiscriminate butchery of the whites and blacks, including those of both colors who had been previously wounded. … Both white and black were bayoneted, shot or sabred; even dead bodies were horribly mutilated, and children of seven and eight years and several negro women killed in cold blood. Soldiers unable to speak from wounds were shot dead, and their bodies rolled down the banks into the river. The dead and wounded negroes were piled in heaps and burned, and several citizens who had joined our forces for protection were killed or wounded. Out of the garrison of six hundred, only two hundred remained alive. … Two negro soldiers, wounded at Fort Pillow, were buried by the rebels but afterward worked themselves out of their graves. …" The joint congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War investigated the incident and concluded that Confederates were guilty of atrocities, including murdering most of the garrison after it surrendered, burying Black soldiers alive, and setting fire to tents containing Federal wounded.

And while many later Southern accounts of Fort Pillow dismissed the reports of massacre as Union propaganda, contemporary Confederate reports tend to corroborate the official account. For instance, two days after the battle, Sergeant Achilles V. Clark, serving under Forrest’s command, described the action in a letter to his sister: "The slaughter was awful—words cannot describe the scene. The poor deluded negroes would run up to our men, fall upon their knees and with uplifted hands scream for mercy but they were ordered to their feet and then shot down. The white men fared but little better. Their fort turned out to be a great slaughter pen—blood, human blood, stood about in pools and brains could have been gathered up in any quantity. I with several others tried to stop the butchery and at one time had partially succeeded but Gen. Forrest ordered them shot like dogs and the carnage continued. Finally our men became sick of blood and the firing ceased."

President Lincoln first addressed the Fort Pillow incident during a speech at the Sanitary Fair in Baltimore on 18 April, six days after the battle and just two days after the New York Times story shocked the North. "A painful rumor, true I fear, has reached us of the massacre by the rebel forces at Fort Pillow, in the west end of Tennessee on the Mississippi river of some three hundred colored soldiers and white officers who had just been overpowered by their assailants. There seems to be some anxiety in the public mind whether the government is doing its duty to the colored soldier, and to the service, at this point. At the beginning of the war, and for some time, the use of colored troops was not contemplated; and how the change of purpose was wrought, I will not now take time to explain. Upon a clear conviction of duty I resolved to turn that element of strength to account; and I am responsible for it to the American people, to the Christian world, to history, and on my final account to God. Having determined to use the negro as a soldier, there is no way but to give him all the protection given to any other soldier. … We are having the Fort Pillow affair thoroughly investigated. … If there has been the massacre of three hundred there, or even the tenth part of three hundred, it will be conclusively proved; and being so proved, the retribution shall as surely come. It will be a matter of grave consideration in what exact course to apply the retribution; but in the supposed case, it must come" (Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 7:304–05).

After Lincoln’s speech, the Northern media continued to shine a spotlight on Fort Pillow. Both Frank Leslie's Illustrated Weekly and Harper's Weekly published reports. The 30 April issue of Harper’s featured a full-page woodcut illustration of the massacre and declared that "The annals of savage warfare nowhere record a more inhuman, fiendish butchery than this, perpetrated by the representatives of the 'superior civilization' of the States in rebellion."

As the truth about the massacre emerged and was confirmed, Lincoln struggled to find an appropriate response. On 3 May, he sent virtually identical letters to the members of his cabinet, including the present to Secretary Welles:

"It is now quite certain that a large number of our colored soldiers, with their white officers, were, by the rebel force, massacred after they had surrendered at the recent capture of Fort Pillow. So much is known, though the evidence is not quite ready to be laid before me.—Meanwhile I will thank you to prepare, and give me in writing, your opinion as to what course the Government should take in this case."

Written replies from seven cabinet members survive, all of which demanded that the Confederate government be called on to avow or disavow the massacre. Welles, Secretary of State William Seward, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, and Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Chase all further proposed that a number of Confederate prisoners of war equal in rank and number to the Federal troops massacred at Fort Pillow be separately confined for retaliatory execution pending the Confederate government’s avowal of the massacre. However, Secretary of the Interior John Usher, Attorney General Edward Bates, and Postmaster General Montgomery Blair all argued against retaliation on prisoners of war and instead urged that Union efforts be focused on capturing and punishing the actual perpetrators of the massacre. 

On 6 May, Lincoln held a cabinet meeting, at which Secretary Welles played a principal role, to review the various options that had been suggested. Welles’s diary entry for that date provides a succinct overview of the discussion. "At the Cabinet-meeting each of the members read his opinion. There had, I think been some concert between Seward and Stanton and probably Chase; that is, they had talked on the subject, although there was not coincidence of views on all respects. Although I was dissatisfied with my own, it was as well as most others.

"Between Mr. Bates and Mr. Blair a suggestion came out that met my views better than anything that had previously been offered. It is that the President should by proclamation declare the officers who had command at the massacre outlaws, and require any of our officers who may capture them, to detain them in custody and not exchange them, but hold them to punishment. The thought was not very distinctly enunciated. In a conversation that followed the reading of our papers, I expressed myself favorable to this new suggestion, which relieved the subject of much of the difficulty. It avoids communication with the Rebel authorities. Takes the matter in our own hands. We get rid of the barbarity of retaliation.

"Stanton fell in with my suggestion, so far as to propose that, should Forrest, or [Brigadier General James] Chalmers, or any officer conspicuously in this butchery be captured, he should be turned over for trial for the murders at Fort Pillow. I sat beside Chase and mentioned to him some of the advantages of this course, and he said it made a favorable impression. I urged him to say so, for it appeared to me that the President and Seward did not appreciate it."

Lincoln wrote a letter to Stanton on 17 May 1864, authorizing him to inform the Confederacy that he was prepared to execute a like number of Rebel officers and men in retaliation for Fort Pillow—but he evidently never delivered the letter. Although writing it was probably a cathartic act, Lincoln was no doubt fearful that his execution of Confederate prisoners of war would begin an endless cycle of retaliation between the combatants. But he was also doubtless most influenced by his own sense of justice and humanity. Frederick Douglass, the former slave and abolitionist leader, met with Lincoln at the White House in August 1864 to urge retaliation against the South for its brutal treatment of black soldiers. In his "Reminiscences," published in the New York Tribune of 5 July 1885, Douglass wrote "I shall never forget the benignant expression of his face, the tearful look of his eye, and quiver in his voice when he deprecated a resort to retaliatory measures. 'Once begun,' said he, 'I do not know where such a measure would stop.' He said he could not take men out and kill them in cold blood for what was done by others. If he could get hold of the persons who were guilty of killing the colored prisoners in cold blood, the case would be different, but he could not kill the innocent for the guilty."

General Grant's Wilderness Campaign shortly thereafter diverted much public attention from Fort Pillow, but the Confederate attack there gave the North an important propaganda victory, which it continued to exploit as a rallying point for the duration of the war; black Union soldiers often charged into battle with the war cry, "Remember Fort Pillow!" Fort Pillow also marked a pivotal element in the decision of the South to treat African-American Union troops as soldiers in the field and prisoners of war in captivity, rather than as slaves in insurrection.

Only one other of Lincoln's 3 May 1864 letters to his cabinet members has ever appeared at auction, the one sent to Secretary of the Interior Usher (Christie's New York, 8 November 1996, lot 165). The Usher letter was acquired and is retained by the Gilder Lehrman Collection.