39. The Killing Fields
“Nathan Bedford Forrest was one of the wealthiest men in the south, growing rich not only from the Mississippi plantations he owned, but also the slave trading business he founded in Memphis. The civil war interfered with his slave trading endeavors, and the fact that Mississippi and Tennessee were on opposite sides of the war didn’t help his finances. After the war, Forrest sold his trading business and moved south to Vicksburg, where he had purchased land next to Jefferson Davis’s Hurricane Plantation [1].
Forrest’s fortunes recovered as his network of plantations returned to profitability, and he took to improving his Vicksburg plantation, named Carnation. The main house was expanded into a mansion that Jefferson Davis once described in a letter as a “Moorish monstrosity”, and two guest houses were constructed. Forrest read journals on “scientific racism”, becoming particularly interested in the made-up condition of “drapetomania” that Samuel Cartwright claimed was a mental disorder that caused slaves to escape [2]. In 1877, Forrest decided that if he rebuilt his slave quarters at Carnation to model his idea of an “African village,” it would make his slaves feel at home and induce them to stay. This consisted of mud-brick huts with thatched roofs that were generally poorer shelter than even the previous wooden shacks [3]. Jefferson Davis found the endeavour “amusing” and replaced his own slave quarters with similar “African huts,” and the trend quickly spread throughout the plantations of the Mississippi delta.
The decision by Maryland to abolish slavery, as well as Virginia’s constitution that not only abolished slavery but sought to dismantle as thoroughly as possible the old plantocracy, troubled Forrest. “If even the Old Dominion and other noble southern states have moved towards radicalism, this bodes ill for our southern way of life in Mississippi,” he wrote to a friend. “I have no doubt that the negroes here will become restless – even if word doesn’t spread, the abolition up in Richmond will be a miasma, the stench of blacks rampaging about in the Tidewater will subconsciously infect the blacks here.”
This was the backdrop for the Red Delta.
On June 3rd, 1879, a warm and unusually dry day, one of the guest houses at Carnation caught fire and burned down, killing one of Forrest’s friends. Forrest, described as “generally mild-mannered unless provoked, flew into a rage when he heard of the fire. “His face was red with fury,” his son wrote. “He paced about in a frenzy.” The next day, Forrest assembled a posse of several dozen armed men and rode into the slave quarters. Each hut was ruthlessly searched as the confused and worried slaves looked on. “It was like a small army had invaded the village,” Forrest’s son recalled in his memoirs. “Negroes old and young milled about while the militiamen searched for weapons and evidence. There was a preponderance of it.” His son was lying, however – though Forrest loudly proclaimed from horseback that “kegs of powder, dozens of rifles, hundreds of bullets, all the trappings of a slave insurrection” were discovered, there is no evidence that any such plot or weapons cache existed.
Forrest and his men seized the male occupants of the hut where the weapons were discovered, as well as the male occupants of two neighbouring huts. “Here are the arsonists, the murders, the savage barbarians who seek to kill every last white man in the union,” Forrest declared, gesturing at the bound men with his sabre. Forrest decided that erecting gallows would take too long and, dragging the captives to a cotton barn, proceeded to hold a kangaroo court [4]. The “evidence” was presented and, without hearing from the defendants, Forrest sentenced them to death by firing squad. Before the slaves could properly protest, the militiamen were already dragging them outside. Forrest ordered their heads placed on pikes near the African village, saying “let this be a warning to all would-be insurrectionists: failure death is your only fate. We will not be replaced, our superior position cannot and will not be usurped.”
After the horrid display of violence, things seemed to have calmed down and Forrest’s son relates that he “had calmed considerably since that apoplectic fury.” Then, a week after the executions, an overseer at Jefferson Davis’s Hurricane plantation was found dead in the cotton fields. While his death was likely due to heatstroke, Davis claimed that it was clear evidence of a percolating slave insurrection. He quickly rode to Carnation with his family and three guards to warn Forrest. This time, Forrest did not fly into a rage. “His face was full of grim determination, and he was calm as he informed us: ‘it is us or them now.’” He sent out a call for volunteers for a “militia to restore tranquillity,” and hundreds answered the call. The militia that Forrest assembled was little more than a mob, hungering for violence. Forrest and his posse started at Hurricane plantation, where they surrounded the slave quarters [5]. From his horse, Forrest accused them of harboring insurrectionists, the killers of the overseer, and demanded that they be handed over. The confused and terrified slaves began to murmur among themselves. The murmur rose into a panic as some slaves pleaded for mercy while others ran around trying to find an avenue of escape.
Deciding that enough time had been wasted, one of Forrest’s men shot and killed a young man and wounded his wife and father. As some slaves tried to make a run for it, Forrest declared that they were “if not insurrectionists, sympathizers to the black barbarians and just as guilty.” He ordered them all seized, and his frenzied mob surged forward. One enslaved man attempting to flee was shot in the back, and then Forrest’s men opened fire, shooting their weapons indiscriminately. Some, worried about friendly fire, started hacking about with knives and axes. As the killing reached a crescendo, slaves sought refuge inside the huts. In response, Forrest ordered them burned down, with the slaves still inside. While a few managed to escape, most of the survivors were put through a kangaroo court and shot. Over 315 enslaved people were killed in the Hurricane massacre, but amid the chaos, rumors spread of a slave insurrection and other white mobs formed, going from plantation to plantation and killing innocent men, women, and children. By the end of June, nearly 800 enslaved people had been killed, their rotting bodies piled up beside the roads.
News of the massacres was broken in the north by the New-York Tribune, which published reports of “vicious murders of negroes in the Delta Country of Mississippi,” based on the account of a northern businessman who had stopped at the Vicksburg railway station. Further evidence was furnished by the Pennsylvanian Advocate, which relied upon the eyewitness testimony of two slaves at Hurricane. Isaiah Montgomery [6], and Benjamin T. Green. Montgomery, the only literate one of the pair, relayed to the Advocate the harrowing tale of the indiscriminate killings at Hurricane and throughout the Delta, and how he and Green managed to just barely elude Forrest’s posse. The article closed with the lines “this orgy of race-killing has drenched the delta in the blood of the innocent. Col. Forrest is little more than a barbarian blinded by bloodlust.” Days later, the Advocate also published photographs of Forrest and his mob standing by the burned slave quarters and corpses that were taken by a northern amateur photographer.
The north was outraged by the month-long killing spree. In the Senate, James Blaine furiously condemned slavery, claiming that “the pretension that the white man is superior to, and entitled to ownership of, the negro is a corrosive one. It reduces men to the level of beasts. Just as the bodies of the slain putrefy the wells of the Mississippi delta, the vitriol in their killers putrefy the values, the moral fiber, of our Republic. It is more than a crime; it is a stain on what we hold dear as Americans.” Others were even more blunt, with James Garfield calling Forrest “one of the worst, most savage bloodletters in civilization.” President Hendricks remained largely silent except to condemn the “unbecoming brutality” of Forrest’s mob. In a startling breach of decorum, Whig senators loudly booed Senator Edmund Pettus when he rose to defend Forrest as “acting swiftly and decisively to crush a real slave plot.” Roscoe Conkling yelled out “you lie! The blood of the slain is on your hands just as much as it is on theirs’!”
The prospect of abolishing slavery had seemed radical to many northerners before news of the Red Delta broke. But after, abolition was increasingly seen as the only way to end the violence and human rights abuses of black southerners. If only it were that simple…”
From CHAINS BROKEN, CHAINS SHACKLED by Edward Northam, published 2011
“And to those who say that the Red Delta massacre is who we are as a nation, that all of our sacred values and lofty ideals can be distilled down to the base, thuggish, contemptible savagery of a bunch of racists. To those who tar the entire country, your country, and my country, as no better than a vile tragedy from a hundred and fifty years ago, who claim that tragedy as grounds to erase every good thing that’s ever happened here, let me say this: regardless of the past, regardless of the suffering of generations past, we as a nation have taken great strides towards equality, towards justice, towards freedom. Perhaps the greatest testament to the greatness of this nation is that all that came before us is not who we are now [7].”
-Senator Thad Marshall (W-Neb.) delivering the keynote address at the 2020 WNC, July 14th, 2020
[1] OTL it belonged to his brother, TTL Jefferson inherits it after his brother’s death.
[2] This is both insane and 100% real. I couldn’t make this stuff up.
[3] This just seems like, amid lots of revivalist architecture, what slavers with too much ill-gotten money would do.
[4] Funnily enough, the term kangaroo court was mentioned in American newspapers as early as either 1853 or 1841.
[5] Similar to the opening of OTL’s Fort Pillow Massacre, where Forrest led troops in massacring Union POWs, many of whom were black.
[6] The son of Benjamin Montgomery, a slave of Joseph Davis who Davis taught to read and write and made him a trusted overseer/manager of the plantation. His son Isaiah was also taught to read and write.
[7] Taken from the (great) song this chapter’s title is taken from, The Killing Fields by Rosanne Cash.
“Nathan Bedford Forrest was one of the wealthiest men in the south, growing rich not only from the Mississippi plantations he owned, but also the slave trading business he founded in Memphis. The civil war interfered with his slave trading endeavors, and the fact that Mississippi and Tennessee were on opposite sides of the war didn’t help his finances. After the war, Forrest sold his trading business and moved south to Vicksburg, where he had purchased land next to Jefferson Davis’s Hurricane Plantation [1].
Forrest’s fortunes recovered as his network of plantations returned to profitability, and he took to improving his Vicksburg plantation, named Carnation. The main house was expanded into a mansion that Jefferson Davis once described in a letter as a “Moorish monstrosity”, and two guest houses were constructed. Forrest read journals on “scientific racism”, becoming particularly interested in the made-up condition of “drapetomania” that Samuel Cartwright claimed was a mental disorder that caused slaves to escape [2]. In 1877, Forrest decided that if he rebuilt his slave quarters at Carnation to model his idea of an “African village,” it would make his slaves feel at home and induce them to stay. This consisted of mud-brick huts with thatched roofs that were generally poorer shelter than even the previous wooden shacks [3]. Jefferson Davis found the endeavour “amusing” and replaced his own slave quarters with similar “African huts,” and the trend quickly spread throughout the plantations of the Mississippi delta.
The decision by Maryland to abolish slavery, as well as Virginia’s constitution that not only abolished slavery but sought to dismantle as thoroughly as possible the old plantocracy, troubled Forrest. “If even the Old Dominion and other noble southern states have moved towards radicalism, this bodes ill for our southern way of life in Mississippi,” he wrote to a friend. “I have no doubt that the negroes here will become restless – even if word doesn’t spread, the abolition up in Richmond will be a miasma, the stench of blacks rampaging about in the Tidewater will subconsciously infect the blacks here.”
This was the backdrop for the Red Delta.
On June 3rd, 1879, a warm and unusually dry day, one of the guest houses at Carnation caught fire and burned down, killing one of Forrest’s friends. Forrest, described as “generally mild-mannered unless provoked, flew into a rage when he heard of the fire. “His face was red with fury,” his son wrote. “He paced about in a frenzy.” The next day, Forrest assembled a posse of several dozen armed men and rode into the slave quarters. Each hut was ruthlessly searched as the confused and worried slaves looked on. “It was like a small army had invaded the village,” Forrest’s son recalled in his memoirs. “Negroes old and young milled about while the militiamen searched for weapons and evidence. There was a preponderance of it.” His son was lying, however – though Forrest loudly proclaimed from horseback that “kegs of powder, dozens of rifles, hundreds of bullets, all the trappings of a slave insurrection” were discovered, there is no evidence that any such plot or weapons cache existed.
Forrest and his men seized the male occupants of the hut where the weapons were discovered, as well as the male occupants of two neighbouring huts. “Here are the arsonists, the murders, the savage barbarians who seek to kill every last white man in the union,” Forrest declared, gesturing at the bound men with his sabre. Forrest decided that erecting gallows would take too long and, dragging the captives to a cotton barn, proceeded to hold a kangaroo court [4]. The “evidence” was presented and, without hearing from the defendants, Forrest sentenced them to death by firing squad. Before the slaves could properly protest, the militiamen were already dragging them outside. Forrest ordered their heads placed on pikes near the African village, saying “let this be a warning to all would-be insurrectionists: failure death is your only fate. We will not be replaced, our superior position cannot and will not be usurped.”
After the horrid display of violence, things seemed to have calmed down and Forrest’s son relates that he “had calmed considerably since that apoplectic fury.” Then, a week after the executions, an overseer at Jefferson Davis’s Hurricane plantation was found dead in the cotton fields. While his death was likely due to heatstroke, Davis claimed that it was clear evidence of a percolating slave insurrection. He quickly rode to Carnation with his family and three guards to warn Forrest. This time, Forrest did not fly into a rage. “His face was full of grim determination, and he was calm as he informed us: ‘it is us or them now.’” He sent out a call for volunteers for a “militia to restore tranquillity,” and hundreds answered the call. The militia that Forrest assembled was little more than a mob, hungering for violence. Forrest and his posse started at Hurricane plantation, where they surrounded the slave quarters [5]. From his horse, Forrest accused them of harboring insurrectionists, the killers of the overseer, and demanded that they be handed over. The confused and terrified slaves began to murmur among themselves. The murmur rose into a panic as some slaves pleaded for mercy while others ran around trying to find an avenue of escape.
Deciding that enough time had been wasted, one of Forrest’s men shot and killed a young man and wounded his wife and father. As some slaves tried to make a run for it, Forrest declared that they were “if not insurrectionists, sympathizers to the black barbarians and just as guilty.” He ordered them all seized, and his frenzied mob surged forward. One enslaved man attempting to flee was shot in the back, and then Forrest’s men opened fire, shooting their weapons indiscriminately. Some, worried about friendly fire, started hacking about with knives and axes. As the killing reached a crescendo, slaves sought refuge inside the huts. In response, Forrest ordered them burned down, with the slaves still inside. While a few managed to escape, most of the survivors were put through a kangaroo court and shot. Over 315 enslaved people were killed in the Hurricane massacre, but amid the chaos, rumors spread of a slave insurrection and other white mobs formed, going from plantation to plantation and killing innocent men, women, and children. By the end of June, nearly 800 enslaved people had been killed, their rotting bodies piled up beside the roads.
News of the massacres was broken in the north by the New-York Tribune, which published reports of “vicious murders of negroes in the Delta Country of Mississippi,” based on the account of a northern businessman who had stopped at the Vicksburg railway station. Further evidence was furnished by the Pennsylvanian Advocate, which relied upon the eyewitness testimony of two slaves at Hurricane. Isaiah Montgomery [6], and Benjamin T. Green. Montgomery, the only literate one of the pair, relayed to the Advocate the harrowing tale of the indiscriminate killings at Hurricane and throughout the Delta, and how he and Green managed to just barely elude Forrest’s posse. The article closed with the lines “this orgy of race-killing has drenched the delta in the blood of the innocent. Col. Forrest is little more than a barbarian blinded by bloodlust.” Days later, the Advocate also published photographs of Forrest and his mob standing by the burned slave quarters and corpses that were taken by a northern amateur photographer.
The north was outraged by the month-long killing spree. In the Senate, James Blaine furiously condemned slavery, claiming that “the pretension that the white man is superior to, and entitled to ownership of, the negro is a corrosive one. It reduces men to the level of beasts. Just as the bodies of the slain putrefy the wells of the Mississippi delta, the vitriol in their killers putrefy the values, the moral fiber, of our Republic. It is more than a crime; it is a stain on what we hold dear as Americans.” Others were even more blunt, with James Garfield calling Forrest “one of the worst, most savage bloodletters in civilization.” President Hendricks remained largely silent except to condemn the “unbecoming brutality” of Forrest’s mob. In a startling breach of decorum, Whig senators loudly booed Senator Edmund Pettus when he rose to defend Forrest as “acting swiftly and decisively to crush a real slave plot.” Roscoe Conkling yelled out “you lie! The blood of the slain is on your hands just as much as it is on theirs’!”
The prospect of abolishing slavery had seemed radical to many northerners before news of the Red Delta broke. But after, abolition was increasingly seen as the only way to end the violence and human rights abuses of black southerners. If only it were that simple…”
From CHAINS BROKEN, CHAINS SHACKLED by Edward Northam, published 2011
“And to those who say that the Red Delta massacre is who we are as a nation, that all of our sacred values and lofty ideals can be distilled down to the base, thuggish, contemptible savagery of a bunch of racists. To those who tar the entire country, your country, and my country, as no better than a vile tragedy from a hundred and fifty years ago, who claim that tragedy as grounds to erase every good thing that’s ever happened here, let me say this: regardless of the past, regardless of the suffering of generations past, we as a nation have taken great strides towards equality, towards justice, towards freedom. Perhaps the greatest testament to the greatness of this nation is that all that came before us is not who we are now [7].”
-Senator Thad Marshall (W-Neb.) delivering the keynote address at the 2020 WNC, July 14th, 2020
[1] OTL it belonged to his brother, TTL Jefferson inherits it after his brother’s death.
[2] This is both insane and 100% real. I couldn’t make this stuff up.
[3] This just seems like, amid lots of revivalist architecture, what slavers with too much ill-gotten money would do.
[4] Funnily enough, the term kangaroo court was mentioned in American newspapers as early as either 1853 or 1841.
[5] Similar to the opening of OTL’s Fort Pillow Massacre, where Forrest led troops in massacring Union POWs, many of whom were black.
[6] The son of Benjamin Montgomery, a slave of Joseph Davis who Davis taught to read and write and made him a trusted overseer/manager of the plantation. His son Isaiah was also taught to read and write.
[7] Taken from the (great) song this chapter’s title is taken from, The Killing Fields by Rosanne Cash.