When Tidwell returned to Fort Pillow as a ranger after college, he began planning the reconstruction of the embrasures (openings for artillery) in the inner fortification where the Union troops took their final stand against Forrest. Rainwater had enlarged the openings until they collapsed. Most years, the park’s funds went to more urgent erosion management projects, so Tidwell had to get creative. He rebuilt the embrasures using boards he smoothed and shaped himself on an antique sawmill. Replica cannons now stand in these openings. When I visited with Tidwell, the wall of the redoubt rose over our heads, cutting off our view of anything modern.
After the Confederates swept over the top of this wall, Union soldiers tried to escape downhill, toward the river. But they were still within range. Realizing the hopelessness of their position, many Union soldiers threw down their arms and attempted to surrender. A congressional inquiry held shortly after the battle found that the Confederates continued to shoot unarmed men. They especially targeted USCT soldiers. While around 20 percent of the white Union soldiers died as a result of the battle, approximately 70 percent of the USCT soldiers at Fort Pillow were killed, along with an unknown number of civilians.
USCT Private George Shaw testified that a Confederate shot him after he surrendered, telling him, “Damn you. You are fighting against your master.” The Confederates then threw Shaw into the river, where he survived by swimming until night fell. Shaw said he witnessed the execution of three teenagers who had taken refuge at the fort after escaping from slavery. Unable to swim, the boys made easy targets. “They begged them as long as they could,” Shaw remembered, “but they shot them right in the forehead.”
News of the events at Fort Pillow soon spread, shared by Union soldiers who had escaped the battle and even by horrified Confederate soldiers. One Confederate wrote home about what he called “the most terrible ordeal of my whole life,” describing to his mother and sisters how Forrest had ordered Black men “shot down like dogs.”
For the rest of the war, “Remember Fort Pillow!” was a rallying cry for the USCT. Pinheiro thinks that Black soldiers shouted the phrase before battle to remind themselves that they, unlike white troops, “did not have the racial privilege of surrendering.”