The River Was Dyed with Blood

Nathan Bedford Forrest and Fort Pillow

By: Brian Steel Wills Ph.D.

Narrated by: Kirk O. Winkler

The battlefield reputation of Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, long recognized as a formidable warrior, has been shaped by one infamous wartime incident. At Fort Pillow in 1864, the attack by Confederate forces under Forrest's command left many of the Tennessee Unionists and Black soldiers garrisoned there dead in a confrontation widely labeled as a "massacre". In The River Was Dyed with Blood, best-selling Forrest biographer Brian Steel Wills argues that although atrocities did occur after the fall of the fort, Forrest did not order or intend a systematic execution of its defenders. Rather, the general's great failing was losing control of his troops.

A prewar slave trader and owner, Forrest was a controversial figure throughout his lifetime. Because the attack on Fort Pillow - which, as Forrest wrote, left the nearby waters "dyed with blood" - occurred in an election year, Republicans used him as a convenient Confederate scapegoat to marshal support for the war. After the war he also became closely associated with the spread of the Ku Klux Klan. Consequently, the man himself, and the truth about Fort Pillow, has remained buried beneath myths, legends, popular depictions, and disputes about the events themselves.

The book is published by University of Oklahoma Press.

©2014 University of Oklahoma Press (P)2017 Redwood Audiobooks

Critic reviews

"The most comprehensive, dispassionate, and objective look we are likely to get of Forrest's most controversial moment-those awful minutes at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, when warfare briefly became butchery." (William C. Davis, author of The Fighting Men of the Civil War)

Hard to follow the reader.

The narrator of this book was awful. It felt like a roller coaster ride not to mention that at times there was background noise. The book is pretty good if you read it yourself.

An even handed, but somewhat plodding

examination of an alleged atrocity during a war with no dearth of the same. Punchline? Forrest has been - and will probably remain - frequently maligned, but he remains a self-made genius, undeniably courageous, compassionate, determined and, quite simply, a great American. Feet of clay, certainly, but heroic out of proportion to his shortcomings. Wills makes this abundantly clear in this fair and dispassionate history.