The New York papers publish in extenso the report of
the Sub- Committee of Congress on the massacre at Fort Pillow. M essrs. Wade and Gooch, the Sub- Committee, went to Memphis, Tennessee, and Fort Pillow on purpose to take testimony. In addition to the mere wholesale slaughter of soldiers drawn up in line after being taken prisoners, the Committee report that neither women nor chil- dren were spared. "Some of the children not more than ten years old were forced to stand up and face their murderers while being shot. "l'he sick and wounded were butchered without mercy, the reb els even entering the hospital buildings and dragging them out to be shot, or killing them as they lay there unable to offer the least re- sistance." All the cry was "Kill the damned niggers!" and prayers for mercy were answered by taunts as well as bullets. "One man was deliberately fastened down to the floor of a tent face upwards by nails driven through his clothes and into the boards under him, so that he could not possibly escape, and then the tent was set on fire. Another was nailed to the side of a building outside the fort, and then the building was set on fire and burned. The charred remains of five or six bodies were afterwards found." The Committee state that all their evidence is derived from eye- witnesses—mostly from the few sufferers who escaped whom they examined in hospital. Massacre appears a part of General Forrest's regular policy, It was ordered before the capture of Fort Pillow and boasted of afterwards. Nor is General Forrest the only leader who adopts it. At Port Hudson, at Millikens Bend, at Fort Wagner, at Paducah, everywhere beyond General Lee's own com- mand, negro troops have been murdered after surrender. But Fort Pillow is the climax. Are not these brutal soldiers, who, though they disgrace General Lee and men of his stamp, really furnish half the muscle and raw material of the Southern armies, as much hostel humani generis as the Taepings ? In the history of war we remember no worse enormity than that of Fort Pillow.
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