[The following takes place during the American Civil War.]
Perhaps it is fitting that the Battle of Fort Pillow should have been preceded by a lynching. On April 4, as the Wizard [nickname of Nathan Bedford Forrest] rested at Jackson, Dewitt Clinton Fort obtained permission to ride twelve miles north to Spring Creek to shoe his horse. “Arriving there early on Monday morning,” Fort was told that the local blacksmith was two miles off assisting in the investigation of the murder of a local white girl named Margaret Hennings. Proceeding to her family’s farm, Fort found
the neighbors for miles around assembled to ferret out the villainy of one of the most atrocious, cruel and bloody murders ever committed by brutal man. Miss Margaret Henning, a beautiful, accomplished and lovely young lady about the age of twenty, had on the evening before been murdered near the house by having her head almost severed from the body with a sharp instrument in the hands of some unknown person or persons. A full day’s investigation established the fact that certain negroes in the neighborhood deserved punishment for the offense.
Whether or not the three blacks were actually guilty of killing Margaret Henning, they apparently had long been suspected of cooperating with the Yankees, and “the condition of the country,” wrote Fort, “rendered it dangerous for the people and impractical for the courts to do justice in this matter,” for Fort Pillow had afforded an “asylum to which the offenders could flee and forever escape the punishment merited by the grossest violation of human, natural, and divine laws.”
So that evening the three men were dragged out and hanged in a proceeding that was “irregular and summary.” Fort explained that because the ordinary “institutions of society were so broken down by the law and its ministers having been swept from the land,” lynchings were all that prevented “the weak and defenseless” from living at “the mercy of the strong, cruel and unrelenting.”
Source:
Ward, Andrew. “A Bitterness of Feeling.” River Run Red: The Fort Pillow Massacre in the American Civil War. Viking, 2005. 142-43. Print.
Original Source Listed:
Fort, “Memoir.”
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