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The Fort Pillow Massacre.

Chicago: Kurz & Allison, 1892. Chromolithograph, 17.375” x 25.25” plus margins, recently mounted on larger sheet of paper backed with linen. CONDITION: Two neatly repaired tears into image at right, approx. 4” and 5” respectively, some minor rippling and small cracks in the sky, small surface losses to lower left of image, some colored in.

A scarce and vivid chromolithograph depicting the Fort Pillow Massacre, and a highly unusual memorialization of Civil War racial violence.

This lithograph dramatizes the Fort Pillow Massacre in Tennessee on April 12th, 1864, showing Union soldiers—all but two of them African American—being murdered in hand to hand combat or falling before Confederate firing squads beneath the white flag of their surrender. On the left, Confederate troops storm the fort, while on the right they fire against a row of unarmed African American soldiers, many raising their hands in surrender, with their backs to the Mississippi River. In the foreground, several African American women lie dead, children cling to fighting or deceased parents, and one mother attempts to fend off a knife-wielding Rebel with a rock while another, defenseless, is stabbed in the heart. Kurz and Allison’s depiction pays more deference to the event’s place in Northern emotional memory than to historical accuracy: although women and children had been evacuated from Fort Pillow prior to the conflict, here they are portrayed amidst the fray, thereby communicating the brutality and injustice of the event, in which at least 1500 Confederate troops overpowered some 560 Union soldiers, taking many white soldiers as prisoners but murdering most African Americans in cold blood. A caption just below the image notes the commanders on either side and the numbers of killed, wounded, and missing soldiers.

The Union garrison stationed at Fort Pillow was under the command of Major Lionel F. Booth, and was made up of roughly half white and half African American soldiers, the latter from the 6th U.S. Regiment Colored Heavy Artillery and the 2nd Colored Light Artillery, previously known as the Memphis Battery Light Artillery (African Descent). Confederate troops were under the command of General Nathan Bedford Forrest, who, after the war, became the first Grand Wizard of the KKK. By mid afternoon, Booth had been killed and William F. Bradford, his successor, refused to surrender. Although accounts differ on the details—especially the formality and consistency of the Union soldiers’ surrender—most agree that when Confederates overcame the battlements and overpowered the fort, most of the Union garrison attempted to escape or surrender, but that, rather than being taken prisoner, they were shot or bayoneted by Forrest’s men. One Confederate participant recounted: “The slaughter was awful. Words cannot describe the scene. The poor deluded negroes would run up to our men, fall upon their knees and with uplifted hands scream for mercy but they were ordered to their feet and then shot down. The white men fared but little better. Their fort turned out to be a great slaughter pen” (Cimprich, p. 81). Of the three hundred Union soldiers killed at Fort Pillow, nearly two hundred were African American.

The lithography firm of Kurz and Allison (1880–ca. 1905) was founded by Alexander Allison (probably the financial partner) and Austrian-born lithographer Louis Kurz (1835–1921), who came to America with his family after the revolutionary upheavals in Europe in 1848. By the 1850s Kurz was painting murals and theatrical sets in Chicago. According to some accounts, Kurz developed a friendship with Abraham Lincoln, who then asked him to make sketches of the Civil War. Whether or not this is true, Kurz did serve in the Union Army, and in 1884 produced a chromolithograph modeled on a section of Paul Philippoteaux’s highly successful Gettysburg cyclorama, which was first shown in Chicago in 1883. Kurz’s lithograph proved to bethe first of thirty-six Civil War prints he would make over the next ten years. Kurz and Allison were not alone in capitalizing on America’s desire, twenty years after the end of the war, to process and memorialize the conflict. However, in a period of “intensifying white racism when many white Americans were fast forgetting the contribution of African Americans to the war effort,” (Neely, p. 218), the firm was unique in its numerous depictions of Black participation and heroism in the Union effort.

OCLC lists just two copies, at Texas A&M and the Tennessee State Library and Archive. A third is held at the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History in New York.

REFERENCES: Cimprich, John. Fort Pillow, a Civil War Massacre, and Public Memory (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005); Neely, Mark E. and Harold Holzer, The Union Image: Popular Prints of the Civil War North (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

Item #8952

Price: $3,750.00

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