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What makes the Civil War--the War of the Rebellion, as it was known at the time, at least in the North--interesting is its political character and the political transformations it brought into being. And these Neely appears to ignore in his effort to confound the conventional wisdom. Neely might regard the massacre of black troops at Fort Pillow as a racist sidebar to the main, and relatively restrained, action. But in truth Fort Pillow captures far more of the central dynamic of the conflict. The war, let us remember, was provoked by a rebellion of Southern slaveholders against the authority of the federal government. The Lincoln administration regarded the rebellion as a treasonous act that it aimed to suppress militarily, and never officially recognized the Confederacy's existence (nor did any other nation). The slaveholders' rebellion and the Union invasion of the South in turn provoked a rebellion of growing numbers of slaves, who fled from their plantations and farms, headed to Union lines in the expectation of finding freedom, and signed up to fight their owners as soon as the Lincoln administration allowed them to do so.
The Confederates did not take the slaves' actions lightly. They considered black soldiers to be slaves in rebellion and ordered that, if captured, they be treated as such: re-enslaved or executed by the authorities of the states to which they belonged. General Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate commander at Fort Pillow (and later one of the organizers of the Ku Klux Klan), simply short-circuited the process. "It was understood among us," one Confederate soldier wrote in 1864 from North Carolina, "that we take no negro prisoners." By the end of the war, black soldiers composed about 10 percent of the Union Army, and in some departments close to half of it. In this, as in so many other areas of meaning, African Americans seemed to have understood better than their white counterparts the social transformations that the wartime struggles portended, and the need to debilitate if not to destroy the enemy. The intensity of their military engagements captured a political essence of the war, and foreshadowed the bloody encounters of the postwar period.
