Download The Mob from Massac

All Code Is Local: Irvin Cobb’s “The Mob from
Massac” and the Edging Shifts in Post-Bellum
American Culture
Richmond B. Adams
Throughout both his fiction and journalism, Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb reflected the racial attitudes of
his home environment in post-Civil War Southwestern Kentucky (Lupoff 7; Lawson 178-179). Reared in and
near the Ohio River town of Paducah, Cobb certainly held racist attitudes toward African Americans while also
looking askance toward whites of a lower social class (Chatterton 1-3). Making the case that Cobb exhibited racist
viewpoints, however, does not fully account for the manner in which Kentucky, and particularly Paducah, gave rise
to the cultural complexities in his fiction. As explained by Wayne Chatterton, in his biography Irvin S. Cobb (1986),
[a]s the lone considerable settlement in the southern and western tip of the only state to declare
neutrality during the Civil War, Paducah enjoyed peculiarities of behavior and attitude that made
this town seem different from other small towns in America during Cobb’s adolescent years. All
through the Reconstruction, the Kentuckians had proved themselves to be primarily Kentuckians
“rather than Union Nationalists or Southern Irreconcilables.” Most Paducahians, however, retained
the almost rabid Southern sentiment which had sent most of its men into the Confederate ranks.
(Elisabeth Cobb, qtd. in Chatterton 13)
Born in 1876, Cobb grew to maturity in the decades when war’s Reconstruction gave way to the myths and the
deliberate cover-up known as the Lost Cause (Chatterton 4; Nolan 12-19). Through his seemingly encyclopedic
reading of classical literature and “the full-scale of American history” during his formative years, Cobb witnessed
the direction that American life began to take after 1877 (Chatterton 2; Stokes 179). In that sense, and as will
be argued, Cobb understood how to write by means of a culturally specific regional code that served, for all
practical purposes, as a counter narrative to the growing, and increasingly violent, hegemony of the Lost Cause.
Cobb knew, even before former Speaker of the House “Tip” O’Neill, that all code, like all politics, is local (qtd. in
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O’Neill xii). If, conversely, Cobb’s fiction is understood apart from these necessary contexts, it remains “jarring and
‘politically incorrect’” to readers in the post-Civil Rights era (Lupoff 7). Concurrent with these trends, at the same
time, is that Cobb’s critical and cultural reputation rests on an inadequate assessment of how his fiction reforms
cultural relationships within late Victorian and early modern American life (15). Discussed often in the 1920s and
1930s, Cobb’s name and fiction have now come to be virtually forgotten by popular audiences and literary critics
(Chatterton n.p.; Lawson xi-xv). Once read, however, through attention to how Cobb used his code within and
among these multifaceted post-bellum discourses, his racial views are more readily seen as “remarkably advanced
and liberal” (Lupoff 10).
Cobb establishes these reformations throughout his twenty years of stories centering upon Judge William
Pittman Priest (Chatterton 92). As Lupoff notes, the Judge Priest stories are consistent in their notable disdain
for the way violence disregards both legal and, one might suggest, moral due process. In particular, they express
an open contempt for the Ku Klux Klan (10). At the same time, Cobb’s fiction also provides a more multilayered
appraisal of post-bellum culture than a respectable condemnation of white-hooded monsters. Through his stories,
Cobb ponders instead how late-century white America had come to view itself in the midst of a shifting cultural
landscape. A first reading of Cobb’s fiction, however, does not clearly suggest a broad, ongoing cultural analysis.
Primarily set within or proximate to the river town of Fairfield, Kentucky, the Judge Priest stories seem to involve
little engagement with the existing social order (Lawson 97). Those problems that do arise further lend themselves
to ostensibly easy solutions, which bring about the restoration of local harmony. “The Mob from Massac,” first
compiled with other stories under the title of Back Home: Being the Narrative of Judge Priest and His People (1912),
appears to offer such a reading as well (Neumann 93; Chatterton 91).
It is nevertheless the particular manner of Cobb’s writing that suggests a greater cultural examination than
might first otherwise seem to be the case. Indeed, his fiction invites late Victorian and respectable post-war white
America, both North and South, to examine its social mores with almost brutal honesty. In fact, “The Mob from
Massac,” as read through a working combination of new and old historicism, presents itself within a complex web
of cultural matrices that, when understood, express more than just an opposition to lawless violence and the Klan.
Most predominantly, “Massac” articulates a coded counter narrative to the controversy surrounding a single event
in the Western theatre of the Civil War, specifically one whose circumstances and consequences painfully reflect
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back upon the origins of the conflict itself (Ward 1; Cimprich 76-85; McPherson 3). Cobb’s story, and the overall
emphasis across his fiction, has as its core of memory the Confederate attack against Fort Pillow, Tennessee on
April 12, 1864 (Cimprich 76-85). In so doing, “Massac” portrays a deep awareness of not simply the particular
military engagement, but also a judgment against the commander who led the Southern forces on that day, General
Nathan Bedford Forrest (Cimprich 77; 80; Ward 1). By itself, of course, Cobb’s stand against Forrest, who, as
Cobb’s first readers well knew, became the first Grand Wizard of the Klan after the war, served another means by
which he pointedly condemned its activities (Trelease 20; Cobb, “Praise God,” 1-2). As he references Forrest’s links
with the Klan, and especially given the General’s position as seemingly the Western theatre’s sole representative
in the pantheon of Confederate heroes, Cobb’s story, along with much of his fictional corpus, reads as a
condemnation of not simply the Klan, but also the Lost Cause, and ultimately, the means by which white America
had come to understand itself in the generations following Appomattox (Eckert 148; Rasmussen 167).
As Lupoff and Cobb biographer Anita Lawson nevertheless suggest, Cobb’s cultural examination does
not mean that he somehow escaped its operative manifestations (Lupoff 7; Lawson 179). Lawson, in particular,
draws out Cobb’s racial limitations as she examines his celebratory editorial in the Paducah News-Democrat on
December 30, 1922 (174-179). She notes how, given that the Klan had encountered significant troubles in
recruiting throughout Western Kentucky, Cobb was able “to declare victory” against those he called “[t]he Masked
Brotherhood of Bigotry, Bravado, Bluster and Bunk” (“Praise God” 2). Entitling his comments “Praise God From
Whom All Blessings Flow,” Cobb used “the traditional orator’s gambit of espousing the ideals” within a Klan
circular “while insisting they could best be reached in other ways” (176; “Praise God” 1). Lawson notes Cobb’s
complicated beliefs in white supremacy and yet places it within an opposition to “a campaign of violence and terror
against black men” even while pointing toward his shared link with other “Southern critics of the Ku Klux Klan in
his day” by viewing it “as much more reprehensible” than the nineteenth century version (“Praise God” 2; Lawson
176, 178).
Even as Lawson alludes to the cultural and historical complexities of Cobb’s background, she does not,
however, fully extend them to the implications of his fiction. By noting Cobb’s belief that the Klan he faced in
1922 was somehow less “reprehensible” than its post-Appomattox ancestor, Lawson tends to read the emphasis of
Cobb’s editorial as simply maintaining “white supremacy” while trying to give it a human face (178). Lawson quotes
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a 1924 speech at “a luncheon honoring Cardinal [Patrick Joseph] Hayes [hosted] by the Catholic Actors Guild of
America,” during which Cobb indicated how his father “must have been ‘turning in his grave because the name was
stolen to [advocate] religious intolerance and bigotry’” (qtd. in Lawson 178). At the same time, Cobb’s mention of
his father reads as much the same “orator’s gambit” that Lawson ascribes to Cobb’s 1922 editorial (176). Then in
his late forties, Cobb had undoubtedly come of age hearing stories about the war, Reconstruction and, of course,
the Klan (17). Given Cobb’s adolescent love and reading of history, particularly when those interests were coupled
with his work as the nineteen-year-old editor of the Paducah Evening News, it seems almost impossible that he would
not have known about the “systematic crime wave” launched by the first Klan during the late 1860s (Trelease 27).
Cobb consequently would also have known that General Forrest had served as its Grand Wizard (20). With such a
background rooting his fiction, Cobb’s stories come to read as more than just stances for the abstractions of “the
law,” denunciations of local violence or tortured rationalizations of one, as opposed to another, Klan (“Massac”
268). Instead, they serve as cultural codes wrapped in the historically-based matrices of post-bellum Kentucky and
Tennessee that ultimately question the means by which the white North and South had managed to achieve regional
reconciliation between Appomattox and the turn of the Twentieth Century. “The Mob from Massac,” as a single,
yet representative story provides a full contextualization of Cobb’s code and its matrix.
“Massac” itself takes place within the August backdrop of Fairfield’s area elections (250). Having retained
his judgeship over several campaigns since returning from Confederate military service, Judge Priest, along with his
“ring” of elected and prominent friends, presently face an ambitious set of opponents who have, as they say, the
advantage of age on their side (248-250). This already combative atmosphere is accelerated by the near lynching
of a black man arrested for assaulting a local white girl based upon the “judgment” of nothing more than area
“bloodhound[s]” (255, 270). Deputy Sherriff Dink Bynum takes the accused into a hot and filthy jail, but not so
much to anticipate the judicial process; rather, he awaits the decision by the same area lynch mob about whether
they will soon storm the jail. Cobb writes that after only a few days, “the mob from Massac came” (259).
As they arrived, Judge Priest was taking a nap, both from the rigors of the campaign and the heat of an
August afternoon (259-260). Awakened by the fearful summons of his servant and best friend Jeff Poindexter, the
Judge hears that the “mobbers is comin” to raid the jail, remove the accused and have their way with him (264). For
a sworn officer of the court, Judge Priest’s decision to confront the mob seems, at a preliminary reading, to reflect
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only an adherence to duty and oath. As the scene develops, and particularly when he speaks about the centrality
of “the law,” Judge Priest makes starkly clear that he will not back away, even if it means acting in ways that go
against his own self-interest (268). By insisting that “the law” must be followed, Judge Priest defends a black man
accused of the worst possible crime within the racial and gender worldview of the post-Civil War South (268). Such
perplexing behavior leads Bynum to remind the Judge that by opposing the mob, he risks losing re-election to the
bench (265-266). Since the men from Massac are voters within Priest’s judicial district, the Deputy Sherriff seems
correct in his caution about the defense of dry legal statutes (268). Bynum’s reasoning is that anything that might
endanger a block of loyal votes in an upcoming close election could prove disastrous to what the Judge and his
fellows represented (249-250, 265-266). Judge Priest, of course, knows the stakes as well (Chatterton 92).
Though the story lacks an explicit reference, Judge Priest knows well that many in the mob were his fellow
veterans from Confederate military service. In that regard, John Ford’s 1953 film The Sun Shines Bright, based on
“Massac” and two other Judge Priest stories, visually and vocally solidifies that connection (McBride 521). By
preventing the mob from obtaining their intended victim, the Judge has apparently nothing to gain and a great deal
to lose. If he steps aside and permits the Massac men to kidnap the accused, Judge Priest, as put by one of the
“mobbers,” would significantly help his vote totals in their precinct (“Massac” 264, 269). The Judge, however, stands
his ground and, to further emphasize his position, literally draws an Alamo-like line in the dirt between the Mob
and himself (271). He further threatens to “kill the first one of ” the mob who attempted to cross it in defense of
“the laws of this state” (273, 268). Such action, from the standpoint of many among Cobb’s first readers, may have
been seen as both courageous and respectable (268). Conveniently, it seems, Judge Priest appears to be reflecting the
manner by which these same citizens understood themselves.
For it is not so much the law as institution that Judge Priest defends at the risk of his social standing,
political position and physical life. It also matters not that the accused is soon found innocent of rape, that another
black man confessed to the crime or even that Judge Priest won re-election partially through the overwhelming
support of the eligible (all male) voters in the Massac district (276, 282-283). Even further, Judge Priest does not just
oppose the Klan and its history of violence (Lupoff 10; “Praise God” 1-2). The Judge, at the jail and throughout
the story, is expressing a cultural code within a complicated matrix of historical, racial and military symbols. Such a
code, while emanating from the post-bellum view of the Lost Cause and its heroes, created a cultural space which
complicated how white America had chosen to understand itself in the years after Appomattox.
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Cobb opens “Massac,” as he does with most of the Judge Priest stories, through a type of mitigated
indirection. The events described “might” be called “a tragedy,” Cobb writes, “[f]or that was exactly what it was
… and in its way a big one” (246). Introducing the “tragedy” as just a matter of “local politics of a county or a
district,” Cobb explains that during the midst of a heated election, especially in the late Victorian South, “things”
literally just “c[o]me to pass” (246). Cobb further expands that while a good number of Fairfield’s populace was
surprised by events soon portrayed, the majority simply took them “as a matter of course” (246). Given that the
narrator will soon describe how an anonymous black man is accused of raping a local white girl, dragged to an
overheated jail and apparently left to the whims of a barbaric posse, Cobb’s understatements seem, even for an early
century audience, misplaced at best (252, 254-255, 257, 250).
Beyond the story, of course, it stands to reason that most of Cobb’s readers had some awareness of the
lynchings that had been taking place across much of the country for decades after 1865. Some may have read
that among the four Border States, Kentucky had the largest number of black mob-led executions between 1889
and 1918 (NAACP 31-32). Writing for newspapers during the mid- to late-1890s, Cobb unquestionably knew that
throughout his home state, “no black person was immune from attacks by whites” (Lawson 21-2; Chatterton 4,
17-22; Wright 1). The detached tone of his fiction vis-à-vis these horrors, as the twentieth century evolved toward
more appropriate racial relationships, perhaps served as a factor in how Cobb’s work came to lose the critical
attention it deserves (Lupoff 15). By opening the story with an almost immediate reference to Major J. Q. A.
Pickett’s “leg [that was] providentially foreshortened [with] a Minie ball at Shiloh,” however, Cobb invites his
readership into the depth of his culturally-coded complexity (“Massac” 246).
The mention of Shiloh, of course, is a reference to the battle in April of 1862 which, at its conclusion,
comprised “by far the largest battle fought in America to date” (Eicher 230). Its “carnage” of nearly 25,000
casualties “stunned the nation” (230). By portraying Major Pickett’s leg as but one of more than 16,000 non-lethal
wounds over a two-day confrontation, Cobb further raises images of excruciating amputations under ghastly
conditions (“Massac” 246; Hurst, Born to Battle, 64, 101). Such violence in the midst of battle, however, is a reality
that both Judge Priest and Major Pickett could endure, if perpetually remember. Some men die in battle while
others suffer lifelong injuries. The same reasoning is in Ford’s film regarding the Battle of Chickamauga, which took
place the following autumn (Thomas 310). During a one-day conflict on September 20, 1863, almost 35,000 men
were killed, wounded or declared missing (Eicher 590). As a sergeant in the Confederate cavalry, William P. Priest,
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without doubt, would have witnessed gruesome death on an unprecedented scale in each of these confrontations
(“Forrest’s Last Charge” 309; Chatterton 92; Hurst, Nathan Bedford Forrest, 88-92, 136-138).
Thanks to “Massac’s” specific references to Shiloh and, through Ford’s film, Chickamauga, Judge Priest’s
stance at the jail, on its face, appears all the more confusing. For while the Confederates came tantalizingly close to
victory at Shiloh, as the historian Lonnie E. Maness indicates,1 the lack of leadership on the part of their principal
commander, General P. G. T. Beauregard during the night between the first and second day of conflict allowed
Union forces under General Ulysses S. Grant to obtain the reinforcements with which he subsequently carried
the field (Maness 4; Hurst, Nathan Bedford Forrest, 90-91).2 Even as General Beauregard slept, however, one of his
lower-level officers urged, to the extent he was able, continued action against the still disorganized Union command
(90-91; Maness 4). Seventeen months later, Chickamauga was a clear Southern victory, but as at Shiloh, the
particular Confederate commander on the scene, now General Braxton Bragg, did not take the advice from one of
his prominent subordinates to exploit Union confusion after initial victory had been won (4, 176-177).
By placing references to the ambiguities of both these battles in tension with Judge Priest’s unyielding
jailhouse stand, “Massac” once again seems not to follow from either logical or political perspectives. With his
apparent cultural non sequitur, however, Cobb achieves the broader purpose of deliberate misdirection. Meshing area
history and literary technique within the framework of what Thomas L. Connelly and Barbara L. Bellows call not
simply the Southern, but the “National Lost Cause,” Cobb introduces his cultural code without appearing to do so
(44-47, my emphasis). Those sets of inverted symbols, manifested through the ways in which “a strong national
interest in the Civil War and southern culture” began to gain prominence in the late 1870s, bring forth memories of
Priest’s military years while apparently placing them within the accepted halo of the Lost Cause and its pantheon
of presumably unassailable heroes (47; Rasmussen 167). Cobb’s fictional code seems especially revealing since the
“National Lost Cause” ideology itself centered upon Virginia’s unique place within the Confederate experience
(Connelly and Bellows 62-63). Those same Virginians, it seems, wanted to find a prominent place for General
Forrest in a proposed (and finally built, albeit on a less grand scale) “Temple to the Lost Cause” near Richmond’s
Monument Avenue (Connelly and Bellows 62-63; Rasmussen 167, 169, 177-178). General Forrest would, as the plan
first took shape, have a statue alongside none other than President Jefferson Davis, General J.E. B. Stuart and, of
course, General Robert E. Lee (Rasmussen 167).
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In the midst of these Lost Cause activities, Cobb’s code began to express itself fictionally after his 1911
arrival in New York City to write for the Saturday Evening Post (Chatterton 93). According to Chatterton, what the
Post’s editors desired from Cobb was “‘back yonder’ fiction by which they had expected to create a substantial
increase among Southern subscribers” (qtd. in Chatterton 93). Chatterton relates that Cobb granted their wish
on October 28, 1911 with the introduction of Judge William Pittman Priest to the northern and southern reading
public (93). In an array of stories that continued for more than twenty years, “the curious-minded old judge [came
to serve as] Cobb’s reliable stock and trade” (Lawson 219; Chatterton 93).
Such reliability, however, predicated itself on Cobb’s astute grasp of the cultural matrix from which he
wrote. While Chatterton alluded to the Post’s desire to obtain a (white) Southern audience, he neglected to reference
the complex relationships shared between those readers and their former foes from the north (Chatterton 93;
Connelly and Bellows 44-47). Cobb, in short, needed to write stories that did not turn away immediate descendants
of the Confederacy, but had to do so in such a way as to reaffirm the (white) northern view of the war as a just
cause. Judge Priest’s firm stances upon “the law,” while occasionally fudging it for the more noble sense of “true
justice,” subsequently allowed northern audiences to feel secure that (white) southerners were reconciled to the
Union and content with the abolition of slavery (“The Mob from Massac” 268; Chatterton 100).
As Judge Priest appeases northern sensibilities, though, he does so in an unmistakable cultural drawl. Reared
among the people he now serves, Judge Priest understands both their “deep distrust of ‘book learning’” as well as
their emotional desperation to find some way to reconcile themselves with losing a war in which they believed “God
[had] favored the South and that [as a result] the Confederacy would surely triumph” (qtd. in Chatterton 96; Noll 21;
Foster 13). In short, Priest spoke the language of his people and they trusted him. Such trust was extended among
the men from Massac, even during times of vehement disagreements between the Judge and the people he served
(Chatterton 95; “Massac” 266-274).
By establishing trust on each side of the Mason-Dixon Line, Cobb could explore more ambiguous issues
on a broad national scale. That exploration took white-hot form when Judge Priest confronted the Massac men at
the jailhouse door (266-274). Through his portrayal of such a scene, Cobb instantly bridges the distance between
the Lost Cause and a cultural code that undermines it. For the common link between Priest’s jailhouse stance
before his fellow Confederates and their mutual time in uniform was their service under the command of General
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Forrest (“Forrest’s Last Charge” 280-323; “The Mob from Massac” 268; Gallagher 290). Even knowing that the
General had later served as the first “recognized Grand Wizard” of the Klan does not openly diminish Priest’s
public admiration for his former commander (Eckert 148; Trelease 20). Such a background, however, manages to
suggest yet more questions about how to comprehend both Judge Priest and Mr. Cobb himself. For while it seems
reasonable to write Priest in the war’s Western theatre, Cobb could just as easily have portrayed him as an infantry
soldier under, as one possibility, General Leonidas Polk, instead of the cavalry commanded by General Forrest
(Hurst 71; 90).
What many post-bellum Victorian Americans, Cobb clearly among them, also remembered was that toward
the end of his life, Forrest had rejected the Klan’s use of violence and renounced the organization as a whole
(Hurst, Nathan Bedford Forrest, 361). These actions, in combination with his spectacular military victories, created
for Forrest a unique place in the upper echelons of the Lost Cause heroes across respectable and reconciled white
American society (Mathes 366; Maness 5; Rasmussen 167). Even such post-Klan and Lost Cause redemption does
not fully answer why Cobb placed Priest in Forrest’s cavalry. There is something more to these fictional peculiarities
than Judge Priest simply defending either “the law” or the due process of one black man to having a right to a trial
before a jury of his peers (“Massac” 268, 270-273).
That defense, and its underlying peculiarities, becomes apparent as the mob marches “right up to the line”
between the judge, the jailhouse and themselves (272). In response to the mob’s “leader,” who “doggedly” expresses
that he “[doesn’t] want to have to kill you,” Priest answers, “I don’t want to have to kill anybody” (273). Certainly
having seen four years of combat would give pause to any rational person before choosing to enter upon another
instance of mass death. Such pause, and even when coupled with Judge Priest’s memories of military service, still
does not completely explain the core of his refusal to let the mob have its way. None of these disparate events and
circumstances, it seems, gives light to the way that Cobb portrays both the principal character of his fiction and,
more to the point, what he suggests about American culture in the first portion of the twentieth century.
Through specific use of historical, racial and military discourses, however, Cobb draws together the manner
by which Judge Priest’s memory of a single day’s events under General Forrest’s command seared into him the
difference between unavoidable violence and barbaric slaughter. Such a coded interweaving first makes it reasonable
to place young Priest with Forrest at both Shiloh and Chickamauga (Chatterton 92; “Forrest’s Last Charge” 309).
Beyond those battles and following Cobb’s literary logic, it becomes highly probable that Priest was also among
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Forrest’s men on April 12, 1864 as they approached a bluff overhanging the Mississippi River known as Fort Pillow,
Tennessee (Hurst 166; Ward 1). The highly controversial events of that day, as the historian Andrew Ward describes
them, were “an eruption of all the toxins that had been festering throughout the Western theatre since the war
began: bigotry, anarchy, corruption, incompetence, feuds, and betrayals.” In short, those “eruption[s],” and their
attendant controversies, shaped Judge Priest’s adult lifetime (3). Given the ways that “Massac” links fiction and
history within and beyond a set of particular circumstances, it becomes necessary to delve somewhat at length into
the events just preceding as well as those actually concerning General Forrest’s attack upon Fort Pillow (Maness
238-39; Ward 140-141).
The bare circumstances culminating at Fort Pillow were that General Forrest, for over a month, had been
sweeping through Western Tennessee and Southwestern Kentucky in an effort to harass Union area forces and
obtain additional military supplies (Jordan and Pryor 420; Lytle 272; Ward 140; Cimprich 72). General Forrest’s
activities, and the Union high command’s ongoing concern with him, undoubtedly helped cause the events that
soon transpired at Fort Pillow (72). At the same time, it was another concern that formed a larger undercurrent
beyond the movement of troops, material, and even the fast-approaching third anniversary of the war’s opening
salvos at Fort Sumter (Eicher 38-39; Flood 38).
Since the Union had begun to train and arm black soldiers in 1862, the Western Confederate Army had
viewed these events, as the historian and Forrest biographer Jack Hurst writes, as akin to “something between
cold-blooded incitement toward wholesale murder and a diabolical joke” (162). In a sense, part of that “joke”
seems to have been played on General Forrest during his attempt to take Paducah a few weeks prior to his assault
on Fort Pillow (Hurst 162; Johnson and Pryor 417-18; Ward 119-123). While Forrest prepared to attack, he sent a
communiqué that demanded the surrender of the city’s Union garrison (Maness 225; Ward 119-120). Forwarded
under a flag of truce, the note used terminology that bears great weight upon what soon transpired in Tennessee
(Mathes 201; Ward 120). The General’s terminology, both before Paducah and, some three weeks later, Fort Pillow
was both specific and suggestive (120). At Paducah, in Ward’s retelling, the General wrote that
[h]aving a force amply sufficient to carry your works [. . .] and in order to avoid the unnecessary
effusion of blood, I demand the unconditional surrender of the fort and troops, with all public
property. If you surrender, you shall be treated as prisoners of war; but if I have to storm your
works, you may expect no quarter. (qtd. in Ward 120)
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The Union commander, Colonel Stephen G. Hicks, did not surrender. Partially as a result, Forrest came to suffer
what Maness called his “second [and last] tactical defeat” of the war (Ward 119; Maness 224). That Forrest
retreated, however, is not important in grasping how Cobb fictionally adapted his matrix of literary and historical
circumstances; the General’s specific wording of his present and subsequent surrender notes is, on the other hand,
centrally vital to the formulation of why Judge Priest came to stand, with everything to lose and nothing to gain, in
front of the jailhouse door (“The Mob from Massac” 268).
Three weeks later, as Forrest’s men readied to storm Fort Pillow, it did not take long for those rhetorical and
historical matrices to assume a life of their own. For soon upon Forrest’s men successfully overcoming the Union
defenses, events transpired that quickly led to the creation of a still raging set of interpretive industries (Cimprich
78-82). Through the 1990s and even as late as 2007, these combatants were still in full battle for Fort Pillow’s
analytical high ground (Maness 229-261; Davison and Foxx 234-236; Ward 206-237; Cimprich 76-85). Winning that
ground, as all the participants seem to know, will allow them to dictate how both General Forrest, and more broadly,
the Lost Cause itself continues to be understood. What remains extraordinary, of course, is how Cobb’s fiction
raised those same issues in a context when matters of “fair play … tolerance [as well as] law and order and decency”
were almost solely reserved for white Americans who conformed to the segregated social order (“Praise God” 1).
It seems plausible to suggest that Cobb’s editorial opposition to “a campaign of terror and violence aimed at black
men” actually served to advocate at least some rough form of racial equality within a strict reading of American
jurisprudence (2). Cobb’s editorial, while openly professing a belief in “White Supremacy,” just as clearly expressed
his opposition to “a campaign of terror against black men” (2). Those sentiments, within the context of his fictional
code, suggest Cobb’s knowledge of how such a “campaign of terror” and “violence,” even within the bounds of
war’s normal horrors, had unequally come upon the black men defending Fort Pillow in the early spring of 1864 (2).
The battle for an understanding of Fort Pillow’s events, and General Forrest’s decision making on April 12,
1864, began almost as soon as the Confederacy had formally surrendered. Only three years after Appomattox and
continuing at least through Andrew Lytle’s 1931 homage, then renewed with Maness’ early 1990s military biography
and, more recently, the co-authored Nathan Bedford Forrest: In Search of the Enigma (2007), the general’s conduct has
been argued as an unfortunate series of events in an otherwise unavoidable situation (Jordan and Pryor 434-440;
Hurst 282; Mathes 224-232; Lytle 278-279; Maness 252-261; Davison and Foxx 234-236). Fortunately, the significant
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majority of recent historians such as David Eicher, Andrew Ward, John Cimprich and, to a lesser extent, Shelby
Foote, have acknowledged the essential reality that during the preceding three years of war, Forrest had maintained
virtually complete military control of his men (655-657; 56-58; 78-82; 3.110-111). As Cimprich notes, some of
Forrest’s newer recruits had been demonstrating a “lack of discipline” in the days preceding Fort Pillow (80). Even
so, and especially given how, as one Confederate newspaper reporter portrayed the scene, “‘the sight of negro
soldiers stirred the bosoms of our soldiers with courageous madness,’” if any of Forrest’s troops understood their
commander to be permitting them certain forms of cultural discretion within the midst of battle, it is altogether
unlikely that they would have ignored such an invitation (qtd. in Cimprich 80).
In the view of Ward and Cimprich, the discipline among Forrest’s troops at Fort Pillow does not so
much rest on a specifically written or spoken order that the general did or did not issue (Ward 227-228; Cimprich
83). Rather, what stood as centrally important for the Confederates and their commanding officer was, to use
the language of the time, their definition of a man. Forrest’s note to Colonel Hicks at Paducah, as an example,
demanded the surrender of “‘fort and troops with all public property’” with the overhanging threat of “‘no
quarter’” if submission was not forthcoming (qtd. in Ward 120). Forrest knew, of course, that almost one year
earlier, the Confederate Congress “had enacted an official policy of returning captured slaves to their owners—
and of putting to death white officers and their noncoms of the new black [military] units” (Hurst, Nathan Bedford
Forrest, 159). As a former slave owner, Forrest also grasped and accepted the long-standing white Southern claim
that slaves were, legally and in fact, “‘property’” (Hurst 42; Levine 32, 82). Given that the Confederate Congress
had codified that claim in reaction to the Union’s enlistment of black men as armed soldiers, anyone with black skin
wearing a Northern uniform had no standing as either a soldier or as a man (qtd. in Ward 120; Hurst, Nathan Bedford
Forrest, 159). Since there were black troops among the Paducah garrison, General Forrest’s demand for the surrender
of its “fort and troops with all public property” was, in effect, a coded message to his normally well-drilled soldiers
(qtd. in Ward 120; Cimprich 80).
Cimprich’s argument that as Forrest came upon Paducah, he “took the unusual but practical step of offering
to accept the entire [city’s] garrison as prisoners of war” does not entirely grasp the General’s distinction between
‘property’ and ‘men’ (Cimprich 72; qtd. in Ward 120). Forrest’s surrender note articulates that distinction very
well indeed. By specifically demanding the surrender of Paducah’s “troops and public property,” General Forrest
Ethos: A Digital Review of Arts, Humanities, and Public Ethics Vol. 2.1 59
culturally and, from his own vantage point, legally distinguished between the black ‘property’ and white ‘troops’
facing his soldiers (qtd. in Ward 120). For understanding how Cobb viewed the subsequent events at Fort Pillow
and how he fictionally placed them within the memory of Judge Priest standing at the Fairfield jailhouse door, that
distinction becomes crucial. By threatening ‘no quarter’ if Colonel Hicks refused to surrender both his ‘troops’ and
‘property,’ General Forrest slyly informed his troops that the armed black soldiers facing them were not entitled
to military courtesy as ‘prisoners of war’ (qtd. in Ward 120). For all intents and purposes, Forrest indicated that if
these uniform-wearing black pieces of ‘property’ refused to cooperate with their repatriation into slavery, his ‘men’
were free to express any degree of force they saw fit within a unique set of conditions (qtd. in Ward 120, 175).
On April 12, the cultural precursor of Paducah fully incarnated itself at Fort Pillow. As Forrest’s men
prepared to attack, the General almost precisely duplicated his behavior of three weeks previous. After signaling a
truce, Forrest wrote to demand the unconditional surrender of Union forces (Ward 174-175). Ward indicates that
the General’s “note read”:
The conduct of the officers and men garrisoning Fort Pillow has been such as to entitle them to
being treated as prisoners of war. I demand the unconditional surrender of this garrison, promising
you that you shall be treated as prisoners of war […]. Should my demand be refused, I cannot be
responsible for the fate of your command. (qtd. in Ward 175)
Maness’s conveyance of the general’s writing to the Union commander expresses admiration for the “brave men”
who were defending the fort (qtd. in Ward 246). As “men” who submit their “unconditional surrender,” they would
be entitled to “treat[ment] as prisoners of war” (qtd. in Ward 246). Without such a surrender, Forrest again absolved
himself of responsibility for the fate of the Union command.
Both Ward and Maness, along with Cimprich, indicate that General Forrest seemed to make a generous
offer of clemency to the “‘officers and men’” defending the fort (Ward 175; Maness 246; Cimprich 78). All three
historians also cite the demand for total Union capitulation. By doing so, each historian continues, Forrest indicated
that Fort Pillow’s garrison “‘shall be treated as prisoners of war’” (Ward 246; Cimprich. 78). Each version of
Forrest’s note concludes with the promise of severe consequences if surrender does not quickly follow (Ward 175;
Maness 246; Cimprich 78).
The difficulty for the defenders of Fort Pillow, just as it might have been for their fellows at Paducah,
however, continued to be Forrest’s definition of a man (Hurst 7-8; Wyeth 18). The question, it seems, rather begs
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itself; Forrest, in the words of his own notes to the Union commanders at Paducah and Fort Pillow, did not see
blacks as human in any way that he afforded to whites. Coupling his own feelings with the legal imprimatur of
what he believed to be his government creates the conclusion that as Forrest wrote how the “‘men’” of Fort Pillow
were, upon their surrender, promised “‘treatment as prisoners of war,’” he did not include any black man within
such a definition (qtd. in Maness 246; qtd. in Ward. 175; qtd. in Cimprich 78). Subsequently, within the cultural code
which Cimprich overlooks, the black soldiers inside Fort Pillow were not “men,” but “property,” and were not, if
the Confederate troops attacking the fort saw almost any pretext for doing so, to receive “treatment as prisoners
of war” (Mathes 273; Hurst 159; Forrest qtd. in Ward 175; qtd. in Maness. 146, 78-83; Levine 32; 82). Under the
calmest of conditions, these black Union soldiers would have been returned to slavery; given how the entire Fort
Pillow garrison refused General Forrest’s demand coupled with the heightened cultural “toxins” in an already brutal
civil war, it became all too easy for the black defenders of Fort Pillow to soon fall under the fixed bayonets of their
adversaries (Hurst 159; Ward 3).
Doing nothing while appearing to do something may have been just what General Forrest envisioned in his
pre-battle planning. Even while his note at Fort Pillow was similar to earlier surrender demands, it carried different
cultural implications (Maness 144-145; Cimprich 78). If then, as Maness proclaims, General Forrest was a military
genius without training, his distinctions between white ‘men’ and black ‘property’ made him, at least on April 12,
1864, a deliberate, while apparently passive, instigator of barbarism (Maness 7; Ward 3; Cimprich 81-82).
As noted by Sheppard and other analysts on each side of the Fort Pillow debate, it is the case that Forrest
clearly promised fair treatment to the “brave” Union “soldiers and men” as “prisoners of war” upon their surrender
(Jordan and Pryor 431; Mathes 220; Lytle 278; qtd. in Cimprich 78). It is correct again, as Forrest’s defenders
universally echo, that for whatever reason and in his own good time, the General probably ordered his men to cease
killing Union troops who had already surrendered their arms and themselves (Foote 3.110-111; Maness 251; Wyeth
355; Davison and Foxx 234).
What nevertheless remains is the fundamental sense that perhaps prior, but certainly during his assault on
Fort Pillow, General Forrest, in a very charitable reading of the events, seems to have lost both military and social
control of his men (Browning 56; Hurst 159; 177; Cimprich 80-83). Even more, he somehow appears to have lacked
an immediate awareness of how his troops felt about the reality of former slaves holding combat arms against them
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(Hurst, Nathan Bedford Forrest, 162, 177; Cimprich 72). It also seems that Forrest’s cultural amnesia left him unable to
discern the rabid hatreds unleashed across all segments of West Tennessee and Southwest Kentucky for a period of
exactly three years since the beginning of the war (Ward xiv; Flood 38).
Such a combination of amnesia and passivity expressed by General Forrest at Fort Pillow stands in almost
total contrast to his leadership under other combat conditions throughout the course of the war (Maness 3-5,
233-234). As Maness notes by quoting the General “[i]n any skirmish or battle, Forrest believed that it was ‘the first
blow that counts and if you keep it up hot enough you can whip them as fast as they come up. … Get them skeered
and then keep the Skeer on them…charge and give them hell’” (qtd. in Maness 3). Confronting a situation already
“hot enough” with fear and animosity, General Forrest at Fort Pillow apparently forgot that while giving ‘hell’ is a
part of war, allowing its embodiment upon a vanquished enemy most certainly is not (qtd. in Maness 3; Cimprich
80-83). All these factors generate the conclusion that on Fort Sumter’s third anniversary and in a tinder-box-like
confrontation enmeshed within a long hot season of regional vitriol, General Forrest, under the most generously
possible interpretation, simply “lost control of his ordinarily obedient soldiers” (Eicher 38-39; Flood 38; Cimprich
78-83). Within that context, Forrest’s normally “well-disciplined command” of military brilliance degenerated into
a mob of barbaric murderers (Maness 238; Cimprich 80-83). More to the point, it is accurate to note that General
Forrest deliberately used the well understood cultural and military conditions specific not simply to his era, but
within that particular day, to free his men so that they might, if circumstances developed during the heat of battle
or its immediate aftermath, to massacre scores of fleeing and surrendered Union troops, black and white alike
(Johnson and Pryor 431; Wyeth 319; Cimprich 80-83; Ward 175). For William Pittman Priest, the result of these
circumstances was that he witnessed the deliberate misuse of “the law” to bring about the butchering of black
Union troops by white Confederate soldiers (“The Mob from Massac” 168). Having these horrors occur within the
sight and sound of the General whose cultural and military tactics brought them into being served to harden Priest’s
memory all the more (“The Mob from Massac” 168; Cimprich 80-83; Ward 3, 206-212).
In the deep background of “The Mob from Massac,” Cobb placed a young William Pittman Priest at
the center of events surrounding Fort Pillow. Thus, Priest saw the mass murder of men that violated both “the
ascendance of true justice” and, as Cobb indicated in his News-Democrat editorial celebrating the triumph, in Paducah
at least, of the “[j]ust laws and liberty” within any civilized society (“Praise God” 2). During the decades that he
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came to serve as Fairfield Circuit Court Judge for the Commonwealth of Kentucky, Judge Priest never forgot what
he witnessed, heard and felt on April 12, 1864 (Chatterton 94-95). Standing before the Fairfield jail in the August
dust between the Mob from Massac and himself, Priest confronted his fellow Confederate veterans with “broad
stomach stuck out far in front … balanced by the rearward bulge of his umbrella” and spoke more than mere words
about the sanctity of the “law” (267, 268). What his words, figurative line in the dirt, and a lifetime of courageous
moral honor finally portray is the memory of men mercilessly killed by a hero of the Lost Cause (Rasmussen 167).
It is a line that Judge Priest and Irvin Cobb would literally die to never see take place again.3
Notes
1. Dr. Maness was one of my professors at the University of Tennessee at Martin while he served with my
father, who taught English on the faculty during the 1970s and 1980s. While our conclusions about General Forrest
are profoundly different, I do want to acknowledge Dr. Maness’ generosity of spirit towards my interest in the Civil
War and, most especially, his gentlemanly graciousness in relationship to this overly talkative student some thirty
years ago.
2. The Confederate commander as the Battle of Shiloh was General Albert Sidney Johnston. During the
heat of the first day’s conflict, General Johnston bled to death after being wounded “in a leg numbed by an old
dueling wound” (Born to Battle 44). Since General Beauregard entered the battle as Confederate second in command,
he assumed overall leadership of Southern forces for the remainder of the engagement.
3. I became introduced to the work of Irvin S. Cobb in a class on the films of John Ford at Southern
Illinois University Carbondale (SIUC) under the direction of Professor Tony Williams. I want to express my thanks
to Professor Williams for the ongoing support he has lent to my interest in Mr. Cobb, particularly through the
development of the current project. I also want to thank a former graduate colleague at SIUC for his assistance
with the editing of these pages, Mr. Nathan Beck. Any flaws that remain, of course, are solely and completely my
own.
Ethos: A Digital Review of Arts, Humanities, and Public Ethics Vol. 2.1 63
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