He was a big man, two inches above six feet, towering over the other Confederate officers in the room. He could have beaten any of them in a fight, with any weapons or none. He knew it and they knew it; it gave him part of his power over them. Though his chin beard was graying, his wavy hair had stayed dark. His blue eyes could go from blizzard cold to incandescent in less than a heartbeat.

“I wrote to Bishop Polk last week that I was going to take Fort Pillow,” he said. He had a back – country accent, but a voice that could expand at need to fill any room or any battlefield. “I reckon we can go about doing it now. All the pieces are in place. “

His aide – de – camp, Captain Charles Anderson, nodded. “Yes, sir,” he said. “General Buford's raising Cain up in Kentucky, and we've got enough men looking busy down by Memphis to keep the damnyankees there from moving north along the Mississippi.”

“About time we gave that garrison what it deserves,” Forrest said. “Past time, by God. Niggers and homemade Yankees…” He scowled at the idea.

“Wonder which is worse,” Anderson said.

“Beats me.” Nathan Bedford Forrest's scowl deepened. That black men should take up arms against whites turned every assumption on which the Confederate States of America were founded upside down and inside out. “You sooner get bit by a cottonmouth or a rattlesnake?”

Dr. J. B. Cowan, the chief surgeon on Forrest's staff, looked up from his cup of sassafras tea. “No,” he said. “I'd sooner not.”

The concise medical opinion made Forrest and the rest of his staff officers laugh. But mirth did not stay on the commanding general's face for long. Most of the white Union troops in Fort Pillow were Tennesseans themselves, enemy soldiers from a state that belonged in the Confederacy. When they came out of their works, they plundered the people who should have been their countrymen. If half of what Forrest heard was true, they did worse than that to the womenfolk. And so…