Editing Lauderdale County, Tennessee (section)

===Battle of Fort Pillow===
{{main|Battle of Fort Pillow}}
In 1861, the [[Confederate States Army]] built extensive defensive fortifications in Lauderdale County along the Mississippi River and named the site for General [[Gideon J. Pillow]]. Because of its strategic location, the fort was taken over by the [[Union Army]] in 1864, which had occupied the state since 1862.

In 1864, Confederates attacked and overran the fort's Union defenders, who were about evenly split between white and black soldiers. They were reported to have refused to surrender, but historians have disputed this account. The Confederates gave the soldiers no quarter, and killed black soldiers in twice the proportion of white ones. After the Union Army established the [[United States Colored Troops]] (USCT), made up of numerous recruits who were escaped slaves, Southern military officials vowed to kill them rather than take them prisoner.<ref name="cimprich">John Cimprich and Robert C. Mainfort, Jr., "Fort Pillow Revisited", 1982, in ''Race and Recruitment'', ed. John David Smith, Kent State University Press, 2013, p. 214</ref> People in the North considered this event to be a massacre, and blacks in the Union Army used the cry, "Remember Fort Pillow!" to rally during the remainder of the war.

[[Fort Pillow State Park]] has a museum to interpret the battle and also has reconstructed fortifications on the original site of the fort.