Forrest and Fort Pillow Capstone

So since I have to graduate school at some point I'm taking the final requirement for my history degree which is a capstone. The capstone involves a 25-30 pg paper on some aspect of Civil War Memory. At first I was going to write my paper on Civil War reenacting and the role it plays in how people remember the Civil War. However, I decided to look at something a little more controversial and changed my topic to how General Forrest is remembered for the role that he did or did not play in the massacre at Fort Pillow and the congressional investigation into his involvement with the KKK. I soon found out that this was still a little too broad and decided that I would then narrow this to just how Fort Pillow was remembered and as a result how Forrest is remembered. I will be posting interesting books on this topic as well as some interesting primary sources as my research goes along. I know that Forrest is either loved or hated and I am going to attempt to sift through all of this and see whether he deserves to be hated. Many people cite what happened at Fort Pillow as the reason why Forrest was a "bad man." What I want to find out is whether the information that is taught currently is skewed or whether what we normally hear about this incident is truly what happened. So if anyone bothers to read this I hope that you all will be able to come to some conclusion on this incident as well. Cheers!

First Link is a pdf file about the "humanity of the Confederates" it refers to the investigation into what happened at Fort Pillow. It pretty much states that although Forrest did not tell his men to slaughter those within the fort he is ultimately responsible for the actions of his men. There is also the the typical talk of Forrest stopping his own men from killing the federals (see top of pg 9). This was published in 1864.
Humanity of Fort Pillow.pdf

ftpillow.htm


Link above has reports both Union and Confederate commanders about what happened. Notice that Chalmers said the Federals made no attempt to surrender while Forrest does not even bother to talk about the supposed massacre in his first report. While the third link on the page, Lee's correspondence, talks about the need to clear up the misconceptions about what happened. My next goal will be to try to get my hands on these later reports as I have a feeling that finding reports from Confederates on this incident will be the hardest part of my research.