A bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest greets those who enter
the House of Representatives chamber of the state Capitol
building. The bust has been the object of protests.
Posted on 02/18/2006 9:43:18 PM PST by SmithL
"The past isn't over; it isn't even past."
- William Faulkner
Self-made businessman and brutal slave trader.
War hero and war criminal.
Civic leader and Klan boss.
Nathan Bedford Forrest has been called all these and more, a man whose complex and sometimes contradictory legend has grown to almost mythic proportions. The Confederate cavalry general and leader of the original Ku Klux Klan, to a greater extent than other Rebel figures such as Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, stirs debate to this day.
Born in the backwoods, enriched near Big Muddy, glorified in war and vilified in peace, Forrest is one of the most praised and pilloried of Tennesseans.
His statue towers over a park in Memphis; his bust glares down at legislators in the state Capitol building; children attend Forrest School in Chapel Hill and families vacation at Nathan Bedford Forrest State Park near Eva.
But the Memphis statue has been the target of graffiti artists, the capitol bust of protests. The state parks system also manages the remains of Fort Pillow, site of the massacre that stained Forrest's reputation forever.
According to one count, noted by University of Tennessee journalism professors Paul Ashdown and Ed Caudill in their 2005 book, "The Myth of Nathan Bedford Forrest," there are 32 statues of Forrest in Tennessee - more than the number of Lincoln statues in Illinois or George Washington statues in Virginia.
Some, however, think Tennesseans would be better served by ignoring an ignoble warrior. Just last year, black leaders in Memphis tried to remove the statue and his name from a city park.
The various versions of Forrest are hard to reconcile.
"We have a hard time with ambiguity," Ashdown said.
That ambiguity, for some, fuels fascination with Forrest.
"It doesn't matter if you love him, hate him or don't know much about him," Caudill said, "he's a great story. And we love great stories."
Forrest was born in the backwoods of South Central Tennessee, near the hamlet of Chapel Hill, on July 13, 1821. His rough-and-tumble childhood, recounted by Ashdown, Caudill and other biographers, set the tone for his entire life.
An obelisk flanked by a Confederate battle flag marks his birthplace today. Forrest's name also adorns the high school in Chapel Hill.
Roy Dukes, assistant director of Marshall County Schools, said the name hasn't been controversial.
"To my knowledge, it has never been an issue," Dukes said.
Chapel Hill's black population is small - about 4 percent of its nearly 1,000 residents. The student body at Forrest School, which educates more than 700 students in grades six through 12, mirrors the community.
Dukes, who is black, said minority students haven't reported concerns about the name. He said the quality of the teachers inside the classroom, not the name on the outside of the building, is more important in educating students.
"I've never had anyone make me feel uncomfortable and it's never bothered me," Dukes said. "It's part of history."
Forrest's rough upbringing presaged a violent adulthood that included a downtown shootout in Hernando, Miss.
Later that year, in 1845, he married Mary Ann Montgomery, who was related to a Revolutionary War general. The couple later moved to Memphis, where Forrest served as an alderman and flourished as an entrepreneur. He also owned a 3,400-acre plantation in North Mississippi.
Though he engaged in a variety of more respectable business enterprises, including a stage line, a brickyard and a cattle-and-horse brokerage, he's best remembered now as a slave trader. By the time Tennessee seceded from the Union, he was a wealthy man.
When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Forrest enlisted as a private in the Confederate army. Tennessee Gov. Isham B. Harris, a personal friend, asked him to raise a unit of cavalry and promoted him to colonel.
Forrest was a savage warrior. According to his count, he killed 30 men and had 29 horses shot from under him. He argued with his superiors and once fatally stabbed a subordinate.
As a tactician, he was one of the most brilliant of the era. The late historian Shelby Foote called him one of two true geniuses to emerge during the war, the other one being President Abraham Lincoln.
Almost always outnumbered and untutored in the art of war, Forrest outflanked, outwitted and outfought West Point graduates.
The battle at Brice's Cross Roads, in Mississippi, was his masterpiece. He divided his troops in the face of a much larger Union force, and, using the terrain to his advantage, attacked from multiple angles to achieve an overwhelming victory.
If Brice's Cross Roads was his most glorious moment, the assault on Fort Pillow was his most shameful.
Fort Pillow stood on the Chickasaw Bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River north of Memphis. Though it was supposed to have been abandoned, the fort was manned by 605 Union troops, including loyal Tennessee cavalry troopers and two artillery units composed of 284 black soldiers, plus their white officers.
On April 12, 1864, Forrest sent a note demanding surrender, and then unleashed his troops.
Estimates of the Union dead were as high as 297, roughly half the garrison. Though blacks made up about half the Union troops, they died at twice the rate of their white comrades.
"The massacre took place, there's no doubt about it," Ashdown said.
But to this day there is debate over whether Forrest ordered the massacre, allowed it to happen, ordered a halt to the killing or didn't know about it at all until later.
To Caudill and Ashdown, it doesn't matter.
"Any way you cut it, he was responsible," Caudill said. "He was the commander."
The state of Tennessee has preserved the battlefield, which is now a state historic park.
The state Legislature also established Nathan Bedford Forrest State Park in 1929, at the site of his raid on a supply depot in Johnsonville. According to the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation, people have occasionally commented or complained about the name.
"We received one complaint last year questioning the use of that name in association with the park," TDEC spokeswoman Tisha Calabrese-Benton said.
Forrest was promoted to lieutenant general, the only soldier on either side to rise from private to such a lofty rank, on Feb. 28, 1865. As vicious as he was in battle, Forrest was resigned to defeat when the end of the war arrived a few months later.
In his farewell address to his troops, Forrest told his men, "You have been good soldiers; you can be good citizens. Obey the laws, preserve your honor and the government to which you have surrendered can afford to be and will be magnanimous."
After the war, Forrest set about trying to rebuild his fortune. He'd sold off part of his land, but quickly set up a sawmill on his Mississippi plantation. He tried his hand at insurance and paving, but filed for bankruptcy within three years.
Ashdown and Caudill point out that Tennessee, like the rest of the defeated South, was a society that had collapsed into lawlessness. In many places, returning Confederate soldiers formed vigilante committees to keep the peace.
One such group banded together in 1866 in Pulaski, Tenn. The original Ku Klux Klan was formed to fight outlaws, carpetbaggers and what its founders deemed the excesses of Reconstruction. Loosely organized dens spread quickly throughout the South.
Forrest wasn't a founder of the Klan, but he was recruited into its leadership. His exact role in the secret society remains murky, Caudill said.
Unlike the groups that resurrected the name in the early 20th century, the original Klan didn't have racism as its reason for existence.
"They were really vigilantes," Caudill said of the first Klan. "You don't want to defend the Klan, but the Klan of the 1860s was not the Klan of the 1920s."
As the Klan expanded, however, it became increasingly violent, prompting Gov. William G. "Parson" Brownlow to call out the militia to extinguish the group. In 1869, because of the rising tide of violence, Forrest ordered the Klan to disband.
During the last few years of his life, Forrest tried to build a railroad, but failed. As his fortunes dwindled, though, his outlook on race became more progressive.
He frequently said that freed blacks would drive the region's recovery from the ravages of war.
On July 5, 1875, at a barbecue near Memphis, Forrest accepted a bouquet of flowers from a black woman named Lou Lewis and, according to a newspaper account reprinted by Forrest biographer Jack Hurst, told the primarily black audience that he wanted to strengthen race relations.
"I want to elevate you to take positions in law offices, in stores, on farms and wherever you are capable of going," he said.
Later in his brief address, he said, "We have but one flag, one country; let us stand together. We may differ in color, but not in sentiment."
Forrest spent his last days running a prison work farm on President's Island in the Mississippi River. He and his wife lived in a log cabin they had salvaged from his plantation. He died on Oct. 29, 1877.
He was buried in Elmwood Cemetery in Memphis. In 1905, his and his wife's bodies were moved to Forrest Park near the University of Tennessee-Memphis campus. A statue of Forrest on horseback marks the graves.
Last year, Shelby County Commissioner Walter Bailey started an effort to move the statue and rename the park. Bailey also wanted two other city parks renamed.
Memphis Mayor Willie Herenton, who is black, blocked the move.
"In the aftermath of the tragic assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in our city, we do not need another event that portrays Memphis nationally as a city still racially polarized and fighting the Civil War all over again," Herenton said when he announced his decision in August.
"Believe me," he continued, "I understand and share the same commitment many citizens have to resist bigotry and racial hatred, but digging up and moving graves or renaming city parks is not the proper way of dealing with this issue."
Today, state Rep. Johnny Shaw, D-Bolivar, walks beneath a bust of Forrest whenever he enters the House of Representatives chamber of the state Capitol building. Like the Memphis statue, the bust has been the object of protest over the years. Shaw, the chairman of the Legislature's Black Caucus, said it's time to stop honoring Forrest.
"While I think it's important that we commemorate history, I don't think we need to highlight people like Nathan Bedford Forrest," Shaw said. "That doesn't speak well for us. We've got to become race-neutral to overcome (inequality), and I don't think we can become race-neutral if our parks are named after him."
Ashdown, on the other hand, warned against turning a blind eye to history.
"I'm against going back and cleaning up history," Ashdown said.
Tennesseans, whether they admire or revile him, cannot forget Forrest. Though the war that catapulted him to fame and infamy ended 141 years ago, Forrest still rides in the state's collective imagination.
"Tennesseans just don't know what to do with him," Ashdown said. "You can't kill him, and he keeps coming back in different ways."
I have read 9 Forrest biographies, and will comment on them tomorrow when I have time.
Interesting... I knew about the 20th century revival (hurray for obscure Frank vs. Magnum knowledge finally paying off) but I didn't know that the original KKK wasn't really for racist purposes.
I have one, by Wyeth. How does it rate compared to your others?
Fort Pillow, site of the massacre that stained Forrest's reputation forever.That, and, he was a Democrat.
Memphis Mayor Willie Herenton sounds like a very sensible man.
I have always enjoyed the Hurst one.
however, the left and those here who collaborate with them will not rest till Forrest and those like him are demonized like Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot.
(original Klan)It was in response to Union occupation, white disenfranchisement and what both those meant to whites. Not to say they were darlings....they were not.
Blacks were esentially freed, exploited momentarily to usher in shoddy Radical Republican administrations in the Deep South and then rejected and abandoned by those who "freed" them and who really understood them less and were even more bigoted than us. Sorta like I think you ought be free but now since you are would you mind staying down South away from us and maybe if you're good we'll give you some little postage stamp of land we appropriated from the ruins of plantocracy. Sorta like how the Dems treat any minority today.
That is the north's legacy they'd prefer you forget.
Not to say they're weren't some decent folk here and there who meant well.
Forrest quit the Klan after a few years when the Yankees left ...as did Wheeler I believe.
Forrest ping
Had no idea there were 9 bios of NBF. Hurst is a good one? which others? I'm almost finished with Guns of the South - can you imagine Forrest with an AK-47!
By that logic Lincoln has 600,000 dead at his feet. He was the commander.
I don't think they would like that one.
623,026 according to Shelby Foote
Amen, Brother....you are preaching to the choir! :)
ping
So you see the South wasn't fighting to be racist, there was far more at stake there.
"Get there first with the most!" - General Nathan Bedford Forrest, CSA.
Have you read his other ones on the subject? No sci-fi and more alternate history instead. Interesting that the 16th president lives and becomes the founder of the American Socialist Party. What's even more interesting is that for the first few books in the series at least, he tries to use actual statements from the historical figure. Although he's taken it too far IMHO. His has a northern bias that is revealed by WWI in the alternate history
This is my first turtledove book - a bit of change from other historical books I normally read. Thanks for the info billbears.
Well Guns of the South is separate from the series I mentioned so I shouldn't spoil anything for you on this one (which is good by itself). He has another series, back in the sci-fi realm, where lizard aliens show up in the middle of WWII to take over the world. That series is up to the middle of the 21st century.
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