Posted on 09/10/2007 7:48:32 AM PDT by meandog
This coming from a man who has a picture of “Sherman” on his page......:)
But...I will defer. I am an old Submariner myself. USS Sunfish, SSN-649. (And the Skipjack was the first sub I ever toured :)..............
I am not convinced that a Confederate Victory would have been a bad thing. I believe that eventually, we would have reunited, but would have been a stronger nation for the experience. A nation that had a true balance of power between the states and the Feds.
Bravo Sierra. Robert E. Lee considered him a gentleman and his finest general.
While he did participate in the slave trade (condemned any yankees lately), he refused to break up families, nor would he sell a slave to a cruel master. He offered 45 slaves their freedom if they fought with him - regardless of the outcome of the war - 44 were with him at the end.
He certainly was a fine general - I was unaware that Lee had called him a gentleman.
he refused to break up families, nor would he sell a slave to a cruel master
LOL! And he gave every slave a fluffy little kitten.
Give me a break.
Never saw her but I toured on a couple of other 637 fish boats. When were you in?
Sorry, but I will never agree that Sherman was anything more than a butcher. Talk about war crimes! He had Confederate prisoners dig up land mines!
That would be considered a war crime by ANY civilized nation. I was in during the late 70’s and early 80’s.....
Which 637 boats were you on?
The first part is incorrect, it was founded by 5 men, none of them Forrest. Regarding the later, that is true.
Go browse the Stormfront website
The only traces I can find today of the "Jubilee of Pole Bearers" are references to Forrest's speech. It may have been more of a social or fraternal organization, rather than a political group.
Forrest died of complications of diabetes in 1877. Maybe he was already ailing when he addressed the group. He'd gone bankrupt some years earlier when his railroad failed.
So perhaps Nathan Bedford Forrest was trying to get right with God. He may have felt guilty about something: "Men have come to me to ask for quarter, both black and white, and I have shielded them."
That adds something to our understanding of the man. But if Forrest helped create the conditions where White Southern politicians couldn't talk like this publicly to a Black organization for a century, that also shouldn't be ignored.
From the Dallas Herald newspaper of July 1, 1865 reporting from the Memphis Bulletin:
Fort Pillow. -- Since the war has closed, it has transpired that there was much misrepresentation in reference to the Fort Pillow affair. It is not true that the rebels took no prisoners. On the contrary about two hundred were taken prisoner and carried South. A Federal officer assures us that some of the negroes who surrendered at Fort Pillow explain the reason they were so badly used. They say that when the rebels got on the fortifications and demanded a surrender, in their ignorance of what to do, they gave them a volley instead of surrendering -- that this incensed the rebels, who pitched in without mercy. This explanation of the affair we get from a Federal officer who has had opportunities of becoming posted. Memphis Bulletin
From the Memphis Argus immediately after the Fort Pillow battle, as reported in the New Orleans Daily Picayune (both Memphis and New Orleans being in Federal hands at the time):
Capt. Young, Provost Marshall, was taken prisoner, slightly wounded, and paroled the liberty of their camps, and allowed to see his wife. He says that our troops [the Federals] behaved gallantly throughout the whole action, that our loss [Federals again] in killed will exceed 200; he also stated that Gen. Forrest shot one of his own men for refusing quarters to our men.
He was the polar opposite of a butcher in ever way. The march took almost no lives, relatively speaking and ended the war and gave Lincoln re-election, which assured Rebel defeat and saved the United States.
I was never on 637's - see my profile for the boats I was on - but I had buds who were. You got out the same time I got in. 85-93.
When they reassembled a week later, the six young men were full of ideas for their new society. It would be secret, to heighten the amusement of the thing, and the titles for the various officers were to have names as preposterous-sounding as possible, partly for the fun of it and partly to avoid any military or political implications.
Thus, the head of the group was called the Grand Cyclops. His assistant was the Grand Magi; there was to be a Grand Turk to greet all candidates for admission, a Grand Scribe to act as secretary, Night Hawks for messengers and a Lictor to be the guard. The members, when the six young men found some to join, would be called Ghouls.
But what name to call the society itself? The founders were determined to come up with something unusual and mysterious. Being well-educated, they turned to Greek.
After tossing around a number of ideas, Richard R. Reed suggested the word "kuklos," from which the English words "circle and "cycle" are derived. Another member, Captain John B. Kennedy, had an ear for alliteration and added the word "clam." After tinkering with the sound for a while, group settled on the "Ku Klux Klan." The selection of the name, chance though it was, had a great deal to do with the Klan's early success.
Something about the sound aroused curiosity and gave the fledgling club an immediate air of mystery, as did the initials K.K.K., which were soon to take on such terrifying significance.
Sherman called the use of landmines "not war but murder." Longstreet and McClellan expressed similar opinions.
Modern landmines were developed by a Confederate General, Gabriel Raines. And Sherman regarded them as cowardly and against the rules of war.
The story I heard is that Sherman put prisoners of war in front of his columns as they advanced over mined territory. McClellan forced prisoners of war to help clear away mines.
I don't know what the exact facts are. But it sounds like it was the same way as any new weapon -- just how to react and what the rules were was unclear.
This isn't a case of evil Sherman breaking established rules of war or being crueller than the other side.
From the March 20, 1865, Houston Tri-Weekly Telegraph (paragraph breaks mine for readability):
Major General Forrest
Major General Forrest has characterized the commencement of his military administration, as commander of West Tennessee, Mississippi, and East Louisiana, by an act of noble humanity, which, if it does not eclipse, is at least not surpassed by any of his deeds of heroism in the field in which he has developed and illustrated the very highest qualities of a great commander.
We refer to the treaty, which, it is now generally understood, he has entered into with the Federal General Thomas, to supply the suffering and destitute families within and near the Yankee lines, with food from the rich prairies of Mississippi and Alabama. Trains loaded with corn are to be run to such point, on the Mississippi and Charleston railroad as are most convenient to the destitute districts, without molestation from either party. Large sections of fertile country south of the Tennessee river, are wholly desolated by the ravages of war, and the suffering and impoverishment of the people are heart-rending in the extreme, demanding prompt assistance to secure them from an absolute starvation.
The spirit with which Major General Forrest comes to the relief of those suffering people develops in his character a nobility of nature and an enlarged feeling view of humanity which constitute the crown of his heroic achievements.
Nor should we withhold from an enemy the meed of commendation due for a good act. The promptitude with which Major General Thomas has responded to the suggestion of the noble Forrest stands forth in pleasant relief of the vandalism of the Federal commanders, whose barbarism and cruelty have despoiled those very sections, and others, now appealing to humanity for relief. It is true his own soldiers have robbed the people whom he now consents for General Forrest to feed. It is, notwithstanding, credible to him that he consents to mitigate the horrors of invasion by an exceptional instance of humanity.
You know, I don’t blame black freepers who don’t cotton up to all this though Forrest’s black contemporaries were fonder of him arguably.
What bugs me is that the same folks on parade here Forrest bashing do so on any thread that has the slightest ethno-racial-religious sensitivity to it.
They seek out such threads to point their high and mighty fingers at the rest of us.
That sort of “geez...I know bigotry better than anyone and let me prove it to ya” zeal is part of the problem in our culture today and cripples our ability to deal with Islam and illegals ...just for starters.
Though I confess to admiring Forrest...warts and all...I realize it’s my perspective but this kneejerkedness amongst conservatives is discouraging....very. Not much different than the left...in fact worse than some.
Just because you can't find anything else doesn't mean they didn't exist. Forrest wasn't even the keynote speaker. The event was barbecue held at a Memphis county fair, by the Independent Order of Pole-Bearers.
Now, there are people trying to change the name of Nathan Bedford Forrest High School in Jacksonville, Fla.
Heck, why stop there?
Let’s rename Washington DC and any other references to that slave-holder.
Take Washington and Jefferson off our currency too...
I do not see anything wrong with that. Had those mines not been removed some Southern child might have been blown to bits later.
Given that they had to be removed, what's worse about having Confederate prisoners digging them up than Union soldiers? They did not have the military engineering equipment that we have today so there would be equal risk no matter who dug them up and using Confederate prisoners might be a restraint on further employment of this cowardly way to wage war.
Oh Yea?
Watch an army force prisoners to dig up land mines nowdays.....They will be committing a WAR CRIME according to the Geneva Convention.
As for “cowardly”, the Confederates were using what weapons they had to stop an overwhelming force from invading THEIR land! (and land mines were and are STILL legal.)
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