Nathan Bedford Forrest
Hurst, Jack
BOOK REVIEWS W hen the train carrying Tennessee's delegation to the 1868 Democratic National Convention in New York stopped at a small Northern town (its name long forgotten), a gang of toughs...
...Sherman later called him "the most remarkable man" produced by the war...
...At the battle of Brice's Crossroads in 1864, where he led one of the most humiliating routs in the history of the U.S...
...His leadership of the Ku Klux Klan was clearly an effort to subvert black political aspirations...
...Forrest was the epitome of what W.J...
...Its leader, a supposedly undefeated brawler, challenged one of the delegates to emerge from his coach so that he could "thrash" him...
...Riding ahead of his outnumbered troops, he used fear on foe and friend alike...
...Cash in The Mind of the South (1941) called "the tendency to violence which had grown up in the Southern backwoods...
...S.){ months' schooling in his lifetime lef him semi-literate at best...
...When the town bully stopped cold, turned, and ran terrified from the coach, with a now roused Forrest in pursuit, he was doing only what thousands of frightened Federal soldiers had done before him...
...and killed if it costs 10,000 lives and bankrupts the treasury...
...The thirty Federal officers and men he killed in close combat were not the only victims dead at his hands...
...He is most widely cited for a probably apocryphal military axiom—"get thar fustest with the mustest"—which is even more Robert D. Novak is a syndicated columnist, a television commentator, and editor of the Evans and Novak Political Report...
...Assaulting or shooting them with his own hands when they tried to run from battles, he compelled them to run in the opposite direction...
...Hurst is less adept at the difficult art of combat narrative, stingy with maps, and sometimes overwhelmed by his file cards, compelled to offer all conflicting accounts of even trivial events...
...The delegate's name was Nathan Bedford Forrest...
...A quintessential son of the South, Forrest was arguably the Civil War's most successful troop commander, and without question its most innovative tactician...
...F orrest's propensity for violence and an ability to instill fear help explain one of the most extraordinary, and most overlooked, figures in American history...
...Forrest was indeed a military genius, but he was also something more: a genuine man of violence...
...Joseph E. Johnston, who said Forrest would have been the conflict's "great central figure" had he been educated...
...He, was not to be trifled with, even by superior officers...
...Forrest's story so parallels the drama and tragedy of the South that this ambivalence on race brings into question...
...Needless to say, he regards Forrest as a man of far more subtlety than the contemporary Northern press's portrait of a racist butcher commanding his troops to slaughter black soldiers trying to surrender at Fort Pillow.began to condemn Klan violence and in 1873 was quoted as saying that if he "were entrusted with proper authority, he would capture and exterminate the white marauders who disgrace their race by the cowardly murder of Negroes...
...In undercutting the prevailing one-dimensional picture of the slave trader–Klan leader, Hurst has written the most complete and objective treatment of Forrest to date, and has ploughed some important new ground...
...Yet the latest biography of Forrest, by Chicago Tribune country music columnist Jack Hurst, is one of very few...
...Forrest during the war killed a Confederate lieutenant with a pen knife and after the war a black hired hand with an ax, both in self-defense...
...an assessment shared by Confederate Gen...
...We may differ in color, but not in sentiment...
...Addressing a black gathering in 1875, he declared: "We have but one flag, one country, let us standtogether...
...Forrest, "erect and dilated, his face the color of heated bronze, his eyes flaming, blazing," arose—a giant for his time at 6 feet 1 1/2 inches and 180 pounds—and confronted his antagonist...
...Braxton Bragg, Forrest wrote him: "You have played the part of a damned scoundrel and are a coward, and if you were any part of a man, I would slap your jaws and force you to resent it...
...Starting in 1868, however, Forrest 72 The American Spectator November 1993...
...For the next century, the world's sophisticated general staff schools would study this unlettered backwoodsman's use of cavalry as mounted infantry, his tactics of deception, and his concept of the constant offensive even when outnumbered...
...Forrest often deceived the enemy into thinking his forces were much larger and then did his best to frighten them out of their wits...
...Army, Forrest voiced his philosophy of war: "Get 'em skeered, and then keep the skeer on 'em...
...In 1863, quarreling with his theater commander, the dyspeptic Gen...
...The Wizard of the Saddle is succinctly described by Hurst as: an epic figure who, having risen from log cabin privation to wealth as an antebellum slave trader, became the only soldier South or North to join the military as a private and rise to the rank of lieutenant general...
...Violent Forrest and the South were, as their Yankee foes could testify, but the connection to race was never that simple...
...Forrest's troops feared him more than the enemy, and with good reason," Hurst writes...
...I am Forrest," he said...
...What do you want...
...Not just that Forrest lacked formal military training...
...He was also the intrepid combatant who killed 30 Union soldiers hand to hand, had 29 horses shot from beneath him, and was so feared by even his most warlike opponents that one of them, William T. Sherman himself, pronounced him a "devil" who should be "hunted down The American Spectator November 1993 71 tle with the conviction "that nothing living could cross him and get away with it...
...The sense of dread evoked in combat by "the sudden and terrible Forrest" (to use Cash's phrase) does not emerge as vividly from Hurst's printed page as it did from Shelby Foote's epochal three-volume history of the Civil War...
...Bragg did not dare risk the consequences of reporting this insubordination and meekly agreed to Forrest's transfer out of his command...
...It would be a century before white Southern politicians would echo those sentiments...
...BOOK REVIEWS W hen the train carrying Tennessee's delegation to the 1868 Democratic National Convention in New York stopped at a small Northern town (its name long forgotten), a gang of toughs gathered outside...
...The local champion burst into the car in which the fabled Confederate cavalryman was riding, shouting, "Where's that damned butcher Forrest...
...L ike his region, slave-trader Forrest prospered from slavery (his annual earnings in the late 1850s surpassed $100,000, a seven-figure income today), was ruined by the war, and never recouped...
...This tendency, Cash wrote, "reached its ultimate incarnation in the Confederate soldier," who went into batNATHAN BEDFORD FORREST: A BIOGRAPHY Jack Hurst Alfred A. Knopf/464 pages / $30 reviewed by ROBERT D. NOVAK improbably rendered by Hurst as "I always make it a rule to get there first with the most men...
...In recent years, he has been the focus of efforts to remove Forrest statues in the South, a posthumous acknowledgment of his role as a founder and the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan...
...the validity of Cash's analysis of Southern violence as dedicated to the "savage ideal" of black inferiority...
...I want him...
...His use of Eng ish as a written language is illustrated by his rejection of a soldier's third request for a furlough: "I told you twist [meaning "twict," lower-class Southern for twice] Goddammit Know [meaning "no...
...But Hurst also sees a less pragmatic softening in outlook toward blacks, as Forrest neared his death in 1877 at age 56 and for the first time became a practicing Christian...
...This was the quality that enabled the Confederacy to prolong for four years its rebellion against overwhelming odds—with Forrest the last Southern commander still leading troops in the field in the spring of 1865...
...Hurst concludes that Forrest "embraced the Klan as a weapon in a savage fight for individual and sectional survival—and thrust it away soon after he saw that it injured, instead of aided, the best interests of the South and the Nation...
...Forrest is but faintly remembered in the South and unknown elsewhere (a situation only slightly remedied by the PBS Civil War television series...
...Nonetheless, Hurst does an admirable job of charting "an exceptional American's remarkable philosophical journey...
...Minnesota farm boys sent to Mississippi to fight Forrest were confronting a ferocity given voice by the blood-curdling rebel yell and summed up by his slogan: "War means fightin', and fightin' means killin...
Vol. 26 • November 1993 • No. 11
