Nathan Bedford Forrest: Born to Fight

Abstract

Nathan Bedford Forrest:Born to Fight Richard Tillinghast (bio) NATHAN Bedford Forrest remains one of the Civil War’s most controversial figures. According to his biographer Jack Hurst, he was both “a soft-spoken gentleman of marked placidity and an overbearing bully of homicidal wrath.” Of his military genius there can be little doubt. When asked to name the best officer who had fought on the southern side, Robert E. Lee unhesitatingly replied, “His name is Forrest.” In the Ken Burns pbs documentary on the Civil War, Shelby Foote remarked that two authentic military geniuses had emerged from the war: Abraham Lincoln and Nathan Bedford Forrest. Not Robert E. Lee, not Stonewall Jackson, and certainly not Ulysses S. Grant. And yet his abilities were never fully appreciated within the Confederate government. In 1869 Jefferson Davis sat by Forrest’s bedside in Memphis the day before he died of diabetes, wasted down to 100 pounds—“broke up,” the old warrior confessed, “broke in fortune, broke in health, broke in spirit.” The next day the president of the Confederacy served as a pallbearer. Riding to Elmwood Cemetery in the funeral cortège, Davis spoke of Forrest’s martial greatness and commented that “the generals commanding in the Southwest never appreciated him until it was too late. Their judgment was that he was a bold and enterprising raider and rider. I was misled by them, and never knew how to measure him until I read the reports of his campaign across the Tennessee River in 1864.” Of Brice’s Crossroads, Forrest’s most enterprising and daring victory, “That campaign was not understood in Richmond,” the former president said. “The impression made upon those in authority was that Forrest had made another successful raid. … I saw it all after it was too late.” What is our final evaluation of Nathan Bedford Forrest as man and soldier to be? What was it like to serve as a trooper under Forrest’s command, or to be among the outsmarted Union officers and common soldiers who had the misfortune to go up [End Page 599] against him? How did his slaves see him—those men, women and children force-marched along the dusty or muddy southern roads from Alabama to Mississippi, from Mississippi into West Tennessee during the years before the war when Forrest was in the business of buying and selling human beings? These are questions I have attempted to answer to my own satisfaction, though probably we shall never get a clear answer to that last question, never plumb the depths of that rage, fear, frustration, and pain. When Forrest was free to fight without having to follow orders from above, he was most himself, and he usually won, often against heavy odds, earning his nickname, The Wizard of the Saddle. But he hated serving under other officers, even when, as with “Fighting Joe” Wheeler, his ranking officer liked and admired him. After he fought under Wheeler in 1863 at Dover on the Tennessee River and Wheeler was dictating his official report on the battle, Forrest was lying in pain on the floor in the cabin they were using as a temporary headquarters, propped up on a cane-bottom chair. He had been thrown from his horse that day, and his ribs were bruised. Forrest said to Wheeler, that though he meant “no disrespect to you; you know my feelings of personal friendship for you; you can have my sword if you demand it; but there is one thing I do want you to put in that report to General Bragg—tell him that I will be in my coffin before I will fight again under your command.” Two things stood in the way of Forrest’s advancement: he was not a gentleman, and he had not gone to West Point. The South liked to see itself as an aristocratic society whose leaders were men of distinguished lineage, their conduct above reproach. Robert E. Lee was the very model of a Christian gentleman, a knight from Arthurian romance reborn in Virginia. Then there was the question of military background. Jefferson Davis’s elevation of generals Braxton Bragg and Leonidas Polk, based on his friendship with...