Dixie Ping!
“Thought you might be interested in the subject” ping.
A goverment that fears arms in the hands of it people should also fear ROPE!
- Nathan Bedford Forrest about 1845
NBF Dixie Ping
I’ll repeat an opinion I’ve offered several times on this forum: Slavery would have ended within a generation without the Civil War and civil rights were set back, not advanced, by Northern interference labeled “reconstruction”.
This from an Nth generation Yankee.
I never knew Forrest had many blacks serve under him and not all were supply or quartermaster corps.
he offered pay and emancipation to his own slaves who agreed to serve under him
his reputation as a Simon Legree is utterly false.
I’ll be glad to debate Ft Pillow with any Neo-Abolitionists here too if they would like and we can do it strictly with Federal accounts
Nice. But it would help if the guy knew how to spell barbecue.
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.