And he was probably America’s greatest calvary and light infantry general
He was a slave master/trader who freed all of his slaves before the end of the war.
He also founded the KKK and then ordered it disbanded.
A wide mix to go from.
Nathan Bedford Forrest had great physical courage and was a gifted cavalry commander.
He also bought and sold human beings as chattel for a living and committed war crimes.
What about it? The drunken bluebellies in the fort didn't want to surrender......so Forrest's men whipped their @sses but good.
Dixie Ping
I’d give Forrest a pass before I’d give Byrd a pass.
The late, great, civil war historian Shelby Foote said there were two geniuses to come out of the civil war, Abraham Lincoln and Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Here in Wake Forest, NC there was a street named “Forrest Road” with 2 r’s. My parents lived there. When the Politically Correct crowd figured it out, they changed it to the current “Forest Road”.
I’m hope that D.C. and all of the other cities will also change the name of Malcolm X Blvd, Park, school or whatever, too, being that he referred to whites as “blue-eyed devils.”
you mean where people continued to fight after surrendering?
Forrest offered to treat both the Black troops and the scalawag White troops as prisoners of war if they surrendered. The union commander refused, and the fort was never surrendered - it was taken by storm.
If you are looking for goats at Fort Pillow, the defending troops were poorly commanded by Bradford, and the commander of the New Era refused to cover the retreat.
From wikipedia:
When Forrest testified before a Congressional investigation in 1871 ("The reports of Committees, House of Representatives, second session, forty-second congress," P. 7-449) the committee concluded that Forrest's involvement with the Klan was to attempt to order it to disband. They found no evidence that he had founded the Klan, that he had led the Klan or that he had acted to advise it other than to make efforts to have it disband.
On July 5, 1875, Forrest became the first white man to speak to the Independent Order of Pole-Bearers Association, a civil rights group whose members were former slaves. Although his speech was short, he expressed the opinion that blacks had the right to vote for any candidates they wanted and that the role of blacks should be elevated. He ended the speech by kissing the cheek of one of the daughters of one of the Pole-Bearer members.[1][2]
One Memphis newspaper emphasized the surprising presence of mourning blacks, who seemed to display "a genuine sorrow in the death of the great soldier."
Rightly assuming that many readers would doubt the sincerity of freed people grieving over the death of a renowned slave trader, the reporter added that the African Americans in attendance had nothing but praise for Forrest. "The negroes," he wrote, "had opportunities to see and know [Forrest's] goodness and to recognize his charity and benevolence."
The Contested Image of Nathan Bedford Forrest Court Carney The Journal of Southern History, Vol. 67, No. 3. (Aug., 2001), pp. 601-630.
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.