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.
A convenient and oft-repeated Southron myth. In the first place slave marriages were not recognized in any Southern state. In the second place there is documentation that Forrest did indeed separate slaves from their partners and children. In "River Run Red" Andrew Ward details how one Forrest admirer, Judge J.P. Young, was upset as a child when Forrest bought his nursemaid and took her away, separating her from her two children. A former slave named Louis Hughes wrote many years after the war about how his wife and children, who he claims had been illegally abducted after being freed in Kentucky, were sold to separate owners by Forrest. And as it turns out one of the survivors of Fort Pillow, Thomas Hooper of the 6th U.S. Colored Artillery, apparently as a child was sold by Forrest along with his mother, but to separate parties.
Forrest was above all else a successful businessman in his chosen profession. Successful businessmen do not become so by holding to practices that prevent them from doing business. While claims that Forrest abused his slaves apparently have little evidence to support them, he did buy and sell slaves as the opportunity presented itself. And if that meant separating parents from children, or parents from each other, then he didn't seem to have a problem with that.
It's also interesting to note that in his book "Nathan Bedford Forrest: A Biography" Jack Hurst quotes Forrest as claiming in later life that he was part owner in the Wanderer, a slave ship from the 1850's, and was apparently proud of the fact that the death rate among the slaves was low. While slave trading was certainly a legal occupation in the South, slave importing was not.