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You can flood my email with pro-Forrest propaganda, but I've read up on your hero's exploits enough to last a lifetime, thanks--to include Foote's three-volume love song to the South, along with the Forrest-adoring book 'Critter Company' et al. Contemporary eyewitness accounts, including a personal letter written by a Confederate Captain (whose name escapes me right now), confirm that the order to shoot prisoners--specifically black prisoners--was initiated and overseen by the commander. He did it. He was responsible. Forrest also co-founded the KKK, or are you going to go into that tiresome, neo-confederate apologia about that being a sensible reaction to an unnecessarily harsh Reconstruction policy? One wonders how many lynchings Forrest presided over.

And just how, exactly, does citing Union abuses constitute a defense of your hero's actions?

Finally, implying that I'm uninterested in the facts of the matter because I have some 'damn Yankee' bias is unfounded, if typical of those still in love with The Cause. True, I happen to have several direct ancestors and distant relatives who fought in the Civil War--one of whom died in Andersonville--but I also happen to think that Lee, for example, represented the nobility of spirit the best of the Old South stood for. And it is hard not to admire the cold brilliance of Jackson or the raw courage of common solders like Sam Watkins, who stuck it out bravely to the bitter end. So my advice? Find a new hero, one without so much innocent blood on his hands.