The Life of General Nathan Bedford Forrest (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading)

By John Allan Wyeth and Ian M. Cuthbertson

Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest is perhaps the most compelling and complicated individual that the Civil War brought to prominence. In looking at his life and military career, it quickly becomes obvious that for those who admire him, as well as those who despise him, there is no shortage of ammunition. In The Life of General Nathan Bedford Forrest (1899), John Allan Wyeth, a former Confederate soldier who briefly served under Forrests command, narrates some of the building blocks of the Forrest legend, from his spectacular string of victories as a brave and gifted soldier to his prominent role in the founding of the Ku Klux Klan.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Sep 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781411429369

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

IN A CONFLICT MARKED BY THE OVERSIZED PERSONALITIES AND REPUTATIONS of many of the general officers of both the Confederate and Union armies, Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest has been judged by many, from General Robert E. Lee to the historian Shelby Foote, to be one of the few truly great military commanders that the American Civil War produced. His reputation as a fearless soldier and gifted tactician, one who consistently visited defeats on his more numerous and better armed opponents, has made him a revered figure to some. It is equally true, however, that his ruthless, sometimes cruel, treatment of his opponents, including charges that he at least condoned, if not actually ordered, the massacre of African-American Union soldiers after they had surrendered, as well as his role as one of the founders and first Grand Wizard of the Klu Klux Klan (KKK), has led others to label him as a war criminal and an unrepentant racist. What is indisputable is that Forrest emerged from the Civil War as one of its most colorful and controversial figures, one whose reputation evolved in the decades after the South’s surrender to near mythical status. The trajectory of his life, from a hardscrabble boyhood through a successful and lucrative career as a slave trader and plantation owner, followed by a spectacular string of victories as a brave and gifted soldier, to his prominent role in the founding of the KKK, an organization he swiftly disowned as a hindrance to what he believed was a highly desirable reconciliation between North and South, marks him as perhaps the most compelling and complicated individuals that the Civil War brought to prominence. In looking at Forrest’s life and military career, it quickly becomes obvious that for those who admire him, as well as those who despise him, there is no shortage of ammunition. In The Life of General Nathan Bedford Forrest, first published in 1899, John Allan Wyeth, a former Confederate soldier who briefly served under Forrest’s command, narrates some of the building blocks of the Forrest legend. It is a story whose resonance still has considerable power in the debate on race relations in the United States, as witnessed by the continued controversy over the appropriateness of a park, in the center of the heavily African-American populated city of Memphis, that bears Forrest’s name and contains both his gravesite and a large equestrian statue of the general in full Confederate uniform.

It is rare for the author of a biography to have led as interesting and accomplished a life as that of his subject, but in John Allan Wyeth, who was by turns a soldier, a medical innovator, a distinguished surgeon, and a prolific author, the exception proves the rule. Wyeth was born in 1845 in Alabama and educated at the Lagrange Military Academy in his home state. At the age of seventeen, in the spring of 1862, Wyeth joined the Confederate Army as a volunteer in Quirk’s Scouts, the advance guard of John Hunt Morgan’s Confederate cavalry. Wyeth later served as a private in the 4th Alabama Cavalry and took part in several skirmishes and battles, some of them as part of General Nathan Bedford Forrest’s command. In October 1863, Wyeth was taken prisoner during a raid on a Union wagon train. Although initially he was treated well by his captors, soldiers of the Tenth Illinois Infantry, Wyeth was subsequently transported to the Union prison at Camp Morton, Indiana. Here he was incarcerated for sixteen months in conditions he later described as ones of deep privation, suffering, and abuse. In this Union camp, thousands of captured Confederate soldiers died of disease, cold, and starvation, all symptoms of the cruelty and neglect that both sides in the Civil War all too frequently displayed towards their prisoners. After the war, however, Wyeth was heavily criticized in the North when he wrote an article in which he detailed his treatment while in Federal captivity and claimed that the suffering he and his fellow prisoners had endured was as great, and as inhumane, as those at the notorious Confederate prison camp at Andersonville, where thousands of Union soldiers also died from privation and abuse.

In early 1865, as the war was entering its final phase, Wyeth, after suffering from a wide variety of illnesses and diseases, including measles, pneumonia, dysentery, typhoid, and malaria, was released as part of a prisoner exchange between the North and South. It was to be two years before Wyeth fully began to regain his health. In 1867, though still suffering from the after-effects of a number of the diseases he had contracted in the prison camp, Wyeth began studying medicine at the University of Louisville, where he graduated in 1869. He subsequently opened his own medical practice in Alabama. Absurd as it seems to modern eyes, his academic and professional progress was standard at that time. Provoked by the catalyst of the death of one of his patients, Wyeth, already believing that his preparations to practice medicine had been woefully inadequate, took the next step and became one of the first American doctors to wholeheartedly embrace the realization that two years at a medical college, with the strictly theoretical training that these types of schools then provided, bore little relationship to the type of education and preparation that was required for doctors to have the necessary training and skills to make the kind of life-and-death decisions that the actual practice of medicine routinely thrust upon them.

By now all too conscious of his own shortcomings as a doctor, Wyeth decided to gain a fuller knowledge of his profession before he treated any more patients. Determined to acquire the finest clinical training available, Wyeth gave up medicine and worked for three years as a riverboat pilot until he could pay the tuition to repeat his undergraduate studies at New York’s Bellevue Medical College. After his graduation in 1874, and as he practiced medicine in New York, Wyeth stayed fast to his belief that there was an urgent and vital need for the medical profession to implement a system of post-graduate education and instruction to give doctors the knowledge and skills necessary to practice medicine effectively. To further that aim, in 1882, after several years of practicing medicine and performing surgery, as well as touring a number of the most famous medical centers in Europe to observe their methods and procedures, Wyeth established the New York Polyclinic Medical School and Hospital, the first post-graduate school of medicine in the United States. The new clinic provided, for the first time in America, systematic postgraduate instruction for doctors under the supervision of experienced specialists in a setting that was an integral part of a hospital where practical lessons could be learned and applied. The establishment of the Polyclinic was a major factor in giving impetus to the movement to modernize the teaching and practice of medicine and surgery in the United States. Wyeth developed into a surgeon of great skill, devising operating procedures that saved countless patients the needless suffering that older surgical methods had inflicted on them. Building on such innovations, Wyeth became a successful and prominent surgeon, and wrote a leading surgical textbook, as well as serving as president of both the New York Medical Association and the American Medical Association

With such a storied and distinguished career behind him, Wyeth still had one last hurrah in him when, in 1917, fifty-six years after he had first donned his gray Confederate uniform, he put on the khaki drab of the American Army and embarked for the Western Front in France as a second lieutenant in the 33rd Division of the American Expeditionary Force. While at the age of seventy-three, Wyeth did not take part in actual combat, his position as a translator and member of the Divisional headquarters frequently brought him close enough to the front to be regularly subjected to shelling and aerial bombing. This experiences led Wyeth to pen poems that recounted his surroundings and to try to capture the experiences of the young soldiers he saw all around him, in particular their attitudes and brutal daily existence. Wyeth even attempted to capture in his literary and well-honed sonnets the harsh jargon and macabre slang of his fellow soldiers in a way that would be relevant and accessible to civilians and soldiers alike. Wyeth’s poems, unflinching but restrained, and keenly observant of the horrors of trench warfare, reflect the cool acceptance of pain from a man who had already seen too much suffering in his life, first as a soldier, then as a prisoner of war, and finally as a doctor and surgeon, that he was unsurprised at the new terrors that modern military technology had unleashed on his long-suffering comrades in arms. Despite the advanced age at which he embarked on his second tour of duty as a soldier, Wyeth survived World War I, dying in 1922.

Wyeth’s penning his poetry on the Western Front was the culmination of a long and distinguished career as a writer. Together with his vocation as medical innovator and skilled surgeon, Wyeth earned a substantial reputation as a writer. Beyond his surgical textbook and this biography of Forrest, an undertaking to which he devoted years, Wyeth also wrote several books on topics ranging from the history of his alma mater, the La Grange Military Academy, and its corps of cadets, to a history of Oregon, to a large number of articles on a wide range of topics published in such prominent magazines as Century and Harpers. He also wrote an autobiography, With Sabre and Scalpel. The Autobiography of a Soldier and Surgeon (1914).

That Wyeth was both a Confederate cavalry trooper and even briefly served under Forrest’s command gave him unique, if not wholly unbiased, insight into General Forrest’s campaigns and his conduct during them. Wyeth’s own active military service ended when he was captured two weeks after the South’s Pyrrhic victory at Chickamauga, where Forrest’s dismounted cavalry had fought with great distinction on the right flank of General Braxton Bragg’s Army of Tennessee. When this book first appeared in 1899, it was the first major biography of Forrest to be published. It examined the military career of a Confederate general whose reputation, as both a war hero and someone who, even as the war was still being fought, had been a critic of the very generals that many in the South now held responsible for their defeat, was already revered. Given the personal history of its author, as well as the sensibility of his times, it might have been unrealistic to expect such a biography to be much more than a hagiography of a Southern hero. Wyeth, however, while obviously a partisan of his subject, does make a considerable effort to try to present a balanced assessment of Forrest. Wyeth, however, is not always successful in his attempt at objectivity, and his dismissal of the massacre of African-American Union soldiers during Forrest’s capture of the Federal positions at Fort Pillow is particularly unconvincing. Wyeth uncritically repeats what was already the standard Southern apologia of the events at Fort Pillow as merely being the inevitable heavy casualties that were to be expected during particularly intensive combat. Yet it is to Wyeth’s credit that, with an attempt at seriousness and evenhanded ness that was highly unusual for a Southerner of his time, he does at least touch on and attempt to analyze all of the major controversies that marked Forrest’s career.

In his narrative, Wyeth displays his considerable abilities as a compelling storyteller, while at the same time producing a well-written and painstakingly researched record, one that lays out in exacting detail the military aspects of Forrest’s campaigns. As the basis of his biography and his detailed descriptions of Forrest’s campaigns, Wyeth drew heavily on the contemporary military records and the personal papers of some of the major participants, as well as the accounts of people who served with Forrest and many others who knew him personally. Wyeth’s book remains, even today, an invaluable source of primary material on Forrest and his battles. In addition to these primary sources, however, in this book, as in his other accounts of the Civil War, in particular his detailed stories about the hardships he suffered as a prisoner of war, Wyeth draws on the stories and impressions of his fellow enlisted men. It was a methodology for capturing an important aspect of historical memory that was rare among the writers and historians of his period. It was an approach that Wyeth had first adopted when he began his service in the Confederate Army, where he sought to capture his own experiences as a cavalryman and as a prisoner. In his biography of Forrest, Wyeth’s attentiveness to the attitudes and activities of his fellow soldiers would enable him to provide some interesting insights into Forrest’s character and his campaigns. However, this is not in any way a definitive analysis of Forrest’s personality, which later historians deal with in more detail and with greater insight. The type of psychological analysis of motivations and behavior that are such a staple of modern biographical writing were almost wholly unknown to the historians of Wyeth’s time. But what this book clearly demonstrates are Forrest’s tactical virtuosity and operational brilliance and its narrative serves to reinforce the widely held view that Forrest was one of the best cavalry commanders ever to take the field. Wyeth provides a detailed and carefully written recitation of all of Forrest’s many engagements, the actions of his subordinates and their commands, the casualties his troops inflicted and suffered, and the scope of the various operations Forrest embarked upon. Other valuable aspects of the book are the copious footnotes and wealth of references it contains.

And there was a wealth of events and personalities for Wyeth to chronicle. Despite a lack of any formal military training, Nathan Bedford Forrest, who enlisted as a private in the Confederate Army in 1861, went on to become a Lieutenant-General and one of the most daring and successful cavalry commanders of the Civil War. Born in Tennessee in 1821, Forrest had built a successful career as a slave trader and plantation owner and was already a wealthy man when the war broke out. Although he had joined the cavalry as an enlisted man, his great wealth—variously estimated at up to U.S. $1,500,000—meant he was quickly asked by his state’s authorities to raise a cavalry unit and equip it at his own expense, a common mustering technique for the South in the early days of the conflict. After arming his troopers, he led his cavalry regiment in skirmishes with a variety of Union troops. Next, the by now Colonel Forrest found himself and his command as part of the Confederate force besieged by U. S. Grant at Fort Donelson. Having rendered distinguished service during the siege, and after a mass Confederate breakout attempt from the besieged fort had failed, Forrest won renown by refusing the instructions of his superiors to accept the unconditional surrender terms Grant had imposed on the garrison. Instead he chose to lead his own command, along with a number of other individual Confederate soldiers who did not wish to enter Union captivity, on a breakout that took them through Grant’s lines. It was an action that brought Forrest great public renown throughout the South, even as he struggled with the difficult and unglamorous task of participating in the rearguard of the Confederate army as it retreated from Nashville.

Joining Albert Sidney Johnston’s newly organized Army of the Mississipi, Forrest played an important part in the bloody battle at Shiloh, although the brutal face-to-face pounding that characterized the battle gave scant opportunity for the effective use of cavalry and his regiment fought dismounted, finally forming the Confederate’s rear guard as the army retreated, having failed repeatedly to break Grant’s lines. During the disengagement, Forrest was wounded, although he continued to exercise command until he was sure that the army had gotten away cleanly from the still disorganized Union pursuers. After serving during the siege of Corinth, Forrest was promoted to brigadier general, and he raised a brigade with which he launched a raid that captured the Union base at Murfreesboro, along with its garrison of 2,000 men and large stocks of badly needed supplies. Despite the fact that both armies were now hunkered down in winter quarters, the ever-aggressive Forrest actively probed the Federal front at Nashville, continually raiding and doing damage in order to keep the enemy unbalanced. As 1862 turned to 1863, Forrest continued to harry the Union forces in Western Tennessee with his raids, depredations that were so successful that they helped force Grant to abandon his campaign in central Mississippi.

But despite his increasing military skill and fame, Forrest proved to be a poor subordinate, headstrong and unwilling to follow orders with which he did not agree. Always serving in the Western theater, Forrest never had the opportunity to serve under the great Confederate generals, such as Lee or Jackson, who might have garnered his respect and obedience. Instead he served under a succession of commanders whose poor to mediocre performance he was quick to recognize and criticize, and under whose orders he chafed. In what was to become a regular pattern, Forrest clashed with his commanding officer, General Joseph Wheeler, and swore he would never serve under him again after a failed attack on the Union forces at Fort Donelson. And while Forrest continued to score successes on the battlefield, including the capture of a large Union raiding column in the spring of 1863, he continue to attract controversy, as when he was shot and wounded by a disgruntled subordinate, whom he then knifed to death. Recovering from his wound, Forrest commanded with distinction the cavalry on the right wing of the Confederate line at the battle of Chickamauga. Disgusted by the achievement of only a partial victory in a battle he believed should have led to the rout of the Union forces, Forrest again clashed with his superiors, in particular the famously abrasive Confederate commander General Braxton Bragg, a confrontation that became so heated that Forrest threatened to kill Bragg if they ever again crossed paths. After this blow-up, Forrest tried to resign his commission, but his resignation was rejected and instead a compromise was reached that recognized his superb military skills, but which also took account of his willful and truculent character. Forrest was promoted to the rank of major general and given command of the Confederacy’s mounted troops in north Mississippi and west Tennessee.

Even with the promotion, the reality was that Forrest had been placed in charge of what, at best, could be described as a shadow command, given the small force of horsemen that was actually available for service. Despite the small force at his command, however, Forrest’s orders were expansive, no less than to protect at all costs this vital food-producing area from Union assault. Aggressive local recruitment helped supplement his small force and such was Forrest’s confidence that he unhesitatingly shifted from the defensive to the offensive, constantly and successfully skirmishing with much larger Federal forces, resulting in the local Union commander, the always belligerent William T. Sherman, demanding an all-out effort be undertaken to destroy Forrest and his increasingly effective horsemen, by then simply labeled as Forrest’s Cavalry. It was during this period that one of the biggest black marks on Forrest’s career occurred when his command stormed and captured Fort Pillow, a Union fortress, resulting in what has subsequently been widely held to be a massacre of the fort’s largely African-American garrison. But it was also the time of one of Forrest’s greatest victories when, with a force of only 3,200 men, he defeated 8,300 Federals under General Samuel D. Sturgis at Brice’s Crossroads. Forrest showed his great tactical skill in this encounter by attacking the head of the straggling Federal column, defeating it, and then routing each successive Union brigade in detail, killing one-third of the Union force and capturing the Federal supply column.

Forrest scored further tactical victories against a succession of Union attacks into middle Tennessee and Mississipi in the fall of 1864, but these successes did little to alter the strategic realities of the situation of the Confederacy in the Western theater. Always the Cinderella of the Confederate Army, the Army of Tennessee constantly found itself starved of resources that went instead to the more famous and more consistently successful Army of Northern Virginia. While Forrest continued to raid successfully behind Union lines, destroying Federal transportation links, capturing garrisons and burning depots throughout Tennessee, the reality was that as Sherman pushed into Georgia, Forrest’s cavalry was too weak to stop equally devastating Union raids on the Confederacy’s irreplaceable logistical heartland in Alabama and Georgia. After briefly serving under General Hood following the destruction of Atlanta, in the final months of the war Forrest was promoted to lieutenant general and given his final assignment, to defend a front that ran from Decatur in Alabama all the way to the Mississippi. It was just as well that the main Union force largely ignored this area since protecting such a breadth of territory was an impossibility with the small force under his command and Forrest finally surrendered, with a few hundred men, on May 9, 1865, a month after Lee surrendered at Appomattox.

Paroled like other Confederate soldiers, Forrest found himself all but penniless. Despite this setback, his essentially positive nature reasserted itself and he resumed farming, as well as taking a sinecure as the president of the Selma, Marion & Memphis Railroad. Forrest, however, was not content simply to look to his own welfare, and he helped found the Ku Klux Klan shortly after the war, as what he saw as a self-protection force for Southerners ravaged by a brutal army of occupation and their rapacious henchmen, both white and black. Forrest, however, relatively quickly came to the opinion that the widespread and increasingly horrific violence being perpetrated by the masked riders he had helped organize was counter-productive to what he saw as the vital necessity of getting the South back on its feet economically. In 1869, he left the vicious and highly destructive movement he had helped create to others more interested in the racial politics of Reconstruction rather than the economics of rapprochement with the North.

Forrest, despite his all too obvious shortcomings as an individual, remains a much-revered military icon, whose tactics have been copied by everyone from Erwin Rommel to George S. Patton. Forrest himself summed up his entire tactical doctrine in the pithy, though ungrammatical phrase: Get there firstest, with the mostest. Seizing the advantage, and bringing the maximum force to bear as quickly as possible, remains one of the most important cornerstones of modern military thinking. Forrest, who died in 1877, would recognize his principles at work on many modern battlefields.

Ian M. Cuthbertson, M. Litt., is a Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute of the New School University and Director of the WPI’s Counter-Terrorism Project. He holds an M. Litt. in Strategic Studies from the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, and is the author of a number of books and articles on European military affairs, transatlantic security issues, and counter-terrorism policy.

PREFACE

FOR THE LAST TWO YEARS OF THE CIVIL WAR I WAS A PRIVATE SOLDIER IN A regiment of Alabama cavalry which had formerly served under Forrest. Four companies of this regiment had formed a portion of the famous battalion which had distinguished itself in the engagement at Fort Donelson, and, refusing to surrender, had marched out with him through the gap in General Grant’s lines. Although I was at no time directly under General Forrest, I was impressed by the enthusiastic devotion to him of these veterans, who had followed his banner for the first year of the war, and who seemed never to tire in speaking of his kind treatment of them, his sympathetic nature as a man, his great personal daring, and especially of his wonderful achievements as a commander. Of these achievements I was at that time not altogether ignorant. His escape from Fort Donelson; the desperate charge which saved Beauregard’s army from Sherman’s vigorous pursuit after Shiloh, in which he was severely wounded; the capture of Murfreesborough with its entire garrison of infantry and artillery, with his small brigade of cavalry without cannon; the charge on and capture of Coburn’s infantry at Thompson’s station; the capture of the garrison at Brentwood; and the relentless pursuit of Streight’s raiders, which ended in the surrender of these gallant Union soldiers to Forrest with less than one-half of their number, had already attracted wide attention and had made him famous. The knowledge of these facts, together with a personal association with the men who had felt the influence of his immediate leadership, naturally interested me in his career, which I closely followed to the end of the great struggle. When the general government, with wise forethought, began to collect and to place at the disposal of its citizens the official reports and correspondence, and all the reliable literature of the war, I undertook, in the light of these and other authentic papers, a closer analysis of his military record. The further my investigations proceeded, the more I became convinced that while Forrest was justly acknowledged to be one of the most famous fighters and leaders of mounted infantry or cavalry which the war produced on either side, he was more than this, and that a careful and unbiassed statement of his achievements would place him in history not only as one of the most remarkable and romantic personalities of the Civil War, but as one of the ablest soldiers of the world. While I had hoped, as year after year slipped by since peace was declared, that some one abler than I would undertake the task of placing in readable shape the story of his life, I had determined if this were not done before I should pass into the sere and yellow leaf to pay this tribute to his memory myself. It has been a work of years to gather up from every available source the matter relating to this history—his early days, his civil and private life, and the accurate facts of his military record. In 1894 I wrote a condensed sketch, had it printed in single column upon the margin of wide sheets of paper, leaving a large blank space, and these I mailed to every surviving officer or soldier of his command whose address I could obtain, and to others personally acquainted with Forrest before or after the war. All were requested to return the sheet with corrections, and to add everything of interest, for the accuracy of which the sender could vouch. I also caused the publication of this sketch in various newspapers of wide circulation in the section of the South from which his troops were chiefly drawn, and asked as well for private letters of information. As a result of these efforts a great mass of material came into my possession, and an interest was aroused which encouraged me in the laborious task of sifting the reliable from the unreliable, and of making presentable to the reader the matter which was worthy of credence.

To each one of this long list of persons who so promptly and generously responded to my appeal I shall ever be grateful. I am also under great obligation to many officers and soldiers who served immediately with General Forrest, and to a number who served in the commands of the Union forces directly opposed to him, for much that is of interest, and that has enabled me to present a clearer history of this remarkable man than could otherwise have been obtained. It was my good fortune to become intimately acquainted with the late General Thomas Jordan, who, associated with Mr. J. B. Pryor, had immediately after the war written a book entitled The Campaigns of Lieutenant-General N. B. Forrest, a great portion of the manuscript of which book had been perused by Forrest, who had personally made important corrections and valuable suggestions. General Jordan had for a considerable period after the war been intimately associated with Forrest, and from him I received much that was of service to me in the work I had in hand. Naturally the volume he had written so soon after hostilities had ceased was pervaded by a bias or prejudice for the Southern side of the struggle which detracted from its value as an historical document, and many of the statements it contained I found were not accurate when tested by the official reports which came out later, and to which General Jordan and his associate could not have had access. I have endeavored to exclude from these pages everything bearing upon the civil or military life of Forrest that could not be substantiated. In the reports of battles and campaigns, when any material differences of opposing commanders were evident, I have analyzed the reports, in the effort to arrive at a fair and unbiassed conclusion, making every allowance for the natural prejudice of the human mind under the influence of the excitement incident to war.

It has been suggested that certain portions of this book which bear testimony to Forrest’s harshness and violent temper should not be made public, as they might detract from his reputation as a man; but it has been my endeavor to paint him exactly as he lived, so that posterity may form its own opinion of him from the evidence. To my mind it would be as inexcusable to hide any of his shortcomings as it would be to permit the assailants of his reputation to go unchallenged. He had his weaknesses, and was not an angel by any means, but he was very far from being a man who did not have a high sense of right and justice. Personally, nothing would please me more than to have left out of my book everything which could possibly awaken an unpleasant memory or cause the slightest irritation, but simple justice to Forrest requires a recitation of some of these unhappy incidents.

Happily for all, the bitterness engendered by that fratricidal struggle has passed away, and while Forrest took the Southern side and fought to the last with desperate energy and an intensity of purpose unsurpassed, his history and his fame are part of the glory of our common country. No spirit more loyal to its convictions ever animated a mortal frame than that which dominated his all too brief existence. When his blood-red sword was sheathed at last, he took on the modes of peace as earnestly and consistently as he had carried on the direful methods of war. From the day that his battle-flag was furled to the day of his death he labored for more than a political rehabilitation of the nation. He wished it a union heart to heart between the South and the North. This was the burden of his eloquent and pathetic addresses to the veterans of his command at the annual reunions; and when the hand of the Great Destroyer was laid upon him, in his last will he bequeathed his sword to his son with the expressed wish that, should occasion offer, he, as his father would have done, would use it under the Stars and Stripes with the same devotion and earnestness that it had been wielded for the Southern Confederacy.

JOHN A. WYETH

CHAPTER ONE

THE ANCESTRY AND EARLIER LIFE OF N. B. FORREST

NOW AND THEN THERE COMES UPON THE STAGE OF LIFE, IN THE THEATER OF this world, a man who so differs from the rest of that he catches the eye and ear at once, and, as long as he moves in the scene, holds the attention of his fellows. When the sable curtain falls, and his part in the drama is over, we who remain to fill the minor rôles find time in moments of reflection to ask ourselves: What manner of man was this, and wherein did he differ from others of his kind? By what mysterious alchemy did the elements in him combine to lift him to the stars, while we who just as earnestly, with upturned eyes and patient longing, strive to reach the realms of the immortals, stumble and fall, perish and are forgotten?

The innumerable caravan that moves

To that mysterious realm where each shall take

His chamber in the silent halls of death

On the 13th day of July, in the year 1821, in a rude frontier cabin, amid surroundings which told of poverty, and in the obscurity of a remote backwoods settlement of middle Tennessee, there was born one of these rare beings. The light which first greeted his infant vision came through the cracks in the chinking between the logs of hewn cedar, or sent its penetrating rays beneath the riven boards of the roof which in overlapping rows were laid upon the rafters and held in place by heavy poles and blocks, in lieu of nails. This humble cabin, which was his mother’s home, claimed no more than eighteen by twenty feet of earth to rest upon, with a single room below and a half-room or loft overhead. One end of this building was almost entirely given up to the broad fireplace, while near the middle of each side swung, on wooden hinges, a door. There was no need of a window, for light and air found ready access through the doorways and cracks, and down through the wide, squatty chimney. A pane of glass was a luxury as yet unknown to this primitive life. Around and near the house was a cleared patch of land containing several acres enclosed with a straight stake-fence of cedar rails, and by short cross-fences divided into a yard immediately about the cabin; rearward of this a garden, and a young orchard of peach, apple, pear, and plum trees. The yard fence ran parallel with the public road so newly cut through the forest that stumps and roots of trees still showed above the level of the ground, waiting to be removed by the slow process of decay.

Across the highway, squatting among the giant cedars of the Duck River country, stood a log blacksmith-shop, with bellows and forge, anvil, tongs, and hammer, and the other simple paraphernalia of an artisan in iron; and here, week in, week out, from morn till night, the sparks flew in showers from the red-hot metal as the skilful hand and powerful arm of the workman, with turning tongs and sturdy blows of the hammer, wrought the half-molten mass into useful shape.

The owner of this shop was William Forrest, blacksmith, then twenty-one years of age, more than six feet in height, with the heavy, muscular development of a mechanic. He was an honorable man and a law-abiding citizen, sober and industrious. This I have from a perfectly reliable source—from one who lived a near neighbor and knew him well. He must have been this and more to have won the love and devotion of Mariam Beck, the woman of extraordinary character who on this day first held to a mother’s breasts her twin-born hostages to fortune, his son and daughter. If, as was natural on this eventful day, his heart swelled with the pride of paternity and a father’s love, what height of ecstasy might not this humble workman have reached could he have seen through the curtain of the future and read the horoscope of that first-born boy of his, who was destined to write his name on one of the loftiest tablets of the immortals in the Temple of Fame! But this was not to be.

For three generations the Forrests had belonged to that restless race of pioneers who in search of home and fortune had followed close upon the heels of the savages, as these were driven farther and farther towards the setting sun. While there was yet a narrow fringe of civilization along the Atlantic coast, they were content to dwell among the foot-hills of the eastern slope of the Alleghanies. But when the hardy Anglo-Saxon race began in earnest to cross the sea and establish more numerous settlements there, these bold and self-reliant frontiersmen, with wives and children, packing up their small store of household goods, gathered in little colonies, yoked their oxen to the wagons, turned their backs upon the Atlantic, and, cutting as they went a trail across the Eastern Divide, plunged into the vast wilderness of the valley of the Mississippi.

Among this class of men was Shadrach Forrest, who about 1740 moved from Virginia into the colony of North Carolina, settling in that section of country which afterwards became Orange County when that state was admitted to the Union.

Here he lived many years, was married, and reared a large family of children. Among these children of Shadrach Forrest was Nathan, the second son, who had married in North Carolina a Miss Baugh, descended from an Irish family which had immigrated to that section of the New World. William Forrest, the blacksmith, and the father of the distinguished general, was the firstborn child of this marriage, having seen the light of day about the year 1798.

Nathan Forrest, with the restlessness and enterprise characteristic of his race, accompanied by his aged father and his own family, among whom was William Forrest, then eight years of age, immigrated in 1806 to Tennessee, and settled north of the Cumberland River, not far from the present town of Gallatin, in Sumner County. Not satisfied with their surroundings, two years later, pushing farther into the wilderness, they finally established themselves in the Duck River country in 1808, in what was then Bedford County, Tennessee. Here, as William Forrest grew to manhood, he learned the blacksmith’s trade, which was his vocation when in 1820 he married Mariam Beck.

I obtained from Mr. J. B. Boyd, an aged and respected citizen of Holt’s Corner, in this section of Tennessee, the following reliable information concerning the Forrest family a few years after their arrival in Bedford County: The grandfather of General N. B. Forrest, whose first name was Nathan, lived within a half-mile of my father’s house. In my early boyhood he had a small farm and nursery of fruit-trees. He was the father of eight children, five boys and three girls. William, the oldest son, and the father of General Forrest, was a blacksmith by trade. The other sons of Nathan Forrest were principally engaged as traders in live-stock; except one, who was a tailor. None followed farming as an occupation while living in this community. There are now none of the name living here. While I was yet quite a small boy, Nathan Forrest, the general’s grandfather, sold his place and moved about five miles distant. Whether William Forrest, the general’s father, continued to work at the blacksmith’s trade after leaving our immediate neighborhood, I am unable to say. Nathan Bedford Forrest, who afterwards became so famous, was born in Bedford County, in that portion which was afterwards cut off to form in part the county of Marshall. The house in which he was born was a log cabin of the primitive kind, built by the early settlers in this then backwoods country. It stood a little less than a half-mile from where the village of Chapel Hill now stands, but at the time of which I write this country was very sparsely settled, and there was as yet no such place as Chapel Hill. This house was torn down many years ago. The Forrest family were all energetic, high-minded, straightforward people. I have never heard of any of them being dissipated or connected with anything that was disreputable.

Of William Forrest but little is known beyond the fact that he worked at his trade steadily and earnestly in this sparsely settled backwoods country, to support a family which rapidly gathered about the fireside as the years of his married life went swiftly by. He is said to have been a man who possessed great determination and courage, and to have exercised a considerable influence in the small community in which he moved. In 1834, when Nathan Bedford Forrest was just thirteen years of age, William Forrest, with his wife and children, moved from middle Tennessee into northern Mississippi, to that portion of the State which had been occupied by the Indians. The aborigines having been transferred to reservations beyond the Mississippi, these lands were opened to settlers, and thither he immigrated and entered a homestead on the banks of a small stream in Tippah County, not far from the present village of Salem. Here, in 1837, when the subject of this sketch was not quite sixteen years of age, his father died, leaving him the head of a family consisting of his widowed mother, six brothers, and three sisters, and to these was added, four months later, his brother Jeffrey, a posthumous child.¹

General Forrest’s mother was of Scotch extraction, her parents having emigrated from South Carolina and settled near what is now known as Caney Springs, not far from Duck River, in middle Tennessee, about the time of the admission of this State into the Union in 1796. Mr. Boyd writes me: The family of the general’s mother, Miss Mariam Beck, lived near Caney Springs Post-office, but they have all either died or emigrated from this place.

Mentally and physically Mariam Beck was a remarkable woman. In stature she was almost six feet, of large, muscular frame, and weighed about one hundred and eighty pounds. Her hair was dark, her eyes a bluish-gray, her expression gentle and kind; and yet no one who saw the prominent cheek-bones, the broad forehead, and the deep lines of her face could doubt that she possessed great force of character, a determination of will, and unusual courage. Hers was the ruling spirit of the household, and, although strict and severe with her children, it may be said with perfect truthfulness that she won their affectionate love and retained it throughout her life. Bedford Forrest’s love for his mother amounted to adoration, and was one of the noblest features of this great man’s character. It is said of this Mother of the Gracchi, who gave eight sons to the service of her country, that she was in her family, as well as in her neighborhood, self-willed and imperious to a degree, and that, having undertaken any enterprise, she persisted in it until it was accomplished. It is more than likely that this marked trait in the character of her distinguished son was inherited chiefly from the mother’s side, for once convinced that he was right, his determination to accomplish his end was characterized by a fixedness of purpose which brooked no opposition, and at times bore down with almost savage fierceness upon all who stood in his path. She bore eleven children to William Forrest, and six years after his death married Mr. Joseph Luxton, and to this union four children were born—three sons and a daughter.

John Forrest, the brother next to the general, volunteered in the American army and served in the Mexican War, and there received a gun-shot wound through the lower part of the spinal cord which produced complete paralysis from that point downward. He could neither walk nor stand without the aid of crutches. He resided in Memphis, and was living at the Worsham House when the Federals occupied that city in 1862. A Union officer with a detachment of men had visited his mother’s plantation, situated five or six miles in the country from Memphis, and had deported themselves in such manner as to arouse the indignation of the mother of the Forrests. All of her sons being absent in the army except John, she visited Memphis the next day and informed him of what had occurred. A day or two later, as John Forrest was sitting in front of the hotel, this officer passed near him, when he stopped him, called his attention to his conduct in the presence of his mother, and told him that if ever he repeated the offence he would break his crutch over his head. The Federal officer resented this remark, and began to abuse not only John Forrest but all the family in severe terms. At this the cripple raised himself from his chair, and, leaning upon one crutch, tried to strike the officer with the other. His antagonist seized the crutch as it was raised in the air, and kicked the remaining one from underneath the paralyzed man, who immediately fell to the sidewalk. Having full use of his arms, he drew a derringer from his pocket and shot the officer, who for weeks lay at the point of death, but finally recovered. John Forrest was immediately arrested, placed in irons, and confined on board a gunboat anchored at the wharf or landing at Memphis. Here he remained in close confinement, isolated from all friends and acquaintances, for sometime, and, the news of his arrest having come to General Forrest, he at once demanded of the general in command at Memphis the proper treatment or release of his brother, until he could be tried by law for shooting the officer. This demand was complied with at once, and John was set at liberty and afterwards acquitted.

William Forrest, the next son, a captain of scouts, was an exceedingly handsome man of large build, big brown eyes, and brown curly hair, which in middle age was streaked with gray. He served with distinction in the Confederate cavalry, and was wounded on several occasions. He led the charge upon Streight’s column at the battle on Sand Mountain, near Day’s Gap, the last day of April, 1863, and was desperately wounded, his thigh having been shattered by a Minié ball. He had the reputation of being a headstrong, reckless, and dangerous character, but was neither reckless, high-tempered, nor violent. On the contrary, he was modest and reticent in his demeanor, yet possessed that quality of courage which did not seem to realize what fear meant. He was quick to resent an insult, and, following the rule which had prevailed in the frontier community where he was born and reared, he believed the only way to settle a dispute was to fight it out.

Aaron Forrest, the fourth son, became a lieutenant-colonel of a Mississippi regiment of cavalry, and in the expedition to Paducah, Kentucky, in 1864, was taken ill with pneumonia, and died near Dresden, in west Tennessee.

Jesse Forrest served with the distinguished courage of the family, and became colonel of a regiment. He displayed exceptional ability and gallantry in the attack on Athens, Alabama, in 1864, where he was very severely wounded.

Jeffrey, the last son and child of William Forrest, born four months after the death of his father, was the pride and special care of his distinguished brother, who felt that he must be to this fatherless child not only an elder brother, but a father also. Having by the time that Jeffrey was old enough to go to school succeeded in amassing a considerable fortune, he determined to give him a thorough school and collegiate education, which he carried out up to the time the war came on, when Jeffrey, in common with all the Forrest brothers excepting John, enlisted. He exhibited military ability of an order which approached more nearly the genius of the great general, became colonel of cavalry, and was commanding a brigade in his brother’s division when, at the battle near Okolona, in the pursuit of Sooy Smith, in 1863, while leading the charge, he was shot through the neck and instantly killed.

All of the daughters of William and Mariam Forrest died early in life. The sons, whose names have just been given, are now, in 1898, all dead.

Of the three sons by her second husband, the eldest two entered the Confederate service. The third was too young to be mustered in. After the war these children, one of whom became Sheriff of Uvalde County, accompanied by their mother, moved to Texas, where she died and was buried in Navasota, in 1867.

Macbeth’s surpassing apostrophe to his fearless wife might well apply to this Southern mother, who consecrated eight sons to the god of war:

Bring forth men-children only.

One or two incidents in the life of General Forrest’s mother will serve to emphasize what has been said in regard to her physical prowess, as well as her strong and determined will. They are not the less interesting in the fact that the same characteristics belonged to her illustrious son, who at the period mentioned was but a boy fifteen years of age.

When the Forrests first settled in Mississippi, so sparsely peopled was this portion of the country, from which the Indians had but recently been removed, that it was some ten miles to their nearest neighbor. Roads were practically unknown, and those that existed were little better than bridle-paths through the woods and canebrakes, and had to be travelled on foot or on horseback. On one occasion Mrs. Forrest and her sister, Fannie Beck, who lived with her, started out on horseback to pay a visit to this neighbor. When they were leaving for home late in the afternoon her hostess presented her with a basket containing several young chickens. Their return trip was without incident until they had arrived within a mile of their cabin. The sun had gone down, and it was beginning to grow quite dark. At this moment they heard the yelp or scream of a panther in the dense woods, and only a few yards distant. They realized at once that the hungry beast had scented the chickens, and was bounding through the cane and undergrowth to secure its prey. At the first yelp of the animal the horses became frightened and broke into a run. Their riders, or at least one of them, was alarmed, and both urged their horses towards home as fast as they could go with safety over the narrow and rough trail. Mrs. Forrest’s sister shouted to her from her position in front as they were galloping along to drop the basket and let the panther have the chickens, which would stop it, but Mariam Beck was not that sort of woman. There was too much determination and Scotch grit in her, and she declined to do as she was bid. She was not going to let any varmint have her chickens, and on they sped, the horses holding the panther safely in their wake, until they approached the creek which ran near by their cabin. On account of the high banks of this stream and the depth of the water, they were compelled, as they reached it, to slacken their speed almost to a stand-still to prevent the horses from falling as they slid down the declivity and struck the water. This slowing-up enabled their swift pursuer to gain on them rapidly, and, mad with hunger to such a desperate degree that it had lost the natural fear of human beings, the beast leaped from the top of the bank, striking Mrs. Forrest upon the shoulder and side of the neck with his front paws, while the claws of the hind feet sank deeply into the back of the animal she was riding. Smarting under the pain and wild with fright, the horse plunged forward so quickly that the hold of the panther was torn loose, and at the same time the rider’s clothes were ripped from her back, and several deep, lacerated wounds were inflicted in the flesh of the shoulders as the beast fell into the water. The screams of the women brought the whole household out from the cabin, which was situated on the opposite bluff, and Bedford Forrest came running with his dogs to the rescue. The mother, still holding on to her basket of chickens, was lifted from the saddle and tenderly cared for by her eldest son and his aunt. As soon as she was made as comfortable as possible, young Forrest took his flintlock rifle from the rack above the fireplace and started towards the door to call his dogs. His mother asked him what he was going to do. He said, Mother, I am going to kill that beast if it stays on the earth. She tried to dissuade him from going into the woods at that hour, asking him to wait until daylight, when he could see what he was doing. The boy replied that by that time the trail would be so cold the dogs would not be able to follow it; that he was going now while the scent was fresh; the hounds would soon run it into a tree; and away he went into the darkness. The hounds soon picked up the trail, and followed it for miles through swamps and briers and canebrakes, until nearly midnight. After an hour or so of the chase, the boy perceived it would tax his strength sorely to keep up with the dogs, and fearing they would get out of hearing and reach of him he cut a small grape-vine, tied it around the neck of one of the oldest hounds, and held fast to the other end of the tether. At times the other dogs would get out of hearing, but the captive hound followed unerringly upon the trail, and after a while, far in the distance, he heard the baying of the pack, which told him that they had at least treed the panther. It was too dark when he arrived to see the beast, so he waited patiently until the day began to break, and then he saw it lying stretched at full length on a large limb, lashing its cat-like tail from side to side and snarling with its white teeth at the dogs, which had never taken their eyes from it or given it a moment’s peace. Putting a fresh primer in the pan of his flintlock, and taking steady aim, the young huntsman sent a bullet through its heart, when it fell limp and dead to the earth. Cutting off the scalp and ears, he started for home, where about nine o’clock the same morning he arrived to show his mother the trophy he had won.

An officer of distinction and a close observer, who served under Forrest from the beginning, writing of his influence upon his men after the first few weeks of service, says: In the short period since its organization, this command found that it was his strong will, impervious to argument, appeal, or threat, which was to be the governing impulse in their movements. Everything necessary to supply their wants, to make them comfortable, he was quick to do, save to change his plans, to which everything had to bend. That this same unbending will came to him by direct inheritance seems evident from the following incident:

Several years after the death of William Forrest, in 1837, his widow married Mr. Joseph Luxton, and when the Civil War broke out, in 1861, she resided upon her plantation some few miles out from Memphis on the Raleigh Road. The oldest son by this second marriage was then eighteen years of age, and had for some months been employed as a clerk in one of the stores in Memphis, and had enlisted in the Confederate army in one of the companies organized in that city. On a Friday afternoon he appeared at his mother’s home clad in a neat-fitting new suit of Confederate gray, trimmed with gold lace and other fancy trappings, so much in fashion at the beginning of the war. His mother had some ideas of her own which the younger generation deemed old-fashioned, but to which, despite criticism, she tenaciously adhered. Some of her neighbors said she was set in her ways. Among other eccentricities she maintained that no meal was so good as that which was ground from corn raised on her own farm and shelled under her personal supervision, where she could see that none of the small faulty grains near the point of the ear were used. Every Saturday morning, bright and early, she would send one of her boys to mill with a sack of this corn to be ground. As her son retired to his room that night she said, Joseph, I want you to get up early in the morning and go to mill with that sack of corn. She did not seem to take into consideration the fact that he was living away from home, and was now a Confederate soldier. The young man did not respond to his mother’s command, but went silently to bed none the less determined not to soil his new soldier clothes by riding on a sack of meal. The mother belonged to that robust and enterprising type of housewife who believed in getting up before daylight and having everything ready for work by the time it was light enough to see. On week-days everybody on her farm had breakfast by candlelight. The next morning, as usual, every one was called early, and all appeared at the table excepting the devotee of Mars. The old lady said to the negro servant who was waiting upon the table, Tell Mr. Joseph to come to breakfast right away; and continued, as the servant went on the errand, I am not going to put up with any city airs on this place. She then occupied herself in pouring out the coffee for those at the table, and, while so doing, the negro returned with a message from her impertinent offspring, that he did not intend to go to mill; she might as well send one of the niggers with the corn. One who was present on this occasion says: When this message was delivered, she was just in the act of pouring out a cup of coffee, with the cup and saucer in one hand and the pot in the other, lifted several inches from the table. For a moment she seemed dumfounded at such impertinence on the part of her son, and then, setting the half-filled cup and the coffee-pot down, she arose from the table, told us to go on with breakfast, and asked us to excuse her, as she would return in a few minutes. She marched out into the yard, broke off three or four long peach-tree switches, and went directly upstairs, pulled that eighteen-year-old warrior of hers out of bed, and gave him such a thrashing as to justify a remembrance of it for the remainder of his life. She made him get up and put on an old suit of farm clothes which he had left at home when he became a city chap. The horse was already at the gate, and, accompanying the prodigal son that far, she picked up the two-bushel sack of corn, put it on the horse, and made him get up on top of it, and away he went to the mill. As she came back into the house, her eyes flashing and her face red with anger and the exertion which the chastisement had called for, she said, Soldier or no soldier, my children will mind me as long as I live."

It is said that Joseph returned in due time with the meal, a wiser and probably a better son. Her influence over her children was great and unimpaired to the end. When her distinguished son was a lieutenant-general, it is said that he was as docile in her presence and as obedient to her as if he were still a boy living under her roof, and no one could pacify him in his moments of anger or control