CW N Civil War News
Vol. 44, No. 2
$3.50
America’s Monthly Newspaper For Civil War Enthusiasts
48 Pages, February 2018
The Confederate ‘Wizard of the Saddle’ Loses His Statue in Memphis
Gen. Nathan B. Forrest. By Stephen Davis Special to Civil War News Robert E. Lee commanded the Army of Northern Virginia. Jefferson Davis served as the Confederacy’s only president. Thomas J. Jackson earned the distinctive nickname of “Stonewall.” Nathan B. Forrest commanded Southern cavalry in the Civil War’s western theater. Different men, different paths to historical fame, but they have one thing in common. They all have memorial statues that have been removed from public parks in Southern cities. The recent removal of Forrest’s statue from a Memphis park leads to this reconsideration of the famous Tennessean’s life and legacy.
Antebellum Planter and Slave Trader The man who would become one of the Confederacy’s most famous generals was born in middle Tennessee on July 13, 1821. His father, William Forrest, was a country blacksmith who relocated the family to north Mississippi. Bedford, as he was called (Nathan was his grandfather’s name) was thirteen. When William died in 1837, young Bedford, still a
teen, became head of the family—his mother, five brothers and three sisters. There was not much time for education. Bedford probably had only a few months of formal schooling in Tennessee, and not more than that in Mississippi. Working the family’s small farm, he got his own education, “using the wilderness and frontier life as his teacher,” in the words of Brian Steel Wills, the general’s biographer. At the age of 21 he struck out on his own, about the time that his mother remarried. Moving to Hernando, Miss., he joined his uncle’s livestock and livery-stable business, working hard and earning a living. He got married in September 1845, began raising a family, and with them moved to Memphis in the spring of 1852. Soon Forrest started buying real estate and established a business of buying and selling slaves. He made a lot of money in the latter calling. Jack Hurst, another biographer, has estimated Forrest’s annual income in the late 1850’s from the sale of a thousand enslaved African-Americans to be at least $96,000, “a fabulous income.” “It is said Forrest was kind to his negroes; that he never separated members of a family,” wrote Lafcadio Hearn, the noted journalist years after the Civil War. Hurst is openly skeptical of this and other attestations to the slave trader’s “kindness”: “to be successful,” he writes, “a slave trader had to be known as humane.” In his landmark study, Slave Trading in the Old South (1931), Frederic Bancroft asserted, “when traders prospered, were honest, thrifty, and bought plantations, like Forrest…and many others, they enjoyed the essentials of respectability.”
This respectability as a prosperous Memphis businessman led to Forrest’s election as city alderman in 1858 and re-election in 1859. That year, however, he resigned from office, sold his slave business in Memphis, and began raising cotton on a 3,000-acre plantation in Coahoma County, Miss. He bought more land and slaves, and by the time of the war had become a wealthy Southern planter.
Raises a Cavalry Battalion
Tennessee seceded on June 8, 1861, two months after the Confederates’ firing on Fort Sumter. Forrest volunteered six days later as a private in a company of Tennessee mounted rifles. “Forrest did not remain a private long,” the noted historian Ed Bearss has written. According to Confederate Brig. Gen. James R. Chalmers, who rode with Forrest during the war, Tennessee governor Isham G. Harris knew Bedford well and summoned him to Memphis to raise a battalion of mounted troops. Forrest set out to buy arms and equipment with his own money, and advertised for volunteers. By early October, the battalion of eight companies had been raised and organized; Forrest was logically elected its lieutenant colonel. A few weeks later he and his battalion were sent to Fort Donelson, on the Cumberland River near the Kentucky border. Two more companies were added to Forrest’s battalion, bringing his command to regimental size (the 3rd Tennessee Cavalry), though its commander remained a lieutenant colonel. In February 1862, Union Brig. Gen. Ulysses Grant’s Army of the Tennessee advanced on Fort Donelson in conjunction with Northern gunboats. By the 12th the Confederate garrison under Brig.
Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest’s equestrian monument before removal. (John C . Spaziani) Gen. John B. Floyd was hemmed in; a Southern effort to break out failed on February 15. Floyd’s officers met and decided to surrender. Forrest, in charge of his regiment and several hundred other troopers, refused to give up and that night led his men out through enemy lines. The remaining garrison troops were surrendered to Grant the next day. Regimental reorganization in mid-March led to Forrest’s election as colonel. Several weeks later, following the Confederate defeat in the battle of Shiloh, Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard put Forrest in
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charge of his retreating army’s rearguard. Three months later, he was put in command of a mounted brigade, some 1,400 men. He led them against a Federal garrison at Murfreesboro, Tenn., on July 13. His threat to “have every man put to the sword” scared the Union commander into surrendering his garrison: 1,200 officers and men, a quarter-million dollars’ worth of arms, equipment, and wagons, plus four field pieces. A week later he was promoted
H Forrest
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