Nathan Bedford Forrest Day is a National Embarrassment
July 13th is Nathan Bedford Forrest Day in Tennessee. Each year, by law, the governor of Tennessee is required to sign a proclamation declaring the anniversary of Forrest’s birth as a “special day of observance”.
Celebrating the life of Nathan Bedford Forrest is a national disgrace and Tennessee should be ashamed of itself.
Confederate memorials and Civil War remembrances are a hot topic these days. How do you remember the positive contributions of some men without commemorating their rebellion? Do you honor Jefferson Davis for being Secretary of War under Franklin Pierce or Robert E. Lee for 32 years of distinguished service to the U.S. Army including being Superintendent of West Point? How do you reconcile Stonewall Jackson’s record as a Confederate general with the fact that he knowingly broke Virginia law by teaching slaves to read or that in the 1850s he helped start a Sunday school for black children, which he continued to fund with his Confederate army pay? Most men aren’t all good or all bad, but somewhere in between. Trying to remember the good without celebrating the bad makes these Confederate remembrances all that much more difficult. The exception to that problem, however, is Nathan Bedford Forrest. That man was all bad.
Wait! Is this the same Nathan Bedford Forrest that Shelby Foote so fondly remembered in Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary series? How can that be? Didn’t Foote called him one of the authentic geniuses of the Civil War era?
Shelby Foote, along with the state of Tennessee, is wrong.
Don't get me wrong, I love Shelby Foote’s writing. I’ve read several of his books and they were remarkable pieces of narrative history. I think Foote’s narrations adds depth and a degree of beauty, for the want of a better term, to Burns’ Civil War (and I think that documentary series ought to be required watching for every high school student in America). I agree with virtually all of Foote’s observations about the Civil War, about its impact on us as a nation, and on how we remember it. But where it comes to Nathan Forrest, I vehemently disagree with him.
There is nothing worth celebrating in the life of Nathan Bedford Forrest. His life was without merit. He was a hateful man, an unabashed racist and white supremacist, and a man who made two fortunes from the sweat of black men’s brows. His supposed military prowess is vastly overrated. Even his supposed enlightenment at the end of his life was nothing more than a sham.
Let’s examine the highlights of Forrest’s life. He was born poor but became wealthy as a planter, using slave labor, and as a slave trader. By the time the Civil War broke out, he had become one of the richest men in the South. He recruited and equipped cavalry units, rising to command his own group of raiders.
Forrest was militarily most successful as a raider. He was a savage fighter, fearsome in battle, and personally killed many men. But his military success beyond raiding was limited. As a cavalry commander as part of the Army of Tennessee, for example, he was an abject failure. He understood small unit tactics and taking advantage of the ground in front of him but he didn’t understand large scale operations or show any sort of strategic skill. He didn’t understand the role of cavalry within a larger army context. His savage nature and callous disregard for human life peaked at the Battle of Fort Pillow, where he and his men massacred several hundred U.S. troops, black and white, after they had already surrendered.
After the war, Forrest continued his racist and white supremacist ways. He joined the fledgling Ku Klux Klan in 1866 or 1867 and became the Klan’s first national leader and Grand Wizard. He was a delegate to the 1868 Democratic Convention where the motto of the convention was “Let White Men Rule”. (The 1868 presidential election was easily the most racist in history. President Trump would have to multiply his rhetoric by about a thousand to even come close to 1868.)
Forrest would persist in supporting white supremacist causes and candidates and resisting Reconstruction into the 1870s. In the mid-1870s, as his health was failing him, Forrest defenders will claim that he had a change of heart and began to embrace reconciliation. As proof, they offer up speeches that Forrest made, such as the so-called Pole-Bearer’s Speech. However, what Forrest said and what he did were two different things.
While Forrest was publicly talking about reconciliation, we’d call it being politically correct today, he was building his fortune on the backs of people who were being treated barely better than slaves. Forrest started farms that leveraged Mississippi’s new Convict Lease System, a system that would be used during the Jim Crow era to arrest black men on trumped up charges, then lease them out to local landowners for far less than those landowners would have to pay if they had to actually use hired labor. The Convict Lease System, the chain gangs, would persist in various forms throughout the South until the middle of the twentieth century.
I firmly believe that we need to take a deep breath, slow down, and rationally approach what we want to do about Confederate monuments and commemorations. We need to have a dialog that engages all of the constituents so that we can find common solutions. However, I don’t believe that at all about anything to do with Nathan Bedford Forrest. The Tennessee legislature should revoke their 1921 law. If the law isn’t revoked, the Governor of Tennessee should refuse to enforce it. Monuments to Forrest should be removed and melted down. Let’s end the national embarrassment of commemorating this man.
