Nathan Bedford Forrest: A Biography by Jack Hurst

Author:Jack Hurst [Hurst, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Military, History, United States, Civil War Period (1850-1877), General
ISBN: 9780307789143
Google: 1LIvYI_ER5kC
Amazon: 067974830X
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-06-08T17:32:25.878019+00:00

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“A TRAIN FROM the north, bringing Forrest in advance of his troops, reached Meridian [Mississippi], and was stopped; and the General, whom I had never seen, came to report,” Confederate lieutenant general Richard Taylor, son of President Zachary Taylor and brother-in-law of Jefferson Davis, would later remember of a day soon after the Memphis raid. Forrest, he wrote, “was a tall, stalwart man with grayish hair, mild countenance … slow and homely of speech,” and Taylor quickly told him “that all of our energies must be directed to the relief of Hood’s army, then west of Atlanta. The only way to accomplish this was to worry Sherman’s communications north of the Tennessee River, and he [Forrest] must move his cavalry in that direction at the earliest moment.” Taylor was surprised to find the reputedly intrepid cavalryman exhibiting “no stomach for the work,” noting the “many difficulties” of the task and “ask[ing] … numerous questions: how he was to get over the Tennessee; how he was to get back if pressed by the enemy; how he was to be supplied; what should be his line of retreat in certain contingencies; what he was to do with prisoners if any were taken, etc.” Then, however, “having isolated the chances of success from causes of failure with the care of a chemist experimenting in his laboratory,” his “whole manner … changed.” He announced his needs “in a dozen sharp sentences … said he would leave a staff officer to bring up his supplies, asked for an engine to take him back north twenty miles to meet his troops, informed me that he would march with the dawn, and hoped to give an account of himself in Tennessee.”1

Although he himself had suggested a return to his native state several times—the latest being a telegram to President Davis on September 5, the very day he met Taylor—his troops, exhausted from the long Memphis ride or the hard work of holding the Federals around Oxford, had just begun to get a little rest. There was also the fact that he, better than anyone else, knew his brilliant dash on Memphis was really the result of ominous deficiency: Brice’s Cross Roads and Harrisburg had cost him men whose like and number even his iron-fisted conscription never would be able to muster again. He may have learned, too, that Atlanta had fallen to Sherman September 2—that, in other words, the Confederate high command had waited far too late to loose him onto the Tennessee railroads. Plus he doubtless was in no mood to be taken for granted by another departmental commander.

Having eluded Smith’s attempt to turn and capture the Memphis raiders returning to Oxford, Forrest had been summoned south to Mobile by the urgent appeals of Maury. Apparently both Forrest and his wife attended a dinner there given in his honor by Mrs. Maury, who had “invit[ed] some lady friends who were desirous of meeting this great hero,” Maury later remembered. Forrest displayed “natural deference” to females characterized by great courtesy, Maury proceeded, “and in their presence was very bright and entertaining.

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