Ripples of Battle by Victor Davis Hanson

Author:Victor Davis Hanson
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781400095322
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2004-10-11T16:00:00+00:00

Night: The Klansman

As Sherman braved fire to reform his perimeter, as Albert Sidney Johnston was bleeding to death in the early afternoon of the first day of the battle, and as Lew Wallace was reversing course and returning to the river route to Pittsburg Landing, Col. Nathan Bedford Forrest joined his cavalry regiment in the furious Confederate assault against the surrounded Union troops in the Hornet’s Nest. Prior to his late entry into the melee, Forrest had become increasingly restless with his assigned minor supporting role. Shiloh was certainly not the colonel’s type of war. He much preferred fluid skirmishing between rapidly moving mounted columns of intrepid rangers. Instead, the morning’s fighting had turned into a static, ugly infantry slugfest. At Shiloh numbers and firepower, not cunning and audacity, were more likely to bring success amid deep mud, thickets, and ravines.

When the shooting had started, the lowly and mostly unknown Colonel Forrest had been given the ignominious task of protecting the Confederate flank at Lick Creek—largely a safe assignment to the rear and at the periphery of the battlefield. For the first five hours of fighting Forrest waited patiently, obedient to his orders to watch the right flank should any Union reservists come up the river to land at Hamburg and turn the Confederates’ rear. Finally, Forrest had had enough of his inaction. He remarked to his men, “Boys, do you hear that rattle of musketry and the roar of artillery?” When they shouted, “Yes, yes,” he bellowed in reply, “Do you know what it means? It means that our friends and brothers are falling by hundreds at the hands of the enemy and we are here guarding a damned creek. We did not enter the service for such work, and the reputation of the regiment does not justify our commanding officer in leaving us here while we are needed elsewhere. Let’s go and help them. What do you say?”

When his men roared back in the affirmative, Colonel Forrest rode into the first major pitched battle of his career. Before that decision to disregard orders and gallop toward the firing, Forrest had been relatively ignored among the Southern high command. His sound advice either to defend the garrison or break out en masse was ignored at Fort Donelson, whose timid commanders instead surrendered thousands of valuable soldiers to Grant. Forrest also had no formal, much less military, education. In fact, he was nearly illiterate. He had not been sought out by the new Confederate government, but instead had raised his own brigade of Tennessee horsemen and supplied them with his own weapons. Most likely, his own shady past in slave trading made him suspect among the aristocratic Southern officer corps.

Yet his dramatic entry into the Hornet’s Nest would mark the first of three remarkable acts at Shiloh, which over the next twenty-four hours would magically transform the Memphis slave trader into the legendary icon Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest. Just as Sherman’s near-death experiences at Shiloh would resurrect his professional life

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.