The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power by Deirdre Mask

Author:Deirdre Mask [Mask, Deirdre]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781782833789
Google: FwOCDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2020-04-01T23:00:00+00:00

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Nathan Bedford Forrest was a slave trader. He sold thousands of black slaves out of a “Negro Mart” in downtown Memphis, often advertising that his merchandise came “directly from Congo.” A newspaper describes him whipping a slave stretched out between four men. Another time, Forrest whipped a naked woman with a “leather thong dipped in salt water.” At the start of the Civil War, Forrest enlisted as a private; he ended the war as a general. According to historian Charles Royster, “he was a minor player in some major battles, and a major player in minor battles.”

One of his most notorious victories came at Fort Pillow, a Union garrison Forrest had decided to attack for supplies. The Union forces holding the fort included a large number of African American soldiers. Some had been Forrest’s former slaves. Forrest and his three thousand men singled out the black troops for particularly vicious attacks, refusing to accept their offers of surrender.

“The slaughter was awful,” a Confederate sergeant wrote. “Words cannot describe the scene. The poor deluded negroes would run up to our men, fall upon their knees and with uplifted arms scream for mercy but they were ordered to their feet and then shot down.” One black soldier pled for his life to a Confederate soldier chasing him. “God damn you, you are fighting against your master,” the soldier said. The soldier then raised his gun and shot him. A Confederate newspaper confirmed that “the whites received quarter, but the negroes were shown no mercy.” Forrest himself wrote that the river was dyed with blood for two hundred yards. “It is hoped that these facts will demonstrate to the Northern people that Negro soldiers cannot cope with Southerners. We still hold the fort.” In the end, 69 percent of the white Union troops survived—compared with only 35 percent of the black soldiers. The surviving black soldiers were captured into slavery.

Unsurprisingly, losing the war didn’t change Forrest’s mind about black people, and he soon became the KKK’s first grand wizard. Forrest defended the Klan in Congress in 1871, arguing that negroes were being “insolent” and ladies were “ravished.” The KKK had simply been formed to “protect the weak.” As Michael Newton has described, on his way out of the hearing, a journalist stopped Forrest. “With a wink, the grand wizard told him, ‘I lied like a gentleman.’” Black people’s post–Civil War hopes, which had, as Newton explained, manifested themselves so energetically in new schools, self-improvement groups, and civic organizations, were soon crushed.

None of this history is remotely secret. None of this history is even much contested anymore. And it’s why, Israel told me, Forrest Street particularly bothered him. I had to agree. I couldn’t understand why anyone in modern America would want to commemorate him.

And then I remembered Shelby Foote.

I first came across Nathan Bedford Forrest, like many of my generation, in Ken Burns’s 1990 documentary, The Civil War. When I was in fifth grade, watching the nine-part documentary every night was my homework.

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