by Jack Hurst
Manhood came early and became a frantic fight to escape the clutches of poverty. He chased and caught runaway slaves for the rich of his region, earning enough money to start buying and selling human chattel himself. Then, like the aggressive poker player he became, he threw the wealth earned from this early slave trading into buying and selling not only more slaves but also lots and buildings in Memphis, Tennessee, and ever-larger expanses of frontier cotton land. He strove for two decades, gathering a net worth he would come to claim, with a salesman’s bent toward accentuation of the positive, equaled an improbable “million and a half of dollars.” He then wagered it all on this new Confederacy, even spending sizable sums of his own wealth to arm and equip men he recruited. At Fort Donelson he had watched with dismayed outrage as his timid, blue-blooded Confederate commanders seemingly threw away their new nation and, with it, the fruit of his labors.1
Forrest had spent the prime of his adulthood advancing toward the ranks of the South’s landed gentry. Amassing the wealth was the easier part of this upward climb. Aristocrats tended to look down on the humbler station he hailed from and its attendant lack of refinement. When they did so to his face, he responded in fury. As a young farmer, he had shot a neighbor’s bull dead after the landowner had repeatedly let the animal break down fences and consume Forrest’s crops. He then put a bullet in the man’s clothes when he came, armed, to protest. On the town square of Hernando, Mississippi, a twenty-five-year-old Forrest had single-handedly fought and bested another area landowner—as well as the man’s overseer and two kinsmen—with a two-shot pistol and a knife. And as a young husband scrambling to earn a living, Forrest had started a brickyard and constructed a building for an academy in Hernando, only to clash hotly with city fathers who took their sweet time paying.
Soon after, Forrest had left Hernando for a larger arena. He moved the few miles north to Memphis, a brawling river town second only to New Orleans in the western slave trade. In less than a decade, making incessant forays as far away as Texas, he became a titan in that seamy but lucrative business. He won election to the Memphis city council three times in the late 1850s, rising to chair its finance committee. He formed friendships with those among the powerful who accorded him respect—and collided with any who, consciously or otherwise, did not. In one council meeting, when a fellow alderman declaimed that the body had taken a “coward-like” action, Forrest rose in abrupt challenge. As described in the flat prose of the Memphis Daily Appeal, “Alderman Forrest said that Alderman Finnie meant him in his attack, for [Finnie] knew he was a fighting man.”
In early 1859, Forrest left the slave business and returned to Mississippi. He identified his vocation to the 1860 census taker as “planter,” a far more socially acceptable vocation than slave trading. He was entitled; he not only owned but also now occupied 3,345 Coahoma County acres of the best cotton land in Mississippi. The place boasted a six-room house that a neighbor later described as “not beautiful but comfortable . . . in a grove of magnificent oak trees and facing the public road.” The house fronted two rows of cabins that the census said housed thirty-six slaves.
Owning three dozen human chattel put Forrest comfortably in the Southern planter class—entry level was considered ownership of twenty, a long stride above “farmer.” He probably owned more slaves on other properties or in the slave jails of his late firm’s offices from Memphis to Vicksburg, but at least here on this Coahoma County property, he remained well short of the aristocratic status to which he likely aspired. Aristocrats were understood to own at least fifty slaves. These barons of bondage comprised Dixie’s elite, numbering just 10,000 families in a Southern white population of 1.5 million families. Yet, even these privileged 10,000 did not constitute the top rung of the Southern social ladder. Its wealthiest and most powerful planters, the South’s de facto rulers, owned more than a hundred slaves each and numbered just 3,000 families.
Forrest doubtless had visions of reaching this lofty level, arithmetically if not socially. In 1861, his plantation harvested 1,000 bales of cotton, or $30,000 worth. That could have bought him thirty more slaves. By then, though, he had changed professions again, this time choosing the one that suited him best: soldier.
When history notices Nathan Bedford Forrest at all, it tends to view him as a military miracle. His feats are presented as special blessings of the gods of war, unheralded by previous experience. This is likely because historians tend to glorify the profession of arms and the graduates of its schools. Forrest would have laughed. While he appreciated attention, he plainly never saw himself as unprepared for the great conflict. He knew different. His wartime exploits were part and parcel of who he had always been.
His range of preparatory experience was panoramic. He knew how to plan ahead, as his antebellum rise to riches attests. He had personally driven enough slave gangs along the roads of the South to know logistics and develop the instinct of absolute command. His labor on subsistence farms had taught him to value every piece of equipment to the utmost and to jerry-rig substitutes for any he did not have. His slave jails had taught him the mechanics of keeping captives and accounting for every one, along with every meal they must be fed and every tool they might be required to use. Card playing and armed civilian encounters—in, but in no way restricted to, his capacity as a Hernando constable—had taught him aggressiveness, the value of the bluff, and the imperative of pressing every advantage to the kill. Finally, he was a past master of guns and horses. Near its end, he would sum up his life as a battle from the start. The Civil War was just another phase.
In June 1861, six days after Tennesseans voted to secede, he had enlisted in a Memphis cavalry company as a private. Influential friends thought this was a waste, and Forrest probably soon did too. The friends had prevailed on Tennessee governor Isham G. Harris and General Gideon Pillow, commander of Tennessee’s provisional army, to vault him upward. Both Memphis lawyers, Harris and Pillow surely knew that Forrest’s reputation as a man of action would draw recruits, whom Forrest was rich enough to outfit. He spent less than a month as a private before being commissioned a lieutenant colonel and instructed to raise a cavalry battalion. It was the week of his fortieth birthday.
Forrest likely entered the high officer corps of the Confederate army with eager respect, presuming he would join like-minded individuals of valor and action. At Fort Donelson, he learned otherwise. The elite cadre was peopled with too many men too similar to the blowhards of the Memphis city council.
Forrest’s senior commander at Donelson, ex–US secretary of war Brigadier General John B. Floyd, had proved yellow as fool’s gold; Floyd’s three subordinate generals were little better. The second in command, rich Tennessee politico Gideon Pillow, was only semicompetent, if that. The third, courtly West Pointer Simon Buckner of Kentucky, was pompous and argumentative. The fourth, West Point graduate turned college professor Bushrod Johnson, was unassertive as a phantom. This quartet merely tried not to lose the battle—and thus lost.
On February 12, 1862, the first day of the fighting at Fort Donelson, Major General Ulysses S. Grant’s 15,000 infantrymen advanced twelve miles overland from Fort Henry to encircle the part of Donelson not bounded by the Cumberland River. Forrest and his 1,000 or so troopers mounted the sole opposition outside the fort. In five hours of hard skirmishing, they brought half of Grant’s army to a temporary standstill. But when Forrest warned that Grant was attempting to surround the fort and only more infantry could prevent it, Buckner ordered Forrest back inside the trenches.
On the struggle’s icy fourth day, the Confederates charged out of the left end of their entrenchments. Forrest was in the vanguard as they began pushing the Union right back onto its center. After some three hours, he saw white flags here and there within the fierce clots of Federal resistance. Having learned the psychology of violence and fear in many prewar face-offs, he begged to lead a charge to try to turn the piecemeal Union withdrawals into a stampede. But Bushrod Johnson shrank from making pivotal dec
isions. No, he said, the Federals might be laying a trap.
So the Confederate push, slower and bloodier than Forrest thought necessary, lasted seven hours. Forrest’s troopers, awash in gore, took or helped take clusters of Federal artillery and droves of prisoners. Around the last cannons anchoring the Union right, blood from men and horses pooled in the snow, splashing onto those still fighting.
The Confederates pushed Grant’s stout and stubborn Federal volunteers back a mile or more. Then came a supreme act of military ineptitude in a day with more than its share. Pillow, the Confederates’ operational commander, halted the attack and declared victory. He ordered the troops back to their trenches, abandoning the frozen ground they had bought with blood. Pillow intended for the men to collect their gear and escape to Nashville. But Grant refused to let them get away. He countercharged.
For all his overcoat’s bullet marks—not to mention a second horse that perished beneath him when a cannonball passed through its flanks—Forrest’s finest hour at Fort Donelson may actually have occurred off the battlefield. Later that night, when the generals gathered and decided to surrender, the lieutenant colonel harangued his superiors with an impertinent speech. He had not come to Fort Donelson to surrender, he said. He had promised the parents of his men he would take care of them, and he would not see them starve or freeze to death in a Northern prison. He would rather see their bones bleaching on the hills around Fort Donelson. He wanted to lead them in a breakout bid.
Buckner had succeeded to the fort’s command to allow Floyd and Pillow to skedaddle shamefully. Before leaving, Pillow prevailed on Buckner to let Forrest try to take his men out. Forrest gathered most of his men and others who had horses or scrambled up to ride double with the cavalry. Then, because several scouts insisted that the Federals had reblocked the dry route, he led them out a flooded riverside road. The icy backwater was one hundred yards wide and, unbeknownst to them, four feet deep, a fact they wouldn’t learn until somebody tried to cross it. Forrest was the first man in.
He took his fugitives to Nashville, which was still under Confederate control. A few days’ hard labor there salvaged 600 boxes of military clothing, 250,000 pounds of bacon, and 40 wagonloads of ammunition for the Confederate cause—an effort opposed by the poor, hungry, and desperate residents of the Tennessee capital. Their wealthier townsmen had fled in headlong panic. Railroad cars were jammed. Long lines of public and private vehicles trailed southward-streaming remnants of the western Confederate army.
Federal troops reached the Nashville suburbs on February 23, a week after Donelson’s fall. Forrest and forty of his men, the last Confederates to leave the city, rode to Murfreesboro ahead of the Federal advance. There, western commander Albert Sidney Johnston ordered the cavalrymen farther south to Huntsville, Alabama.
By then, Forrest may have gotten wind of a mixed reaction to his escape. The Southern public saw it as heroic, but some aristocrats and West Pointers equated it with the cowardice shown by Floyd and Pillow. The generals had fled for their lives, Floyd with some of his Virginia troops on commandeered steamboats and Pillow with a couple of staff members in a skiff. Forrest, by contrast, had intended to fight his way out.
On February 25, after arriving at Huntsville, Forrest gave his men a two-week furlough. They returned on March 10 with newly enlisted friends.Two officers had recruited whole new companies. The proliferated units now totaled a full regiment whose troopers did not share the high command’s low view of their commander. By acclamation, they elected him full colonel.2
II
SHILOH: “THE DEVIL’S OWN DAY”
3
APRIL 6, FORENOON—FORREST
“Main Force and Ignorance”
Western Confederate defenses were collapsing in domino fashion. The fall of Forts Henry and Donelson had given federal gunboats control of the Tennessee River all the way to northern Alabama, outflanking installations on the Mississippi as far south as Memphis. A climax was coming fast.
Almost overnight, General Albert Sidney Johnston, the western Confederacy’s chief commander, had become hotly unpopular. A raging Southern press denounced him for the fall of Henry and Donelson and the hundred-mile retreat that followed. By now, another top Confederate was on the scene, and Johnston turned to him for assistance. P. G. T. Beauregard, hero of Fort Sumter and Manassas (and like Johnston, ranked at full general), had been sent west in mid-February because his considerable vanity clashed with that of Jefferson Davis. Johnston asked Beauregard to supervise the withdrawal of the western wing of the Kentucky defense line, now halved by the Henry-Donelson disaster. Beauregard complied, bringing that half of Johnston’s army to Corinth, Mississippi, from Columbus, Kentucky. Johnston meanwhile personally led the eastern half’s retreat from Bowling Green through Nashville to Huntsville, Alabama. From there Johnston headed it west to link up with Beauregard.
Forrest led his newly expanded regiment out of Alabama in mid-March, bound for the northern Mississippi hamlet of Burnsville. There, a dozen miles east of Corinth on the Memphis & Charleston Railroad, he reported as ordered to Major General John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, recent vice president of the United States and now commander of a Bluegrass brigade. Most of Forrest’s troopers spent the next days drilling. Twenty, though, rode a few miles north to the banks of the Tennessee River, assigned to watch the progress and direction of the Federal army of Major General Don Carlos Buell. They soon confirmed that Buell was heading southwestward from Nashville, apparently to join the Federals pushing south along the Tennessee River. This information agreed with other intelligence from Confederate spies and sympathizers in Middle Tennessee, and Forrest duly reported it to General Johnston.1
Confederates knew the bridges they had destroyed in their retreat from Nashville could delay Buell for only so long. Soon after Johnston arrived at Corinth in late February, Beauregard told him that elements of the Henry-Donelson army were coming upriver. By mid-March they were debarking in large force at Pittsburg Landing, twenty-five miles from Corinth. Forrest’s and other reports indicated that Buell’s column would arrive in early April. Additional intelligence likewise called for quick Confederate action. On April 2, General Frank Cheatham’s division, twenty-four miles north of Corinth at the Bethel, Tennessee, railroad station, reported pressure from Federals. Cheatham believed—correctly—that the opposing troops were Major General Lew Wallace’s division from Crump’s Landing. This led Beauregard to think Grant was dividing his army, sending a large part westward fifteen miles to raid the Mobile & Ohio Railroad and perhaps farther, toward Memphis. That and Buell’s imminent approach led Beauregard on April 2 to pen Johnston an abrupt memo in the margins of Cheatham’s message.
“Now,” it said, “is the moment to advance and strike the enemy at Pittsburg Landing.”2
Johnston was reluctant. He knew many of the troops gathering at Corinth were raw. Beauregard and Major General Braxton Bragg at length persuaded him. Because of his late infamy, however, Johnston gave Beauregard operational control of the army for the coming battle, while retaining titular leadership. Beauregard quickly—perhaps too quickly—drafted a plan. It designated Breckinridge’s corps as the reserve, and Forrest remained assigned to Breckinridge. This likely was no accident. Breckinridge, with no military training, had gotten his own assignment less than a week earlier. He replaced Major General George Crittenden, a West Pointer removed for flagrant drunkenness after investigation found discipline “wretched” in his command.
Most superiors doubtless thought Forrest’s assignment to Breckinridge appropriate. One of Forrest’s own aides later recalled that after the Donelson escape, the Tennessean was “much criticized” among other officers “for what he had already done”: this, the aide wrote, made Forrest negatively “conspicuous in the cause.” Some of this had to do with his avoidance of the Donelson surrender, but more seems to have stemmed from his lack of training and his headlong ferocity in combat. Federals attributed his early triumphs to nothing more than overpow
ering numbers—or “main force and ignorance”—the aide wrote, adding that most Southern officers thought he would not last long. His immediate subordinate at the time, Major David C. Kelley, later wrote that some of Forrest’s own officers feared the potential consequences of their chief’s “disregard . . . of the ordinary rules of tactics” and his recklessness “in personal exposure.”3
The theater commander may have viewed him differently. Forrest’s authorized biography claims that his Fort Donelson performance made him “a favorite” of General Johnston. Postwar, a prominent Kentucky Confederate recalled that Forrest’s name “had become widely known” even before Donelson, after he routed Union cavalry at Sacramento, Kentucky. In that clash, he commanded 300 Confederates against 168 Federals and killed three Federal officers with his own hands. At Donelson, Brigadier General Simon Buckner had reported that Forrest acted “with his usual gallantry.” Had deeds measured worth in the Confederacy, Forrest’s feats at Sacramento and Donelson might already have made him its most accomplished—if not respected—cavalry leader thus far in the western war.4
But apart, perhaps, from Johnston, no one else in high command seemed to notice Forrest’s effectiveness—thus his assignment to the reserve. He rode from Burnsville to Johnston’s headquarters in Corinth to get his orders to join Breckinridge. Johnston surely had little to do with that. Operational commander Beauregard likely relied for such assignments on the new chief of staff, Braxton Bragg, who had scant appreciation for citizen soldiers.
Beauregard patterned his battle plan on Napoleon’s at Waterloo. The Beauregard version, however, was convoluted, requiring 44,000 mostly ill-trained Confederates to travel two rough and tricky routes. Not only were the Ridge and Bark Roads to Pittsburg Landing miry from recent, continuing rain, but they also joined each other eight miles from the target. The two columns would have to take turns passing through the junction.