Devil's Dream

by Madison Smartt Bell

  December 21: Through bluffing, Forrest induces surrender of the U.S. garrison at Union City.

  December 31: Caught between two Union forces at Parker’s Crossroads, Forrest is said to have ordered his troopers to “charge both ways.”

  1863

  January 1: Returning from his West Tennessee expedition, Forrest crosses the Tennessee River. Bragg, meanwhile, has retreated from Stones River to Tullahoma.

  February 3: Forrest, Wharton and Wheeler make a concerted attack on Dover, Tennessee. Forrest has a horse shot from under him in a charge. Later a second horse is shot from under him in the failed attack. Forrest (who opposed the Dover attack and lost a lot of men in it) quarrels with Wheeler the night after the battle and refuses to serve under him any longer.

  February 25: Forrest is transferred to the command of General Van Dorn.

  March 5: At Thompson Station, Tennessee, Forrest assists in the defeat of Union troops under John Coburn and the capture of 1,200 men. His favorite horse Roderick is killed in this battle, as well as Montgomery Little, an early organizer of Forrest’s escort.

  March 25: Continuing to raid around Middle Tennessee during the month of March, Forrest captures two Union garrisons and arms at Brentwood, about ten miles south of Nashville. General G. C. Smith engages Forrest’s force but cannot defeat or destroy it.

  April 10: Forrest attacked by General David Stanley near Franklin, about fifteen miles south of Nashville. His artillery commander, Captain S. L. Freeman, is killed. Forrest is reported to have wept at Freeman’s funeral the next day.

  Late April: Forrest quarrels with General Van Dorn, who challenges him with a sword (over Forrest’s having appropriated weapons seized in Brentwood for the use of his own troops). Forrest is ordered to Alabama and Van Dorn is killed by a jealous husband in Tennessee.

  April 23: Forrest is ordered to reinforce Colonel P. D. Roddey in Tuscumbia, Alabama.

  April 26: As Forrest is skirmishing at Town Creek, Union raiders coming from Nashville, commanded by Colonel Abel Streight, move south of him with 1,500 men—on a mission to cut the railroad from Chattanooga to Georgia.

  April 30: Forrest attacks Streight’s rear guard and Streight lays an ambush on Sand Mountain. Forrest’s brother Bill Forrest, whose scouts led the attack, has a thigh shattered by a bullet and Bedford Forrest loses two cannon commanded by Lieutenant A. W. Gould. After five hours of fighting Streight moves on, then prepares another defense at Hog Mountain, using the captured cannon. When Bedford Forrest attacks this position by moonlight, he has three horses shot out from under him—but recovers his two cannon, although spiked. Streight moves on to lay a third ambush at 2 a.m. Forrest allows his men two hours rest.

  May 1: Streight reaches Blountsville at 10 a.m., departs at noon and is soon attacked in the rear by Forrest. After another battle on the shores of the Black Warrior River, Streight completes the crossing of the Black Warrior at 5 p.m. and heads for Gadsden. To rest his outnumbered men, Forrest is pursuing in shifts, and with a force of 600 he overtakes and attacks Streight at a bridge over Black Creek. Streight’s men burn the bridge after the crossing, but a local girl, Emma Samson, shows Forrest a nearby ford where his men quickly cross. Streight forces an all-night march, destroys stores at Gadsden and makes for Rome, Georgia, hoping to delay Forrest by burning the bridge over the Oostanaula River there.

  On the same day, the Confederate Congress legislates the return of black slaves captured under arms to their owners and the summary execution of white officers and noncoms in these new black Union units.

  May 2: Forrest harries Streight’s rear, with Streight losing stragglers until he is forced to stand and fight at 4 p.m. With much of his ammunition wet from his rapid river crossings, Streight moves on, sending an advance of 200 men to secure the bridge at Rome. Streight eludes an ambush at Centre, Alabama, moves along the Chattooga River to Gaylesville, where Confederates have destroyed the ferry. Streight then gets his command lost in a logging area, happens on a Confederate ironworks and destroys it, and finally crosses the Chattooga just before dawn.

  May 3: Streight halts at Lawrence Plantation, twenty miles short of Rome. Forrest sends in a demand for surrender, reinforced by circling the same pair of cannon over and over within Streight’s view. Thanks to this ruse and to circular marching of the troops, Streight surrenders nearly 1,500 men to Forrest’s 600 (although, once he understands the trick, Streight asks for his arms back to continue the fight). This pursuit destroys 300 of Forrest’s 550 horses but he replaces them with Streight’s—while making an effort to return mounts Streight had commandeered to owners in Alabama. A grateful citizen of Rome gives Forrest an excellent horse named Highlander.

  May 13: Following a meeting with General Bragg, Forrest is promoted to major general and begins reorganizing his command in Middle Tennessee.

  June 13: At the Masonic Hall in Columbia, Tennessee, Forrest is shot by Lieutenant Gould, who lost the two cannon during the pursuit of Colonel Streight, and is disputing his transfer orders. Forrest retaliates by cutting Gould with a clasp knife and then pursues him with a pistol, declaring, “No man can kill me and live.”

  June 25: Union General William S. Rosecrans advances from Murfreesboro toward Shelbyville, and Bragg falls back toward Chattanooga. After two days of skirmishing in south-central Tennessee, Forrest is retreating through Cowan (his wife’s hometown) when an old woman berates him for cowardice, shouting, “Old Forrest’d make ye fight!”

  August 9: Forrest requests transfer to his home ground in West Tennessee and North Mississippi, probably hoping to escape the command of Braxton Bragg. Bragg has been flanked out of Middle Tennessee without a battle, and driven back to the Chattanooga area, where Forrest commands the cavalry attached to Bragg’s command. Forrest refuses to obey Bragg’s order to dismount cavalrymen led by John Hunt Morgan who have returned from an unsuccessful raid through Ohio and Indiana.

  September 7: As Union troops close in around him, Bragg evacuates Chattanooga for Lafayette, Georgia, again without a fight.

  September 13: Forrest is wounded in the back while opposing the advance of Union troops under Thomas Crittenden on the Georgia-Tennessee border. Though a lifelong teetotaler, Forrest reluctantly obeys the order of his surgeon (his wife’s relative, Doctor J. B. Cowan) to take a medicinal drink of whiskey.

  September 18: The battle of Chickamauga begins with Forrest skirmishing with Union troops along Chickamauga Creek, west of Chattanooga. His splendid horse Highlander, gift of the citizens of Rome, is shot dead from under him.

  September 19: Forrest and his men are heavily engaged in a long day of inconclusive fighting.

  September 20: Reinforced by General James Longstreet and his force, the Confederates finally rout the Union soldiers and send them fleeing back toward Chattanooga (except for a section of the line held stubbornly by Union commander George H. Thomas). Despite urging from Forrest and others, Bragg fails to capitalize on the victory and allows the Union Army to retreat and regroup in Chattanooga, more or less unmolested.

  September 21: In pursuit of retreating Union forces, Forrest has his horse shot through the neck and closes the wound with his forefinger so that he can continue to ride. He reaches the crest of Missionary Ridge, where he is able to see the confusion of the Union troops in and around Chattanooga. Though Forrest urges a rapid advance, the Confederate leadership does not respond.

  September 28: While enjoying a rare ten-day leave and visit with his wife at LaGrange, Georgia, Forrest is ordered by Bragg to turn over his troopers to Wheeler for a raid. Forrest responds with a furious letter denouncing Bragg for dishonesty and cowardice. Soon after, in the company of his surgeon, Doctor Cowan, he rides to Bragg’s Missionary Ridge headquarters to denounce him in similar terms to his face. Though duels were fought for less during the Civil War, and Forrest certainly intended his visit as a challenge, Bragg lives up to Forrest’s prediction that he will “take no action in the matter.”

  In the aftermath of Chickamau
ga, Forrest, losing confidence in the Confederacy’s chances of success and suspecting that he himself may soon be killed, frees a number of the forty-five slaves who have enlisted with him as teamsters.

  October 13: General Bragg approves Forrest’s request for transfer to the Mississippi River region. Forrest goes to Okolona, Mississippi, with his sixty-five-man escort, four cannon, Morton’s sixty-seven artillerymen and part of Jeffrey Forrest’s regiment, bringing him to a strength of 350. Jeffrey, though reported killed in North Alabama, reappears as an exchanged prisoner.

  November 25: As Bragg is driven from Chattanooga by Grant, Forrest goes raiding and recruiting in West Tennessee; ten days later he reports to General Johnston that he has 5,000 recruits and more coming in.

  December 13: Forrest writes a letter of complaint to General Stephen Hurlbut, commander of Union-occupied Memphis, about the Union military’s mistreatment of Confederate sympathizers in West Tennessee.

  December 24: Forrest has to withdraw from Jackson, Tennessee, with his 3,500 raw recruits, only 1,000 of them armed, but receives official word of his promotion to major general. He eludes pursuit and protects his considerable beef on the hoof and bacon supply by sending out many decoy detachments.

  1864

  January 2: Confederate General Patrick Cleburne proposes that the Confederacy offer to free any slaves willing to serve in its army. This idea is swiftly suppressed by President Jefferson Davis and the Confederate government in Richmond.

  January 12: Northern press reports: “Forrest, with less than four thousand men, has moved right through the Sixteenth Army Corps, has passed within nine miles of Memphis, carried off a hundred wagons, two hundred beef cattle, three thousand conscripts, and innumerable stores; torn up railroad tracks, destroyed telegraph wires, burned and sacked towns, ran over pickets with a single derringer pistol, and all in the face of ten thousand men.” Union Generals Grant and Sherman begin to take serious alarm at Forrest’s ability to carry out such operations behind their lines.

  January 13: “Forrest’s Cavalry Department” established for North Mississippi and West Tennessee.

  January 27: General Sherman writes orders for General William Sooy Smith to organize a two-pronged raid into the Deep South. Sherman intends to raid from Vicksburg to Meridian, Mississippi, while Sooy Smith moves out of Memphis through Okolona to join him at Meridian for a combined maneuver against Selma, Alabama, destroying Confederate communications and foraging and looting as much as possible along the way. This operation is a trial run for Sherman’s eventual march through Georgia; Sooy Smith’s maneuver is in part intended to divert Forrest from Sherman’s movement.

  February 12: Forrest threatens to execute nineteen deserters at Oxford, Mississippi (all recent West Tennessee recruits). Forrest reports that Sooy Smith with 1,000 men has passed Holly Springs—he sends Jeffrey Forrest to engage Smith at West Point.

  February 19: Smith begins wrecking railroad tracks near Okolona. Some 3,000 freed slaves in his train are burning fields, barns and houses so indiscriminately as to shock Smith himself.

  February 20: Jeffrey Forrest, after a forty-five-mile march, interrupts Smith’s progress to Meridian at West Point. Smith eludes a trap set by the Forrest brothers and plans his retreat.

  February 21: At Sakatonchee Creek, southwest of Okolona, Smith begins a diversionary battle with Jeffrey Forrest’s command. Bedford Forrest thrashes a Confederate trooper fleeing from the Sakatonchee bridge and sends him back into the battle with the admonition, “You might as well get killed there as here.” Retreating from the bridge, Smith’s men make occasional stands till finally they halt at 2 a.m., three miles south of Okolona.

  February 22: At daylight, Bedford Forrest and his escort charge Smith’s rear guard, chasing the Union troops northwest from Okolona. At Ivey’s Hill, Sooy Smith makes another stand and Forrest’s brother Jeffrey is killed by a ball in the throat during the action there. Bedford Forrest charges into the thick of the Union force (outrunning his hugely outnumbered escort) to kill three men in hand-to-hand combat, decapitating one Federal cavalryman. Forrest has two horses shot from under him in the course of this day; a third mount, King Philip, survives despite taking a bullet. At the end of the day, Forrest abandons pursuit of Smith, thanks to exhaustion and ammunition shortage.

  February 26: Sooy Smith’s battered force reaches Memphis, having lost 388 men by the general’s report. Because of Smith’s failure to join him at Meridian, Sherman returns to Vicksburg, abandoning the advance toward Selma. Forrest quarters his troops in Columbus and Starkville, Mississippi, and prepares for another excursion into West Tennessee.

  March 20: Forrest returns to Jackson in West Tennessee—a region now shredded by partisan warfare, full of deserters and preyed upon by scalawags and bushwhackers.

  March 24: Colonel W. L. Duckworth bluffs a Union garrison at Union City, Tennessee, to surrender by sending in a note purportedly written by Forrest himself.

  March 25: Forrest attacks and briefly occupies Paducah, Kentucky, but cannot reduce a fort there occupied by Union troops, who refuse to be bluffed into surrender by Forrest’s warnings and threats. The fighting at Paducah is Forrest’s first engagement with a force of freed slaves in Union service: 274 men of the First Kentucky Heavy Artillery.

  April 3: Forrest reaches Trenton, Tennessee. James R. Chalmers, commanding some of Forrest’s troopers, defeats a force commanded by local Union sympathizer Colonel Fielding Hurst, near Bolivar.

  April 4: Forrest writes to request that Morton’s artillery be sent to him from Mississippi to aid in attacking boats and the river forts. He begins to consider requests from West Tennessee Confederate loyalists that he reduce the Union garrison at Fort Pillow, at the junction of Coal Creek with the Mississippi River. Commanded for the Union by West Tennessean Major William Bradford, Fort Pillow had become a tinderbox of local partisan antagonism. Bradford’s men stood accused of wholesale looting, insult and rape; atrocity crimes, including mutilation, had also occurred. Many of Forrest’s own men were West Tennessee natives as well (some very recently recruited) and so took such matters personally. Local Confederates regarded Fort Pillow as a nest of outlaws which harbored a number of runaway slaves. Shortly before Forrest’s arrival in the area, the fort had been reinforced by 292 black Union troops sent north from Memphis, under command of Major Lionel Booth.

  April 11: Forrest orders Chalmers to advance on Fort Pillow; Chalmers rides thirty-eight miles from Brownsville in the rain to reach the fort for a daybreak attack the next day. Also on April 11, Buford, en route to Paducah, sends a diversion to Columbus with a surrender demand saying “negroes now in arms” will be returned to their masters if they surrender but killed if they resist. White troops will be treated as prisoners in either case. Forrest returns to Jackson to find his brother Aaron dead of pneumonia.

  April 12: Forrest reaches Fort Pillow in the mid-morning, following the first wave of the attack, having ridden seventy-two miles in twenty-seven hours. Booth has been killed inside the fort by one of Forrest’s sharpshooters, though the Confederate besiegers don’t know this. During his first reconnaissance Forrest is rolled on by a horse shot from under him. “They are not many, we must take them,” he concludes. Forrest’s demand for surrender offers to treat all the men (black Union soldiers implicitly included) as prisoners of war, adding, “Should my demand be refused I cannot be responsible for the fate of your command.” With the demand for surrender refused, Forrest’s men storm the fort, reportedly slaughtering a great many of the defenders even after they have attempted to surrender. Forrest eventually intervenes in person to stop the killing. By later reports the Mississippi River ran red with blood for 200 yards below the fort.

  April 15: Forrest writes to Jefferson Davis requesting that he be sent to Middle Tennessee (the Nashville area and supply lines north and south of that city) to disrupt Sherman’s preparation for his campaign against Atlanta and the state of Georgia. Forrest’s plan is discredited by his old adversary
Braxton Bragg. Forrest is ordered to return to Mississippi, where he begins to refit his troops after the West Tennessee campaign.

  April 18: An article entitled “The Butcher Forrest and His Family: All of Them Slave Drivers and Women Whippers” appears in the Northern press. Describing events at Fort Pillow as “the cowardly butchery … of blacks and whites alike,” the article goes on to claim that Forrest “had two wives—one white, the other colored (Catharine) by each of which he had two children. His ‘patriarchal wife,’ Catharine, and his white wife had frequent quarrels or domestic jars.” A “Remember Fort Pillow” movement begins among black Union troops quartered in Memphis.

  April 29: Apprehensive that Forrest may in fact destroy his planning in Middle Tennessee, Sherman replaces the Union commanders at Memphis and writes to them urging that “It is of the utmost importance to keep his forces occupied, and prevent him from forming plans and combinations to cross the Tennessee River and break up the railroad communications in our rear.”

  April 30: Samuel Sturgis, the new Memphis cavalry commander, sets out in pursuit of Forrest, who withdraws from Jackson to Tupelo, Mississippi.

  May 15: Sherman outflanks the Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston by crossing the Oostanaula River. Using delaying tactics and fighting battles with Sherman at three different locations, Johnston is pushed back toward Atlanta. Concerned that Forrest may still break up his lengthening supply lines in Tennessee, Sherman orders Sturgis to lead another expedition against Forrest.