Devil's Dream

by Madison Smartt Bell

  May 17: Though actually on his way from Mississippi to Middle Tennessee, Forrest is ordered back in the direction of Tupelo to deal with the threat from Sturgis. Forrest’s idea of aborting Sherman’s march through Georgia is thus itself aborted.

  June 10: At the battle of Brice’s Crossroads, Forrest resoundingly defeats Sturgis’s superior force—Forrest’s 4,800 men against the Union 8,000. Stubborn rearguard resistance by black Union troops commanded by Colonel Edward Bouton helped part of Sturgis’s command make a safe retreat, although black soldiers, when routed themselves, tear off and throw away the “Remember Fort Pillow” badges they are wearing. In pursuit of the routed Union force, Forrest and his horse both fall asleep, to be awakened only when the horse blunders into a tree.

  June 13: Forrest writes a complaint to Union General Cadwallader Washburn at Memphis about useless bloodshed at Brice’s Crossroads, brought about because “Both sides acted as though neither felt safe in surrendering, even when further resistance was useless.” In this letter he denies he ever had a policy of slaughtering surrendering men.

  June 15: In the aftermath of Brice’s Crossroads, Sherman writes to U.S. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton terming Forrest the “very devil” and claiming that there “never will be peace in East Tennessee until Forrest is dead.” To President Abraham Lincoln he writes that he is sending out generals from Memphis “to pursue and kill Forrest.”

  June 28: Forrest writes to his immediate superior, Stephen D. Lee, complaining of an attack of boils and asking that he be relieved of command.

  July 8: Union General A. J. Smith, leading 14,000 men out of Memphis in pursuit of Forrest, moves through Ripley, Mississippi, leaving a ten-mile-wide swath of destruction.

  July 13: Reconnoitering Smith’s positions on the Pontotoc–Tupelo Road with Lieutenant Sam Donelson, Forrest narrowly escapes capture.

  July 14: Participating, under Lee’s command, in a full frontal assault on A. J. Smith at Harrisburg, Forrest is painfully wounded in the foot, but remounts and rides to the front again to reassure his men he has not been killed. At the end of this costly and futile engagement, Forrest is reported to have snapped at Stephen Lee, “If I knew as much about West Point tactics as you, the Yankees would whip hell out of me every day.”

  August 7: Based on inaccurate reports of the outcome at Harrisburg, Sherman anxiously inquires of General Washburn, “Is Forrest surely dead?”

  August 8: A. J. Smith, advancing from Memphis again with another large force, crosses the Tallahatchie River to threaten Oxford, Mississippi.

  August 10: Forrest arrives in Oxford.

  August 11: Washburn to Sherman—“General Forrest is not dead, but was in Pontotoc four days ago.”

  August 19: Forrest eludes Smith in Mississippi and races north to raid Memphis.

  August 21: Forrest’s men storm into Memphis at 4 a.m., occupying the city for just a few hours. Although they fail to capture any of the three Union generals who were targets of the raid, they take 600 prisoners and force General Smith to abandon his second Mississippi invasion and return to his Memphis base.

  September 2: Atlanta falls to Sherman; Forrest’s planned movement against Sherman’s supply lines has been delayed too long. Nevertheless Forrest is ordered back into Tennessee with the object of wrecking the railroads supplying Sherman. Despite reducing a number of small Union forts at railway stations in Middle Tennessee, Forrest is unable to reach the principal Nashville–Chattanooga line.

  October 5: Forrest is forced to retreat across the Tennessee River. Again he begins to regroup, but due to recent losses and the attrition of four years of war he now must depend more than ever on recent and comparatively unreliable conscripts, and to deal with persistent shortages of men, horses and munitions. He writes to General Richard Taylor: “I have been constantly in the field since 1861, and have spent half the entire time in the saddle. I have never asked for a furlough for over ten days to rest—and except when wounded and unable to leave my bed have had no respite from duty.” Nevertheless he agrees to start another expedition into West Tennessee.

  Mid-October: Forrest reestablishes his headquarters in Jackson, Tennessee.

  October 26: General Taylor orders Forrest to report to General John Hood in Middle Tennessee as soon as his current mission has been completed. Retreating northward from the loss of Atlanta, Hood now intends to recapture Nashville and make a junction with the army commanded by General Robert E. Lee in Virginia.

  October 29: Forrest’s men destroy the Federal steamboat Mazeppa at Fort Heiman on the Tennessee River.

  October 30: Forrest’s men capture another federal transport ship on the Tennessee, along with a gunboat, the Undine, and use these boats for an assault on the Union depot at Johnsonville.

  November 2: After losing an engagement with two Union gunboats, Forrest’s men burn the Undine and desist from further naval activity.

  November 4: Attacking Johnsonville by land, Forrest destroys a vast amount of supplies ultimately destined for Sherman in Georgia.

  November 8: Lincoln wins reelection as U.S. president, putting an end to faint Southern hopes that a Democrat president might be inclined to reconcile with the Confederacy.

  Mid-November: Forrest joins Hood at Florence, and makes an energetic speech predicting a Confederate success in Nashville.

  November 19–24: Moving his cavalry in advance of Hood’s main body, Forrest fights daily engagements with 2,800 Union troops commanded by John Schofield, attempting to retreat northward toward their Nashville base.

  November 28: Forrest gets one of his divisions across the Duck River near Columbia, maneuvering to the north of Schofield’s line of retreat.

  November 29: Thanks to miscommunication and some overconfident negligence on the part of General Hood, the Confederates fail to block the Columbia-Franklin Pike, and during the night Schofield slips his men away through Spring Hill toward Franklin.

  November 30: Schofield entrenches a line of defense on the south side of Franklin (about twenty miles south of Nashville). Forrest offers to flank Schofield out of this hastily dug position, but Hood refuses, preferring a full-frontal assault across an open field, and orders Forrest to the far right of the line (essentially out of the action). Hood loses over 6,000 men in the ensuing catastrophe, along with twelve of his generals, including Patrick Cleburne.

  December 1: Schofield continues his retreat to Nashville and Hood pursues, dispatching Forrest to Murfreesboro.

  December 15–16: In the battle of Nashville, Hood’s Army of Tennessee is routed by a Union force about twice its number.

  December 18–19: Forrest assists the remnants of Hood’s army in the crossing of the Duck River at Columbia and encourages Hood to move the men he has left further toward safety.

  December 20: Hood continues his retreat, leaving Forrest to mount a rearguard action in Columbia.

  December 21: As Union forces cross the Duck River, Forrest begins to retreat.

  December 23: Five miles south of Columbia, Forrest’s men take advantage of terrain to temporarily halt the Union advance.

  December 25: Forrest mounts another counterattack at Anthony’s Hill, southwest of Pulaski.

  December 26: Forrest lays another ambush to buy time for Hood’s remnants to cross the Tennessee River.

  December 27: Forrest retreats across the Tennessee and reports to Hood at Tuscumbia.

  1865

  January 13: With the Army of Tennessee for all intents and purposes destroyed, General Hood is relieved of command. His successor, General Richard Taylor, puts Forrest in command of all Confederate cavalry in Alabama, Mississippi and East Louisiana. At this stage of the war, the new command consists of no more than 10,000 men scattered across three states; Forrest is forced to resort to firing squads to maintain discipline and discourage desertion.

  February 29: Forrest (who in happier times would join in the sport) arrests a party of his men, including his son, Willie, for horseracing past his tent (though he had be
t on the races himself before they were concluded).

  March 18: The Confederate Congress votes to permit enlistment of slaves in the Confederate Army—though not to free them for their service.

  March 22: Union General James H. Wilson leads 14,000 cavalrymen across the Tennessee River into northwest Alabama.

  March 29: Wilson reaches Elyton, Alabama (today’s Birmingham). Forrest, trying to concentrate his troops to defend the Confederate munitions center at Selma, has two alleged deserters shot and displayed to his men on the roadside (a pair of Kentuckians later found to be innocent of the charge).

  March 31: After intercepting Forrest’s couriers, Wilson is able to outmaneuver him in the race to Selma—mowing down the outnumbered Confederates with Spencer repeating rifles. Forrest and his escort attack Wilson’s flank, temporarily separate and scatter his force, take prisoners and then ride hard to the front of his rapid advance, to camp sixteen miles south of Montevallo at 10 p.m.

  April 1: Reinforcements fail to reach the Confederates at Ebenezer Church, north of Plantersville. They are routed by the Federals, Forrest fighting furiously hand-to-hand against six Federals slashing at him with sabers and receiving a saber cut on the arm. He is later heard to remark, “If that boy had known enough to give me the point instead of the edge I should not have been here to tell you about it.”

  April 2: The blood-covered Forrest rides into Selma in time for General Taylor to evacuate by train, leaving Forrest in command in his place. With some 3,000 men Forrest tries unsuccessfully to hold a fort intended for defense by 10,000. Abandoning Selma, his men scatter; Forrest and his escort cut their way out along the same road the Federals attacked by. Near nightfall Forrest kills a thirtieth enemy—the last man he will slay at close quarters during the war.

  April 4: Forrest crosses the Cahaba River to Marion to join Chalmers and William H. Jackson, meeting his artillery and wagons just arriving from Mississippi. He and his escort collapse there.

  April 8: Lee surrenders at Appomattox. Forrest, arm in a sling from the April 1 saber cut, meets Wilson at Cahaba to discuss prisoner exchange.

  April 10: Wilson shoots 500 horses to keep them from carrying Confederates and heads east to Montgomery. Forrest, having re-collected his troops still at large, moves northwest toward Gainesville.

  April 15: President Lincoln is assassinated.

  The first black soldiers are mustered into the Confederate Army at Richmond shortly before Richmond falls.

  April 25: Forrest instructs his troops to disregard rumors of surrender.

  April 29: Forrest’s commander, General Richard Taylor, meets Union General E. R. S. Canby near Mobile and agrees to surrender.

  May 3: Secessionist Tennessee governor Isham Harris and Mississippi governor Charles Clark invite Forrest to go with them to join still resisting Confederates in Texas. Forrest declines, stating “Any man who is in favor of a further prosecution of this war is a fit subject for a lunatic asylum.”

  May 4: Taylor and Forrest make speeches announcing the surrender to their men assembled at Meridian, Mississippi. “We have made our last fight,” Forrest told his troopers. “Men, you have been good soldiers; a man who has been a good soldier can be a good citizen.”

  May 9: On the day paroles are to be signed, Forrest rides out with his staff member and sometime secretary Charles Anderson, to whom he describes his impulse to go to Mexico, where some nonsurrendering Confederates have ambitions. Anderson persuades Forrest that he has an obligation to stand by his men, whereupon the two together draft a farewell address to the troops. In this speech, Forrest advises his men to purge themselves of “feelings of animosity, hatred and revenge … when you return home, a manly straightforward course will secure the respect even of your enemies.”

  May 15: In conversation with a Northern reporter, Bryan McAlister, Forrest states: “I have lost 29 horses in the war, and have killed a man each time. The other day I was a horse ahead but at Selma they surrounded me, and I killed two, jumped my horse over a one-horse wagon and got away.”

  May 18: Forrest is erroneously reported killed (following rumors that the family of the Kentuckians he had ordered shot for desertion had sworn vengeance).

  End of May: Forrest returns to his Coahoma, Mississippi, plantation. Some of his former slaves return from Georgia, where they had waited out the war, to work for him as freedmen. While pursuing his application to President Andrew Johnson for a pardon, Forrest invites seven Union Army officers into Mississippi and goes into partnership with one, Major B. E. Diffenbacher, in farming concerns. A party of uniformed Union cavalrymen visiting Forrest’s premises out of curiosity is attacked by Forrest’s reluctantly retired warhorse, King Philip, supported by Forrest’s personal servant Jerry.

  The black population of Memphis increases from 3,000 to 60,000.

  1866

  March 31: Forrest exhorts Thomas Edwards, a freedman on his plantation, to stop beating his wife; Edwards attacks him with a knife and wounds him, then Forrest kills Edwards with an ax.

  April 6: Forrest begins sharecropping on land he had owned before the war.

  May 1–3: During race riots in Memphis, forty-six black people are killed, with ninety-one of their houses, twelve churches and four schools destroyed.

  September 25: Having lost much of the property he owned before the war, and plagued by various accusations connected to events at Fort Pillow, Forrest places a notice in a Memphis paper advertising his services as a cotton factor.

  December 6: In a letter Forrest describes his involvement in a new project: construction of “the Memphis and Little Rock Railroad.”

  Sometime during the fall of 1866, Forrest may have accepted an invitation from his former artillery commander John Morton to assume leadership of the Ku Klux Klan. By this time the KKK has evolved from its origins as a loose association of pranksters into a serious and secret terrorist organization intended to defend the interests of former Confederates disenfranchised by the terms of the surrender.

  1867

  March 2: The United States Congress passes the Reconstruction Act, providing for states of the former Confederacy to be placed under martial law.

  May 7: Ads for the Planters Insurance Company of Tennessee, N. B. Forrest, President, run in the Memphis paper.

  In a letter to another former Confederate Forrest states that he is “settling up my affairs as rapidly as possible, believing as I do that Every thing under the laws that will be inaugurated by the military authority will result in ruin to our people.”

  1868

  February 5: Planters Insurance Company files for bankruptcy.

  Late February: KKK operations, previously confined to relatively nonviolent scare tactics, veer in the direction of whippings and lynchings.

  Early March: Forrest visits KKK Grand Dragon John B. Gordon in Atlanta, to discuss a new insurance venture in Memphis and perhaps to confer on Klan matters.

  June 10: After much controversy in the course of a meeting in Nashville, Forrest is elected delegate to the National Democratic Convention in New York as the Democrats try to organize opposition to the candidacy of Ulysses S. Grant for the presidency.

  July 27: During the Democratic convention in New York, Tennessee’s Reconstruction governor William G. Brownlow calls a special legislative session to declare Klan members outlaws punishable by death. Brownlow calls up state militia to take military action against the KKK.

  July: During his visit to the New York convention, Forrest obtains a pardon from President Johnson.

  August 11: In an address to a large crowd on the steps of the Brownsville courthouse, Forrest denounces Brownlow as a scalawag and a carpetbagger, urges black men in his audience to “stand by the men who raised you,” and promises, “If they bring this war upon us, there is one thing I will tell you: that I shall not shoot any negroes so long as I can see a white radical to shoot, for it is the radicals who will be to blame for bringing on this war.”

  August 28: In a long interview publi
shed by the Cincinnati Appeal (and later reprinted by the New York Times), Forrest affirms the existence of the Ku Klux Klan, estimating 40,000 members in Tennessee and 500,000 more in the rest of the South. Forrest describes the Klan as “a protective, political, military organization … sworn to recognize the Government of the United States.”

  September 6: Following the New York Times reprinting of the August Appeal interview, Forrest writes a letter retracting many of his August statements about the KKK.

  October 28: In a letter published by the New York Times, Forrest denounces ex-Union General Judson Kilpatrick as “a blackguard, a liar, a scoundrel, and poltroon.” Kilpatrick had accused Forrest of atrocities at Fort Pillow. Forrest’s letter amounts to a challenge to a duel, and Forrest’s second proposes it might best be fought “mounted and with sabers,” as both parties were cavalrymen. Kilpatrick does not respond to the challenge.

  November 3: Ulysses S. Grant is elected president of the United States.

  December: Members of the Southern aristocracy begin to publish statements to the effect that the increasingly violent KKK has outlived its usefulness. At this point Arkansas, Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, Louisiana and Alabama have been readmitted to representation in the U.S. Congress.