Forrest

Nathan Bedford Forrest:

Time magazine reports on a controversy in Mississippi.

In 1867, former Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest became the first Grand Wizard of a newly formed organization called the Ku Klux Klan. Forrest had been a slave trader before the Civil War; he was also the commanding officer during a battle known as the "Fort Pillow massacre" in Tennessee at which some 300 black Union troops were killed in 1864. (Whether they died in combat or were killed after they surrendered is still a matter of dispute.)

Now, in honor of the Civil War's 150th anniversary, the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) are seeking to put Forrest on a Mississippi license plate.

OK, that's a pretty good job of explaining why it would be controversial to put him on a license plate! Now, to balance the article, we'll get an explanation of why they want to do so. That way we'll have both sides of the story. Right? Well, no, not exactly: we get two cherry picked lines framed with explanations of what we're supposed to think about them.

Chuck Rand, a member of the SCV, calls any assumption that the Forrest license plate is racist a "knee-jerk reaction" by people who don't understand the "real causes" of the Civil War. Or, as he calls it, "The war for Southern independence." But critics point out that slavery isn't addressed in these commemorations.

...

"Lincoln waged a war to conquer his neighbor," Rand explains. "In our view, he was an aggressor against another nation, just as Hitler was an aggressor against other nations." Most people, Southern or otherwise, are not likely to agree with such an inflammatory statement[.]

We also get some expert testimony to help us decide what to think.

"Robert E. Lee has been replaced as the great [Confederate] hero by Nathan Bedford Forrest by these Southern white heritage groups," says Mark Potok, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project, which investigates extremist groups. Lee owned slaves, Potok says, but "he was very much a statesman, and at the end of the Civil War, he encouraged Southerners to rejoin the Union in heart and soul. Forrest was very much not like that. The fact that they want to honor him specifically says a lot about what they stand for."

The takeaway from the article, then, is that Forrest was completely undredeemable, and the SCV are extremist crypto-racist jerks.

I'm not associated with SCV in any fashion; maybe they are crazy cryto-racist jerks. I do know enough about the history of the Civil War to know why someone would think Forrest was a figure in whom we should recognize praiseworthy qualities. He was a slave-owner, certainly; but so were Washington, Jefferson, James Jackson of Georgia, and a number of other highly praiseworthy men.

He founded the Ku Klux Klan, which my family fought against back in the days right after the Civil War in Tennessee. It should also be noted that in 1869, when four years of guerrilla resistance against the new governments had not produced victory, Forrest took a leadership role in disbanding the movement. Congress thanked him: "General Forrest and other men of influence in the state, by the exercise of their moral power, induced [the KKK] to disband."

In other words, he was much like some of the Sunni leaders in Iraq who fought for Saddam, and then fought against us in the insurgency; but whose leadership in bringing peace and order to the region after the Awakening caused us to receive them as allies. As for the Ft. Pillow massacre, Time at least notes the controversy around it; Forrest himself denied any such massacre, ascribing the reports to the invention of Northern reporters for propaganda purposes.

Forrest was born poor, and received little education. Yet his native intelligence and spirit allowed him to win a fortune before the war. He never received a military education like most of the Confederate generals, so when the war broke out he enlisted as a private -- and worked his way up to Lieutenant General.

He formed his own cavalry units and fought them with such brilliance and insight that a number of his methods fundamentally reformed the training and doctrine for the U.S. cavalry for decades to come. As motorized units came into play later, they became the foundation of our understanding of maneuver warfare: the kind of warfare still practiced today. US Army and Marine Corps front-line combat units take pride in their distinction as "maneuver units," a distinction that we really owe to Forrest.

At Brice's Crossroads, Forrest destroyed an enemy army more than twice the size of his own, using tactics that he invented without any formal training.

An article that made all of that clear might have raised some interesting questions: questions quite relevant to our lives today, as we think about how the new Iraq will settle its own differences, and forgive old wounds. At this remove I suppose we feel free to condemn without reservation, but that is not something that Iraq can do to its Sunni leaders without destabilizing the situation. That is another way of saying that they are necessary for peace, too: and if there is peace, it will be because they (like Forrest) exercise their moral leadership in that direction.

If they do, they might be thanked for it: Forrest was. It's less clear if they should be forgiven. That is a question we haven't decided here, even a hundred and fifty years on.