Southern Plantation Aristocracy

During the Civil War, Forrest showed himself to be not only a brilliant general, whose belief in being "the first with the most" has become a famous military dictum, but also very much a soldier's general, a general who led his troops from the front.1 After the war's end, he stubbornly refused to accept military defeat as meaning an end to the "way of life" for which he fought, and of which he himself was a conspicuous example. Although the question cannot be regarded as conclusively settled, it is overwhelmingly likely that he became the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, serving in that role from 1867 until as late as 1869.2 In the short term, the goal of the original KKK was to serve as a sort of guerilla resistance against the impositions and alleged excesses of Reconstruction; in the long term its fundamental goal was to maintain as far as possible the subservient status of Southern blacks, and therefore the continued existence of a social order similar to that of the prewar plantation South.

Forrest thus embodied in his character and career both the

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6 In 1864, Forrest again found himself operating to interdict the supply lines of and thus break up another Union invasion plan aimed at Mississippi, again led by a Union general named Smith  this time A. J. Smith. Again, the fighting was for the most part smallscale: skirmishes and raids, closely akin in fact to guerilla war, but culminating in one classic if small setpiece battle, that of Brice's Cross Roads in Mississippi. Strategically, Forrest was operating on the defensive, attempting to break up Gen. Samuel D. Sturgis' largescale raid into Mississippi. Sturgis' force consisted of some 10,000 infantry and cavalry. Forrest had 6,000 cavalry available to oppose this advance, and was therefore outnumbered nearly two to one.17 Nevertheless, Forrest determined to take the tactical offensive: to seek out Sturgis' force and engage it. ________ 16Ibid., 71. 17Edwin C. Bearss, Forrest at Brice's Cross Roads (Dayton, OH: Morningside Bookshop, 1979), 5960. Audacious as was Forrest's decision to head off and fight Sturgis' overwhelming force where he found him, it was a calculated audacity.18 Forrest was in fact confident that he could effectively eliminate the Union nume
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Approximate Pages = 17 (250 words per page)

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