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Southern Plantation Aristocracy

It has sometimes been said of the South's plantation aristocracy that it was invisible in war, invincible in defeat. Whatever may be said of the military performance of the planter class as a whole, the first part of this aphorism clearly does not apply  and the second part just as clearly does  to one of its notable representatives, General Nathan Bedford Forrest.

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

1Walter E. Pittman, Jr., "General Nathan Bedford Forrest and Military Leadership," The West Tennessee Historical Society Papers, 35 (October, 1981), 56.

2Robert Selph Henry, "First With the Most" Forrest (New York: BobbsMerrill, 1944), 447ff.

brightest and the darkest elements of the martial culture of the Confederacy. He was a superb fighting general, who fought at Brice's Cross Roads what has been called the "classic small battle of American military history."3 ...

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Southern Plantation Aristocracy. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 18:14, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1705518.html