Yet his troops committed, and he himself was implicated in, the notorious "Fort Pillow Massacre," in which black (and white) Union troops were slaughtered after their surrender. His fighting spirit and determination was thus deeply intermixed with what can only be called race hatred. In studying him, we come closer to the underlying causes of the Civil War, and perhaps to the underlying nature of war itself.
Nathan Bedford Forrest was born in log cabin obscurity in rural Tennessee on July 13, 1821.4 Evidently his mother, Mariam, made a greater impression on contemporaries than did his father; she was nearly six feet tall and weighed about 180 pounds at a time when average statures and weights were considerably smaller than today. In the classicising style of that time, she was described as a "mother of the Gracchi," referring to famous Roman reformers of the second century BC. She provided no fewer than eight sons to the service of her country, we are told.5 Nathan Bedford himself early established for himself a reputation as a leader in juvenile mischief.
He became a successful slave dealer and planter, who by his own account estimated his wealth at the beginning of the Civil ________
4John A. Wyeth, Lifwe of General Nathan Bedford Forrest (Dayton, OH: Morningside Bookshop, 1988; orig. pub. 1899), 2.
War as a million and a half dollars.6 The purchasing power of these nineteenth century dollars was perhaps ten times that of present day money, and in a vastly smaller economy; by any standard, Bedford must be considered a man of wealth and power, a leading figure of rural plantation society. He was a prime beneficiary of the Southern plantation system's "way of life."
It was a way of life which was aristocratic, but not by our standards genteel, particularly not in the more westerly and rural portions of the South. As an aristocrat, he might more fairly be compared to a Homeric warrior or a ...