User:Jengod/Forrestlegacy



Many memorials have been erected to Forrest, especially in Tennessee and adjacent southern states. Forrest County, Mississippi is named after him, as is Forrest City, Arkansas. Obelisks in his memory were placed at his birthplace in Chapel Hill, Tennessee and at Nathan Bedford Forrest State Park near Camden.

Forrest was elevated in Memphis—where he lived and died—to the status of folk hero. Historian Court Carney suggested that "embarrassed by their city's early capitulation during the Civil War, white Memphians desperately needed a hero and therefore crafted a distorted depiction of Forrest's role in the war." A memorial to him, the first Civil War memorial in Memphis, was erected in 1905 in a new Nathan Bedford Forrest Park. A bust sculpted by Jane Baxendale is on display at the Tennessee State Capitol building in Nashville. The World War II Army base Camp Forrest in Tullahoma, Tennessee was named after him. It is now the site of the Arnold Engineering Development Center. The Nathan Bedford Forrest Statue in Nashville was particularly notable for its idiosyncratic depiction of Forrest on horseback.

, Tennessee had 32 dedicated historical markers linked to Nathan Bedford Forrest, more than are dedicated to all three former Presidents associated with the state combined: Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk, and Andrew Johnson. The Tennessee legislature established July 13 as "Nathan Bedford Forrest Day". A Tennessee-based organization, the Sons of Confederate Veterans, posthumously awarded Forrest their Confederate Medal of Honor, created in 1977.

A monument to Forrest in the Confederate Circle section of Old Live Oak Cemetery in Selma, Alabama reads "Defender of Selma, Wizard of the Saddle, Untutored Genius, The first with the most. This monument stands as testament of our perpetual devotion and respect for Lieutenant General Nathan Bedford Forrest. CSA 1821–1877, one of the South's finest heroes. In honor of Gen. Forrest's unwavering defense of Selma, the great state of Alabama, and the Confederacy, this memorial is dedicated. DEO VINDICE". As an armory for the Confederacy, Selma provided a substantial part of the Confederacy's ammunition during the American Civil War. The bust of Forrest was stolen from the cemetery monument in March 2012 and replaced in May 2015. A monument to Forrest at a corner of Veterans Plaza in Rome, Georgia was erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1909 to honor his bravery for defending Rome from U.S. Army Colonel Abel Streight and his cavalry.

High schools named for Forrest were built in Chapel Hill, Tennessee and Jacksonville, Florida. The school in Jacksonville was named for Forrest in 1959 at the urging of the Daughters of the Confederacy because they were upset about the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. In 2008, the Duval County School Board voted 5–2 against a push to change the name of Nathan Bedford Forrest High School in Jacksonville. In 2013, the board voted 7–0 to begin the process to rename the school. At the time the school was all white, but now more than half the student body is black. After several public forums and discussions, Westside High School was unanimously approved in January 2014 as the school's new name.

In August 2000, a road on Fort Bliss named for Forrest decades earlier was renamed for former post commander Richard T. Cassidy. In 2005, Shelby County Commissioner Walter Bailey started an effort to move the statue over Forrest's grave and rename Forrest Park. Former Memphis Mayor Willie Herenton, who is black, blocked the move. Others have tried to remove Forrest's bust from the Tennessee House of Representatives chamber. Leaders in other localities have also tried to remove or eliminate Forrest monuments, with mixed success.

In 1978, Middle Tennessee State University abandoned imagery it had formerly used (in 1951, the school's yearbook, The Midlander, featured the first appearance of Forrest's likeness as MTSU's official mascot) and MTSU president M. G. Scarlett removed the General's image from the university's official seal. The Blue Raiders' athletic mascot was changed to an ambiguous swash-buckler character called the "Blue Raider" to avoid association with Forrest or the Confederacy. The school unveiled its latest mascot, a winged horse named "Lightning" inspired by the mythological Pegasus, during halftime of a basketball game against rival Tennessee State University on January 17, 1998. The ROTC building at MTSU had been named Forrest Hall to honor him in 1958, but the frieze depicting General Forrest on horseback that had adorned the side of the building was removed amid protests in 2006. A significant push to change its name failed on February 16, 2018, when the governor-controlled Tennessee Historical Commission denied Middle Tennessee State University's petition to rename Forrest Hall. The Forrest Hill Academy high school in Atlanta, Georgia, which had been named for Forrest, was renamed the Hank Aaron New Beginnings Academy in April 2021 after the Atlanta Braves baseball star who had died less than three months prior.

Military doctrines
Forrest is considered one of the Civil War's most brilliant tacticians by the historian Spencer C. Tucker. Forrest fought by simple rules; he maintained that "war means fighting and fighting means killing" and the way to win was "to get there first with the most men". U.S. Army General William Tecumseh Sherman called him "that devil Forrest" in wartime communications with Ulysses S. Grant and considered him "the most remarkable man our civil war produced on either side".

Forrest became well known for his early use of maneuver tactics as applied to a mobile horse cavalry deployment. He grasped the doctrines of mobile warfare that would eventually become prevalent in the 20th century. Paramount in his strategy was fast movement, even if it meant pushing his horses at a killing pace, to constantly harass the enemy during raids by disrupting their supply trains and communications with the destruction of railroad tracks and the cutting of telegraph lines, as he wheeled around his opponent's flank. The Civil War scholar Bruce Catton writes:

"Forrest ... used his horsemen as a modern general would use motorized infantry. He liked horses because he liked fast movement, and his mounted men could get from here to there much faster than any infantry could; but when they reached the field they usually tied their horses to trees and fought on foot, and they were as good as the very best infantry."

Forrest is often erroneously quoted as saying his strategy was "to git thar fustest with the mostest". Now often recast as "Getting there firstest with the mostest", this misquote first appeared in a New York Tribune article written to provide colorful comments in reaction to European interest in Civil War generals. The aphorism was addressed and corrected as "Ma'am, I got there first with the most men" by a New York Times story in 1918. Though it was a novel and succinct condensation of the military principles of mass and maneuver, Bruce Catton writes of the spurious quote:

"Do not, under any circumstances whatever, quote Forrest as saying 'fustest' and 'mostest'. He did not say it that way, and nobody who knows anything about him imagines that he did."

Fort Pillow
Modern historians generally believe that Forrest's attack on Fort Pillow was a massacre, noting high casualty rates and the rebels targeting black soldiers. Forrest's claim that the Fort Pillow massacre was an invention of U.S. reporters is contradicted by letters written by Confederate soldiers to their own families, which described extreme brutality on the part of Confederate troops. It was the Confederacy's publicly stated position that formerly enslaved people firing on whites would be killed on the spot, along with Southern whites that fought for the Union, whom the Confederacy considered traitors. According to this analysis, Forrest's troops were carrying out Confederate policy. The historical record does not support his repeated denials that he knew a massacre was taking place or that he even knew a massacre had occurred at all. Consequently, his role at Fort Pillow was a stigmatizing one for him the rest of his life, both professionally and personally, and contributed to his business problems after the war.

Historians have differed in their interpretations of the events at Fort Pillow. Richard L. Fuchs, author of An Unerring Fire, concluded:

"The affair at Fort Pillow was simply an orgy of death, a mass lynching to satisfy the basest of conduct—intentional murder—for the vilest of reasons—racism and personal enmity."

Andrew Ward downplays the controversy:

"Whether the massacre was premeditated or spontaneous does not address the more fundamental question of whether a massacre took place ... it certainly did, in every dictionary sense of the word."

John Cimprich states:

"The new paradigm in social attitudes and the fuller use of available evidence has favored a massacre interpretation ... Debate over the memory of this incident formed a part of sectional and racial conflicts for many years after the war, but the reinterpretation of the event during the last thirty years offers some hope that society can move beyond past intolerance."

The site is now a Tennessee State Historic Park.

Grant himself described Forrest as "a brave and intrepid cavalry general" while noting that Forrest sent a dispatch on the Fort Pillow Massacre "in which he left out the part which shocks humanity to read".

In popular culture
In the 1990 PBS documentary The Civil War by Ken Burns, historian Shelby Foote states in Episode 7 that the Civil War produced two "authentic geniuses": Abraham Lincoln and Nathan Bedford Forrest. When he expressed his opinion to one of General Forrest's granddaughters, she replied after a pause, "You know, we never thought much of Mr. Lincoln in my family". Foote also made Forrest a major character in his novel Shiloh, which used numerous first-person stories to illustrate a detailed timeline and account of the battle.

Tom Hanks's title character in the film Forrest Gump remarks in one scene that his mother named him after Nathan Bedford Forrest and "we was related to him in some way". The following scene satirically depicts Hanks as Forrest in a Ku Klux Klan outfit, donning a hood and being superimposed into scenes of the Klan from The Birth of a Nation.

Continuing controversies


Forrest's legacy as "one of the most controversial—and popular—icons of the war" still draws heated public debate.

A 2011 Mississippi license plate proposal to honor him by the Sons of Confederate Veterans revived tensions and raised objections from Mississippi NAACP chapter president Derrick Johnson, who compared Forrest to Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. The Mississippi NAACP petitioned Governor Haley Barbour to denounce the plates and prevent their distribution. Barbour refused to denounce the honor. Instead, he noted that the state legislature would not likely approve the plate anyway.

In 2000, a monument to Forrest was unveiled in Selma, Alabama. On March 10, 2012, it was vandalized, and the bronze bust of the general disappeared. In August, a historical society called Friends of Forrest moved forward with plans for a new, larger monument to be 12 feet high, illuminated by LED lights, surrounded by a wrought-iron fence, and protected by 24-hour security cameras. The plans triggered outrage, and around 20 protesters attempted to block the construction of the new monument by lying in the path of a concrete truck. Local lawyer and radio host Rose Sanders said, "Glorifying Nathan B. Forrest here is like glorifying a Nazi in Germany. For Selma, of all places, to have a big monument to a Klansman is totally unacceptable". An online petition at Change.org asking the City Council to ban the monument collected 313,617 signatures by mid-September of the same year.

In 2013, Forrest Park in Memphis was renamed the Health Sciences Park amid substantial controversy. In light of the 2015 church shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, some Tennessee lawmakers advocated removing a bust of Forrest located in the state's Capitol building. Subsequently, then-Mayor A C Wharton urged that the statue of Forrest be removed from the Health Sciences Park and suggested that the remains of Forrest and his wife be relocated to their original burial site in nearby Elmwood Cemetery. In a nearly unanimous vote on July 7, the Memphis City Council passed a resolution in favor of removing the statue and securing the couple's remains for transfer. The Tennessee Historical Commission denied removal on October 21, 2016, under the authority granted it by the Tennessee Heritage Protection Act of 2013, which prevents cities and counties from relocating, removing, renaming, or otherwise disturbing without permission war memorials on public property. The City Council then voted on December 20, 2017, to sell Health Sciences Park to Memphis Greenspace, a new non-profit corporation not subject to the Heritage Protection Act, which removed the statue and another of Jefferson Davis that same evening. The Sons of Confederate Veterans threatened a lawsuit against the city.

On April 18, 2018, the Tennessee House of Representatives punished Memphis by cutting $250,000 (~$ in ) in appropriations for the city's bicentennial celebration. Brett Joseph Forrest, a direct descendant of Nathan, spoke in support of the bust's removal.

As of 2019, Nathan Bedford Forrest Day was still observed in Tennessee, though some Democrats in the state had attempted to change the law, which required Tennessee's governor to sign a proclamation honoring the holiday. However, since that time, Governor Bill Lee's administration introduced a bill – passed by the Tennessee legislature on June 10, 2020 – which released the governor from the former requirement that he proclaim that observance each year and a spokesperson for Governor Lee confirmed that he would not be signing a Forrest Day proclamation in July 2020.

In June 2020, after black members of the Tennessee House of Representatives unsuccessfully asked it to eliminate a state celebration of Forrest, Representative Cameron Sexton opined: "I don't think anybody here is truly racist. I think people may make insensitive comments." In 2021 Sexton voted against the removal of the bust of Forrest from the Tennessee State Capitol and into the Tennessee State Museum, but only one other legislator agreed with him, and the bust was removed. Sexton said that he believed the removal of the bust "aligns ... with the teaching of communism."

On June 3, 2021, the remains of Forrest and his wife were exhumed from their burial place in the park, where they had been for over a century, to be reburied in Columbia, Tennessee. The exhumation and reburial were the results of a campaign that began after the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. The effort was spearheaded by Shelby County Commissioner Tami Sawyer, an educator and Memphis native who founded a group called Take 'Em Down 901 to advocate for the removal of Confederate iconography. After the Forrests' remains were removed from Memphis, they were reportedly buried in Munford, Tennessee until their reburial in Columbia in September 2021 by the Sons of Confederate Veterans. In 2023, Forrest Street in Alexandria, Virginia, named after Forrest has been proposed by local legislators for renaming.

"...to make a slave trader look like a superior being, he must be represented as a star, playing a noble, decisive rôle, like Achilles, who 'rose, and his thundering voice alone put the Trojans to flight.'"