Insurgents, Raiders, and Bandits (19 page)

After a brief period of recuperation, Forrest returned to the field, this time much more on the offensive. Over the summer and fall of 1862 he honed his growing mastery of the bolt-from-the-blue raid, striking at small Union detachments as well as at rail and telegraph lines. But it was his characteristic simultaneous attacks on flanks and rear—swift, slashing, and completely disruptive of the Union forces’ cohesion—that became a true hallmark of his raiding style. His operations contributed mightily to disrupting Union operations after Shiloh, so much so that the South seized the strategic initiative. But under the clumsy generalship of General Braxton Bragg, the Confederate offensive that began in Kentucky soon fizzled.

At this point Forrest took his raiders west, where Grant was now trying to march overland toward the key Confederate river fortress of Vicksburg. With Union forces intending eventually to come upriver from New Orleans, which had been taken by David Farragut at the end of April, the loss of Vicksburg would split the Confederacy in two. But Grant didn’t reckon with Forrest’s tremendous energy, mobility, and fighting spirit. In a relentless series of raids on Union telegraph and rail lines, along with strikes against supply depots, Forrest completely halted the Union advance on Vicksburg.

As 1862 drew to a close, Union forces had to fall back on Memphis for, as Bruce Catton noted, Forrest’s raids “brought Grant’s army to a standstill. All hands were put on half rations, and to keep his army from starvation, Grant sent his wagons out into the country to seize supplies.”
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Tens of thousands of tough Union troops, led in the field by their most effective general, had been thwarted by the comparatively tiny irregular force—never more than a few thousand riders—led by Nathan Bedford Forrest.

Grant, however, was not a man to quit on an important objective. He soon renewed his efforts, this time relying heavily on the Union Navy to move much of his force by river most of the two hundred miles between Memphis and Vicksburg. For this campaign Grant had slightly more than a hundred thousand troops under his command, and he used them brilliantly in maneuvers, first away from the river and then back toward it—and Vicksburg. Forrest pestered him every step of the way, striking all over the map, sometimes riding for days nonstop so he could hit a target a hundred miles from where he had last raided. The only way Grant coped with Forrest was by allocating nearly two-thirds of his force—more than sixty thousand troops—to the protection of his lines of supply and communications.
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Vicksburg fell in July 1863, just as Lee was losing the Battle of Gettysburg back east. But Forrest had shown precisely how disruptive a tiny force could be when used skillfully against a modern army’s transportation and communications infrastructure. While Davydov and Abd el-Kader had demonstrated the effectiveness of such small-scale raids, they had operated against slow, wagon-drawn logistical systems. Forrest demonstrated that similar, even greater results could be achieved against railroad-based supply organizations despite the presence of telegraphic links that allowed the alarm of his presence to be spread swiftly. He just had to hit hard and run, for pursuit from multiple directions was never far off.

After the Vicksburg campaign Forrest once again served with the main Confederate force operating in southeastern Tennessee and northwestern Georgia. It was still commanded by Braxton Bragg, who was now trying to prevent a Union advance beyond Chattanooga. Bragg and Forrest had what can only be called a toxic relationship. Bragg could barely tolerate the irregular cavalryman: “The man is ignorant, and does not know anything of cooperation.”
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Forrest viewed Bragg as “a damned scoundrel.”
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This hardly formed a basis for fruitful collaboration.

Nevertheless in the late summer of 1863 the two men and their forces were able to catch the Union commander in this area, General William Rosecrans, in an awkward spot that imperiled his whole force. The place was near Chickamauga Creek, not far from Chattanooga but already in Georgia. Bragg struck Rosecrans there in September, in one of the bloodiest battles of the war. While Confederate casualties were higher than the Union’s during the two September days of battle—some twenty thousand versus sixteen thousand—Rosecrans was clearly defeated, a catastrophe being averted only by the stand of General George Thomas, the “Rock of Chickamauga.”

Determined to exploit this opportunity, Forrest lobbied Bragg hard to follow up the victory with a relentless pursuit, a view that was supported by Longstreet, who had come from the east with fresh forces to assist in the campaign. But Bragg would have none of it, wanting instead to reconsolidate his force after all the carnage. Forrest argued that the suffering would be in vain if Bragg did not take quick advantage of his victory. Bragg would not budge, and Forrest exploded against him, asking of the staffers at the meeting, “What does he fight battles for?”
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Less polite things also were said, and Forrest had his troopers taken away from him. Soon he was transferred to Mississippi, where he was ordered to mount raids to keep the federals from making further incursions there.

In this manner Forrest was shunted aside on the eve of the great Union offensive against Atlanta, the campaign that many historians believe truly sealed the Confederate defeat. For its capture in September 1864, just two months before the presidential election, ensured that Lincoln—whose prospects were shaky—would have a second term, and that there would be no peace short of victory over the Confederacy. Forrest, who had completely thwarted two major Union offensives already during the war, would almost surely have delayed Sherman’s advance (Grant had now moved east to take command of all federal forces), likely long enough to have thrown the election into doubt.

Even if his coming to Georgia had brought more federal troops in pursuit, as historian Albert Castel has suggested,
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they would have had to rely upon the same rail lines as Sherman’s forces, increasing the impact of any disruptions Forrest would have caused. Nor is it clear that Union leadership would have been willing to strip the Mississippi theater of troops, given that Napoleon III had just set up a “Catholic empire” in Mexico. The possibility that tens of thousands of French troops might engage in further adventurism—on American soil—encouraged the maintenance of a substantial military presence in the trans-Mississippi region.

The South, however, took advantage of none of these favorable factors, and Forrest was relegated to fighting far to the west of the decisive area of operations. He did so against ever greater odds, as there were almost no other important Confederate formations left in the west, leaving him to build his own new force from scratch. Still, he achieved remarkable results. They were just not the results that the South most needed at this critical juncture.

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During 1864 Forrest would grow as proud of his handful of newly recruited raiders as he was disappointed in his superiors. These troopers were quick to imbibe the spirit of his operational concepts, sometimes riding out on their own for days and weeks. On these independent raids they showed great cleverness in using the power of the Forrest “brand,” claiming their leader was with them when they demanded the surrender of a Union outpost. This
RUSE DE GUERRE
often worked; but increasingly, even when Forrest was with them, he was made to show himself in order to convince skeptical federals he was indeed present. Then they would generally surrender.

In April 1864, at a place now quite far behind Union lines on the Mississippi River called Fort Pillow, some forty miles north of Memphis, this need to show himself caused Forrest to have two horses shot from under him while he reconnoitered the post and tried to intimidate its garrison of about six hundred soldiers, just over half of them African Americans, into surrendering. The defenders felt their position was secure enough to mount a resistance, even in the presence of Forrest, as there was a Union naval gunboat right there at the fort. Even so, once the battle was on, with Forrest typically striking from several directions simultaneously, the rebels overran the fort and began to slaughter the Union soldiers. Some ran away along the river but most were taken prisoner, and many were forced to kneel and were shot execution-style in the head. African American prisoners were particularly singled out in this manner.

Fort Pillow proved to be the darkest day in Forrest’s career. An abundance of eyewitness evidence, including from Union soldiers, confirms that, once he became fully aware of what was going on, he put a stop to the killing. But even though the madness was ended, in less than half an hour, more than a hundred federals were murdered. Forrest was responsible for this horrible war atrocity, something that would nag him for the rest of his life. It would also tarnish the U.S. military’s memory of him and impair efforts to distill the lessons from his advanced concepts of field operations as European military leaders were doing. The American armed forces averted their gaze from Forrest and even went so far as to name the great base that is home to the majority of their special operations forces Fort Bragg, memorializing instead the military hack who did so much to keep Forrest down.

After Fort Pillow, Grant and Sherman began sending flying columns after Forrest. The first major effort consisted of more than eight thousand troopers who came to grips with him in June at Brice’s Cross Roads in northern Mississippi. Forrest scraped together every man he could find, which amounted to little more than three thousand. Yet, he seized the initiative and mounted another multidirectional attack. This favorite battle tactic of his worked again, and the federals suffered more than two thousand casualties. Forrest’s own unit lost about five hundred killed and wounded. The battle was something of a masterpiece of swift movement and misdirection of the enemy, perhaps Forrest’s best.

Union leaders were stung by this reverse; but in their coldly calculating way Grant and Sherman decided to continue after Forrest in the same manner. In part they did this to keep him busy far away from the decisive area of operations around Atlanta. A month after Brice’s Cross Roads, a much larger Union force, more than twelve thousand, induced the rebels to attack them as they were advancing near the town of Tupelo, Mississippi. In this battle the federals also benefited from Forrest’s Achilles-like decision to stay out of the fight. He was fuming about having been passed over for command in this theater in favor of Stephen Lee, a distant relative of Robert E. Lee. Forrest insisted that his new superior lead the troops into battle, which Lee did in a most clumsy, direct fashion. The rebels were badly beaten, losing well over a thousand men—a third of the force—to Union casualties of fewer than seven hundred. Forrest approached his superior after the battle and said, “I’ll tell you one thing, General Lee. If I knew as much about West Point tactics as you, the Yankees would whip hell out of me every day.”
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Eventually Forrest’s exile from the main action was ended—but too late, as Atlanta had already fallen. Now, instead of using his skills to bedevil Sherman’s sprawling army of freebooters rampaging across Georgia—easy pickings for a raider like Forrest—he was sent along on General John Bell Hood’s kamikaze-style offensive into Tennessee. Hood was soundly defeated, as he had been in the clumsy attacks he mounted against Sherman’s forces outside Atlanta after he had replaced the more skillful defender, General Joseph E. Johnston.

That any Confederates made it back from the catastrophe in Tennessee had much to do with Forrest’s heroic conduct of rearguard operations. As one of Hood’s staff officers reported, when the rebel army was finally out of harm’s way, “I heard General Hood heartily thank Forrest . . . saying to him that without his aid he should never have brought his army [back] across the Tennessee River.”
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Even in the midst of an outsized military debacle, Forrest had fought effectively, in this case winning time. But his skill in such an awful situation should prompt us to ask how much more effective he would have been had his talents been employed months earlier in thwarting Sherman’s advance, which was already slowed by Johnston’s sturdy defense of Atlanta.

During the last months of the war Forrest kept on fighting hard and succeeded in holding his command together. When the end finally came for the Confederacy, it was the idea of linking up with Forrest and fighting on that animated President Jefferson Davis’s abortive attempt to escape from besieged Richmond. Davis, who had brought in Bragg as his senior military adviser during the last year of the war, admitted that Forrest’s worth was “not understood at Richmond.”
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It was the understatement of the war.

Upon his return to private life, Forrest found that his knack for commercial success was gone. He failed in one venture after another, from mercantile to agricultural enterprises, and in an attempt to start a railroad company. His health also began to fail, with the cumulative effects of four years’ rough living, four major wounds, and what may have been undiagnosed diabetes all taking their toll on him. As he declined financially and physically, however, yet one more opportunity to serve came to him—or so he thought. He was invited to lead a secret Southern resistance society whose goal was to throw off the yoke of Northern occupation and control. He accepted, becoming the first grand wizard of an organization called the Ku Klux Klan.

Forrest’s dalliance with these terrorists did not last much beyond the elections of 1868, when Klan threats and violence probably swung a couple of Southern states away from Grant in the presidential election. But it was not enough to prevent the Union general’s victory. Soon after, Forrest repudiated the Klan and its ideology and tactics, spending the last years of his life a penitent. His health finally gave out in 1877, when he died at the age of fifty-six.