THE CIVIL WAR: THE TRUE STORY BOOK 1

Nathan Bedford Forrest

Nathan Bedford Forrest

By Andrew Nelson Lytle on Jul 13, 2016

This essay was published as a new introduction for Lytle's Bedford Forrest and His Critter Company and is published here in honor of Forrest's birthday, July 13.

This is a young man's book. To have anything more to say about a book you did fifty odd years ago brings you hard up against the matter of time. The young author shows a familiar visage, as enigmatic as the portrait of a great-grandfather "struck" in his youth, gazing into the close air of the parlor. You know you are kin, but that youth belongs to the ancestors. Therefore to redo or revise in any real sense would mean to make another book. Fifty years can change more than the use and control of language. The world may go on for a thousand years and, outwardly at least, be always the same. Then something appears out of nowhere, so sudden does it seem, and a shattering takes place; as for example when the stirrup was introduced into Russia by the Sarmations riding out of Siberia. They stopped with the conquest of Russia, but the stirrup did not stop there. The Goths took it into Rome. It ended the stalemate between the mounted archers of Parthia and the Roman legion. It had its long history in Europe. It came to an end as an instrument of military power about a hundred years ago in Alabama.

Everywhere east of the Mississippi the Confederacy lay in ruins. The great Lee had surrendered, and the Army of Tennessee, constant in defeat, workmanlike always, was stopped forever at Goldsboro. But Sherman had reported that "There will never be peace in Tennessee until Forrest is dead." His very name, so long as his troops were intact, made all these larger victories unsure. Reports had it Davis was fleeing Richmond to join him, cross over into the Trans-Mississippi department and there carry on the war with Kirby-Smith. And then the news. Forrest had surrendered. The Wizard of the Saddle had dismounted for the last time. He had been whipped in his last fight, the one general who had always won and whose victories were always thrown away by others in higher places. The war was now indeed over. The Republic of the Founding Fathers was no more. A certain ideology used by a sectional group of new men and interests had usurped the name "Union" to undo the political union. The Numerical Majority, as Calhoun called it, had triumphed over the Federal system; and, since numbers never rule, indeed cannot, but are always manipulated by some active minority, such rule is never representative of the whole except in rare moments of pressure or emergency.

History has borne Calhoun out; it has also made his predictions seem too local and domestic. Wise as he was, it was not to be expected of anybody in the eighteen forties and fifties to foresee so quick an end to Britain's hegemony of the world. The tragic consequences of change, and so Calhoun viewed them, would therefore involve only the internal health of the union and not foreign entanglements. For the United States to be strong enough to intervene in the quarrels of Europe and emerge the dominant power in the West, would have seemed fantasy to those politicians who saw Senator Mason rise in the Senate to deliver the dying Calhoun's last words. And yet ten years later a war was fought and won, the ultimate consequences of which would be just this.

So in a very literal sense the Civil War was the first World War. It not only created a powerful nation of organized resources and potential military might, but the greater world wars took their pattern from the American one, even to the trench system Lee set up at Petersburg. These wars were internecine, all of them; but it was not in this that we find the crucial resemblances. In view of a common Christian culture wars within Europe would of necessity be internecine, but at least at one time there were Truces of God. What this country brought to Europe was unconditional surrender. The actual phrase was used by Roosevelt in the Second World War, but it was not his phrase. Grant had delivered it to the Confederate Command at Fort Donelson in February, 1862. Its implication is total surrender or total destruction, or slavery, or whatever. A strange alternative to be delivered by one Christian state to another; and yet it had precedent in Sherman's harrying the lands of Mississippi and Georgia, whenever Forrest was out of the way.