THE CIVIL WAR: THE TRUE STORY BOOK 1

Nathan Bedford Forrest Wins A Rare Victory Over Cancel Culture

Nathan Bedford Forrest Wins A Rare Victory Over Cancel Culture. Here's Why That's A Good Thing
Scott Morefield | Jun 22, 2020 12:01 AM

In 2020's version of the Bolshevik Revolution, almost any statue or monument that predates or doesn't explicitly honor the Civil Rights era is a potential target for being defaced, damaged, or toppled entirely, Taliban-style. The woke social justice warriors who have somehow managed to seize the culture don't seem to concern themselves much with whether these monuments honor Jefferson Davis, George Washington, Robert E. Lee, Thomas Jefferson, Winston Churchill, Christopher Columbus, or even famous abolitionist Matthias Baldwin. To them, these are just dead old white dudes who belong in the dustbin of history because, well, they were probably evil, engaged in hate-think, and participated in and benefited from the structural systemic institutional racism of their era, or something. However, while most conservatives will balk when leftists try to cancel Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and famous abolitionists, they have generally been pressured into ceding ground on anything relating to the Confederacy. Nobody is defending slavery today, but even those who have argued for these monuments' retention based on historical reasons have mostly given up. Granted, there is certainly room to discuss, in a non-mob-like way, the peaceful, orderly removal - to museums or private property - of certain statues put on government property by segregationists or KKK members for the express purpose of intimidating minorities. Most reasonable people understand this.

But other statues and monuments are simply there to acknowledge that, right or wrong, the person being remembered did something impressive, something noteworthy, something that history remembers because he did it here during a unique moment during his sliver of time on earth. After all, if all of us had to be perfect to be great, none of us would ever be great.

Take the Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, for example. A debate comes up every year over the bust that sits in the Tennessee Capitol building in Nashville. It wasn't placed there by segregationists, but rather by a Democratic member of the Tennessee State Senate in 1973 - not to praise the bad things he did, but rather to acknowledge Forrest's many accomplishments and prominent role in Tennessee history.

In a rare break from the acquiescence to the left we've been seeing all over the U.S. of late, the latest attempt to have the bust removed failed in the Tennessee State House last week by a whopping 61-25 margin. Tennessee Rep. Micah Van Huss was defiant in a statement written during the brouhaha: "Leftists are free to choose not to look at these glorious monuments," he wrote. "You want to blind yourself to history? Go ahead and live in your politically correct fantasy world. I live in the real world and will represent my constituents from that viewpoint. I won't be bullied into pandering to your fragile feelings. I will stand by my heritage and the history of the greatest nation the world has ever seen." While General Nathan Bedford Forrest's life certainly had its blemishes, it's also remembered for some of the most extraordinary accomplishments, like being widely acknowledged as one of the greatest tactical generals of all time in ANY era. It also ended with an attempt at racial reconciliation that almost nobody knows about, probably because the left doesn't believe in redemption for its chosen "sin unto death," only condemnation and forever banishment from the annals of history.

They say you can learn a lot about a man from what his enemies say about him. Union General William T. Sherman, who called Forrest "the very devil" for his success against Union troops during the war, also referred to his former enemy as "the most remarkable man our Civil War produced on either side," a man who "had a genius of strategy which was original, and to me incomprehensible."

Forrest was a millionaire when the war started, but chose to enlist as a private in the Tennessee Mounted Rifles, using his own money to equip the group. He quickly rose to lieutenant colonel and, after a series of unparalleled military successes, was eventually elevated to lieutenant general before disbanding his forces in May 1865. Known as the "Wizard of the Saddle" for his brilliant cavalry maneuvers, the Tennessee general's tactics are still studied by military students today. Space obviously doesn't exist here to go into too much detail about his life and military career, but to anyone interested I highly recommend reading virtually any fair Forrest biography, particularly the older ones. No joke, it's literally like something out of a Greek epic. Now, despite the fact that every historian acknowledges Forrest's military genius, there are generally three main knocks against the general - the Fort Pillow massacre, slavery, and the KKK. But like almost anything else in history, it's much more complicated than the picture Puritanical leftists want to paint.