The brothers Forrest

[larry_cockerham]

A son Jeffrey E. Forrest was born in Salem in 1837, just four months after the untimely death of his father William. Jeffrey died in his brother Nathan’s arms after being wounded at the battle of Okalona, Mississippi 22 Feb 1864. He was a Captain of the 7th Tennessee at Ft. Donalson and was later Colonel of the 8th Tennessee Cavalry. He was shot through both thighs at Bears Creek, Mississippi in October 1863. Jeffrey managed a livery stable in Memphis prior to the war.

The Forrest family was a remarkable, tough part of the history of Tennessee and Mississippi who gave far more than their share of blood and effort in the American Civil War.


Please let me know where corrections are needed. Thanks!

[Southern Son]

Originally Posted by larry_cockerham

If there's an American family who put more of their energy, personal fortune and blood into the Civil War, I'd like to hear or read about 'em.

The Fighting McCooks

The Fighting McCooks were members of a family of Ohians who reached prominence as officers in the Union Army during the AWC. Two brothers, Daniel and John McCook, and thirteen of their sons were actively involved in the army, making the family one of the most prolific in American military history. Six of the McCooks reached the rank of Brigade General or higher.
Although scholars disagree on the exact number of McCooks who fought in the Civil War, it appears that Daniel McCook and eight of his nine sons took up arms for the North, as did his brother, John McCook, and his five sons.

“TRIBE OF DAN”
Maj. Daniel McCook: mortally wounded at Buffington Island.
Maj Latimer McCook: a surgeon.
Brig. Gen. George McCook: early regimental commander
Midshipman John McCook: died at sea.
Brig. Gen. Alexander McCook: commander of the 20th Corps.
Brig. Gen. Daniel Jr. McCook: mortally wounded at Kennesaw Mt.
Maj. Gen. Edwin McCook: served under Grant and Sherman.
Pvt. Charles McCook: killed at Bull Run.
Col. John McCook: seriously wounded in Virginia.

“TRIBE OF JOHN”
Maj. Gen. Edward McCook: captured Confederates behind the lines.
Brig. Gen. Anson McCook: served with distinction in 3 battles and 2 campaigns.
Rev. Henry McCook: a chaplain.
Marine Lt. Roderick McCook: accepted the surrender of a Confederate regiment.
Lt. John McCook: served when only 18 years old.

[ole]

Awessome post, Southern son. The McCooks were indeed in the forefront of family involvement. Thanks for your post.

ole

[larry_cockerham]

Originally Posted by Southern Son

The Fighting McCooks

The Fighting McCooks were members of a family of Ohians who reached prominence as officers in the Union Army during the AWC. Two brothers, Daniel and John McCook, and thirteen of their sons were actively involved in the army, making the family one of the most prolific in American military history. Six of the McCooks reached the rank of Brigade General or higher.
Although scholars disagree on the exact number of McCooks who fought in the Civil War, it appears that Daniel McCook and eight of his nine sons took up arms for the North, as did his brother, John McCook, and his five sons.

“TRIBE OF DAN”
Maj. Daniel McCook: mortally wounded at Buffington Island.
Maj Latimer McCook: a surgeon.
Brig. Gen. George McCook: early regimental commander
Midshipman John McCook: died at sea.
Brig. Gen. Alexander McCook: commander of the 20th Corps.
Brig. Gen. Daniel Jr. McCook: mortally wounded at Kennesaw Mt.
Maj. Gen. Edwin McCook: served under Grant and Sherman.
Pvt. Charles McCook: killed at Bull Run.
Col. John McCook: seriously wounded in Virginia.

“TRIBE OF JOHN”
Maj. Gen. Edward McCook: captured Confederates behind the lines.
Brig. Gen. Anson McCook: served with distinction in 3 battles and 2 campaigns.
Rev. Henry McCook: a chaplain.
Marine Lt. Roderick McCook: accepted the surrender of a Confederate regiment.
Lt. John McCook: served when only 18 years old.

While the McCooks and Forrests must have had interestingly different accents, they obviously shared many of the horrows of war. Thanks very much for your most informative and interesting post. This is another example of the similarity of experiences had by soldiers in all levels of the war. I believe you have certainly met my challenge to match the brothers Forrest in contribution to the war.

[larry_cockerham]

Confederate Compatriot Bill Barr gave me permission to post the following in this forum. It is an excerpt from a speech he wrote concerning the exploits of N.B. Forrest which was presented at the recently held national SCV Convention:

Brethren,

My speech below was delivered last Friday at the Forrest Cavalry, one of many groups which meets annually in conjunction with the SCV National Reunion. Unable to attend at the last minute, it was read for me by my brother Jim, who is the Commander of the Illinois Division.
I thought that it might be of some interest. --Bill Barr (#109)
__________________________________________________ _____________
Forrest: the Man, and the Myth of Fort Pillow

Throughout Henry V, Shakespeare explores the ethics of mercy to shed light upon the character of Henry, an English king at war with France.
In preparation to regain the Norman peninsula, Henry pardons a prisoner who has committed a minor offence. Immediately afterwards, he orders the summary execution at Southampton of three English nobles who are traitors to the Crown. By conspiring with the king of France against him, the condemned men must die for the "health of England." Once in France, Bardulf, a boyhood friend of Henry, is executed when the king discovers that the luckless man stole from a church. Henry shows no mercy to evil-doers. But by the end of the campaign, Henry has pardoned a man who had insulted him, demonstrating a sense of justice tempered by mercy.
Notably, Henry's mercy is shown to the inhabitants of the surrendered Harfleur, a Norman port which fell as a result of a costly siege over the course of three weeks.

Yet Shakespeare portrays Henry as bluffing the defenders of the fortified city into surrender. Expect the most dire consequences, Henry warns, unless the gates are immediately opened to him.

How yet resolves the governor of the town?
This is the latest parle we will admit;
Therefore to our best mercy give yourselves;
Or like to men proud of destruction
Defy us to our worst: for, as I am a soldier,
A name that in my thoughts becomes me best,
If I begin the battery once again,
I will not leave the half-achieved Harfleur
Till in her ashes she lie buried....

Therefore, you men of Harfleur,
Take pity of your town and of your people,
Whiles yet my soldiers are in my command;
Whiles yet the cool and temperate wind of grace
O'erblows the filthy and contagious clouds
Of heady murder, spoil and villany.
If not, why, in a moment look to see
The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand
Defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters;
Your fathers taken by the silver beards,
And their most reverend heads dash'd to the walls,
Your naked infants spitted upon pikes,
Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confused
Do break the clouds...
What say you? will you yield, and this avoid,
Or, guilty in defence, be thus destroy'd?
Shakespeare acknowledges that sometimes soldiers cut down the defenseless, when
The gates of mercy shall be all shut up, And the flesh'd soldier, rough and hard of heart,
In liberty of bloody hand shall range/With conscience wide as hell, mowing (down) like grass...

[larry_cockerham]

If any American general officer was a hero of Shakespearean intensity. it was Nathan Bedford Forrest.

Soon after Forrest's first incursion into Kentucky, one of his officers, Major David Kelley, observes that he scarcely recognized his commander once the regiment had been blooodied. At Sacremento, Forrest's face was so flushed "that it bore a striking resemblance to a painted Indian warrior's, and his eyes, usually mild in their expression, were blazing with the intense glare of a panther's springing on its prey." Another Confederate has described the general's complexion, when his blood was up as burnt orange.

Significantly, the combativeness which always lay beneath Forrest's exterior was revealed foremost, but not exclusively, in the face of the enemy. Nevertheless, time and again, accounts of Forrest reveal a man who put patriotism ahead of personal pique and stifled his temper.

We all know of the many horses shot out from under the general, and can imagine the attendant, continuous bruising and reopening of war wounds. We know that losing a mount never stopped the general. In the engagement against the enemy at Pontotoc, Mississippi, three horses were shot out from under Forrest, and he lost a like number of mounts in action at Fort Pillow, Tennessee.

But it takes it takes a very old-fashioned leader, a leader out in front of his men, to accomplish the feat pulled off by Forrest at Rossville, Georgia. When a minie ball severed the neck of the general's horse, he refused to give up chasing the Yankees and simply plugged the hole with his index finger. Once the enemy had fled the vicinity, Forrest removed his finger and the animal immediately collapsed and died.

[larry_cockerham]

In his 2003 biography of the late Shelby Foote, C. Stuart Chapman calls Forrest "a test case for Southern culture in the twentieth century", a contradictory figure who elicits "lionizing and demonizing,...evangelical worship and blinding hatred". Getting that right, Chapman goes on to excoriate Foote for writing a million words in his three-volume history of the War, and devoting none of them to denigrating Forrest.

For Stuart Chapman, and for all others possessing a Jacobin turn of mind since 1864, the South is synonymous with the general from Memphis, and Forrest, in turn, is synonymous with the Fort Pillow Campaign. Consider Chapman's erroneous, but succinct mythic recitation of death and dying at Fort Pillow on April 12, 1864:

"Forrest's troops pinned black Union soldiers on a Mississippi River bluff 50 miles noth of Memphis. The Union troops faced the daunting choice of jumping off the 300-foot bluff or placing themselves at the mercy of Forrest's bloodthirsty troops. Neither choice offered sanctuary. Those who jumped were riddled with gunfire from the cliff, and those who surrendered were shot."

Now a myth is simply the way history is remembered. From the end of the War until the end of Reconstruction, Forrest and Fort Pillow were inextricably linked in Republican Party propaganda as shorthand for the mythic virtue of the Union cause. As well, the way the Radical Republicans remembered Fort Pillow formed a shorthand for the valorization of such developing Unionist goals as the hotly contested issues of emancipation, the black soldier in Federal blue, and the civic future of a large class of non-citizens, the men of African descent.

[larry_cockerham]

And what's mythic virtue without a mythic evil, the serpent in the garden? Thus, Forrest and his troops at Fort Pillow have been invoked with a pious shudder as symbols of the Devil and all his works, a convenient shorthand for the base threat to American principles posed by the Rebels down in Dixie. Again, the ritual cursing of the Confederates at Fort Pillow formed for Radical Republicans a crucial referent in denying Southern veterans the vote and overturning conservative electoral results during Reconstruction while simultaneously placing the ballot in the hands of the illiterate freedman.
In the U.S. presidential elections of 1864 and 1868, Forrest and his Cavalry Corps formed useful targets to direct attention away from the Northern failure to subdue the Southerners through war and Reconstruction. The general and the troops who loved him became symbols to many Unionists of their losses in the crusade to impose a moral and cultural uniformity on the country, and thus redeem the promise of the Universal Yankee nation to guide all of mankind. The Rebels had to pay, and the story of Forrest's command, as retailed by interested parties, was useful in making that case.
As Sons of Confederate Veterans, we are too familiar with the avarice and ambition fueling a retelling of the Fort Pillow story in contemporary accounts offered by Dixie-hating liberals. Stuart Chapman, for example, is a spinmeister with a PhD employed by one of the leading congressional advocates of slavery reparations. Dare one point out the obvious? There would simply be no return on the relentless undermining of Forrest and the Confederate soldier as American role-models without power and prestige to be gained by lesser men in our time walking over the graves of our honored dead

[larry_cockerham]

Before moving on, the Forrest and other Memphis-area camps deserve to be recognized for facing up to this new onslaught by our enemies, and for displaying the dexterity and determination shown by Old Bedford himself during Reconstruction. Throughout what Hodding Carter calls the "angry scar" of Reconstruction, Forrest once again proved to be a pioneer in learning how to succeed in a new kind of warfare. It's fitting that Shelby County men, citizens of the community which the general called home, have offered such spirited resistance to the cultural nihilists who hate Dixie, along with everything else native, noble and fine.
__________________________________________________ ________________________________________
Now the victorious Confederates at Fort Pillow were not without their own mythic understanding of the events of the day. The Southerners immediately voiced their doubts as to the suitability of blacks as soldiers, given the collapse of the latter's organized resistance once they no longer held a fortified position.

Investigating the positons of the U.S. Colored Troops after the engagement, the Rebels found evidence that many of the 600 federal troops defending Fort Pillow had consumed copious amounts of alcohol during the fve hours of fighting before Forrest proposed a truce to negotiate the garrison's surrender. Inebriation, the Southerners claimed, had affected their foes by producing eratic behavior like issuing obscene gestures and displaying their private parts to the Confederates during the truce, and throwing down their weapons and then picking them up again after the Rebels had breached the parapets from three sides once the truce ended.

Confederates recalled that once the Federal parapets had been gained, manyof the U.S. troops remaining alive fled down the steep, eighty-foot bluff to the Mississippi, some firing as they retired. Some Federals even jumped high into the air and leapt over the bluff, only to be crushed in falling to their death.

Other Federal soldiers, from white and black units, had reached the riverbank under a hail of Confederate rifle fire, and made for a barge only to be cut down before it could withdraw upstream. The boats which could have towed the barge, however, had already steamed out of harm's way at this point and were travelling upriver, and Federal blood spilled over some 200 yards into the Great Father of the Waters.

Confederate accounts stress that no surrender was attempted of the garrison, that the enemy did not haul down his own banner, and that even as some Federals were being taken prisoner, others were remained in arms or in flight, with some of the latter soldiersas well retaining their carbines and muskets. Moreover, the Confederates remembered hearing that, at the breach of the parapit, the garrison's commander had essentially declared it was every man for himself.

He was Major Bradford, commander of the Tennessee Union cavalry of the Fort. Bradford, a "Tennessee Tory" to the Confederates, inherited command of the Fort that morning when a sniper had killed Major Booth, the overall Federal commander. Bradford was shot while trying to escape captivity the day following the battle, according to the Confederate account, which is not the way he met his end in the Union account. It stresses the threat of the Confederate Congress to execute white officers commanding runaway slaves in arms.

Of course, a number of Federal troops, black and white, who saw action at Fort Pillow had been forced into military service. Forrest himself was no shrinking violet when it came to military conscription, one remembers.

[larry_cockerham]

Forrest incurred 100 casualties at Fort Pillow, most of whom were wounded in action. By nightfall, over 400 Federals were killed, and some 170 taken prisoners taken (most of whom were wounded). Some male civilians were made casualties who were either runaway slaves or slaves drafted for a labor corvee by the garrison. Most of the Federal casualties were suffered in the action before their general route following the success of the final Confederate charge.

A clear pattern emerges that U.S. black soldiers, as opposed to their white comrades, were more likely to be killed outright than accepted as prisoners on the afternoon Fort Pillow fell. One black prisoner from the Federal garrison expressed surprise to his captors for his good treatment, as his white officers told the blacks that Forrest would only spare white enemy soldiers. Even with the cooked testimony of the Republican-dominated congressional committee investigating Fort Pillow, an evident widespread fear in the black artillerymen of the garrison existed that their surrender would not be accepted.

Fair-minded contemporay historians accept that whether Forrest encouraged or discouraged the taking of black prisoners that day, a point which is disputed, the engagement could not have occurred without atrocities--regardless of which side took the victory. Consider who the First Division of the Cavalry Corps was up against. Given that the enemy were black soldiers who, to the man, had been slaves, and that the Southern Union troops were West Tennesseans adept only in stealing horses and illegally trading in cotton, trouble was inevitable in the wake of Forrest's frequent demand of surrender or refusing quarter to enemies in fortified positions.

Union forces at Fort Pillow, black and white, labored under the (well-founded) stigma attached to soldiers who rape and murder and bully and plunder. While Forrest's Texas troops were singled out in congressional reports for sparing surrendered Union prisoners, such was not the case of men hailing from units where their homes were under Federal occupation.
A pattern emerges suggesting that Confederate oficers tended to dissuade the enlisted ranks from shooting surrendered enemies, albeit perhaps out of a desire to see runaways returned to Confederate patriots or to impress black prisoners into the ranks of the camp servants. In one account, a Confederate officer at the bluff is quoted as stating that as there was a great deal of heavy lifting to be done in disposing of the garrison stores, Forrest specified that the black soldiers were not to be put to the sword.
Significantly, all the Federal wounded, black and white, were released to the U.S. Navy for transfer to Cairo soon after the battle.

Again, significantly, the area of the riverbank and the sloping bluff were too broad to corral enraged Confederate enlisted ranks until a great deal of lead had been expended to arrest the Federal flight, one way or another. Moreover, for some time following the breach, the attention of Forrest and his principal officers was engaged in directing fire on a Yankee gunboat, that great, unrealized hope for rescue of the garrison.

That Forrest was quite aware of sporadic massacre being meted out to some Federals is evident in the credible testimony of a Federal surgeon who approached the general for his protection. The exchange went like this before Forrest commanded the man be received as a prisoner detailed to assist the Confederate field hospital.
"You are a surgeon of a ****ed ****** regiment."
Doctor Fitch identified himself as assigned to the 13th Tennessee Cavalry, the white unit of the garrison.
"You are a ****ed Tennessee Yankee, then."
Fitch went on to state that while he was born in Massachusetts, he currently lived in Iowa.
"What in hell are you down here for? I have a good mind to have you killed for being down here."

That was Forrest all right. However much the Yankees charged him with being selective in the taking of prisoners, trying to drive a wedge between the increasingly black Union forces and the white boys in blue, the preponderence of the evidence indicates that Forrest believed that having a just cause to go to war does not permit one to wage total war.

And that's the truth about Forrest, the man, and the myth, forever joined to the story of a hard-won Confederate victory at Fort Pillow.