Lol!
This is such a classic Forrest thread!
Well, I'm rooting for the guy running from brother Bill's hounds, too. Some of the scouts were former slave catchers - they knew the countryside even better than others born and raised there. And, there is no such thing as a nice slave trader. Forrest took better care of his stock than most - got them health care, clothes, decent enough food, didn't beat them too much - that's from a post-war comment by a former occupant of his jail. Frankly, most of them were gone too fast to get into that much trouble! Thing was, it was like any livestock - you want top dollar, you see that your stock is in top dollar shape. Forrest was a high-end slave dealer - he went for the well-heeled planter. Now, is that repulsive? You bet. Was it legal then? You bet. Did he think blacks
were farm stock? You bet. (And, in Brazil in 1995, some miners got off murdering some Amazonian Indians because they didn't know it was against the law. In 1997, Guatemala finally made it illegal to kill Indians.) Did the government take care of reservation Indians? Sure! Enough (sometimes) to eat, some clothes, some blankets... What I'm saying is everybody of color was treated as less than human for quite some time in this country, be it slavery or conquest.
Instead of rehashing all the wrongs of Forrest - I call it the 'evil things Forrest done' section of research - let's go in a slightly different course but still on topic. WHY is Forrest such a lightening rod for articles such as those in the OP? There weren't actually any real errors but the author was clearly inclined to spin for the worst. Of all the Confederate generals, Forrest is the one singled out for this sort of thing. He wasn't the only rebel general to join, lead and support the klan. He sure wasn't the only one who thought blacks ought to get themselves back to picking cotton. He wasn't the only ex-Confederate to participate in a counter-insurgency in the form of secret organizations. In fact, he was a lot more moderate in all these things than others. For example, Chalmers and his former troopers were called upon to quell a race riot, which they did - harshly. Chalmers (who, incidentally, was the commander actually on the ground at Ft Pillow) called, "Easy, boys! Don't kill to many n-rs - we need cotton pickers!" So, we have to ask the question - why is Forrest 'it'? He was no better or worse than any of his contemporaries, and better than some Union officers with racial issues! Why not write the same articles about Gordon? John B Gordon was a klan leader. Is Forrest paying for being the only Confederate general who was a slave trader? Others dabbled in it - John Hunt Morgan, for instance. Is it because he scared the pants off Grant and Sherman? He was the
only cavalryman who got Grant rattled, by the way. Doesn't seem likely. Killed 30 Yankees in hand to hand combat? Wade Hampton killed 18. (He didn't count 'em all - just the hand-to-hand combat opponents.)
Does anybody have a suggestion or answer as to why these articles and others like them are written about this particular Confederate general? What is it about this man that generates such strong and such oppositional
feelings?