I'm surprised nobody else has responded. Forrest is such an interesting character and often discussed. At any rate, here's what I can contribute from the one book I've read about him: A Battle From the Start copyrighted 1992 by Brian Steel Wills. Dr. Wills was born in Virginia, educated in Virginia and Georgia, and as of 2003 was chair of the department of history and philosophy at the University of Virginia.
I like the book so much I'm rereading it. Following is part of the Foreward by Emory M. Thomas, himself a respected author:
Brian Wills knows more about Forrest than any previous biographer. He has sought the scraps of Forrest's record in county courthouses, newspapers, private correspondence, and oral tradition, and he offers here previously unknown information, especially about Forrest before and after the war. The true significance of Wills's work, however, lies in what he does with the facts of Forrest's life.
Wills takes Forrest seriously as a person and understands him as an offspring of the Southern frontier. Before Forrest was a soldier, he spent forty years scratching and clawing his way from backcountry oblivion to wealth and power in Memphis. Wills recites, indeed invigorates, the incidents of Forrest's life and military career. He tells the old stories with a fresh voice.
Following Forrest to war, Wills watches him learn to be warrior. Then the action accelerates as Forrest rides to battle after campaign after raid. Wills never lets the narrative escape his analysis, however; he offers insight even while he and his reader canter with Forrest into combat.
At Fort Pillow, for example, Wills reveals Forrest out of control as his troopers vent blood lust on African-American Federal soldiers and white Tennessee Unionists. Yet Forrest himself had instilled the savagery that motivated the massacre.
In 1865 Forrest gave up because he and his horsemen were used up. Wills traces Forrest's failures during the postwar period, fully implicates him in the infamy of the Ku Klux Klan, and illumines his attempt at redemption.
Having offered Forrest in context, Wills concludes by placing him in perspective as a Confederate general. The contrast with Robert E. Lee is important. The "conventional" war that Lee fought relegated Forrest to a secondary role. In a sense Forrest and other "freaks" played the sideshows, while Lee and commanders like him worked the center ring. But Lee and generals like him lost. Could Forrest have won?
He was a primitive in the mid-nineteenth century when warfare was evolving toward struggles between whole peoples, fought by massive armies in which relatively small bands of armed horsemen would seem unimportant. But no circumstance is inevitable simply because it happened; people choose, and in this case Jefferson Davis chose Lee's way of warfare.
When "total war" continued to evolve, primitive behavior again became successful. Bedford Forrest may have seemed slightly out of step in the American Civil War; but he seems ideally suited for combat in Vietnam, Afghanistan, or Croatia. Our "modem" world appreciates the primitive. So again the question—couId Forrest have won?
Thanks to Brian Wills, we can see the whole Forrest and Forrest whole.
Bringing the