After publishing articles concerning Confederate monuments and the appropriateness of a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest in the Tennessee capitol in Nashville, Clarksville Now received several reader queries about both Forrest and the broader history of Confederate statuary.

In response to those inquiries, Dr. Timothy Wesley, Associate Professor of Civil War Era History at Austin Peay State University, offers his thoughts.

Nathan Bedford Forrest was born near Chapel Hill, Tennessee, in 1821. Born into poverty and never formally educated, he was one of the richest men in the state by the time of the American Civil War, having amassed a personal fortune of over one and one-half million dollars (roughly fifty million dollars today). Although his money-making endeavors were diverse and included cotton planting and land speculating in Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas—and gambling wherever he went—the bulk of Forrest’s wealth was generated through the buying and selling of enslaved men, women, and children.

Always a skilled horseman and handy with a sword, Forrest joined the Confederate cavalry in June 1861. When Tennessee Governor Isham Harris learned that the Memphis millionaire had enlisted as a private, however, Harris commissioned Forrest a lieutenant colonel and authorized him to organize his own cavalry battalion. Forrest ultimately rose to the rank of lieutenant general, the only originally enlisted man in either army to do so. Renowned as a natural, if untrained, tactician with personal bravery to spare, Forrest was dubbed “The Wizard of the Saddle” for his wartime exploits at such battles as Fort Donelson, Shiloh, Murfreesboro, and Chickamauga. In one of the war’s most controversial events, troops under Forrest’s command murdered more than three hundred African American soldiers (as well as a few of their white officers) as they attempted to surrender at the Battle of Fort Pillow in West Tennessee in April 1864. Given the bulk of the evidence, Forrest’s claim that the fort’s defenders had neither submitted nor laid down their arms when most of the deaths occurred is almost certainly untrue. Thus, while historians still debate whether or not Forrest expressly ordered the killing of capitulating soldiers and how quickly he acted to stop the carnage, there is little doubt that a wholesale slaughter of would-be African American prisoners transpired under Forrest’s watch at the Massacre of Fort Pillow.

After the Civil War, Forrest continued to defend his idea of a racially hierarchical society. He served as the first elected leader or “Grand Wizard” of the most infamous (of several) terroristic groups dedicated to pursuing the vanquished Confederacy’s foundational tenet of white supremacy. Given his wartime renown and the postwar popularity among resentful white southerners it engendered, Forrest contributed significantly to the Ku Klux Klan’s early development in terms of both membership and tactics. In his later years, however, Forrest repudiated the Klan and, owing perhaps to the ameliorating impact of a late-in-life embrace of Christianity, spoke out against the murder of African Americans by white “marauders” in 1874 and then the abuse of black laborers in penal labor camps a year later. He died from complications related to diabetes in 1877.

Virtually everyone in both the North and South knew in 1861 that the American Civil War had been brought on by slavery (Forrest knew so as well, and he said as much). Thus the Confederacy’s defeat necessitated the end of state-sanctioned and race-based bondage in America, presenting the postwar nation a moment in which it might more fully realize the promise of its founding. Reconstruction could and should have been a period of readjustment during which American ideals and American realities started to better square for a “more perfect” Union. The Constitution had provided a framework—what Abraham Lincoln called the “frame of silver”—within which the first generation of Americans established arguably the most forward-thinking government in the then-modern world. But the American Constitution had been limited in its egalitarian impact by its concessions to inequality. Regrettably, “we the people” had been too narrow in the original. As Lincoln envisaged at Gettysburg however, perhaps the nation might witness a “new birth of freedom” by privileging the principles of equality espoused in the Declaration of Independence, firmly investing black men and women with the liberties and protections of citizenship.
And there was much to encourage progressive Americans in the years immediately after the Civil War, when the governing Republican Party’s commitment to freedmen and women seemed in earnest. The military occupation of the South promised freedmen and women physical protection from racist violence, while constitutional amendments abolished chattel slavery, established the right of all Americans to equal protection under the law, and granted the vote to African American men. For the first time, African Americans were elected to the Senate and House of Representatives and participated in state and local governments throughout the South. During this period, there were few monuments to Confederates erected in public spaces. While it was not altogether rare to witness the dedication of a commemorative marker or figure in a southern cemetery in the decade after the war ended, they almost always memorialized individual soldiers and not the larger Confederacy those soldiers served.
But times changed, and the most important equalitarian gains of the 1860s and 1870s were short lived. After the Panic of 1873 and the half-decade of economic depression that followed, white northerners grew critical of the cost of maintaining the federal military presence in the South. Northern racism was as pronounced after the war as it had been before, and most whites there cared little about the plight of black southerners if their mistreatment facilitated an improving national economy. Not unpredictably then, by the time federal troops left the former Confederacy in 1877, the Republican Party, and especially the Republican-controlled Supreme Court, had all but returned to its pro-business and less socially “radical” origins.

As the Court offered business-friendly verdicts one after the other in the 1880s and 1890s, northern industrialists and the chiefs of extractive industries like timber and mining (who all but colonized parts of the postwar South) invested little of their profits in their southern workforce. Sharecropping, an agrarian labor system analogous to debt peonage, further made African American and poor white wealth accumulation all but impossible in the rural South, while the eventual widespread use of convict labor incentivized the criminalization of blackness. Sharecropping, convict labor, and rents received from northern companies made southern landowners rich once again. Complicit southern political leaders needed additional mechanisms by which they too might grasp power and maintain popular support while witnessing the ongoing exploitation of their region and its people. Nothing served those purposes more conveniently than did white supremacy.

As long as chattel slavery endured in the South, there had been no need to construct other institutional and cultural reminders of America’s foundational inequity. When slavery ceased to exist, however, the message of white social, political, and economic dominance that the institution conveyed had to be communicated in other ways. “Jim Crow” as a descriptive label is simply the collective term for all such legal and extralegal reminders. Segregation and “white only” laws draped in the bastardized legitimacy of constitutionality (under the doctrine of “separate but equal”) delivered that message to black and white Americans alike. So too did the oppressive labor systems discussed already, political “tactics” dedicated to disenfranchising African Americans such as poll taxes and literacy clauses, and economic policies like redlining and discriminatory lending patterns. And, along with many other less historically scrutinized contributors, so did Confederate statuary.

The majority of the roughly 700 Confederate monuments currently standing in the United States were not built immediately after the Civil War, but between the 1890s and 1930s. In the 1950s, another wave of Confederate memorialization ensued after the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education decision in the Supreme Court. Unlike the earliest memorials to fallen southern soldiers in cemeteries, most of these newer monuments were forged in the image of prominent Confederates like Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and especially in Tennessee, Nathan Bedford Forrest (Tennessee is said to have more statues dedicated to Forrest than Illinois has to Lincoln). Lording over their towns and villages for every southerner to see, these monuments to Confederate luminaries were never “just” historical nor “only” about regional heritage. They were intended instead to avow in marble and stone that whiteness still carried immense clout. Nathan Bedford Forrest and those of his ilk who had taken up arms against the United States had not only avoided punishment after the fact, but because they did all that they did in the name of whiteness and in service to a would-be government dedicated to its preeminence, they were now celebrated in the public square. Even the most destitute white racists of that day were emboldened by such validations, while African Americans who walked under the unwavering gaze of these looming figures were reminded of their vulnerability. As Confederate memorials increasingly appeared outside of southern cemeteries, their cultural significance grew more pronounced, commonly understood, and sobering. The Confederacy had failed, they proclaimed, but white supremacy flourished yet.

A recent study by the Southern Poverty Law Center revealed that when the number of Confederate statues was combined with smaller busts (in courthouses and capital buildings) and dedicated public venues such as schools, roads, and military bases, there were more than 1,500 symbols of the Confederacy in American public space in 2015, most in the South. Although a few monuments have since been taken down, the majority remain visible in the squares and courtyards of dozens and dozens of American cities, towns, and hamlets. These statues, dedicated to white traitors of the nineteenth century, were predominantly erected by white supremacists in the twentieth. While I do not advocate their extralegal removal by brute force, I believe that civic leaders should listen to both their conscience and their constituents, and take them down.

The argument that they “teach” contemporary onlookers about America’s history is misleading. As a culture, we teach with books and via libraries and museums, but commemorate and celebrate with statues and monuments. Nor is there validity in the idea that the removal of Confederate statues from public spaces is somehow “erasing”’ or rewriting the past. In truth, it is the “Lost Cause” myth that these monuments perpetuate, in their celebration of Confederate virtue and devotion, that is the biggest whitewash in our national history. The argument of “heritage not hate” is predicated on the assumption that a given heritage can’t be hateful. It is likewise made possible by the fruitful efforts of postwar southern apologists to write the violent and oppressive institution of slavery out of the history of the Civil War and to insert in its place southern valor and sacrifice. And it is a lie. I am a native and mostly admiring southerner, but I am not delusional about the South’s past. True enough, the flag of the United States flew over more enslaved people over time than the various Confederate national banners ever did, but the United States was not dedicated to slavery in principle as much as it was tarnished by it in practice.

And lastly, these statues and busts should not stand in the public square because they celebrate enemies of the United States, plain and simple. A commonly heard question of late is, “Where does it end . . . will we likewise remove statues of Washington and Jefferson and Andrew Jackson because they enslaved people as well?” The appropriate answer seems fairly simple, at least in my estimation, and at least for now. It “ends,” to answer the question, with traitors. All of their rhetoric of “just leave us alone” notwithstanding, Nathan Bedford Forrest and those who joined him in taking up arms in the name of the Confederacy were intent upon ending the United States as it was then constituted. In the name of an upstart government dedicated to the preservation of slavery, they effectively and sometimes ruthlessly made war against the United States; if we take him at his word, Nathan Bedford Forrest personally killed thirty American soldiers in that effort. The old assumptions of identity and inevitability—that Forrest and his fellow Confederates could not have acted differently—is both overly deterministic and contradicted by the actual history of the more than thirty-one thousand white and almost seven thousand African American Tennesseans who fought for the Union cause. Nathan Bedford Forrest chose treason. While he is a part of our national history and should be taught as such in our textbooks and museums therefore, he should not be celebrated or commemorated in our public squares, court houses, and state capitol today.

Timothy Wesley
APSU