New and Noteworthy--- The River Was Dyed With Blood: Nathan Bedford Forrest And Fort Pillow

The River Was Dyed With Blood: Nathan Bedford Forrest And Fort Pillow, Brian Steel Wills, University of Oklahoma Press, 274 pp.,  18 black and white illustrations, 4 maps,  appendices, bibliographic notes, bibliography, index, $29.95

From the Publisher: 

The battlefield reputation of Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, long recognized as a formidable warrior, has been shaped by one infamous wartime incident. At Fort Pillow in 1864, the attack by Confederate forces under Forrest’s command left many of the Tennessee Unionists and black soldiers garrisoned there dead in a confrontation widely labeled as a “massacre.” 

In The River Was Dyed with Blood, best-selling Forrest biographer Brian Steel Wills argues that although atrocities did occur after the fall of the fort, Forrest did not order or intend a systematic execution of its defenders. Rather, the general’s great failing was losing control of his troops.

A prewar slave trader and owner, Forrest was a controversial figure throughout his lifetime. Because the attack on Fort Pillow—which, as Forrest wrote, left the nearby waters “dyed with blood”—occurred in an election year, Republicans used him as a convenient Confederate scapegoat to marshal support for the war. 

After the war he also became closely associated with the spread of the Ku Klux Klan. Consequently, the man himself, and the truth about Fort Pillow, has remained buried beneath myths, legends, popular depictions, and disputes about the events themselves.

Wills sets what took place at Fort Pillow in the context of other wartime excesses from the American Revolution to World War II and Vietnam, as well as the cultural transformations brought on by the Civil War. Confederates viewed black Union soldiers as the embodiment of slave rebellion and reacted accordingly. 

Nevertheless, Wills concludes that the engagement was neither a massacre carried out deliberately by Forrest, as charged by a congressional committee, nor solely a northern fabrication meant to discredit him and the Confederate States of America, as pro-Southern apologists have suggested. The battle-scarred fighter with his homespun aphorisms was neither an infallible warrior nor a heartless butcher, but a product of his time and his heritage.

Blurb:  "Readers of Brian Steel Wills's biography of Nathan Bedford Forrest, A Battle From The Start, know the quality of his work.  Wills now gives us the most comprehensive, dispassionate, and objective look wer are likely to get of Fo rrest's most controversial momnet---those awful minutes at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, when warfare briefly became butcher.  The River Was Dyed With Blood must become our safest guide through the murky terrain that separates soldiery frrom savagery, and how participants and posterity choose to remember moments many would rather forget."  William C. Davis, author of Fighting Men of the Civil War among others.

New---The Battle of West Point Bridge, Mississippi Clearly and Concisely Presented

The Battle of West Point: Confederate Triumph At Ellis Bridge, John McBryde, History Press, 128 pages, maps, photographs, illustration, appendices, bibliographic notes, bibliography, $19.99.

William T. Sherman's early 1864 Meridian Mississippi Campaign in some ways prepared him and his troops for the late 1864 Savannah Georgia Campaign.  From February 3–20, 1864, Sherman and the Army of the Tennessee marched from Vicksburg in western Mississippi to Meridian in eastern Mississippi. The primary purpose was to destroy Meridian an important railroad hub, the location of an arsenal, a military hospital, and a prisoner of war camp.  Since the capture of Jackson, the state's capital, Meridan held important Mississippi state offices.

Sherman planned to take Meridian and possibly advance further east to Selma, Alabama or south to Mobile, Alabama. He  ordered Brigadier General William S. Smith and 7,000 cavalry to leave Memphis, Tennessee and to Okolona, Mississippi and follow the route of the Mobile and Ohio Railroad to Meridian.  Smith cavalry met the troopers of  Major General Nathan Bedford Forrest at West Point, Mississippi.   He forced Smith to begin to retreat back into Tennessee. Forrest followed Smith's retreat. Forrest caught Smith and his troops at Okolona, Mississippi  and forced them to retreat even more quickly.  Smith's coverage of Sherman's left flank failed though Smith troops were a magnet for CSA resistance and Forrest did not impede Sherman's advance nor his retreat.

John McBryde's The Battle of West Point: Confederate Triumph At Ellis Bridge, focuses upon the February 21 one as a precursor to the February 22 Battle of Okolona. On the banks of the Chuquatonchee Creek which is crossed by Ellis Bridge, Smith's 7,000 exhausted troops met Forrest's fresher and more experienced 2,500 cavalrymen.  Citing primary sources of troopers and civilians, McBryde's account is concise, well-paced and well organized. He offers ten pages of civil accounts of the engagement.  The period and modern photographs, the officers' photographic portraits and post-war sketches are appropriate and clarify the text. McBryde's narrative is clear and is a fine example of local history well done.

Novel--- Nathan Bedford Forrest, Vulgar and Haunted

Devil's Dream: A Novel About Nathan Bedford Forrest, Madison Smartt Bell, Pantheon, 352 pages, $26.95.

Publishers Weekly:
After tackling the Haitian slave rebellion in a three-book series, Bell uses a smaller stage to create a captivating portrait of Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest. The novel plays effortlessly with time and structure, shuttling between 1845 and 1865 as Forrest marries Mary Ann Montgomery, becomes a guilt-stricken slave trader and, during the Civil War, is targeted for destruction by General Sherman.

Despite his aggressive actions on the battlefield, Forrest struggles with the demands of a complicated family: tensions between Mary Ann and Forrest's black mistress take a personal toll, while the rivalry between his sons Willy and Matthew (the illegitimate child of a long-ago affair with a slave) creates distraction. Meanwhile, his addiction to gambling and his attraction to his mistress send Forrest into a contemplation of the forces that control him.

Many of the war sequences are delivered via Henri, a Haitian wanderer who joins Forrest's troops and possesses the ability to communicate with the ghosts of those killed in battle. The unconventional structure and supernatural twist expand the narrative into an engaging examination of what it means to be free, a question that haunts Forrest through his life. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The Washington Post:
Devil's Dream, Madison Smartt Bell's new novel, is a sort of biopic of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate cavalry general who was considered by his peers to be brutal, brilliant, profane, savage and virtually unstoppable in his ferocity. He is sometimes referred to as "the Wizard of the Saddle," and, at least in this work, he is one hell of a feisty redneck. He is also pompous, taciturn, burdened with a Tennessee twang that would make Minnie Pearl blush and, in the end, not very interesting.
The novel is told in fits and starts, jumping backward and forward in time. In the years before the Civil War, Forrest enjoys some prosperity as a slave trader and some domestic comfort in the company of his highborn, oddly matched wife, Mary Ann Montgomery, whom he met while pulling her carriage out of the mud. The years following the war are filled with one failure after another and, ultimately, destitution. These sudden jumps in time are disconcerting and seemingly without point so that we are left not always knowing exactly where we are.

In fact, if you know little about the Civil War, the book is a wilderness, and if you know a lot, you may be astonished at the nitpicking quality of Bell's scholarship, amazed at his warehouse of trivia, but I doubt you will be much moved or enlightened. As portrayed here, Forrest is relentlessly one-note and irritating. Even hillbilly coarseness loses its frisson after repeated usage. One unnamed character says he is "a man having no pretension to gentility -- a negro trader, a gambler . . . Forrest may be & no doubt is, the best Cav. officer in the West, but I object to a tyrannical, hotheaded vulgarian's commanding me."

Note the use of the ampersand. It is an indication of Bell's pretentious 19th-century style, which is a combination of cornpone and ever more complicated forms of swearing. When Forrest isn't talking dirty, he spouts pompous and not very original aphorisms about the nature of conflict: "War ain't got no goddamn rules," he says at one point. And soon after, "They say the world turns itself like a grindstone. Over and over. Don't never stop. Ye may whet yoreself agin it. Or let it grind ye down." I don't think Nathan Bedford Forrest, or anybody else for that matter, ever actually said those words.

The novel also has as one of its main characters a dead Haitian named Henri, who moves among the living as one of them, even though he presumably died at the ferocious battle of Chickamauga. His undead voodoo status gives him the ability to know the future. But his prescience serves no real purpose, either to the other characters or to the story. Henri claims to be the son of Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L'Ouverture, about whom Bell published a biography in 2007.

Henri seems to be free of the redneck twang, speaking both English and French with a simplicity and an eloquence that are denied every other character except Forrest's wife and his son by a black slave, who speaks as though he had attended Choate and Harvard. I just wish that in the heat of battle, about which Bell writes with passion but an absolute lack of variety, I hadn't had to keep running to the Oxford English Dictionary to look up "widdershins," "osnaburg" and "barracoon," words that stop us dead in our tracks and make us feel like we're playing Scrabble with Yosemite Sam. It is also hard to imagine writing about Forrest -- whose relationships with blacks ran from the horribly brutal to the intensely sexual, even loving -- without mentioning his postwar involvement with the Ku Klux Klan, but Bell manages to do it. Devil's Dream which takes its name from an old fiddler's jig, is like a 300-page transcript of a loudmouth swearing while he shoots some guy in the face. It purports to be a portrait of a man who once played an important part in the most awful episode that has ever gripped this country.

As Bell tells us, by war's end one in every 10 able-bodied Union men was dead, one in every four in the South. Such a towering player in that cataclysmic tragedy as Forrest deserves better. William Tecumseh Sherman said, "War is hell." Madison Smartt Bell's new novel is no fun, either. ---Copyright 2010, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Book Cover Image and Text: Amazon.com
Middle Image: Baltimore Sun
Bottom Image: Son of the South