A History Lesson from a Dumb Conservative Blogger

The whole argument over John Hawkins’ “Top 25 Worst Americans” strikes me as positively absurd, and yet apparently it has been on Memeorandum for like 3 days. Whatever. Seems to me when you write to a bunch of political bloggers and ask their opinion on something, it will come with an implied political perspective. We’re not historians, we’re political bloggers. Well, whatever. (I think quite clearly the 4 worst Americans are the lawyer who managed to outlaw Lawn Jarts, Peyton Manning, the genius that came up with “Jersey Shore” and James Woods.)

Largely I avoided the whole controversy by virtue of the fact that Jonn is a dick and doesn’t include me on such things. He is also a gay bird, Tony Romo’s Bitch, a former pilot in Strike Fighter Squadron 136, and married to Nathan Lane in Massachusetts.  No wait, actually I think that was the dude I wrote about last week, and possibly Peter Griffin who was enjoying the spirit of Massachusetts while on a vacation from Quahog.

None-the-less, I did stop by HotAir this weekend just to make sure I wasn’t missing any vital news. I was not. However, I did read this post by Jazz Shaw wherein he blasts the list. I actually didn’t read it all, but skipped down to his list, which had John Wilkes Booth as #1 and Nathan Bedford Forrest as #2. Well, I have defended Forrest before, so I decided to do so again. I actually wrote to Mr. Shaw who was kind enough to reply. Specifically I wanted to know what made Forrest so odious that he was included, whether it was the alleged KKK nonsense or the “Ft Pillow Massacre.”

His reply in part read:

I have no doubt that a careful analysis of the life of NBF could turn up some fascinating and perhaps even admirable aspects. But I’m afraid that – at least for many of us- none of it can manage to overshadow the defining aspect of being the man who essentially reconstituted the Klan.

Well, that sounded like a fun place to start, since no one ever accused him of reconstituting the Klan, and there is significant historical debate over his role in the KKK at all. (More on that in a minute.) Anyway, I went back to the post and read it in full to get more context. In that post Jazz links to this post by Rick Moran.

Now, as far as I know, I’ve never read Rick Moran. I’ve seen his name bandied about occasionally, but I don’t remember actually reading him. The only reason I even remember the name is because I once thought “Glad to see he came up with something to do after Ghostbusters and shrinking his kids.”

Anyway, Rick thinks Jonn and I are idiots, which is horrifically injurious to my psyche, because I derive all self-worth from what people on the internet I’ve never heard of say about me. Needless to say, after reading his post, I did my version of the crying game shower, and then spent the bulk of the weekend in the fetal position crying and watching Spongebob. He entitled this epic masterpiece “THE TOP 43 DUMBEST CONSERVATIVE BLOGGERS”

Absolutely astonishing. One mass murderer (McVeigh) and one assassin (Booth) made the list. No gangsters. No old west gunmen. Both Woodrow Wilson and FDR in the top 5 worst? If you’re going to penalize presidents so severely for having wrongheaded ideas about economic policy, why not include George Bush? Or the modern Republican party who never met a deficit they didn’t embrace as long is it was caused by tax cuts.

Frankly, this is embarrassing. Putting the Clintons, Pelosi, Reid, Gore, Sharpton, and other contemporary Democrats ahead of someone like Nathan Bedford Forest who was at least partly responsible for creating the KKK after the Civil War and spent his spare nights riding around the countryside whipping, lynching, and burning at the stake innocent African Americans demonstrates an extraordinary ignorance of American history.

Hey now, I resemble that remark!  Apparently I am “extraordinarily ignorant of American history”, but then again, this is coming from a man that spelled Forrest’s name wrong. (It has two “r”’s, except in Maine and Mass where you could supplant an “h”.)

So, anyway, I decided that since I was such an idiot I would follow the advice of my better, the sage and venerable Rick Moran, and try to brush up on my American history by sequestering myself with “Nathan Bedford Forrest: A Biography” by Jack Hurst. Now, I’m not putting Forrest down on the list of greatest Americans, but the way he’s been maligned since his death is completely at odds with what he did during life. Just because some inbred assholes with an IQ of an otter appropriated his name and acted like douchenozzles shouldn’t completely impugn his name.

So, I read the whole book looking for the manifold instances of his having “spent his spare nights riding around the countryside whipping, lynching, and burning at the stake innocent African Americans.” Well, according to this book, he never did that. Not once. And it would have been entirely contradictory to what he said and did during his life. I highlighted 14 passages to list here, but this post will already be too long, so let me cut it down to just a few. At the end I will also list a few of the instances in a short piece, and steer any interested reader to the page that recounts the story in this book.

I wrote to Mr, Moran to get the sources of his statement, as a great historian like he is must have many. Unlike Mr Shaw with whom I enjoyed a rather pleasant email exchange, Mr Moran was apparently too busy to respond to a dumb conservative blogger. Anyway, let’s start at the end, with his funeral:

“(Page 380) Strange as it might appear to those ignorant of General Forrest’s true character,” the Appeal reported, the horde of visitants included “hundreds of colored men women and children [who] flocked to ask permission to view the remains… [The blacks] manifested not only a deep interest in the proceedings, but evidenced a genuine sorrow at the death of a great soldier.” On the morning of October 31 alone, the Appeal said, more than 500 blacks viewed the body; of that number, it felt constrained to add, “not a single one was heard to say anything not in praise of General Forrest.”

That isn’t in the least bit surprising if you read everything that led up to it, including the speech before the all black “Jubilee of Pole Bearers” the previous year that I have mentioned before.

I came here with the jeers of some white people, who think that I am doing wrong. I believe I can exert some influence, and do much to assist the people in strengthening fraternal relations, and shall do all in my power to elevate every man, to depress none.

I want to elevate you to take positions in law offices, in stores, on farms, and wherever you are capable of going. I have not said anything about politics today. I don’t propose to say anything about politics. You have a right to elect whom you please; vote for the man you think best, and I think, when that is done, you and I are freemen.

Either way, I am not going to fight the fight on whether Forrest was in the Klan, or whether he was the leader. What is clear is that he did not found it. I’ve seen that in a few places, Forrest was not an original founder. Second, it is somewhat instructive for a further look at Forrest’s statements to look at what the Klan was when he is alleged to have been named leader. (There is some historical debate on whether he was leader, he even testified he was not a member before Congress. Either way, since this post will already be long, I’ll just concede the argument and show why it isn’t entirely germane, since the accusation is specifically killing folks.)

There’s isn’t a particularly concise quotation from the book about what the Klan was when formed. But, what you think it was, it was not. In fact, Blacks were actually invited to join early on. It was essentially a group formed to fight the “Radical Republicans” or carpetbaggers that were inundating Tennessee. Later of course it would come into conflict with freed blacks, but when it did so, it was ALWAYS against the wishes of Forrest.

(Page 304) [The Klan]….did not begin as an avowedly racist organization; it was founded to play jokes and reorganized to oppose Radical proponents of what it perceived to be black domination, not to scourge blacks themselves. Although it was written that Ku Klux ranks were open only to the more than 100,000 honorably discharged ex-Confederate veterans, the hierarchy in some areas and in some instances seems to have accepted and even recruited blacks, provided that they went along with Conservative-Democrat political philosophy.

Forrest allegedly joined the KKK in Fall of 1866 or Spring of 67. During the first year, the Klan really didn’t do much. They didn’t do any of the night harassment rides and killing folks that Mr. Moran suggests. In fact:

(Page 294) By the time of his [Forrest’s] discussion of [a possible Mexico incursion to set up a new area for Confederates and freed blacks] with General Smith, he surely also had begun to realize the thorny problem of operating an organization whose hooded facelessness, while vital to avoiding Redical Republican persecution, encouraged excesses from within its own ranks, and invited imitation by even more irresponsible pretenders. There is no evidence to suggest he personally advocated more that minimal “regulatory” violence perpetrated in self-defense, and that is perhaps true, especially early on; had the Klan’s new activist role initially been intended to be one of simply mistreating blacks and their advocates, the organization doubtless would have played a more violent part in the 1867 campaign.

It is nigh on impossible to prove that Forrest didn’t “spen[d] his spare nights riding around the countryside whipping, lynching, and burning at the stake innocent African Americans” without accounting for his every day actions. Since Mr. Moran failed to identify his source, I can’t very well prove a negative. It’s like saying to him, “prove to me you never beat your cat.” The best I can do in this limited forum is to show another occurrence which went exactly in disconcordance with how Mr. Moran suggests Forrest would act. This is as good an example thereof as I could find:

[Page 319] [A]n incident at Crawfordsville (now Crawford) on the Mobile and Ohio Railroad drew large numbers of whites to oppose a black crowd after “the negroes threatened to burn the town.” [Forrest] said this threat eventuated after a group of blacks, angered that the horse of a young white man knocked down one of their number when they met in a roadway, followed him into Crawfordsville “to beat him, and then they gathered together.” Forrest was on his way to Memphis when word of the problem was wired up the railroad to West Point and Columbus. Discovering that groups of whites “had got all the trains they could and started down,” he accompanied them and arrived at Crawfordsville to find the blacks “about eight hundred strong…out at the edge of town; the people of the town had fortified themselves; the negroes had burned one house.” Forrest said he quickly “got the white people together, organized them…made speeches to them,” and “told them to be quiet…I then got on a horse and rode over to the negroes and made a speech to them. The negroes dispersed and went home, and nothing was done; nobody was hurt, nobody molested.”

Not exactly the scourge of Tennessee that. Not like Forrest didn’t like being outnumbered, that was his favorite way to fight. He just didn’t see a reason to fight innocent folk. Anyway, there are a ton of such examples, but that one made it relatively clear. Either way, in early 1869 the Klan was officially disbanded for two reasons, one, the excesses were getting to be too much for Forrest (who blamed them on infiltrators) and more importantly because Democrat rule was coming back when a conservative Republican was elected as Governor.

[Page 325] On January 25, a dramatic order purporting to come from [Forrest] directed that, because evil men had infiltrated the Empire [The Klan] and begun to use it for their lower purposes, “the masks and costumes of this order” were to be “entirely abolished and destroyed,” and there were to be no more “demonstrations” unless ordered by a “Grand Titan or higher authority.” Blacks were no longer to be robbed of their guns unless they were arming themselves in groups for political purposes; whippings – for any reason – were to cease, as were breaking into jails to harm prisoners, writing threatening letters in the Klan’s name, or using it for self-enrichment.

Again, I wish I had time to list more of this, but you get the idea. From here, Forrest would go on to champion black voting rights, and then make the speech I listed above before the Jubilee of Pole Bearers. The book makes no mention of a single instance of “burning at the stake” anyone, much less at Forrest’s hand or command. I wish I knew where Moran got that from, but I don’t. Burning of crosses was apparently something that the Klan only did after the rebirth of it following the movie “Birth of a Nation” right after WWI. In fact, other than Ft. Pillow, which I could also deconstruct if need be, the only black person Forrest seems to have killed was one employee of his that Forrest threatened because the man had been beating his wife. There were apparently numerous individuals present, including Union army officers who arrived on scene shortly thereafter who confirmed Forrests account of self-defense.

Forrest seems to have had the worst PR of any man I can find, both while he was alive and afterward. At one point some lady accosted him about Ft Pillow asking if he had murdered those people. He’d already denied it and tried to explain on innumerable occasions, so at last he just told the lady in exasperation “Yes, I killed the men and women, and I ate the babies.” Now, he clearly did no such thing, but how many times can you deny an event?

The fact that he was a part of a group that would later include the most inbred, ridiculous, perfidious and evil folks imaginable certainly doesn’t help that. But, if a man is going to be included in a list of worst Americans, I think it is somewhat incumbent on us to actually make sure he advocated or did the things he is said to be including for. I mean, I’m just a dummy, not a genius like Rock Moran, but I can read.

I hereby offer to send either Jazz or Mr. Moran a copy of the book from Amazon. You have my email addy, just send me an address if you would care for a copy.

Category: Politics