Forrest's change of heart.
Nathan B. Forrest, was one of the greatest military minds our country has ever known, but was he a racist? Did his views on race change as he grew older turning him into a civil rights activist? In today's video we will examine the complicated past of one of the Civil War's most controversial figures who was recently exhumed from his final resting place in an effort to sterilize history. Are conceptions about the General based fact? Let's take a closer look.
VIDEO HERE (8:27 minutes)
With Honest Abe now being viewed as the first statist Preezy instead of a martyr, a lot of the Civil War is getting a second look. Historians note McClellan's logistical problems and his actual orders in the Antietam campaign and contend he did his job well and then some.
ReplyDeleteHonest Abe was anything but honest. The war he prosecuted against the south was illegal, and he committed many unconstitutional acts to prosecute that war. One reason the great men of the south are being vilified is because the truth about them has escaped captivity.
ReplyDeleteThe stories about Forrest having been the head of the Klan are not true. The man always vigorously denied any association with the Klan. Little that is said about Forrest in conformist "history" (actually propaganda) is true.
McClellan did perform well at Sharpsburg. It didn't hurt that someone lost their copy of Lee's op order which was taken to McClellan. It is likely Lee would have won that engagement. As it was, it turned out to be a draw.
More and more folks are realizing that the media didn’t start lying in 2015 when Trump came down the elevator. They’ve been doing it since…forever.
DeleteI've read many books on Forrest, Excellent tactician and military mind.
ReplyDeleteA good honorable man that should be exalted for a life well lived.
Today's Memphis didn't deserve a Man of his stature.
Let true History judge us all, not the re-written, feel good bullshit, they are feeding America.
McClellan was a military genius when he _had_ to fight, but he rarely fought. Together with Allen Pinkerton, he repeatedly misinterpreted intelligence to think he was facing double the actual size of enemy forces and scared himself out of advancing. Stonewall Jackson kept McClellan with 60,000 men out of West Virginia by fast-marching 20,000 men all around the area. The only time Lincoln persuaded him to undertake a full-scale invasion of the south (the Peninsular Campaign), he spent all summer cautiously pushing his lines toward Richmond, but only 7 days to run his troops back to the starting point when Lee sent Jackson around his flank with only a small force. (Later, when Grant was outflanked in the Wilderness by a larger force, he let the 1/4 of his men on that flank fight the Rebels to a standstill and put the rest back on the road south.)
ReplyDeleteBut when some idiot Union general nearly destroyed his own army and Lee invaded the north, Lincoln put McClellan back in. With his back to the wall, he was a military genius. He reformed a broken army into an effective fighting force and outmaneuvered Lee around Cold Mountain. OTOH, he couldn't close the trap on Lee even with a copy of Lee's plans and J.E.B. Stuart getting the southern cavalry lost somewhere, and stopped pursuing Lee after a bloody rear-guard action at Antietam.
Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman understood that the north could win only by a war of attrition, and were willing to kill hundreds of thousands of men to do that. (Lee must have understood this too, but had no opportunity to stop it against the merely competent Grant with a much larger army.) To McClellan, losing 15,000 union troops to 10,000 rebel losses in a fight over a meaningless scrap of land was a loss; to Grant, it was one step closer to victory, because his losses would be replaced. McClellan was either unwilling to take the terrible losses required, or simply lacked enthusiasm for his side and used every chance to avoid bloody battles in southern territory. Grant merely had to keep pushing, following a dead-simple plan that left no chance for Lee's much smaller army to beat him badly, and the numbers would eventually win the war.