Authors: Madison Smartt Bell
June 13: At the Masonic Hall in Columbia, Tennessee, Forrest is shot by Lieutenant Gould, who lost the two cannon during the pursuit of Colonel Streight, and is disputing his transfer orders. Forrest retaliates by cutting Gould with a clasp knife and then pursues him with a pistol, declaring, “No man can kill me and live.”
June 25: Union General William S. Rosecrans advances from Murfreesboro toward Shelbyville, and Bragg falls back toward Chattanooga. After two days of skirmishing in south-central Tennessee, Forrest is retreating through Cowan (his wife’s hometown) when an old woman berates him for cowardice, shouting, “Old Forrest’d make ye fight!”
August 9: Forrest requests transfer to his home ground in West Tennessee and North Mississippi, probably hoping to escape the command of Braxton Bragg. Bragg has been flanked out of Middle Tennessee without a battle, and driven back to the Chattanooga area, where Forrest commands the cavalry attached to Bragg’s command. Forrest refuses to obey Bragg’s order to dismount cavalrymen led by John Hunt Morgan who have returned from an unsuccessful raid through Ohio and Indiana.
September 7: As Union troops close in around him, Bragg evacuates Chattanooga for Lafayette, Georgia, again without a fight.
September 13: Forrest is wounded in the back while opposing the advance of Union troops under Thomas Crittenden on the Georgia-Tennessee border. Though a lifelong teetotaler, Forrest reluctantly obeys the order of his surgeon (his wife’s relative, Doctor J. B. Cowan) to take a medicinal drink of whiskey.
September 18: The battle of Chickamauga begins with Forrest skirmishing with Union troops along Chickamauga Creek, west of Chattanooga. His splendid horse Highlander, gift of the citizens of Rome, is shot dead from under him.
September 19: Forrest and his men are heavily engaged in a long day of inconclusive fighting.
September 20: Reinforced by General James Longstreet and his force, the Confederates finally rout the Union soldiers and send them fleeing back toward Chattanooga (except for a section of the line held stubbornly by Union commander George H. Thomas). Despite urging from Forrest and others, Bragg fails to capitalize on the victory and allows the Union Army to retreat and regroup in Chattanooga, more or less unmolested.
September 21: In pursuit of retreating Union forces, Forrest has his horse shot through the neck and closes the wound with his forefinger so that he can continue to ride. He reaches the crest of Missionary Ridge, where he is able to see the confusion of the Union troops in and around Chattanooga. Though Forrest urges a rapid advance, the Confederate leadership does not respond.
September 28: While enjoying a rare ten-day leave and visit with his wife at LaGrange, Georgia, Forrest is ordered by Bragg to turn over his troopers to Wheeler for a raid. Forrest responds with a furious letter denouncing Bragg for dishonesty and cowardice. Soon after, in the company of his surgeon, Doctor Cowan, he rides to Bragg’s Missionary Ridge headquarters to denounce him in similar terms to his face. Though duels were fought for less during the Civil War, and Forrest certainly intended his visit as a challenge, Bragg lives up to Forrest’s prediction that he will “take no action in the matter.”
In the aftermath of Chickamauga, Forrest, losing confidence in the Confederacy’s chances of success and suspecting that he himself may soon be killed, frees a number of the forty-five slaves who have enlisted with him as teamsters.
October 13: General Bragg approves Forrest’s request for transfer to the Mississippi River region. Forrest goes to Okolona, Mississippi, with his sixty-five-man escort, four cannon, Morton’s sixty-seven artillerymen and part of Jeffrey Forrest’s regiment, bringing him to a strength of 350. Jeffrey, though reported killed in North Alabama, reappears as an exchanged prisoner.
November 25: As Bragg is driven from Chattanooga by Grant, Forrest goes raiding and recruiting in West Tennessee; ten days later he reports to General Johnston that he has 5,000 recruits and more coming in.
December 13: Forrest writes a letter of complaint to General Stephen Hurlbut, commander of Union-occupied Memphis, about the Union military’s mistreatment of Confederate sympathizers in West Tennessee.
December 24: Forrest has to withdraw from Jackson, Tennessee, with his 3,500 raw recruits, only 1,000 of them armed, but receives official word of his promotion to major general. He eludes pursuit and protects his considerable beef on the hoof and bacon supply by sending out many decoy detachments.
January 2: Confederate General Patrick Cleburne proposes that the Confederacy offer to free any slaves willing to serve in its army. This idea is swiftly suppressed by President Jefferson Davis and the Confederate government in Richmond.
January 12: Northern press reports: “Forrest, with less than four thousand men, has moved right through the Sixteenth Army Corps, has passed within nine miles of Memphis, carried off a hundred wagons, two hundred beef cattle, three thousand conscripts, and innumerable stores; torn up railroad tracks, destroyed telegraph wires, burned and sacked towns,
ran over pickets with a single derringer pistol, and all in the face of ten thousand men.” Union Generals Grant and Sherman begin to take serious alarm at Forrest’s ability to carry out such operations behind their lines.
January 13: “Forrest’s Cavalry Department” established for North Mississippi and West Tennessee.
January 27: General Sherman writes orders for General William Sooy Smith to organize a two-pronged raid into the Deep South. Sherman intends to raid from Vicksburg to Meridian, Mississippi, while Sooy Smith moves out of Memphis through Okolona to join him at Meridian for a combined maneuver against Selma, Alabama, destroying Confederate communications and foraging and looting as much as possible along the way. This operation is a trial run for Sherman’s eventual march through Georgia; Sooy Smith’s maneuver is in part intended to divert Forrest from Sherman’s movement.
February 12: Forrest threatens to execute nineteen deserters at Oxford, Mississippi (all recent West Tennessee recruits). Forrest reports that Sooy Smith with 1,000 men has passed Holly Springs—he sends Jeffrey Forrest to engage Smith at West Point.
February 19: Smith begins wrecking railroad tracks near Okolona. Some 3,000 freed slaves in his train are burning fields, barns and houses so indiscriminately as to shock Smith himself.
February 20: Jeffrey Forrest, after a forty-five-mile march, interrupts Smith’s progress to Meridian at West Point. Smith eludes a trap set by the Forrest brothers and plans his retreat.
February 21: At Sakatonchee Creek, southwest of Okolona, Smith begins a diversionary battle with Jeffrey Forrest’s command. Bedford Forrest thrashes a Confederate trooper fleeing from the Sakatonchee bridge and sends him back into the battle with the admonition, “You might as well get killed there as here.” Retreating from the bridge, Smith’s men make occasional stands till finally they halt at 2 a.m., three miles south of Okolona.
February 22: At daylight, Bedford Forrest and his escort charge Smith’s rear guard, chasing the Union troops northwest from Okolona. At Ivey’s Hill, Sooy Smith makes another stand and Forrest’s brother Jeffrey is killed by a ball in the throat during the action there. Bedford Forrest charges into the thick of the Union force (outrunning his hugely outnumbered escort) to kill three men in hand-to-hand combat, decapitating one Federal cavalryman. Forrest has two horses shot from under him in the course of this day; a third mount, King Philip, survives despite taking a bullet. At the end of the day, Forrest abandons pursuit of Smith, thanks to exhaustion and ammunition shortage.
February 26: Sooy Smith’s battered force reaches Memphis, having lost 388 men by the general’s report. Because of Smith’s failure to join him at Meridian, Sherman returns to Vicksburg, abandoning the advance toward Selma. Forrest quarters his troops in Columbus and Starkville, Mississippi, and prepares for another excursion into West Tennessee.
March 20: Forrest returns to Jackson in West Tennessee—a region now shredded by partisan warfare, full of deserters and preyed upon by scalawags and bushwhackers.
March 24: Colonel W. L. Duckworth bluffs a Union garrison at Union City, Tennessee, to surrender by sending in a note purportedly written by Forrest himself.
March 25: Forrest attacks and briefly occupies Paducah, Kentucky, but cannot reduce a fort there occupied by Union troops, who refuse to be bluffed into surrender by Forrest’s warnings and threats. The fighting at Paducah is Forrest’s first engagement with a force of freed slaves in Union service: 274 men of the First Kentucky Heavy Artillery.
April 3: Forrest reaches Trenton, Tennessee. James R. Chalmers, commanding some of Forrest’s troopers, defeats a force commanded by local Union sympathizer Colonel Fielding Hurst, near Bolivar.
April 4: Forrest writes to request that Morton’s artillery be sent to him from Mississippi to aid in attacking boats and the river forts. He begins to consider requests from West Tennessee Confederate loyalists that he
reduce the Union garrison at Fort Pillow, at the junction of Coal Creek with the Mississippi River. Commanded for the Union by West Tennessean Major William Bradford, Fort Pillow had become a tinderbox of local partisan antagonism. Bradford’s men stood accused of wholesale looting, insult and rape; atrocity crimes, including mutilation, had also occurred. Many of Forrest’s own men were West Tennessee natives as well (some very recently recruited) and so took such matters personally. Local Confederates regarded Fort Pillow as a nest of outlaws which harbored a number of runaway slaves. Shortly before Forrest’s arrival in the area, the fort had been reinforced by 292 black Union troops sent north from Memphis, under command of Major Lionel Booth.
April 11: Forrest orders Chalmers to advance on Fort Pillow; Chalmers rides thirty-eight miles from Brownsville in the rain to reach the fort for a daybreak attack the next day. Also on April 11, Buford, en route to Paducah, sends a diversion to Columbus with a surrender demand saying “negroes now in arms” will be returned to their masters if they surrender but killed if they resist. White troops will be treated as prisoners in either case. Forrest returns to Jackson to find his brother Aaron dead of pneumonia.
April 12: Forrest reaches Fort Pillow in the mid-morning, following the first wave of the attack, having ridden seventy-two miles in twenty-seven hours. Booth has been killed inside the fort by one of Forrest’s sharpshooters, though the Confederate besiegers don’t know this. During his first reconnaissance Forrest is rolled on by a horse shot from under him. “They are not many, we must take them,” he concludes. Forrest’s demand for surrender offers to treat all the men (black Union soldiers implicitly included) as prisoners of war, adding, “Should my demand be refused I cannot be responsible for the fate of your command.” With the demand for surrender refused, Forrest’s men storm the fort, reportedly slaughtering a great many of the defenders even after they have attempted to surrender. Forrest eventually intervenes in person to stop the killing. By later reports the Mississippi River ran red with blood for 200 yards below the fort.
April 15: Forrest writes to Jefferson Davis requesting that he be sent to Middle Tennessee (the Nashville area and supply lines north and south of
that city) to disrupt Sherman’s preparation for his campaign against Atlanta and the state of Georgia. Forrest’s plan is discredited by his old adversary Braxton Bragg. Forrest is ordered to return to Mississippi, where he begins to refit his troops after the West Tennessee campaign.
April 18: An article entitled “The Butcher Forrest and His Family: All of Them Slave Drivers and Women Whippers” appears in the Northern press. Describing events at Fort Pillow as “the cowardly butchery … of blacks and whites alike,” the article goes on to claim that Forrest “had two wives—one white, the other colored (Catharine) by each of which he had two children. His ‘patriarchal wife,’ Catharine, and his white wife had frequent quarrels or domestic jars.” A “Remember Fort Pillow” movement begins among black Union troops quartered in Memphis.
April 29: Apprehensive that Forrest may in fact destroy his planning in Middle Tennessee, Sherman replaces the Union commanders at Memphis and writes to them urging that “It is of the utmost importance to keep his forces occupied, and prevent him from forming plans and combinations to cross the Tennessee River and break up the railroad communications in our rear.”
April 30: Samuel Sturgis, the new Memphis cavalry commander, sets out in pursuit of Forrest, who withdraws from Jackson to Tupelo, Mississippi.
May 15: Sherman outflanks the Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston by crossing the Oostanaula River. Using delaying tactics and fighting battles with Sherman at three different locations, Johnston is pushed back toward Atlanta. Concerned that Forrest may still break up his lengthening supply lines in Tennessee, Sherman orders Sturgis to lead another expedition against Forrest.
May 17: Though actually on his way from Mississippi to Middle Tennessee, Forrest is ordered back in the direction of Tupelo to deal with the threat from Sturgis. Forrest’s idea of aborting Sherman’s march through Georgia is thus itself aborted.
June 10: At the battle of Brice’s Crossroads, Forrest resoundingly defeats Sturgis’s superior force—Forrest’s 4,800 men against the Union 8,000.
Stubborn rearguard resistance by black Union troops commanded by Colonel Edward Bouton helped part of Sturgis’s command make a safe retreat, although black soldiers, when routed themselves, tear off and throw away the “Remember Fort Pillow” badges they are wearing. In pursuit of the routed Union force, Forrest and his horse both fall asleep, to be awakened only when the horse blunders into a tree.
June 13: Forrest writes a complaint to Union General Cadwallader Washburn at Memphis about useless bloodshed at Brice’s Crossroads, brought about because “Both sides acted as though neither felt safe in surrendering, even when further resistance was useless.” In this letter he denies he ever had a policy of slaughtering surrendering men.
June 15: In the aftermath of Brice’s Crossroads, Sherman writes to U.S. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton terming Forrest the “very devil” and claiming that there “never will be peace in East Tennessee until Forrest is dead.” To President Abraham Lincoln he writes that he is sending out generals from Memphis “to pursue and kill Forrest.”