Remove the bust of Forrest, a war criminal, from Capitol
I am not one who believes that all monuments and statues glorifying the old Confederacy should be removed. Indeed, there were honorable men wearing the gray who fought valiantly and honorably for their cause. It was not a cause I could believe in, but they did and had the right to defend it.
Gen. Robert Edward Lee was a brilliant soldier who finished second in his class at West Point in 1829 and was commissioned to serve with the Corps of Engineers. He was cited for his engineering skills on the Mississippi River and New York Harbor during the war with Mexico. He served as the superintendent of West Point from 1852 to 1855.
At the outbreak of the Civil War in April 1861, President Abraham Lincoln asked him to command federal forces, but Lee’s loyalty lay with the South. He resigned his commission to accept command of the military forces in Virginia, where he was born Jan. 19, 1807. The war was lost under his command, and he surrendered at Appomattox on April 9, 1865. I admire the statues of him and his horse Traveller.
Some monuments intended as a slap in face
It is unfortunate that some controversial monuments today were erected long after the Civil War ended and were devised as a slap in the face of civil rights activists who were demanding justice. They were put up to remind us of that old Southern justice and that the outcry for equality would be ignored.
The most egregious example in Tennessee is the bust of Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest at the state Capitol. I can ignore the fact that he was a slave owner because many decent people owned slaves. I don’t care if he was an organizing member of the Ku Klux Klan. Many outstanding people were members of that organization and the White Citizens’ Councils. The problem with Forrest is that official government records show he was a war criminal.
Hideki Tojo, the Japanese general who approved the attack on Pearl Harbor, was sentenced and hanged in 1948 as a war criminal. Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator who forced fascism on his people and allied himself with Nazi Germany, was executed by his own countrymen and hung up for all to see. Adolf Hitler took the cowardly way out and died by suicide.
The Fort Pillow Massacre
Forrest, born near Chapel Hill, Tennessee, on July 13, 1821, was self-educated, worked as a farmhand and had the wherewithal to raise a cavalry regiment and become its lieutenant colonel in 1861. In April 1864 he captured Fort Pillow. Rather than let the black troops and their white officers there surrender, he massacred 360 blacks and 200 whites.
When the U.S. Senate Joint Committee on the conduct and expenditures of the war investigated the massacre on May 2, 1864, it interviewed several eyewitnesses who told how the soldiers’ hands were nailed to logs or how they burned to death in wooden structures. Some were buried alive. One eyewitness, Henry Christian, who saw part of the atrocities, said he saw Forrest at the scene. “Yes, sir, old Forrest was there. He was a little bit of a man. I had seen him before in Jackson.”
Robert J. Booker is a freelance writer and former executive director of the Beck Cultural Exchange Center. He may be reached at 865-546-1576.