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Nathan Bedford Forrest Redeemed? Part II
(Emerging Civil War) – “When I can serve you I will do so, [. . .] and when you are oppressed I’ll come to your relief,” Forrest said as his voice echoed through the ears of his audience of Black men and women on July 5, 1875. How could a former slave trader, Confederate general, and Ku Klux Klansman utter such progressive words? Historians have advanced several theories over the years.
The claim that both newspapers altered or concocted Forrest’s speech to improve the general’s image to the people of the North is preposterous, given that both the Avalanche and the Appeal supported secession before the war and anti-Reconstruction policies after it. Nor was the speech embellished by Lost Causers in the succeeding decades, since it was printed in the Appeal and Avalanche the day following the picnic. Thus, Forrest’s speech fulfills the criterion of multiple attestation, and there is little doubt that he gave the speech as it appeared in both newspapers.
Other historians have offered the explanation that Forrest underwent a spiritual and moral awakening in the last years of his life, accounting for his radically different views on race. However, much like the argument that Forrest never gave the speech, this notion is also flawed.
Secondly, Forrest’s conversion to Christianity probably did not coincide with a conversion to civil rights activism. The general’s change in temperament and devotion to religion late in his life is well speculated. Biographer Jack Hurst writes that by the 1870s Forrest “had accepted at last the Christian faith of his family’s women and begun to…
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