Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Crazy Crap / Hicks From the Sticks This Exists: Nathan Bedford Forrest State Park
Posted by Ashley Spurgeon on Wed, Jul 1, 2009 at 12:37 PM
Comments (45)
Showing 1-45 of 45
To save everybody the time and space, I will summarize all forthcoming comments.
Pro-NBF: "He was a great general. The Klan wasn't really like that when he was in charge. He even had a radical agenda that called for racial reconciliation. See, the Klan was more like a fraternity then, and we all know fraternities are well-known for their policies of racial inclusion."
Against NBF: "Part of his 'great generalling' was the Massacre at Ft. Pillow. Also, he founded the Klan. Seriously. The Klan, people. Is it really worth the trouble of offending upteens millions of people just to 'honor' this guy?"
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..that this post is about ten kinds of stupid.
hey ashley, i bet there's other stuff out there that people are happly enjoying without your knowledge or input.. don't waste a minute!
Congratulations Ashley. The park was dedicated in 1929 and has evidently offended no one for ninety years until you got your panties in a wad over it.
Aren't there any really important things you can knot your knickers over?
I think my referencing of Steven King and "The Locomotion" certainly backs up your assertion of JUST HOW LIVID me and my undergarments are in regards to this park.
Please stop talking about my undergarments.
Ashley, I can't be sure, but I think that's how Mr. Flatus flirts.
Have you seen the movie down to the Carter House, which is supposed to be about the Battle of Franklin, but ends up being much more about the director's mad crush on the actor playing Forrest?
Good times.
And, honestly, it's like our whole state is all "Oh, Nathan! He's so dreamy." If that statue on I-65 had gold sparkles and was surrounded by notebooks full of places for people to practice writing their first names with Bedford Forrest's last name, it wouldn't surprise me.
The trolls are adapting, JR -- it's a brave new world.
I'm partial to Fort Awesome, but it's not actually a fort, is it?
How about "Nathan Bedford Forrest Has a Muddy and Ambiguous Past With Disputed Links to Areas of Our Troubled History With Regard to Race Relations so Maybe We Shouldn't Name Shit After Him Just to be Safe State Park"
Why? It's your bloomered butt that's bent out of shape over a non problem/event.
I also reference a Cohen Brothers film. That's when you can really tell when I'm furious. SO ANGRY. I feel like someone is trying to take away my guns.
And no, I have not seem the film. But is the actor a dreamboat or no? The public needs to know. And it's not actually a fort, but one could totally be built using the shattered dreams of the Old South.
Full disclosure: I went to this park when I was a kid, it's near my hometown. Spraypainted under a bridge was the charming idea to "Fuck Niggers," and I saw this graffiti nearly every day for the vast majority of my childhood.
So.
I certainly did not anticipate this becoming a forum on Ashley's intimate apparel.
To that end, Emmett sure seems to know a lot about Ashley's underpants, down to the kind she's wearing.
Lucky bastard.
Teach me your ways of romance, Emmett. I shall sit at your right hand and wet my beak on your wisdom, drinking thirstily from your knowledge. I shall be your devoted pupil of love...
I have been to this park...neat place. Its the only battle in any war that i'm aware of that a calvary unit beat a naval unit.
For those offended by the namesake ....Those that ignore history are doomed to repeat it.
JR pretty well summed up the prevailing views on this issue but, just for the record, Forrest was not the founder of the Klan which started in Pulaski in late 1865. Forrest was recruited in 1867 to serve as the Klan's first and only Grand Wizard. He ordered the organization disbanded in 1871 saying that the need for it had passed. (The modern Klan referred to in the post was founded in the early 20th century and had no connection to the original Klan other than the name and their shared attitude toward blacks.)
One of the best books on the original Klan is Invisible Empire, The Story of the Ku Klux Klan, written by Nashville historian Stanley Horn in 1939. http://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/imagegallery.php?EntryID=H070
So, if we ignore history, a guy on a horse will sink a boat?
Well, I for one would like to see that, so bring on the forgetting about Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Ashley, if you imagine Trace Adkins, Tracy Lawrence, and Alan Jackson had a son who was a Civil War reenactor, the actor who played Nathan Bedford Forrest was about like that. So, if tall, skinny guys with flowing locks are your thing, then, yes, he was dream-boaty.
"What do you think?"
That you're trying to be cute and failing miserably.
As usual.
So "Grand Wizard of the Klan, Not That Klan, But, You Know, the Other One State Park" might be a better park name?
Wasn't Forrest acquitted of the Ft. Pillow incident with the testimony of a Union soldier. I guess that wasn't enough. Then how bout this, since Forrest had so many black soldiers in his unit wouldn't that be to some extent a black on black issue?
Short answer, Johnny, no.
Long answer, courtesy of the US Congress:
http://bit.ly/o14Bz
Historians are split on Forrest's responsibility, but Congress wasn't. And in the best bio of Forrest, Wills' "Battle from the Start," the author says Forrest was responsible.
And black soldiers did serve with Forrest. You're right. Before the war, they didn't call him "General." They called him "Master." Because he owned them. And he said if they fought, he'd give 'em their freedom after the war was over. Fortunately, the 13th Amendment made it impossible for us to know wheter he would have kept his word.
When was it that the city of Forrest Hills officially changed its name to Forest Hills, where it remains as a sovereign and unincorporated part of Metro?
Drive down yonder sometime. Along Tyne Boulevard, you'll drive past Beauregard, Fredricksburg, Kenesaw, & Robert E. Lee Drive. Confederate Drive is off of Robert E. Lee.
Good times...
Ha, I've never been down any of those streets.
Don't get me wrong, I think it's foolish to totally whitewash or disregard a part of the state's (and nation's) history. But names and words have meaning, and it's hard not to view these things as implicit approval of a totally questionable group of people. Are these really the only men that Tennesseeans need to remember?
My druthers - everything is named after Dolly Parton.
Kotzie...Take thyself and thy beak elsewhere. There will be no beak dipping around here.
Neither you or anyone else on the planet has proved, can prove now, or will ever be able to prove Forrest was anything but an American hero. This is true regardless of what YOU say.
All Democrats are commies.
They could downplay the General by calling it the NBF State Park. Like Kentucky Fried Chicken did when it became KFC.
My druthers - everything is named after Dolly Parton.
I'm a charter member of the Joey Ramone Legacy Project.
Only stuff in East and Middle TN should be named after Dolly. West TN is too flat.
Also, regarding the rights of private property owners to display possibly offensive statues and the like (i.e. the Forrest statue off I-65), I wonder there are any restrictions at all as to what can be displayed. What if someone who owned interstate-adjacent land decided to erect a full-out racist display of some sort, or something crudely sexual (perhaps even involving Dolly Parton). Could anything legally be done to prevent it?
I don't recommend you visit Chapel Hill. You'll be highly offended. He was born there. Maybe you could get the state to revoke his birth certificate.
Hey Ashley,
I hear Africa's nice, why don't you move there and love all your nigggers without wasting our time.
Ha, well, I for one find it hilarious that, after a long discussion about how Forrest was not really racist, here come the racists to be all pissed off at Ashley.
So, are we still supposed to pretend like Forrest isn't an important figure to racists or can we just drop the pretense?
I find it amusing that liberals deride Robin Smith for her uninformed and irresponsible brain farts. Then in the next post leap headlong in defense for an equally noxious emission from one of their own. I'm surprised Cap and Trade doesn't include mental flatuence.
Ashley you ignorant traitor. NBF was one of the great people of their time - you indulge yourself in presentism (google it)and are a very very bad boy!
Nathan Forrest did keep his word. About 18 months before war's end, he wrote out letters of manumission freeing those 42 slaves still with him. He did so because he gave his word and he was concerned he might not survive the war.
Moreover, The Memphis & Selma Railroad was organized by Forrest after the war to help rebuild the South's transportation and to build the 'new South'. Forrest took it upon himself to hire blacks as architects, construction engineers and foremen, train engineers and conductors, and other high level jobs. In the North, blacks were prohibited from holding such jobs.
When Forrest died in 1877 it is noteworthy that his funeral in Memphis was attended not only by a throng of thousands of whites but by hundreds of blacks as well. The funeral procession was over two miles long and was attended by over 10,000 area residents, including 3000 black citizens paying their respects.
So, Nathan Bedford Forrest was an enigma. To some, he was the devil incarnate. To many more, he was the finest cavalry general this nation ever produced and became a supporter of civil rights for the American Black later in life.
The idea of using today's standards to criticize past generations seems to pertain mostly to criticizing our Confederate ancestors. Mention is rarely made of the worse conditions for blacks up North. (such as not being able to live in many states)
I wonder if this is because of a lack of knowledge of the history of the period ( most who have posted apparently have little real historical knowledge, or selective at best) or a general lack of historical knowledge.(example: you don't know enough about the English Civil War to make a lucid statement)
I would not call Wills' biography the best on Forrest. You might try attending one of the many seminars on Gen. Forrest, such as the one in Memphis next weekend. Or attend the festival at his boyhood home next year. (this year's event was a couple of weeks ago.) It would be so much nicer to see intelligent comments instead of statements that anyone familiar with Forrest can counter with fact.
JR implies Congress had a solid belief that it completely believes a massacre took place at Fort Pillow. So what?
General Forrest was the enemy then. Does anyone here really believe that Congress was going to find any other way? Did you really think they would be unpartisan, fair? That they would find in favour of Forrest? Are y'all still taking the pill, drinking the kool-aid? Check this site out http://www.37thtexas.org/html/grandfab.html and think about these two quotes from it - ""LT Van Horn reported that "Lieutenant John D. Hill, Sixth U. S. Heavy Artillery, was ordered outside the fort to burn some barracks, which he, with the assistance of a citizen who accompanied him, succeeded in effecting." This accounts for the barracks allegedly burned by Confederates in which wounded Union soldiers were supposed to have perished.'
'Union officers were in charge of burials and made no such report of living burials.'
"Was There a Massacre at Ft. Pillow?" John L. Jordan, Tennessee History Quarterly VI (June 1947), pp 99-133:
"...burial details were composed of Union troops under Union officers, a fact which clears Forrest's men of the charges that they buried Negro wounded alive...Union casualties may have amounted to less two hundred killed, wounded, and missing."
Nathan Bedford Forrest-"The Black soldiers that have served under me, I know of no finer Confederates.
P.G.T. Beuregard after the war argued for civil rights and the right of blacks to vote.
Robert E. Lee inherited slaves before the war broke out and freed every one of them.
Thomas"Stonewall"Jackson started and funded even taught a large black congregation Sunday school class, and was severely opposed to slavery.
Forrest Gump: "Now, when I was a baby, Momma named me after the great Civil War hero..." Ah Hah! another politically correct carpetbagger or Southern native influenced by carpetbaggers from up North. Or, maybe your feeble minded like Jimmy the Geek? Where did you have this experience? Were you inculcated by the collectivist elites at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, or Stanford. Heck maybe you whent to the University of Chicago and had Comrade Ayers, or Comrade Obama! Have the collectivist idiots taken over the University of Tennessee. Hey I'm from the pEOPLES rEPUBKLIK of mASSACHUSSETTS and I think we should rename the Myles Standish monument because of all the evil thinks he did the the "Native Peoples". Typical Knee Jerk Progessive Collectivist Liberal! (Maybe the UN will turn it into a World Historical Site under Agenda 21! How about just leaving it as Nathan Bedford Forrest State Park, you freakin Moron!
Get over it, baby. There are quite a few people who have had sordid pasts who have places named after them. Did you know Martin Luther King was associated with communists during his schooling? Look it up, and think before you go renaming everything. Maybe, start with America?
The world to which the ex-Confederate veterans returned after the war was greatly changed from the one they had known in 1860. Many Southern towns and cities were little more than clusters of blackened chimneys, and large areas of the South were utterly desolate. Besides the physical and economic ruin, a great upheaval of the social structure was taking place. The Radical Republican Congress had placed the South under military rule – Reconstruction. Carpetbaggers and scalawags sat in the state houses, raising taxes and looting the state treasuries. White Southerners had lost all control over their own affairs. As ex-Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest put it, in losing the war they had "lost all but [their] honor", and now they felt even that was being stripped from them. Southerners tried to regain some measure of control by forming secret organizations to restore order to their disrupted society through the intimidation and terrorism of Union troops and officials. These secret societies had such names as the Pale Faces, the Sons of Midnight, and the Knights of the White Camelia.
In May 1866, a group of ex-Confederate veterans in Pulaski, Tenn., formed another such group, giving it the name Ku Klux Klan dedicated to driving out all occupying Union forces. Thus beginning the "invisible empire of the South" that would grow to be the largest and best known of the groups that opposed the Reconstruction government. In May 1867, Forrest became the Grand Wizard of the Empire and thereby leader of the KKK. The Klan was run as a quasi-military organization and grew quickly with the addition of more former Rebel soldiers. Wearing white robes and hoods, these "ghosts of dead Rebel soldiers" paid midnight visits to frightened carpetbaggers and Union troops who were subjecting Southerners to brutal occupation.
Would this be part of the apology that has ran rampant through the south. Change state flags, remove confederate/ southern monuments, and make the people out as monsters? Just can't see it. My Granddaughter is biracial has been taught about both sides. She has and continues to gain a better education than most concerning the Confederacy.
Nathan Bedford Forrest Park still goes by the same name today. You cannot change history or hide it just because you want things to be named to suit your ears with a more politically correct tone. To be offended by the truth is to hide from the truth. Forrest is now recognized to be about the greatest calvary commander who spoke the English language and is duly recognized. He invented the blitzkrieg at Parkers Crossroads, not the Germans in WWII. Patton, Rommel, and many other military leaders have successfully used Forrest's tactics and that is what he is recognized for. What Nathan Bedford Forrest did in your eyes as a bigot is irrelevant.
