For the Sake of Nathan Bedford Forrest, Let's Stop Worshipping Him

Jim Cooper, Craig Fitzhugh, and Megan Barry are all calling for the removal of the bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest from the state capitol. According to Dave Boucher over at the Tennessean:

The bust of a Confederate general and leading figure in the founding of the Ku Klux Klan should be removed from the Tennessee statehouse, top Tennessee Democrats said Monday.

U.S. Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn., and state House Minority Leader Craig Fitzhugh, D-Ripley, said the bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest has no place in the Tennessee statehouse.

"Symbols of hate should not be promoted by government. South Carolina should remove the Confederate battle flag from its Capitol, and Tennessee should remove the bust of Forrest inside our Capitol," Cooper said in a statement to The Tennessean.

Let me be clear, before I launch into the meat of this post, that I do think that removing the bust of a slave trading Confederate general who most likely ordered and at the least stood back and watched the massacre of Tennesseans and then was a high ranking Klansman, back in the "good old days" when the Klan was just menacing black people and had not yet worked up the guts to kill them is completely appropriate. I think we should change the name of the state park, too.

But I also think it's worth it, at this time, to consider a couple things about what Nathan Bedford Forrest means, not to the wider South, but to Tennesseans, as a legend. Forrest is ours not only as a symbol of the Confederacy, but as a Tennessean.

If you study Tennessee history, you've probably noticed that we have (or at least had, for many, many years) a kind of Ur-legend. There are men in the forest who mean you harm. You'll meet one of them and he'll appear to be friendly, perhaps even traveling with you for a while, and then, his small band of compatriots will emerge from the trees and kill you. Often, your body will be sliced open, stuffed with rocks, and tossed in a waterway.

This is the story of Colonel James Brown, trying to get to Nashville by floating down the Tennessee, killed by Indians downstream from present-day Chattanooga after a friendly chat, his body and the bodies of most of the men in his expedition left in the river.

This is the story of the Harpe Brothers, who might ride all friendly-like with you until they got you alone and then, bam, you're literally dead in the water.

Or the famous leader of the Mystic Clan, John Murrell, who was said to steal slaves by pretending to offer to help them to freedom when really, he was just murdering them in the swaps and leaving them.

It's the story of that nefarious slave trader, Isaac Franklin. Hell, it's even roughly the story of Deliverance.

It's also the story of Nathan Bedford Forrest. Look at this story Nina Cardona over at WPLN told about him:

On June 10, 1864, his small regiment spotted Union soldiers on a wooded road in rural Mississippi. The federal force outnumbered his by two to one, but rather than waiting for reinforcements, he decided to trick his enemy.

The general formed an attacking line, giving the impression that there were more soldiers in the scrub oaks. Bugle calls were issued to make it seem as if he had troops in every direction. He timed a cavalry charge against Union men on foot so that his wool-uniformed enemy had to run several miles during the hottest part of the day.

It was a trouncing, said Matt Atkinson, a historian with the National Park Service. When all was said and done, the number of federal troops killed, wounded or missing was five times as high as the Confederate losses.

Forrest is the leader of the scary men in the woods going around killing people. My hunch is that, on top of the way white Southerners looked down their noses at slave traders, and

, one of the reasons he was so poorly utilized at the beginning of the Civil War was that, to Southerners, he appeared to be a villain. You don't let Jason Voorhees command your army.

But when the War became clearly about ending slavery, well, then, Forrest was a monster, but he was the South's monster. Freddie vs. Jason, Godzilla vs. Mothra, those one vampires from Blade II vs. those other vampires.

The thing I find compelling about Forrest is that, belatedly, he realized he was a symbol, a legend in a way he couldn't control. A lot of defenders of Forrest make a lot of hay about his speech to the Independent Order of Pole-Bearers Association at a black community picnic in Memphis where he advocated, in his own racist way, for understanding between blacks and whites. But the speech is only kind of good if you ignore all history and myth.

But if you let Forrest's history and the legends of Tennessee stand along side him, in ways his audience certainly would have, you can see how history and myth had already trapped Forrest. He stood there, in front of a black audience, and said, "Ladies and Gentlemen I accept the flowers as a memento of reconciliation between the white and colored races of the southern states. I accept it more particularly as it comes from a colored lady, for if there is any one on God's earth who loves the ladies I believe it is myself." Now, read that again, knowing that Forrest was a slave trader and think about how casually slave traders like Franklin talked about raping black women, and how widely accepted by white Southerners it was that slave traders all raped black women.

Obviously, we don't know that Forrest did. But we know that a man with his job was assumed to have. And here he is, joking in front of a crowd of people, some of whom were raped by men like Forrest, about loving the ladies. He can't just be a man on a stage. He stands for something he can't escape, even if he doesn't want to stand for it anymore.

Look at what he says later in the speech: "Many things have been said about me which are wrong, and which white and black persons here, who stood by me through the war, can contradict. I have been in the heat of battle when colored men, asked me to protect them. I have placed myself between them and the bullets of my men, and told them they should be kept unharmed."

If you want an idea of how desperate Forrest was to undo the legacy of Fort Pillow, just look at those last two sentences. Nathan Bedford Forrest, to whom legend attributes such loyalty and dedication to his men that, when they were inadequately armed by the Confederacy, he spent his own money on guns for them stands here in front of a crowd, again, a crowd in which the families of the men from Memphis slaughtered at Ford Pillow are standing, and he's saying that he tried to protect black men, who, keep in mind were soldiers, AND HIS MEN DEFIED HIM.

People spit when they mention Hood's name for selling out his men after the war, but I don't think anything Hood did was quite as awkward as what Forrest is trying here—to insist that his men refused to follow his orders or, weirder, that he, what, briefly sided with the United States Army against the Confederacy? It's only because no white people believe him that Forrest isn't considered either at Hood-like levels of dishonorable or an enormous traitor.

But I think, really, what Forrest was trying to do is to just be a man—a fucked-up, complicated man who was buckling under the weight of symbolism and legend ascribed to him. We've never allowed him to just be that fucked-up, complicated man.

Here he is in the Capitol, still a symbol, still a "hero" even after he tried to make it so clear that he was not. But we can, as a state, honor Forrest by ceasing to venerate him. He said, long ago, to those folks in Memphis, "We have but one flag, one country; let us stand together."

It's about time we took his advice.