The Campaigns of Lt. Gen. Nathan B. Forrest
and of Forrest's Cavalryby Thomas Jordan and J. P. Pryor
Book #1062
$45.00
704 pp., introduction by Ezra Warner, maps, illustrations, staff and regimental rosters, index, hardcover.
On June 14, 1861—two months after the Civil War began—Nathan Bedford Forrest, age nearly forty, practically unschooled, and without military training or experience, enlisted in the Confederate Army as a private. Less than four years later, when the war ended, he was a Lieutenant General with a dazzling record of victories and a well-deserved reputation for being a military genius. Historians would hail him as the greatest cavalry commander and one of the best generals produced by the Civil War.
Such a spectacular career has few parallels—probably the closest being that of Oliver Cromwell in the English Civil War—and quite naturally a number of biographies of Forrest bave been written to describe and explain it. Two of them are John A. Wyeth’s Life of General Nathan Bedford Forrest, originally published in 1899 and reissued in 1959 under the title That Devil Forrest, and Robert Selph Henry’s “First With the Most” Forrest, published in 1944. However, the first book about Forrest was Thomas Jordan and J. P. Pryor’s The Campaigns of Lieut.-Gen. N. B. Forrest, which appeared in 1868.
Both authors were veterans of the Confederate Army, although neither had served under Forrest. At the time of their collaboration, Jordan, a West Pointer and former staff general, was editor of the Memphis Appeal, and Pryor, a professional journalist, was an employee of that paper. Forrest, who most likely commissioned the book, gave them access to his military papers, spent many hours being interviewed by them, and closely supervised their writing. Hence this work is not only the flat biography of Forrest—in effect it is his autobiography.
Being such, it suffers (understandably enough) from a pro-Southern bias, lack of perspective, and factual errors resulting from faulty memory and the unavailability of the reports of Union opponents and Confederate colleagues. Furthermore, it fails to deal fully, frankly, or at all with certain controversial episodes in Forrest’s military career. Thus, for example, his stormy relationship with Braxton Bragg, whom he despised, is glossed over with discreet generalities, and there is no mention whatsoever of his near-duel with another pugnacious Confederate cavalry leader, Earl Van Dorn.
Yet these defects are insignificant when weighed against the book’s outstanding merit: It presents vital, firsthand information that otherwise would not be available, and so is the most valuable source on Forrest and his campaigns that exists. All subsequent biographies of Forrest are heavily in debt to it, and none has totally superseded it. Moreover it can be read with pleasure as well as profit. In the preface Jordan stated that he and Pryor “carefully avoided all embroidery of the narrative with florid phrases or romantic, picturesque descriptions, preferring to present the incidents of a remarkable story in the simplest phraseology.” Which is to say that Jordan and Pryor, with Forrest literally looking over their shoulders, wrote about this great military realist in a realistic way.
