Jack Hurst > Quotes

“Around this time, if not before, Forrest instructed Morgan to drop the lawsuits he had instituted, saying he did not wish to leave Willie a legacy of legal warfare. He described himself as “broken in health and spirit,” having “not long to live.” His life, he reflected, had “been a battle from the start … a fight to achieve a livelihood for those dependent upon me in my younger days, and an independence for myself when I grew up to manhood, as well as in the terrible turmoil of the Civil War. I have seen too much of violence, and I want to close my days at peace with all the world, as I am now at peace with my Maker.” Probably on this same trip to Middle Tennessee, he visited a onetime Confederate colonel Sevier who now was a professor at the University of the South at Sewanee. Sevier’s son, then aged seven, remembered long afterward that the talk among his elders centered on the war and that Forrest appeared bored by the discussion. To escape it, he repeatedly went outside and spoke with the children. Informed that the seven-year-old had yet to learn to ride a horse, he called for one, along with a bridle and saddle, and several times, with great patience, reviewed the correct way to approach, bridle, saddle, mount, and sit the animal.”
― Jack Hurst, Nathan Bedford Forrest: A Biography

“It had been just twenty minutes from the sounding of the charge until a Confederate pulled down the fort’s Union flag and Forrest ordered a cease-fire; Confederate partisans later would make much of that, saying the butchery was so great because the fort hadn’t been surrendered, but Federals running for their lives had little time to concern themselves with a flag. Soon”
― Jack Hurst, Nathan Bedford Forrest: A Biography

“The New York Times proclaimed that if the votes in South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana were certified in favor of Tilden, thus electing him over Hayes, the North—twelve years following Appomattox—would have lost the Civil War to the South: “it will be the sign of the subjugation of the nation by the rebels.” The”
― Jack Hurst, Nathan Bedford Forrest: A Biography

“Nevertheless, one black soldier at Fort Pillow, Private Ellis Falls, soon would attest that Forrest ordered the Confederates to “stop fighting,” and another Fort Pillow Federal, a Private Major Williams, would remember hearing a Confederate officer shout that the blacks should be killed and hearing another Confederate officer contradict him, saying Forrest had said the blacks should be captured and “returned to their masters.” Forrest,”
― Jack Hurst, Nathan Bedford Forrest: A Biography

“The Hayes-Tilden deadlock and the fate of Radical Republican administrations in South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana eventually were resolved in Washington with Senator John B. Gordon playing a large role. Gordon apparently helped forge a “bargain” under which the South agreed to certification of the election of Hayes on an understanding that the new President would evacuate the last Federal occupation troops from South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana. This would remove Federal protection from those states’ Reconstruction administrations, giving Gordon’s friend Hampton the disputed South Carolina governorship and another Democrat, F. T. Nicholls, the governorship of Louisiana. This compromise completed the so-called “shotgun” political enterprise for which the Ku Klux Klan had been organized a decade before. The extended campaign of terror, led first by the Klan and then by myriad imitations or offshoots, swept the last troops of Federal occupation from the South, leaving the Southern Democratic power structure free to impose upon the region the white-supremacist program it desired. The New York Times had been proved essentially correct; even though Tilden had not been declared victorious over Hayes, the white South had nevertheless won its long struggle to begin the return of blacks to a status tantamount to their antebellum chains. In an economic sense, their new “freedom” would become worse than slavery, for with all Federal interference removed they soon would be allowed to vote only Democratic if at all—and this time there was no master charged with responsibility for providing them at least rudimentary shelter, food, and clothing.”
― Jack Hurst, Nathan Bedford Forrest: A Biography

“Angered by the taunts of the black soldiers and especially by the Union refusal to surrender, necessitating the paying of more precious Confederate lives for this victory he had to have, he may have ragingly ordered a massacre and even intended to carry it out—until he rode inside the fort and viewed the horrifying result. Then,”
― Jack Hurst, Nathan Bedford Forrest: A Biography

“Nevertheless, out of the 580-man garrison, 66 percent of the blacks and 35 percent of the whites were killed. Most of these casualties seem to have occurred during the melee immediately after the Confederates entered the walls, but not all. One”
― Jack Hurst, Nathan Bedford Forrest: A Biography

“All the buildings around the fort and the tents and huts in the fort had been burned by the rebels and among the embers the charred remains of numbers of our soldiers … could be seen.… Bodies with gaping wounds, some bayoneted through the eyes, some with skulls beaten through, others with hideous wounds as if their bowels had been ripped open with bowie-knives, plainly told that but little quarter was shown to our troops. Strewn from the fort to the river bank, in the ravines and hollows, behind logs and under the brush where they had crept for protection from the assassins who pursued them, we found bodies bayoneted, beaten, and shot to death, showing how cold-blooded and persistent was the slaughter.…46”
― Jack Hurst, Nathan Bedford Forrest: A Biography

“Even if Clark’s assertion stemmed from a false assumption and Forrest ordered no massacre, he probably didn’t have to; there was enough rancor between his men and the armed former slaves, as well as the Tennessee Unionists, that about all he had to do to produce a massacre was issue no order against one. This”
― Jack Hurst, Nathan Bedford Forrest: A Biography

“Even after the Union colors were struck, the horror continued. Surviving Federals claimed the killing went on sporadically into the next day as Confederates burned the place and supervised the burying of dead. Some men were buried alive, Federals”
― Jack Hurst, Nathan Bedford Forrest: A Biography