Brian Steel Wills > Quotes

“Yet the Confederate States of America faced significant challenges in waging a successful war for independence. One of its outstanding fighting generals, Irish-born Patrick Ronayne Cleburne, certainly understood that in a protracted conflict, his country did not have the manpower to sustain its armies in the field against a numerically superior foe. His solution to the problem placed patriotism over any desire to leave the peculiar institution inviolate. If the armed forces of the Confederate States employed blacks as combatants, he felt that not only would the disparity in numbers be addressed but also slavery would become an asset to the South rather than a liability. Freedom at the conclusion of honorable service to the Confederacy would offer a choice other than insurrection or escape and enrollment in the Union military for slaves who wished to exert some measure of control over their lives. But there was no time to lose. “Negroes will require much training, training will require time, and there is the danger that this concession to common sense may come too late.”64”
― Brian Steel Wills, The River Was Dyed with Blood: Nathan Bedford Forrest and Fort Pillow

“For his part, President Lincoln evolved (painfully slowly in Douglass’s estimation) in his political position from “gradual compensated emancipation” to finally putting his administration on record for the freedom of those enslaved in areas that stood in rebellion against the United States. Grappling”
― Brian Steel Wills, The River Was Dyed with Blood: Nathan Bedford Forrest and Fort Pillow

“Nathan Bedford Forrest was no Old Testament warrior bent on illustrating God’s wrath through the indiscriminate slaughter of those opposed to him. Nor was he a backwoodsman run amuck in a civilized world, not understanding the rules of warfare or the strictures of human society. He was, both in the simplest and most complex ways, a soldier trying to win an engagement and willing to use nonlethal, as well as lethal, means to do so. His threat of “no quarter” was a device to win a given battle, and when Forrest found that it could achieve, or at least help to achieve, this goal at Murfreesboro, he clearly decided to use it again wherever he considered the method promising.”
― Brian Steel Wills, The River Was Dyed with Blood: Nathan Bedford Forrest and Fort Pillow

“Fort Pillow proved to be a volatile arena of human emotions that easily got out of hand and, until the demand for violence had been satiated in blood, difficult to bring back under control, even for a force of nature as powerful as Nathan Bedford Forrest.”
― Brian Steel Wills, The River Was Dyed with Blood: Nathan Bedford Forrest and Fort Pillow

“If human testimony ever did or can establish anything then [Fort Pillow] is proved a case of deliberate, wholesale massacre of prisoners of war after they had surrendered. New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley, 1867”
― Brian Steel Wills, The River Was Dyed with Blood: Nathan Bedford Forrest and Fort Pillow

“I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be “the Union as it was.” If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery. If”
― Brian Steel Wills, The River Was Dyed with Blood: Nathan Bedford Forrest and Fort Pillow

“Freedom.” This most powerful word associated with the American Civil War came in many incarnations during that conflict. For supporters of the Confederacy, it meant not having to exist under a government that did not protect a way of life and the values they held dear. For many white Northerners, the concept offered the opportunity for them to decide for themselves what they would do or become in their lives. For many blacks in the South, it meant an end to the “peculiar institution” that had controlled their people’s lives for the hundreds of years since the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in the English colonies along Chesapeake Bay. All of these “freedoms,” though, could not be realized at the same time. War would decide which of them prevailed.”
― Brian Steel Wills, The River Was Dyed with Blood: Nathan Bedford Forrest and Fort Pillow

“On that day Bedford Forrest learned that his opponents in any clash were as afraid of him as he was of them. He came to understand how to turn their fear to his advantage while simultaneously harnessing his own. By mastering himself, he hoped to control a situation and defeat any foe that might rise to challenge him. “Get ’em skeered and then keep the skeer on ’em,” he observed as his unique articulation of that principle.2 Consequently, in scrapes throughout his life and in virtually every circumstance he faced on the battlefield, Forrest emerged successful more often than not through sheer grit and determination.”
― Brian Steel Wills, The River Was Dyed with Blood: Nathan Bedford Forrest and Fort Pillow

“In his introduction to a work dedicated to assessing “Racial Atrocities and Reprisals in the Civil War,” historian Gregory J. W. Urwin identifies the “values of the Confederacy and its people.” He explains, “Certain that black Union soldiers were too barbarous to abide by the rules of civilized warfare, Confederates felt absolved of observing such rules themselves,” thus allowing these Southerners to become “savages themselves.” Applying”
― Brian Steel Wills, The River Was Dyed with Blood: Nathan Bedford Forrest and Fort Pillow

“In the aftermath of Chickamauga, Forrest made a similar point to “a group of Confederate officers” as they discussed “the recent engagement and of military subjects generally.” Knowing the accounts of the “remarkable exploits” associated with their colleague, the “West Pointers, who were curious to know what tactics the great raider had used and what systems he had followed that enabled him to be eminently successful, plied him with question after question.” One specifically wanted to know what Forrest considered “the most important principle to be adopted in active operations against an enemy in the field.” In what the writer recalled was a “broad, uncouth dialect,” Forrest responded eagerly: “‘Wall, General, if I git youah idée, you want to know, sah, what I considah the main pint. Wall, now, I don’t know what you all think about it, but my idée is, to always git the most men thar fust, and then,’ he added, ‘ef you can’t whup ’em, outrun ’em.’” Aside from its practical application, the general’s observation reflected time-honored martial wisdom. The witness concluded simply, “It must be conceded that Forrest’s way of putting the Napoleonic maxim to ‘converge a superior force on the critical point at the critical time,’ was forcible and intelligent, if inelegant.”73”
― Brian Steel Wills, The River Was Dyed with Blood: Nathan Bedford Forrest and Fort Pillow

“The benefit to be derived from such displays would be twofold: aggressive action would mask one’s own vulnerabilities at the same time it kept an adversary off balance and tentative. The result would be to obtain, or retain, the initiative in any confrontation. Again,”
― Brian Steel Wills, The River Was Dyed with Blood: Nathan Bedford Forrest and Fort Pillow

“Whenever you meet the enemy,” he liked to say, “no matter how few there are of you or how many of them, show fight.” Forrest knew that to exhibit weakness or indecision was tantamount to inviting attack. “If you show fight,” he explained, “they will think there are more of you, and will not push you half so hard.”
― Brian Steel Wills, The River Was Dyed with Blood: Nathan Bedford Forrest and Fort Pillow

“In the aftermath of Antietam, Lincoln’s course would appear to have been set. Yet with the deadline approaching for his proclamation to go into effect, he held out one last gesture to the rebellious states through a special message to Congress in December 1862. The president had outlined a proposal for gradual compensated emancipation in March. Now he sought to establish the specific parameters for this proposal. Undoubtedly, he hoped to demonstrate his sincerity in offering any slave state that wished to do so a chance to experience a slower-paced transition from slavery to freedom. As a way of bringing a close to “our national strife,” President Lincoln suggested the adoption of amendments to the Constitution allowing for gradual compensated emancipation. He set January 1, 1900, as the date by which all slaves ought to be freed and offered owners recompense through the sale of Federal bonds for the liquidation of their assets in human property.”
― Brian Steel Wills, The River Was Dyed with Blood: Nathan Bedford Forrest and Fort Pillow

“Threats of retaliation had existed from early in the war. Historian Lonnie Speer notes that the Civil War devolved rapidly: “Within months of its beginning this conflict was anything but ‘civil’ and conducted by anyone but ‘gentlemen.’” Regarding this “war of vengeance,” he maintains, “There is ample documentation to suggest that both sides quite commonly practiced retaliatory measures against each other for real or imagined wrongs.”
― Brian Steel Wills, The River Was Dyed with Blood: Nathan Bedford Forrest and Fort Pillow

“History is less the determination of absolute certainty or truth about any person or event than it is the construction, or reconstruction, of that subject based upon the available evidence. The”
― Brian Steel Wills, The River Was Dyed with Blood: Nathan Bedford Forrest and Fort Pillow

“Urwin recognizes that, “[f]or the most part, white soldiers tended to grant quarter to surrendering or wounded white opponents” but argues that “Confederates denied black Union soldiers the same respect and consideration, not so much for any crimes they may have committed, but for who they were and the social revolution that they represented.” Even”
― Brian Steel Wills, The River Was Dyed with Blood: Nathan Bedford Forrest and Fort Pillow

“He abhorred the institution of slavery personally but elevated the political imperatives above its immediate eradication. Initially, he thought that external colonization for freed persons was a viable alternative if slave owners would accept emancipation with compensation. That”
― Brian Steel Wills, The River Was Dyed with Blood: Nathan Bedford Forrest and Fort Pillow