Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause

by Ty Seidule

Before the war started, Forrest made his fortune selling enslaved people in Memphis, and he participated in the illegal African slave trade. Only the domestic slave trade was legal after 1808, although some scholars estimate up to fifty thousand more Africans were sold into bondage after that date. In 1859, a report started by President Buchanan’s administration found that Forrest sold thirty kidnapped Africans from the ship the Wanderer, one of the last shipments to America from Africa. In 2008, Georgia emplaced a monument to the survivors of the Wanderer.84 Forrest’s wartime record against African American soldiers was equally awful. After a battle at Fort Pillow, near the Mississippi River, in April 1864, soldiers under Forrest’s command, and likely under his orders, massacred Black U.S. soldiers and Black women. In discussing the massacre, a soldier wrote a week after the battle that several Confederate troops “tried to stop the butchery” of the U.S. soldiers but that Forrest “ordered them shot down like dogs, and the bloodbath continued.” “Remember Fort Pillow” became a rallying cry for U.S. soldiers, especially African American soldiers, for the remainder of the war.85 Finally, after the war, Forrest became the first Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. While he eventually resigned from that position, both white and Black people throughout the South knew of Forrest’s infamous role in the first Klan and the Fort Pillow massacre. A political cartoon by Thomas Nast in 1868...