In fact, the United States never broke with the slaveocracy, as exemplified in the career of Forrest. He lost his parents and economic security at seventeen, but became a slave trader, land speculator, and finally a wealthy slaver with his own large plantation. He was the epitome of the “self-made” man that was the vaunted ideal of white settler mythology. In the Civil War, Forrest was a Confederate cavalry officer and was infamous for having led the massacre of hundreds of disarmed Black Union soldiers in 1864, a war crime even at that time. Yet President Andrew Johnson granted Forrest a
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