Nathan Bedford Forrest: Southern Hero, American Patriot
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Book Overview
Nathan Bedford Forrest's critics have called him everything from a violent backwoodsman, illiterate redneck, and cruel slaver to a crooked politician, unfaithful husband, and simple-minded hillbilly. Traditional unreconstructed writers, however, including award-winning Southern historian and Tennessee author Colonel Lochlainn Seabrook, maintain that General
Forrest was none of these things. Seabrook presents his case in Nathan Bedford Forrest: Southern Hero, American Patriot. In this concise and factual book, Seabrook examines Forrest's life, character, military service, and relationships with African Americans. The author argues that, far from being an inhumane slave owner and trader, Forrest granted many of his servants their freedom before Lincoln's War. Others served in his command-including half a dozen who acted as his personal guards-and were emancipated in the fall of 1863. Seabrook further maintains that Forrest refused to separate servant families, declined to sell people to cruel slaveholders, and helped reunite divided Black families.
The book also contrasts Forrest's postwar views with Abraham Lincoln's positions on Black civil rights, colonization, and racial separation. According to Seabrook, Forrest rehired former servants after the War with full civil rights and later called upon the South to welcome new African immigrants.
Seabrook also challenges the widely repeated claim that Forrest founded or led the original 19th-Century Ku Klux Klan. He argues that this Reconstruction-era conservative organization had no institutional connection to the modern Klan and that Forrest ordered it disbanded in 1869 after impostors infiltrated it and committed crimes under its name.
These and many other subjects are presented clearly and concisely by Col. Seabrook, a cousin of Forrest, in a spirited defense of the "Wizard of the Saddle"-one of the most celebrated, controversial, complex, and intriguing figures in American history.
Lavishly illustrated and written in an accessible style, this compact 120-page volume is well suited for Civil War museum shops, historic homes, collectors, students of Southern history, and gift giving. Nathan Bedford Forrest is one of thirteen books Col. Seabrook has written about the famous Southern cavalry commander and includes footnotes, a bibliography, and an index. The foreword is by Southern educator James Ronald Kennedy, author of The South Was Right
About the Author: Lochlainn Seabrook is a bestselling, award-winning historian and the author of over 100 nonfiction books spanning multiple genres, including more than 60 works on the American Civil War. He is also a recipient of the prestigious Jefferson Davis Historical Gold Medal (UDC) and a Kentucky Colonel.
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