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The exploits of Lieutenant General Nathan Bedford Forrest, Confederate States of America, are the substance of many legends, largely because he made life miserable for two of the Union’s best generals—Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman—while serving as a cavalry
commander in the western theater during the American Civil War.
Forrest’s campaigns, and particularly Brice’s Crossroads (often called Tishomingo after a nearby creek), are studied by the services even today. Whether he knew it or not, Forrest was ahead of his time. Lieutenant Colonel E. J. Robeson, U.S. Marine Corps, who studied Forrest’s campaigns extensively, believed that the fundamentals Forrest used during the Civil War can make an officer successful today. Robeson called these fundamentals “Forrest War.” Forrest knew instinctively what the Marine Corps later adopted as doctrine: both firepower and maneuver are essential components of warfare and must be integrated to obtain maximum effectiveness.1
As Robeson so aptly put it, every attack is a frontal assault for an individual infantryman, and his weapons are for killing, wounding, or forcing the enemy to cower. Maneuver is effective only after the enemy has been dominated by aggressiveness and educated in the brutality of firepower. Forrest exemplified this when he attacked enemy cavalry boldly even though outnumbered and kept his own artillery on the move, massing his firepower against the Federals.
Robeson credited six basic characteristics of “Forrest War” for the Confederate cavalryman’s success.
The first was his fearful reputation among the enemy, and there is no doubt that Forrest enjoyed
such a reputation. There are countless stories of Forrest’s behavior in battle, good and bad, but students of the war agree that Forrest took warfare seriously. “War means fighting, and fighting means killing,” he once said. He set the example on the battlefields of the war and fought so relentlessly that his name became synonymous with death. In 23 battles, from Fort Donelson to Atlanta, he was critically wounded twice and personally killed 30 Yankees.
He began building his fearful reputation after Grant issued his famous unconditional surrender terms to the Confederate garrison at Fort Donelson, Tennessee. The garrison complied— except for Forrest, who, true to his character, decided to break out: “Boys, these people are talking about surrendering, and I arn going out of this place before they do or bust hell wide open.”2 In a winter blizzard, he led his men out through the frozen swamps in the dead of night.
Preparation and positioning were always an important part of Forrest War. The detailed plans that he brought to life on the battlefield at Brice’s Crossroads took advantage of the weather, terrain, and his understanding of the enemy’s likely moves to support an aggressive attack.
As he told one of his brigade commanders:
1 know they greatly outnumber the troops I have on hand but the road along which they will march is narrow and muddy; they will make slow progress. The country is densely wooded and the undergrowth so heavy that when we strike them they will not know how few men we have. Their cavalry will move out ahead of the infantry and should reach the crossroads three hours in advance. We can whip their cavalry in that time. As soon as the fight opens they will send back to have the infantry hurried up. It is going to be hot as hell, and coming on a run for five or six miles over such roads, their infantry will be so tired out we will ride right over them. I want everything to move up as fast as possible. I will go ahead with Lyon and the escort and open the fight.3
Third, and very important, was surprise. Forrest was heavily outnumbered in most if not all of his battles, and depended on surprise and confusion to mask his weakness. This worked well at Brice’s Crossroads when along with aggressiveness in the thick blackjack and scrub-oak forest, the general managed to succeed in convincing the Union commander—General Samuel Sturgis—that he was the one outnumbered. Sturgis wrote, “The strength of the enemy is estimated by most intelligent officers at from 15,000 to 20,000 men. A very intelligent sergeant who Was captured . . . reports the number of the enemy actually engaged to have been 12,000 with two division of infantry in reserve.4 Forrest’s actual numbers during the entire battle never exceeded 4,800 men; Sturgis’s 8,300 infantry and cavalrymen M fact outnumbered him almost 2:1.
Physical dominance through firepower is the fourth characteristic Robeson described. Forrest kept his able young chief of artillery, Captain John Morton, on the move, massing his firepower in different places, pinning down the Federate, and allowing Colonel Clark S. Barteau’s division to flank them.
This led naturally to the fifth characteristic of Forrest War: moral dominance through maneuver. The fighting was so severe in the center and on the flanks of the Union line at Brice’s Crossroads that Forrest was able to get elements of his cavalry into the rear of Sturgis’s forces. Even veterans among the Union soldiery turned and ran as their flanks gave way and Confederate cavalrymen appeared to be coming at them from all directions.
The most striking characteristic presented by Robeson, and one that Forrest executed without mercy, was the pursuit of a
demoralized foe. Much of Forrest’s reputation was built around stories of his relentless and unmerciful pursuit of the enemy as he strove to annihilate them. He saw nothing wrong with kicking his victim while he was down; to him, it was all a part of the battle. After Brice’s Crossroads, he pursued Sturgis’s forces for two days and stopped only when his men were completely exhausted. Forrest ordered his men after the fleeing enemy to “keep the skeer on ’em,” which they did through the night. He did not consider darkness an insurmountable obstacle to further combat operations.5
Forrest hounded the enemy because he knew that exhausted men, at the end of their tether and on the run with little food, were easy prey. His intent was not merely to defeat the enemy, or even to cripple him—but to crush him morally so that he would not willingly return to do battle. Sherman, no stranger to the harshness of war, remarked after the terrible loss at Tishomingo, “Forrest is the very devil, and I think he has got some of our troops under cower.”6 In fact, General Sturgis, who before the battle had claimed to Sherman that Forrest was, “disposed to run . . . [and that] ... he is too great a plunderer to fight anything like an equal force,” after the battle said: “For God’s sake, if Mr. Forrest will let me alone, I will let him alone.”7
Robeson described the characteristics of Forrest War as “. .. building blocks that prove devastating when properly woven together on the battle field.”* They are indeed fine building blocks, but it took someone like Forrest to make them work. The leader is what counts most. Anyone who studies warfare can offer a textbook solution to a hypothetical problem. When it gets down to the wire, however, and the situation is desperate, will he be able to make the same decisions or take the same chances? Forrest’s lack of formal military education gave him an advantage. Where better educated commanders may have seen what they were up against and taken counsel of their fears, Forrest did not. While most of his opponents were thinking of what they were going to do, Forrest was reacting. It brought victory more than once and even saved his life in hand-to-hand combat on one occasion. “You know, he said once, describing a close encounter, “if that young fellow had sense enough to give me the point, I wouldn t be here right now, but he tried to slash, which was his last mistake.
At Brice’s Crossroads, Forrest did his planning the night before and reacted during the battle itself. Attacking the enemy cavalry to “show fight” when he was outnumbered was a reaction to a given problem that subsequently saved the day for the Confederates.
The South lost the war for many reasons, but not because of anything Forrest failed to do. His confidence in his men and himself and his certainty of victory never waned. As he once told his chief of artillery, Captain John Morton: “There is no doubt that we could wipe old Sherman off the face of the earth, John, if they’d give me enough men and you enough guns.”10
'LCoI. E. J. Robeson, USMC, “Forrest War: Putting the Fight Back . .." Marine Corps Gazette, August 1986, p. 61.
!Brian Steele Wills, A Battle From the Start (New York: Harper Collins, 1992). 'Robeson, p. 63.
4Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, Series 1, Vol. 39, Part 1, p. 95. ’Robeson, p. 64.
'Wills, p. 217.
'Ibid., pp. 200, 215.
"Robeson, p. 65.
’Ibid.
'"Wills, p. 272.
Lieutenant Philbeck, who graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in June, is a student at The Basic School, Quantico, Virginia.