Nathan Bedford Forrest

If you ever try to interfere with me or cross my path again, you do so at the peril of your life.

- Bob Dylan, "Floater"



In the damp spring of 1863 just outside Rome, Georgia, 450 Confederate cavalrymen under Brig. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest were about to engage a federal force about three times their size led by Col. Abel D. Streight. Veteran Hoosiers mounted mostly on mules, Streight's bluecoats were known as "The Lightening Mule Brigade." Their black-bearded colonel, with a shaved upper lip like his president's, had been ordered by Sherman to cut the Western and Atlantic Railroad line supplying Braxton Bragg's Army of Tennessee, and Bragg deployed Forrest to make sure Streight didn't succeed. For the last two weeks of April, Forrest had been harassing his flanks and rear in daily skirmishes among the mountains of eastern Alabama. But the flatter Georgia terrain seemed to call for a more fully pitched confrontation.



Known as the "Wizard of the Saddle," Forrest had earned a reputation for elusiveness and savagery while "deviling" Sherman's lieutenants. "War means fighting and fighting means killing," he said. In four years of fighting he killed 30 bluecoats in hand-to-hand combat alone – one of them with a penknife after the trooper had shot him. "No damned man kills me and lives," Forrest told him. Whenever his troops gained a real or perceived advantage, Forrest would demand that his counterpart surrender, with the same ultimatum each time: "Should my demand be refused, I cannot be responsible for the fate of your command," often adding that every Union soldier and officer would be "put to the sword." While it was impossible to tell whether he was bluffing, the consequences of being wrong could be gruesome. On May 2, he put the same proposition to Streight.



"Puttin' the skeer on 'em" was how Forrest himself liked to describe it. At 6 feet 2 inches tall and 210 pounds, he was quite a large man by the standards of the day, and even more imposing on horseback. With a bushy goatee and brown hair swept back under a wide-brimmed beaver hat, he was often compared to the Deuce, which was just fine with Forrest, who'd guessed that Col. Streight was aware of his take-no-prisoners approach. He also knew Streight was operating in hostile territory and couldn't be confident of his intelligence sources. To make the "skeer" more intimidating, Forrest marched his troops in a racetrack-shaped oval, only the homestretch of which could be seen by Streight's lookouts, creating the illusion they numbered well into the thousands.



At a pre-battle parley the next morning, Forrest cordially requested that Col. Streight surrender, if only "to stop the further and useless effusion of blood." Streight maintained that while willing to talk, he was by no means ready to give up the fight. But as the parley continued, Forrest made sure his officers kept moving their only two howitzers across a distant rise plainly visible to Streight, then back along a lower path the colonel couldn't see, and over the rise once again. "Name of God!" Streight finally exclaimed. "How many guns have you got? There's fifteen I've counted already."



"I reckon that's all that has kept up," the poker-faced Forrest responded. Like a fellow reraising all in with a measly pair, Forrest was blending menace, nonchalance, and deception, leveraging Streight's fear of sending his men on a suicide mission. It worked. After Streight returned to confer with his lieutenants, the consensus was overwhelming: surrender.



As what now might be called the Donkey Brigade was marched off to prison, the size of Forrest's regiment quickly became apparent. Streight was enraged and humiliated, but there was nothing he could do now that his men were disarmed. A young Confederate captain by the name of Anderson approached him. "Cheer up, Colonel," he said. "This isn't the first time a bluff has beaten a straight."



Robert E. Lee later called Forrest the best soldier who had fought for either the North or the South, and no less an intimidator than Sherman deemed him "the most remarkable man our Civil War produced on either side. He had a genius which was to me incomprehensible." Sherman had showed Forrest enough respect to issue orders that he be "hunted down and killed if it cost ten thousand lives and bankrupts the Federal treasury." Never one to make idle threats, Sherman dispatched 14,000 troops to execute the order. They finally lured Forrest into battle near Tupelo, where they managed to wound their quarry but not kill or capture him.



"He was the only Confederate cavalryman of whom Grant stood in much dread," said a friend of the Union commander, because Forrest "was amenable to no known rules of procedure, was a law unto himself for all military acts, and was constantly doing the unexpected at all times and places." Like a no-limit hold'em artist running amok at a table of ABC players, Forrest fought "by ear," he said, demoralizing opponents by anticipating their moves and getting to strategic positions "the fustest with the mostest."



Without formal military training, this planter and slave trader had an innate sense of hit-and-run tactics. Most cavalry officers led reconnaissance missions for infantry generals, but Forrest deployed his troops as a mounted infantry, more apt to attack the enemy than merely to spy on him. In a typical raid, Forrest's horsemen would surprise a Union outpost, destroy the railhead it was guarding along with any bridges nearby, then escape into the mountains before a counterattack could be mustered. While Forrest went off on his next raid, Union engineers would repair the damage of the previous one, at which point Forrest would swoop back in to wreck things again.



Bragg's Army of Tennessee won a crucial victory at Chickamauga over Rosecrans in September 1863. Stunned into inertia by his own losses, however, Bragg ignored the pleading of Forrest and others to pursue the routed Yankees before they could reorganize in Chattanooga. Bragg did manage to surround the city and cut most Union supply lines, but after being reinforced by Sherman, the larger Union force, now led by Grant, launched a counterattack. The Confederate siege line collapsed and Bragg's troops fled chaotically into Georgia.



"What does he fight battles for?" Forrest asked in a rage, then let it be known that he refused to serve any longer under Bragg's authority. Even before the post-Chickamauga fiasco, Bragg had been considered both imperious and incompetent by his men. Unlike poker-playing regular fellows like Forrest, John Bell Hood, and James Longstreet, Bragg was a finicky stickler for military protocol. He not only made a habit of clashing with subordinates but had notoriously once engaged in a written dispute with himself while serving as both a company's commander and quartermaster.



Now generals Forrest, Longstreet, Leonidas Polk, and William J. Hardee all told President Davis that Bragg must be replaced. Davis reluctantly agreed, but only after a suitable replacement could be found. In the meantime, Bragg spitefully ordered Forrest to give up command of his cavalry. His reply, made to Bragg's face, was a blistering summary of the general's tactical blunders and acts of personal spite. After calling his commanding officer "a coward," he told him, "You have threatened to arrest me for not obeying your orders promptly. I dare you to do it, and I say that if you ever try to interfere with me or cross my path again, you do so at the peril of your life." Bragg apparently failed to report this threat to Davis because he understood Forrest was too valuable to be jailed for insubordination. Or perhaps he was simply afraid.

In any case, Forrest kept "puttin' the skeer" on the bluecoats, sometimes by means well outside the accepted conventions of warfare. Though no irrefutable evidence ever turned up, there was a widespread belief among Union officers and newspaper editors that Forrest participated in or at least countenanced a massacre – at Fort Pillow in April 1864 – of unarmed black troops trying to surrender. Some reports claimed Forrest's men used sabers to hack their victims to death, others that former slaves were crucified on tent frames, doused with kerosene, then set on fire while still alive. The debate about exactly what happened continues 143 years later.



Almost a month after Grant's generous terms of surrender were accepted by Lee, Deep South governors were pleading with Forrest and others to continue the war. Still recovering from his fourth combat wound, Forrest seriously considered launching a guerilla campaign based in Mexico. "If one road led to hell and the other to Mexico," he told an adjutant, "I would be indifferent which to take." But on May 9, 1865 – three and a half weeks after Lincoln was assassinated and the day before Davis was captured – Forrest decided he and his men could best restore Southern pride by laying down their arms and going home. "You have been good soldiers," he told them. "You can be good citizens. Obey the laws, preserve your honor, and the government to which you have surrendered can afford to be and will be magnanimous."



Forrest returned to his wife, Mary, who'd been living in a log cabin on their former estate. Much as Lee's grounds at Arlington were turned into a vast Union cemetery, Forrest's 1900-acre plantation in Coahoma County was given to a Federal officer. "I went into the army worth a million and a half dollars and came out a beggar," said Forrest. But with a single $10 bill that Mary had put aside, he planned to use poker to rebuild their fortune.



Mary being a woman of devout Christian virtue, Bedford had to persuade her that risking their last Yankee sawbuck in a card game was the best chance he had to keep them from the poorhouse. "Won't you consent to my going out tonight and hunting up a game of draw?" he begged her. "And won't you pray that I may win while I am out?" Mary said that while she wouldn't try to stop him, his plan was a sin in the sight of God. "And sin cannot finally prosper." Forrest went out and played anyway, winning enough to fill his famous beaver hat. Returning home at around 2 a.m., he turned over the hat and poured into Mary's lap $1,500.



While his military record suggests he was a poker natural, the God-fearing Forrest chose to understand his last-ditch, 150-times parlay as follows: "Mary, in spite of her objections, really prayed for me while I was gone. At any rate, I found her still sitting up when I got back, and I know her prayers have many a time served me a good turn." It was the Almighty, not his humble servant's bluffing panache, who won all those pots for the Wizard.



Whatever it came from, Forrest's genius as an underdog tactician is what we remember him for. In 1937 five German generals, including Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, visited several Forrest battle sites, and the Wizard's use of speed, surprise, intimidation, bluffing, and other poker-inflected stratagems continue to be studied in war colleges around the world. Unfortunately, in Iraq's civil war, the various Shiite, Sunni, and Al Qaeda guerrillas have also taken pages from Forrest's playbook and used them against his descendants. If published by Mason Malmuth – not that he would! – the book might be called Tactics for Advanced Insurgents, 21st-Century Edition.