April 7, 2018 - The Political Cesspool - James Edwards
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You're listening to the Liberty News Radio Network, and this is the political cesspool.
Two arms, two arms, tune in Dixie.
Though all the beacon fires are lighted, let all hearts be now united.
Two arms, two arms, two arms, and Dixie.
Advance the flag of Dixie.
Hoorah, hoorah.
For Dixie's land, we take our stand and live or die for Dixie.
To arms, to arms, and conquer peace for Dixie.
To arms, to arms, and conquer peace for Dixie.
Oh, here the northern thunders mutter.
Northern flags and southwinds butter.
To arms, to arms, to arms, and Dixie.
Send them back your fierce defiance.
Stamp upon the crystal lines.
To arms, to arms, to arms, and Dixie.
Advance the flag of Dixie.
What a great night it's been.
What a great night it's been as we kick off Confederate History Month 2018 with a passionate from the heart first hour and then Kirk Lyons in the second hour.
And now to round it out tonight, Gene Andrews in the third hour.
Now remember, going forward for the remaining weeks in the month of April, we are going to have two hours to Confederate History Month, one hour to contemporary topics and of the like.
Tonight it was a full three hours.
And then in May, of course, we go back to our regular schedule and normal production.
But this is a special month indeed.
And we're great to have, we're very grateful to have back with us this hour Gene Andrews, former commander of the Sons of Confederate Veterans Tennessee Division.
Gene served as a combat officer with the 3rd Marine Division in Vietnam.
Gene also served in combat at the Battle of Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017.
Back in the States, he played football and ran track for the Marine Corps, was invited even to the tryout camp for the Cincinnati Bengals.
After that, he coached football and track in high school, where he also taught history during a time when they allowed actual, factual history to be taught in schools.
Gene is now retired and works as the caretaker of the Nathan Bedford Forest home near Chapel Hill, Tennessee.
Gene, how are you?
I'm doing just great.
So good to hear you again.
Always good to have you with us on this program.
Gene, you are one of the few people who have spoken, been a featured speaker at both of our political Cesspool anniversary reunions in 2014 and 17, respectively.
Eddie the Bombardier Miller here with us.
He was with us at both of those events as well as Charlottesville with you.
And I know he wants to say a very quick hello because we've got a lot to get to this hour.
Gene, my dear brother in arms, my dear brother in Confederacy, I love you like the brother you are.
But I got to say this one thing.
You know, I don't know if you know it or not, but I had joined the Marines before I got drafted the Army, but I got kicked out, son, because they found out my parents were married.
Uh-oh.
No, you know, you know, I'm just, Gene, there's nobody on this earth I admire more than you.
I would not say that to another Marine if I didn't know.
Marines really appreciate the Army because not everybody can get in the Marine Corps, and so they got to have Eddie Touche, brother.
Each time Eddie meets a Marine, he shows his Marine envy with that particular joke.
Touche, brother.
Touche.
He's a great fella.
Great fella.
We had so much fun traveling together and kidding each other back and forth.
And luckily, we both survived the Battle of Charlottesville.
And I don't know which was worse in northern Quangtree Province, right below the demilitarized zone or coming up Market Street there and being attacked by the communist in Charlottesville.
I say Market Tree.
Got back to the States.
I was going to be attacked by the communists over here.
But lo and behold, hey, yo, yeah, y'all both in Vietnam.
Which was worse, Vietnam or Charlottesville?
You were a combat medic, Eddie.
Of course, Gene was in the Marines.
Y'all tell me.
I'll say Charlottesville because we had to fight her old grubber.
How about you, Gene?
Well, Charlottesville, we didn't have artillery or the Marine Air Wing on call to bring in the Phantoms at treetop level and drop napalm right down on them.
So they did come in.
They were dropping it on us, our own government dropping it on us.
Eddie, you love the smell of napalm in the morning, don't you?
God, all money, I was cut my teeth on it.
We got to get serious.
I mean, we are serious, but we got to get down to it.
Hey, Gene, Gene's the real deal.
I said earlier tonight there are too many heroes, too many battles, too many individuals, too many circumstances to focus on any one with any extended period of time.
We have four weeks to cover Confederate History Month, four shows, 12 hours, and it's going to be a generalized celebration with one exception.
That exception is Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Now, why is Nathan Bedford Forrest the only individual who's going to receive an extensive profile during our Confederate History Month series this year?
And I'll tell you why.
It is, of course, because this show is based in Memphis, Tennessee.
Tennessee is Forest Country.
Nathan Bedford Forrest was born in Chapel Hill, Tennessee.
He lived a great deal of his life in Memphis.
He died in Memphis.
He is buried in Memphis.
This show, the flagship station that carries the political cessible to the AM affiliates across the world, across the country, is AM 1600 right here in Memphis.
This is Forrest Country.
So what we've got with Gene Andrews is this, ladies and gentlemen, a two-part series with Gene, a series within the series, if you will.
Tonight, you're going to hear from Gene Andrews about the life of Nathan Bedford Forrest.
It's going to cover his childhood, his business career, his meteoric rise from a private with no formal training to perhaps the greatest tactician of mobile warfare in the history of battle.
And it's going to go even into his post-war years.
And in the life of Forrest that we're going to be hearing about tonight, this biographical sketch that Gene Andrews is going to present to you, you will hear, of course, about his exploits at Shiloh, particularly Fallen Timbers.
That happened 156 years ago this weekend, April 6th through the 7th.
Fallen Timbers was on April 8th, 1862.
You're going to hear about Forrest at the Battle of Shiloh.
That's going to happen tonight.
And then next week, next week, you're going to hear the lies about Forrest.
Tonight, the life of Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Next week, the lies about Nathan Bedford Forrest.
And that is on the anniversary of another momentous occasion in the life of Nathan Bedford Forrest.
April 12th, 1864 was the Battle of Fort Pillow.
So tonight we will talk a little bit about Nathan Bedford Forrest at the Battle of Shiloh.
That happened on 1862 this weekend.
Next week, 1864, the Battle of Fort Pillow, the life and the lies of Forrest, the life of Forrest, the lies about Forrest tonight with Gene Andrews, and next week with Gene Andrews.
Gene, we have about a minute remaining before we get into the meat of this.
But add to that for our audience anything that I left out, and then we're going to give the whole show to you when we come back from the break.
Go, Gene.
I think that's an excellent summary of what we're going to be doing and pointing out to people the brilliance of Forrest and how far ahead he was of the curve of understanding how the war should have been fought and how the Confederate government ignored him until it was way, way too late to do anything about it.
And then they realized, you know, we've been fighting the wrong kind of war.
We cannot fight a war of attrition.
The South was bled dry, had no replacements.
But Forrest at Shiloh, at Fort Donaldson, after Chickamauga, in so many of these battles, he could not get the West Point generals to get off their dead end and carry out, finish up the campaign.
And it's proven over and over again that Forrest was right and the professional generals, the West Point generals, were wrong.
And we do not have our independence today because they wouldn't listen to him.
It's just that simple.
So you think, I think you just said it, had more power been given to Forrest, had he graduated from the Western Theater and perhaps taken a bigger role in the war, it would have all turned out differently.
Well, a lot of historians say that the fall of Atlanta in September of 1864 sealed the fate of the Confederacy because it ensured that Lincoln would be re-elected in November.
Had Atlanta held out through November like Petersburg and Richmond were holding out in that fall of 1864, Lincoln probably would not have been re-elected.
All right, we've got to take a break right there.
Ladies and gentlemen, when we come back, Gene Andrews, a forest historian, the caretaker of the Nathan Bedford Forrest home in Chapel Hill, Tennessee, he's going to tell you the biography of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the life of Forrest, but we continue right after these words.
Gene's a real deal, Marine, friends.
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Daddy, what is a buy-sell spread for gold coins?
Well, when you sell a gold coin to a coin shop that's worth, say, $1,200, you don't actually get $1,200.
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Fear no danger, shun no labor.
Lift up wrath or pack and saber.
Two arms, two arms, two arms, and Dixie.
Shoulder press and host to shoulder.
Let the odds make each heart folder.
Two arms, two arms, two arms, and Dixie.
Advance the flag of Dixie.
Hurrah, hurrah.
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Two arms, two arms, and conquer peace for Dixie.
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You're listening to the Political Sessible with James Litters, Eddie, the Bombardier Miller, and our special guest this hour, Gene Andrews.
You heard from Kirk Lyons the last hour.
What a great kickoff it has been to Confederate History Month.
It will continue next week and the week after that and the week after that all through the month of April.
But now let's get to the life of Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Gene Andrews is the caretaker of the Nathan Bedford Forrest home near Chapel Hill, Tennessee.
And we're going to talk about that late in this hour before time runs out.
But first, let's get to the beginning of it all.
Nathan Bedford Forrest, his life, his childhood, his career as a successful businessman, his enlistment to the Confederate States Army and his rise there and even the post-war years.
Gene gave a speech on the life of Forrest at our most recent Political Cessbook conference, which was a sold-out event in Memphis last fall.
He is going to give a condensed version of that speech starting right now.
Go, Gene.
Okay, thank you very much, James.
One thing I would like to do before we get caught on time, I would like to recommend a book to our readers, and I've just finished it up.
It's called The Battles and Campaigns of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest.
It's by John Scales.
And with deference to Eddie, John Scales is a retired brigadier general in the United States Army.
And this is written, this book is written from a military standpoint.
And it is really, really an exceptional book, and I highly recommend it.
You go to the back of it, the epilogue, and he breaks down all of the technical aspects of Forrest Command.
He goes into operational art, the tactics that he used, the logistics, intelligence, his impact on the course of the war, and what he did from a military standpoint, a military man looking at it from 100 years later.
And would just like to close that part out with the last paragraph in the book.
And he said, although he never held Army or Supreme Command and because of his lack of formal education and advantages, end quote, would never have been considered for it, as a soldier, he became the symbol of Southern resistance in the Western theater, second only to the Army of Tennessee itself.
His prowess on the battlefield and his grasp of the operational art place him in the first rank of those leaders who emerged during the war.
I agree with Sherman.
Forrest was the most remarkable man our Civil War produced on either side.
Excellent book.
So if you get a chance to get a copy of that, I highly recommend it.
Now, going back a little bit before his military career began, Forrest was born in Chapel Hill, Tennessee in July of 1821 into real poverty.
The family was not the landed gentry of the South.
They were just hardworking yeoman farmers.
His father had worked as a farmer and a blacksmith when the Settlement area, the Chickasaw Purchase was made available to settlement after the Chickasaws were moved out to the Indian Nations, which is today Oklahoma.
William Forrest moved the family down to northern Mississippi.
His grandfather had already gone down there, Nathan, that Nathan Bedford Forrest was named for, and sent word back there's a lot of cheap land down there for settlement.
So William Forrest, his father, moved the family down there.
And at the time, Forrest was only 12 years old when he moved down there.
And the future general was only 12 years old.
At 16, his father died.
And all they know is he died of a fever.
And so at 16, he was the oldest male in the household of a widowed mother and five other children and living on the frontier.
And this was not like living out in the country that we know.
This was a brutal place to try to just exist.
I mean, there were bears and panthers out in the woods.
There were all sorts of diseases that could kill you before you even knew what hit you.
So just waking up in the morning was kind of a plus in an existence like that.
But he provided for the family, worked hard, went into business with his uncle in Hernando, Mississippi, did very well in business in livestock and real estate and mercantile trade, but survived some rough scrapes living on the frontier.
There's one story about one Saturday afternoon, Bedford Forrest and his uncle were walking down the street in Hernando.
His uncle had a feud with a couple of men called the Matlock brothers.
And they were coming up the street the opposite direction.
One of the brothers pulled out a pistol and shot his uncle dead right there on the street.
He turned the gun on Forrest and it misfired.
Forrest drew a pistol and shot the Matlock brother.
The other brother went for a pistol.
Forrest's revolver jammed.
And I always found this interesting.
People were just standing around on a Saturday afternoon, Hernando, watching this fight in the street, and they didn't want to see this boy, a teenage boy, outgunned.
Somebody threw him a buoy knife.
So he goes after the second Matlock brother with a buoy knife, slashes him, and the overseer that was with him all of a sudden decided, you know, these guys aren't paying me enough to work for them and take on this wild teenage kid.
He hightailed it out of there.
So this was the type of life that he grew up in.
But by the time that he became a young adult and met and married his wife, Mary Ann Montgomery, he was a very successful businessman in northern Mississippi and in the Memphis area and very well respected.
He was elected an alderman for the city of Memphis.
He had amassed quite a fortune by the time the war came along.
It was estimated that his net worth was well over a million dollars, which today would be about $40 to $45 million.
So he was certainly no dummy and he did not have a lot of formal education.
I think he only spent about six months cumulative over three or four years just with basic spelling and mathematics and grammar school education.
But he learned quickly and he learned how to trust people and which ones you could trust and which ones you couldn't trust and who you needed to count on for advice.
And this was something that he carried through the war.
The criticism was, well, he didn't get a West Point education.
So he couldn't command large bodies of troops and he didn't know how to command.
But he had an extreme amount of common sense.
And the people he picked on his staff knew how to do the jobs that he wanted done.
For instance, his commissary officer was a gentleman that he had known in Memphis who ran two or three hotels there.
So as a commissary officer, he knew that if you had X number of people, how much food you had to provide to feed that number of people.
So Forrest knew where his talents were and where someone else's talents were, and he didn't hesitate to go get somebody else to do a job that maybe he didn't feel comfortable doing.
So he had a very successful career as a businessman in the Memphis area and in livestock, in cotton and trading, and he was also a slave trader.
And we need to tell all the history about individuals and tell the truth.
So they bash Forrest today about being a slave trader.
Well, at that time, it was a legal profession.
And you have to look back at the history of the United States.
The wealth of New England was built on the slave trade.
And these prestigious Ivy League schools like Harvard and Brown and Princeton, they got their money from people who made their money in the slave trade.
Providence, Rhode Island was one of the major ports for the slave trade, as was New York, Boston, New Bedford, Philadelphia.
All of these slave ships were chartered out of New England and northern ports.
There were no slave ships chartered out of southern ports.
And that our northern historians and politically correct historians tend to forget that point right there.
So Forrest wasn't holding, running an illegal business.
It was a legal business that was used across the United States.
And the other thing that they always skip over and fail to mention was that if you were purchased by Mr. Forrest, you could have been a lot worse off than having Mr. Forrest look after you because his quarters, slave quarters in Memphis were routinely inspected by the Board of Health and passed with flying colors.
And he provided medical care for his slaves.
There were certain people in the tri-state area that he would not sell to because he knew they were going to mistreat the slaves and he would try to buy back family members that had been separated.
Hold on right there, Gene.
Hold on right there.
Commercial Talk Radio is a cruel master.
No pun intended.
But we've got to take a quick break and we'll come back.
We're going to learn more about the life of the great hero and southern hero, Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Stay tuned, everybody.
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Let our showers in Dixie Road, who roll.
Or Dixies, let we take our stand to liberty, Dixie.
Way down South and Dixie.
Oh, way down south index.
Well, that's the way we sang it, ladies and gentlemen, when Gene Andrews was one of our guest speakers at the Political Seth Pool's 13th year anniversary party last fall, and we all sang it, did we not, Eddie the Bible?
Yes, we did.
We sang it loud and we sang it proud.
And of course, Gene was there to give a speech, a condensed version of which you're hearing tonight on the radio.
A few facts about Nathan Bedford Forrest, if I may, as we continue on tonight.
As Gene has mentioned, in spite of being born into poverty and having no formal education, he became a self-made millionaire.
After becoming a self-made millionaire, he invested a great deal of his personal fortune to aid the Confederate cause.
And despite being one of the wealthiest men of the South, he enlisted as a soldier of the lowest rank in order to further serve his country.
As a major planter, Forrest was legally exempted from having to serve, but he chose to serve anyway.
And then, even though he had no formal military training, he went on to become one of the greatest tacticians in the history of mobile warfare.
He retired as a lieutenant general.
His maneuvers are still studied today.
He personally killed over 30 enemy combatants.
Now, that is a thumbnail sketch.
Gene will continue on.
When we left before the break, Gene was talking about some of his exploits as a businessman, which of course was a precursor.
And just years before he would enter into the cause as a soldier, go on Gene.
Yes, sir.
So as you mentioned, he was a very successful businessman.
And as the war clouds were boiling up across the country, Forrest was actually against secession, just like Robert E. Lee was in Virginia.
Forrest thought that secession would be bad economically for the South.
And as a businessman, he was looking out for his business interests more than anything else.
And he thought that, you know, this was an overreaction, that eventually we could gain some type of political independence from the Northeast, which certainly wasn't going to happen.
But he was holding out that hope.
And I have not really documented this, but I've read a couple of articles that said that Forrest actually voted twice against secession.
You know, Tennessee had a referendum in February of 1861, right after the Confederate government was formed in Montgomery, Alabama, and it failed to pass in Tennessee.
About, I think it was about 60, 40 percent voted to stay in the Union.
But then after Lincoln called for an army from the states that were still in the Union to invade the seven states of the Confederacy, Tennessee held a second referendum on secession, and it passed overwhelmingly then.
But supposedly Forrest voted against it both times.
But just like Robert E. Lee in Virginia, who was against secession, once his state, the state of Tennessee, voted to leave the Union, then Forrest went with his state.
And as you had mentioned earlier, as a wealthy businessman, well known in political circles around the state, he could have probably gained a commission as a very high-ranking officer right off the bat.
But he walked into a recruiting station in Memphis and enlisted as a private and started out the war as a private.
And as you had mentioned earlier, James rose to the rank of lieutenant general.
There are only two people in military history of the United States that did that.
One was Nathan Bedford Forrest, and the other was Lieutenant General Lewis B. Chessey Puller in the Marine Corps.
From private to lieutenant general.
So it was a career that he had there.
So as a private, he was mustered into service.
And I'm sure he got a lot kidding about being the old man in the company there from the teenage boys that enlisted and thought the war was going to just last about six weeks and then everybody was going home.
Shortly thereafter, Governor Isa G. Harris contacted Forrest and asked him if he would raise a mounted battalion and with the rank of lieutenant colonel.
So he jumped from private to lieutenant colonel in that early summer of 1861.
And as usually happened with the Confederacy, he got the rank, but no equipment, no supplies, and nothing to equip these men.
So Forrest and some of his fellow officers in this new battalion that was being raised traveled up to Louisville.
And they bought supplies in Louisville.
And Louisville was held by the federal soldiers.
So to get the supplies out of town, they disguised themselves as farmers and put all their supplies in potato sacks and burlap bags and hauled them out of town past the federal patrols looking like they were just hauling grain and products out of town to be sold out in the countryside.
Got all of that back here to Tennessee, equipped his command, and had them ready to go within just a few weeks.
Started off the war up in western Kentucky and fought his first battle in December of 1861 near a little town called Sacramento in western Kentucky.
And this is where he showed his military prowess and his ability to read terrain and read a situation and understand what needed to be done and not fight it by the way they told you it was supposed to be fought in the book.
He never read the book.
So he never fought by the book and never used the same tactics that the rest of the officers did.
He then fell back with his cavalry command and covered the retreat from Fort Henry across the land between the rivers there from Fort Henry on the Tennessee River over to Fort Donaldson.
And it was at Fort Donaldson that his star really began to rise.
And there was a book that was published several years ago about the two commanders that really shone at Fort Donaldson, U.S. Grant on the Union side and Bedford Forrest on the Confederate side.
So when the West Point officers in the Confederate Army decided to break out of Fort Donaldson and escape to Nashville, and that was the plan, they used Forrest's cavalry on the left flank.
And they swung out away from the Confederate entrenchments there at Fort Donaldson like a giant gate pivoting and swinging out.
And Grant's army was caught totally off guard and just crushed and bent back into a real tight V with their backs up against the Cumberland River.
So the Confederates had two choices.
Go ahead with their original plan and escape and get down the road toward Cumberland City and on to Nashville, or throw everybody in line and possibly drive Grant's army into the Cumberland River.
So that's what they were looking at, except they came up with a third plan, and that was to turn around and march back into the fort, which they did.
And they called Forrest in at about midnight.
Now, this is in February, called him in around midnight, and not to get his opinion, but just as the cavalry officer, the ranking cavalry officer there, tell him that they were getting ready to surrender the fort.
And he was just flabbergasted.
He said, you know, we want a victory.
We can get out of here tonight.
We need to escape and take these men out.
There's no sense sending 15,000 men off their prisoner or war camp.
They said, oh, no, no.
The Federals have closed back over the ground they lost.
We're trapped.
We can't get out.
And he said, I know we can get out.
So he sent his scouts out again and came back about 2.30, 3 o'clock in the morning and said, no, the road's open.
We can get out of here.
And they said, no, we're going to have to surrender.
And he said, well, I didn't bring my men here to surrender.
I'm going out here if I have to bust hell wide open to do it.
And he didn't have to bust anything open.
He took about 800 of his men and then about another 200 or 300 infantry that wanted to go and escape with him.
And they got away that night and got into Nashville two days later.
And in Nashville, the word that Fort Donaldson had surrendered, there was no protection on the Cumberland River between Fort Donaldson and Nashville.
There were riots going on and people were breaking into Army warehouses and stealing and looting whatever they could get.
Forrest had the fire engines pump ice-cold water out of the Cumberland River and spray down the rioters in Nashville and maintain law and order in Nashville until the military supplies could be loaded on trains and shipped out of Nashville.
Now, you had mentioned Shiloh, which was later on in the spring of 1862.
He was heading up the cavalry once again with the Army of Tennessee that had been brought together from all over the South to try to oppose Grant, who was encamped very haphazardly at Pittsburgh Landing there on the Tennessee River.
And a Confederate army of well over 40,000 was able to march up from Corinth and almost unmolested right into the camps, basically, of the Federal Army.
In fact, some of the Confederates even fired their rifles that night because it had been raining the night before the battle was fought.
They fired their rifles to see if the powder was still good.
And the U.S. Army on the next morning was still caught off guard.
Now, Forrest was used far over on the right flank and right up next to the Tennessee River.
And his job with the cavalry was to drive forward up the river and try, if possible, to secure the landing and keep reinforcements from being sent across the river to Grant's army.
Now, Albert Sidney Johnston and Beauregard and Bragg and all the Confederate commanders knew that Buell's army was coming out of Nashville and headed southwest to hook up with Grant and reinforce his army for a move on Corinth, Mississippi.
And their plan was to knock Grant out before Buell got there and hold the west bank of the Tennessee River, and then Buell would be on the east side with no way to really get across the river.
There was a couple of days delay because of rain and inaccurate maps.
So the Confederate attack at Shiloh was at least a day late getting started, possibly two days.
And that gave Buell a chance to get there.
But the battle opened as a huge success for the Confederate.
The Federal Army.
Hold on, let's hold on right there.
Let's hold off.
Let's stop on the good news because the second day wasn't as good.
Let's stop right there.
And when we come back, my God, I wish we had three more hours with Gene Andrews tonight.
We have one more segment.
Unfortunately, what a great kickoff to Confederate History Month.
We'll be right back.
Getting advice from a teenager is a little unusual, but please listen to me.
If you find yourself pregnant and you're scared, I've got some advice because I've been there.
My boyfriend wasn't ready to be a father.
And frankly, he wasn't all that interested after I told him I was pregnant.
My friends told me I should keep the baby because it would be fun.
Well, having a baby is about the baby.
It's not about whether I have fun.
Some people told me my parents would help take care of the baby, but my baby still wouldn't have both a mom and a dad of her own.
That's really important to me.
After putting my feelings aside, I made the best decision I could for my baby.
Not because I felt it was easy, but because I felt it was right.
Adoption.
It's about love.
I didn't give my baby up.
I gave her more.
A message from LDS Family Services.
Many of you have heard me talk about my vigor score.
You say, Sam, what on earth is all this vigor stuff about?
Well, vigor is defined as zest for life.
Your strength in body and mind, your energy levels.
It's kind of all wrapped into a term called vigor.
Would you like to improve your vigor score?
Well, you got to first take the free test.
Get a hold of Kurt, C-U-R-T, at libertyroundtable.com or call Kurt Cosby at 801-669-2211.
I took the test on a 13 out of 32 horrible, huh?
But I worked on it with Kurt with some natural help and healing.
And before you know it, now I've got an astounding 29 out of 32 on the vigor score.
Can you tell by the way I talk?
Oh, yes, my zest for life has never been better.
Get a hold of Kurt Cosby.
That's 801-669-2211 and take your free vigor test today.
And you can learn where you stand.
And then you can work on improving it and take the test again.
And oh, compare the results, you will be delighted.
Get a hold of Kurt Cosby.
Kurt, C-U-R-T at LibertyRoundtable.com or 801-669-2211 for your free vigor score test today.
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That's American-Heritage.org.
Welcome back.
To get on the show, call us on James's Dime at 1-866-986-6397.
On 3, 2, 1, when Liberty Valence rode through the town, the women folk would hide.
They lie, Eddie.
When Liberty Balance walked around, the men would step aside.
Because the point of a gun was the only law that Liberty understood.
When it came to shooting straight and fast, he was mighty good.
That's actually better than I remember it.
If no one remembers that, that was actually myself, Eddie the Bubba Miller, and Keith Alexander singing Gene Pitney's hit, The Man Who Shot Liberty Balance.
You can deny the producer, but you can't deny the owner.
And he said he has a surprise for us.
I remember singing it that night years ago.
Years ago in the studio.
I don't remember it sounding that good.
That's actually pretty.
That's scary.
I think we were trying to sing for money.
Anyway, we sang for our supper.
We went to bed hungry this morning.
We sang for our supper and we went to bed hungry.
Yes, we did.
Anyway, all right.
Well, all right, very quick, very quickly.
Hey, Gene, did you come back from Charlesville?
Did you get any hurt?
I didn't get a scratch.
James is telling me that I failed because I didn't come back bloody.
How about you?
Did you come back bloody?
No, I was lucky.
I didn't get nailed on that one.
I was too, man.
But I failed in Michigan.
Well, you survived Vietnam too, both of you.
So I guess y'all got a knack for that.
But James wanted me to get killed in Charlesville so we could do success movie home.
I thought we could raise money if we martyred Eddie, but anyway.
All right.
Joking aside.
Hey, let's get back to it.
Gene, there's no way you can do a biography, a fitting biography of Nathan Bedford Forrest in 40 Minutes of Talk Radio.
We're encumbered by commercials.
We have a listener in Texas tonight that says it is a shame that when C-SPAN or the History Channel does a program on Forrest, that you are not the one that they call upon.
And I agree with our listener in Texas 100% on that.
But we're all the way up.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, that's to say the least.
Stay Texas.
You know, I was looking at the, we haven't announced the schedule yet for Confederate History Month, but I'm looking at all the guests that we have.
Just about all the Confederacy will be covered.
We had Kirk Lyons from North Carolina in the second hour tonight.
Of course, you here from Tennessee, our home state.
Many more to come in the weeks to come.
But we're all the way up in the Forrest biography, and we have 10 minutes remaining.
So 10 minutes remaining.
Keep that in mind.
Really about nine minutes remaining.
We're all the way to Shiloh.
Now, one of the greatest things I liken Nathan Bedford Forrest's real life to that of a mythological god because, well, it really was just about as incredible as any of the myths that you hear about these false gods.
Nathan Bedford Forrest's real life was just about on that level.
The retreat from Shiloh, the Battle of Fallen Timbers.
Now, that was something that our audience needs to know about.
Tell us about Forrest's exploits there, and then we'll get into the post-wrap up Shiloh itself.
Now, that night, Forrest and some of his men used captured Federal uniforms and snuck in along the riverbank.
And they saw that Buell's army from Nashville was being ferried across the river to reinforce Grant's army that was just battered and beaten into almost submission.
He goes to the Confederate commanders and says, we need to finish the job.
Said, we drove them from the field today.
They're totally disorganized, but they're getting reinforcements.
And we need to finish them off because they're going to get reinforcements and they're going to outnumber us tomorrow.
They refused to listen to him.
And sure enough, the next day, here came the Federal Army, counterattacked against the Confederates, drove them from the field.
And then Forrest and his cavalry were assigned the rear guard detail to cover the Confederate retreat back down towards Corinth, Mississippi.
And he noticed that the Federals were getting a little too close to the Confederate retreat.
And it was actually Sherman's regiment that this was one of the quite a few times that Forrest and Sherman ran into each other during the course of the war.
So he ordered his cavalry to charge this Federal regiment that was getting too close to him.
And they drove their skirmishers in, drove them back over a hill, and drove them into an area that had been cut for timber for iron furnaces in that area.
And there was a lot of second-growth timber in there.
And that was where the Battle of Fallen Timbers took place.
And so when they drove the skirmishers back in and the Confederate cavalry came roaring over this hill, here was this entire infantry regiment in line of battle lined up across the road on either side of it.
So most of Forrest's men reined in their horses.
They said, whoa, we're a little bit outnumbered here.
Forrest never slowed down.
He rode right through the Federal line and right in behind them.
Then all of a sudden they turned around.
They're starting to shoot at him, shooting his horse, hollering, knock him off the horse, get him, and went after him.
He was shooting at him with a pistol, slashing at him with a saber.
He got shot in the hip.
But he was able to get back to Confederate lines.
The horse died, and he spent several weeks recuperating from that wound that he got there at Fallen Timbers.
Now, the reason we went into a little bit more detail on Shiloh and a couple of the other battles that he fought early in the war and on through the war, Forrest had a natural grasp of tactics.
If you remember at Fort Donaldson, he said, we can escape.
We can get out of here.
We don't have to stay here and surrender 15,000 men to the Federal Army.
Had they escaped, what would the outcome of the Battle of Shiloh have been with an extra 15,000 Confederates to push that attack on the first day?
At Shiloh, he said, we need to finish the job.
The Federals are getting reinforcements tonight.
They'll outnumber us the next day.
Sure enough, they outnumbered the Confederates, drove them from the field the next day.
When he was at Chickamauga and the Confederates routed Rosecrans' army off the field at Chickamauga, drove them back over Missionary Ridge and into Chattanooga, Forrest was up on Missionary Ridge, saw the disorganization in the Federal Army.
He was trying and trying and trying to get Bragg to finish the job that they'd started on the battlefield at Chickamauga.
Nothing happened.
The Federals were reinforced.
And as we know, then Bragg's army was driven away from Chattanooga, and that opened the campaign to Atlanta.
And then once again, Forrest was transferred to Mississippi after he had a falling out with Bragg, given command in 1864, the Confederate cavalry in Mississippi.
He thought, and he correctly understood, that his job would be to get into Middle Tennessee and cut the Nashville and Decatur Railroad and the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad and leave Sherman stuck in North Georgia with no supplies.
They couldn't use the Tennessee River for supplies in the summertime because of Muscle Shoals and Alabama.
Couldn't get enough heavy steamboats over that to get supplies.
So they had to rely on the railroad.
And Forrest knew that if he got in there and cut the railroad, Sherman would be stuck in North Georgia, just like Napoleon was stuck in Russia when his supply lines were cut.
So the point I'm trying to make is that Forrest had a grasp of the overall situation of the war, and he knew what needed to be done.
Unfortunately, the Confederate government didn't have the same overall grasp of the strategy of the war that Forrest had.
And even though Forrest was not trained at West Point or the Citadel or VMI or Tennessee Military Institute or any of the military schools, he was just a natural-born genius when it came to understanding tactics and strategy and combat.
And he didn't lose his head in combat either.
He could make adjustments, which a lot of generals couldn't do.
They could plan out great battles and train armies, but once that first shot was fired, their battle plan went right out the window.
But Forrest, if something didn't work out, he made adjustments and moved this unit over here and this unit over here.
Okay, we're not going to do it that way.
We're going to do it this way.
So I think that was the genius of Forrest, was to grasp the overall strategy that the Confederacy needed to fight.
The Confederacy couldn't fight these huge bloodbaths like Gettysburg or Chickamauga or Sharpsburg or Shiloh.
We did not have the manpower.
And the South was just literally, after four years, bled dry, and we couldn't get replacements.
We weren't getting the Irish and German immigrants coming over here to fill up the ranks like the U.S. Army was.
So we could win battles, but we couldn't replace the losses.
And Forrest understood that.
He knew that to win our independence, we were going to have to make it almost impossible for the Federal Army to maintain a presence in the South.
It was just, it would cost them too many men to guard every mile of railroad track, every bridge, every trestle, every supply depot, and make them pay for that and finally withdraw and get out of the South.
And as we said earlier, a lot of historians have said that if Sherman had been cut off in North Georgia and couldn't take Atlanta in September as he did, then Lincoln probably would not have been reelected and we would have won our independence.
Ladies and gentlemen, it is we're out of time this hour.
We had intended to cover, in a nutshell, the life of Forrest.
We've made it all the way to Shiloh, maybe a little bit beyond that.
But no, Gene, I mean, you did a fantastic job, my brother.
And I'm so thankful.
I wish we could have had you for the entire three hours tonight, but I am so thankful you'll be back with us next week to talk about the lies that have been told about Nathan Benford Forrest.
There, we will talk a little bit more about his incident at Fort Pillow and then some.
But the military exploits so much, the fallen timbers at Shiloh, the Battle of Bryce's Crossroads, so many times he outmaneuvered and outthought the enemy.
And he really personified the definition of what a man's man is.
Forrest was a man's man.
What happened to the nation that used to produce men like that when you compared the character and the heroism and the sacrifice embodied by General Forrest to that which can be found in today's business and political heavyweights?
They don't even begin to match up.
But he makes me proud to be a Memphian, proud to be a Southerner, proud to be a Tennessean as you are, Gene.
Final word to you.
Well, we produce snowflakes today, unfortunately.
That's about all we come up with today.
Well, we're out of time, ladies and gentlemen.
Listen, Forrest had an incredible life past Shiloh and through the post-war years.
We'll talk more about Forrest next week when Gene Andrews returns, as well as Michael Hill next week, Confederate History Month, week two, next week.