April 5, 2025 - The Political Cesspool - James Edwards
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You're listening to the Liberty News Radio Network, and this is the Political Cesspool.
The Political Cesspool, known across the South and worldwide as the South's foremost populist conservative radio program.
And here to guide you through the murky waters of the Political Cesspool is your host, James Edwards.
15 years after the Mexican War, many of those same West Point officers would answer the call of duty once again.
Political differences so divided our nation that a war between the states was inevitable.
Brother against brother, North against South.
One of the greatest military geniuses of all times had no formal training, yet he rose from the rank of a private to lieutenant general.
His name was Nathan Bedford Forrest.
That devil Forrest must be hunted down and killed if it cost 10,000 lives and bankrupts the federal treasury.
Well, ladies and gentlemen, you know, every year we do a showcase on the Confederacy, the cause itself, and many individuals associated with it, but always one we be sure to do, and that is Nathan Bedford Forrest, and for good reason.
And to help us do that once again tonight is Gene Andrews.
And, you know, Gene, over the years that you've been appearing on our Confederate History Month programming here on TPC, we have we have had you give biographical information about Forrest the man, his life before and outside the war, the war, beyond the war, after the war.
We have, of course, keyed in on Forrest the general, the tactician, and all of that it entails to the extent that we can, because I mean, there have been so many books written about Forrest.
I mean, you could never do a thorough job in the confines of commercial talk radio.
But then also, of course, your specialty, Fort Pillow.
We have zeroed in on that with great detail before.
And I would encourage you folks, if Nathan Bedford Forrest is a historical figure that interests you, and surely he is, go back to our broadcast archives at thepoliticalspool.org and just type in the name Gene Andrews.
And because a lot of these interviews are evergreen.
I mean, we could play them tonight and it would be just as good as it was the first time because not much has changed with that history.
But we're going to be doing something a little bit different tonight, Gene.
We always introduce you as the caretaker of the Nathan Bedford Forrest Boyhood Home, but we haven't really talked a lot about the home, its history, your job there, and some exciting things that are happening.
And that's what we're going to do tonight.
And I thank you, Gene, for once again making yourself available for this series.
I'd never want to do it without you.
Well, James, thank you very much.
I certainly appreciate that.
And I certainly appreciate what you do.
And a lot of our southern, well, radio people like Eddie and authors like Mike Grissom and Donnie and Ronnie Kennedy in the books.
We're trying to correct the lies and misinformation that are put out there about the South and about our Southern heroes.
And, you know, they say the winners write the history books.
And a lot of times the winning version is nothing but a pack of lies covering up what they did to a lot of times start a war.
So it's great to have an outlet that we can get to people and say, no, what we've been taught in school, and I include myself in that, a lot of that was just propaganda.
And here's the factual information.
And we have the opportunity with the Nathan Bedford Forest Boyhood Home down at Chapel Hill, Tennessee, which is about 40 miles south of Nashville.
And that property is owned by the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
So it's private property, and we don't have to worry about all the work that we've put in there since 1997.
Well, actually, I started going down there before 1997 and working on the place.
That we don't have to worry about some goofball mayor or some politically correct, woke city council destroying everything that's been put out there.
So that is an advantage right there.
And when we give tours, we give the factual information on General Forrest.
We don't hide anything.
We don't give the CNN version of it or something that would be on the view or something like that.
We tell the truth.
And that's why a lot of people come out there to the Forest home.
They want to hear the truth.
And you're not going to get it on national TV news, ABC, NBC, or any of those, or some of the cable outlets.
So it's great, James, that you have the nerve to stand up and actually present our Southern Confederate history.
And we're very grateful to you for that.
It's an honor to do it, but it's even more of an honor to have men like you on that I can learn from and share with the audience.
I mean, this is just always just such a special time.
And thank you.
I mean, to receive that praise from someone like you who I have such a great deal of respect for and look up to.
We've had a lot of good times together, Gene, at our conferences, at TPC conferences, you leading that tour of Fort Pillow that we had a couple of years ago.
We chartered the bus, and we had a lot of friends and supporters of this program take that trip with us.
I mean, precious memories over the years with you.
And again, folks, we're doing it a little bit different tonight.
But please do check out the broadcast archives to learn more about Forrest's life, his military successes, Fort Pillow, where Gene sets the record straight about what did and did not happen there and the cause for Forrest being there.
It's all in our broadcast archives.
But tonight, we are going to talk with Gene Andrews about the Nathan Bedford Forest Boyhood Home.
Now, people don't know this yet, but I'll tell them.
Coming up soon, and the next issue of, I believe, the Barnes Review is where they decided to place it, Gene.
Oh, man, that's great.
We submitted a Q ⁇ A with Gene about exclusively about the Forrest Boyhood Home.
And I want to share some of that with you tonight, folks, or rather have Gene share it with you.
So, Gene, we're just going to kind of go down this print interview that we submitted a few days ago and let the people know more about not just this place, but some of the things that are happening there and some of the things that have happened there and how as some of our monuments are being torn down or have been torn down, you're building something for the future there, actual new construction that we can celebrate in.
So, let's first start just at the very beginning.
Give us the history of the Nathan Bedford Forest Boyhood Home in Chapel Hill, Tennessee, and how he came to live there.
Thank you, sir.
Well, this land at one time was a Revolutionary War land grant.
And after our first war for independence, our second war for independence being in 1861, I think most of our listeners understand that.
But our first war, the Continental Congress didn't have any money to pay the soldiers after the war, and France wasn't going to loan us any more money.
So they would give them land in the Western Territories, and then the soldiers could sell it off and make back their money for service in the Continental Army.
And at that time, Tennessee wasn't a state.
It was a Western landholding of North Carolina.
And later on, a Lieutenant Weakly got this property here in Middle Tennessee, and it was divided up.
And the particular track that we're talking about was sold to William and Sally Mayfield.
And they built a two-story cedar log cabin on this property in 1825.
And that's the Forrest Boyhood home today.
So our home there that we've been taking care of and restoring, it's celebrating its 200th birthday this year.
So in 1821, though, over in the town of Chapel Hill, which at that time was in Bedford County.
It's Marshall County today, but Marshall County was part of Bedford County was split off, part of Murray County, and they made Marshall County.
But back then it was Bedford County.
A young man and his twin sister were born to William and Miriam Beck Forrest in Chapel Hill in July of 1821.
And he was named Nathan after his grandfather in Bedford for the county he was born in.
And we've had a lot of people that have come to the Forest home.
They said, well, did they name Bedford County after Bedford Forest?
I said, no, no, it was the other way around.
It was the county he was born in back then.
The chicken or the egg, G, the chicken or the egg.
There you go.
This is a mean chicken when he went in the military.
I'll tell you that.
But anyway, when he was nine years old, his father bought this house and 81 acres from the Mayfields and moved the family out there.
And the house, it's, as I understand it, it's the only house that Forrest lived in that's still on the original location.
And I think there was a cabin that he lived in down in northern Mississippi that either was moved or had a modern house built around it.
But this is the original house restored to what we think it looked like in the 1830s when the Forrest family lived there.
And then in 1833, they only lived there for three years.
In 1833, his grandfather Nathan, that he was named for, had gone down to northern Mississippi for the Chickasaw land purchase.
They'd moved the Chickasaws out to what is today Oklahoma as the Indian Nations back then.
And he sent word back that there's a lot of cheap land for settlement down there.
And he also said there's not all the rock around there like we have in Middle Tennessee.
And I think when they heard no rock, they were gone by sundown the next day.
We've got a lot of rock walls and big rock slabs and sinkholes.
So anyway, the house went through several different family owners and actually had people living in it up through the early 1960s.
And it never had electricity or running water.
They had wood-burning stoves as a hand-dug well about 60 or 70 yards away from the house.
And then it was just used for storage on this farm.
And then in 1972, the state of Tennessee bought the house and 49 acres.
And they were going to fix it up as a little satellite park of Henry Horton State Park, which is just a few miles down the road from the Forest home and Chapel Hill, Tennessee.
And they actually started working on it.
They did some repair work on the chimneys and the foundation.
But then political correctness reared its ugly head, and our offended hyphen Americans in the state legislature didn't want to spend any money on anything Confederate.
Now we have to spend our tax money on their history and their holy grail, but we can't spend anybody else's money on Confederate.
So the project was just abandoned.
And when I first started going down there in the early 1990s, I joined the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and we had an elderly gentleman in our camp, Doc MacArthur, asked me one time, he said, would you like to go see Bedford Forest home?
And I said, is the Pope Catholic?
Heck yeah, I want to go see it.
So he put me down there.
He took me down there one Saturday morning.
And I tell you what, the house was in really bad shape.
And we have a driveway up to it now.
And we had it fixed up.
But back then, you had to park out on the paved road and walk about a half mile back through these fields.
And there were cattle out there grazing in the field.
But when I came over this little rise and saw this wooden, dilapidated house there and knew it was Forrest's home, I mean, I got cold chills up and down my back to walk into a house and on the ground where Forrest had been.
In even as bad a shape as the house was in, that was quite a morning and quite an emotional experience right there.
So then in 1997, We had two of our state representatives, May Beavers, that used to be her house district, and Steve McDaniel from over on your side of the state in West Coast.
Both of them good people.
They were both good people.
Outstanding, outstanding.
And they went to the Parks Department and said, well, look, if you're just going to let it fall down, why don't you give it to a nonprofit group that'll at least take care of it?
We get it off the books and we don't have the liability anymore.
So in 1997, they gave it to the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
And the SCV and a lot of volunteers and our organizations and people that are not even in the SCV have come out there and helped work on it to rebuild the house and the old barn.
The barn out there, like I said, the house was built in 1825, but the barn is probably six months to a year older than the house because that's what you would do back then.
You would get your neighbors and friends together and family and put a barn up relatively quickly and then live in that and take your time to build a nicer house.
And if it protected your livestock, and if your livestock died, then you're probably going to be next.
So had to take care of them.
And the logs in the barn are cedar logs.
They're 35 feet long and 20 feet across.
They are original.
Now, we did replace the tin roof on the barn and rebuilt the corn crib and some things like that.
And we've done that on the house.
When I first started going down there, the tin roof had blown back and water was pouring in.
And a lot of the chinking had come out from between the logs.
Wasps and birds are just zooming in and out of the house like they were coming in out of National Airport somewhere.
And so it's taken a lot of work and a lot of time to try to put it back into shape where it looked like there are people living in there.
And we've had a lot of people that have stepped up.
This is a gentleman, Elton Winsel, that lives just a couple of miles up the road.
And he's done a lot of the restoration work on the home and did the work on restoring the barn.
And, you know, there's a lot of things we've had to battle through out there.
We started working on the barn.
This wasn't real smart in January.
So they brought these big railroad jacks out there and took all the junk wood and mess away from the side of the barn, got the logs jacked up, and then dug out the corners about three or four feet deep.
And we're going to pour concrete in there and then lower it back down on big rocks.
Well, we got it dug out and then here came the rain.
So we'd have to go out there with the buckets on a rope and throw it down in there and get the water out.
And we'd say, well, now if it'll just dry out for a couple of days, then we can pour concrete.
Well, about the second day, boom, here it came.
Another storm filled up the hole with water.
So after about three tries of that, we finally got the concrete poured, pushed great big rocks under the corner and lowered it back down on there.
So it hadn't been an easy job for some of these projects, I'll tell you, James, but we've kept after it.
Now, the other big project that you had mentioned that we're working on right now, we are in the process of building a visitor center out there, which would be about 5,000 square feet.
And what we want to do is have that where we can have the home open on a regular basis, five or six days a week, same hours every day, and have a lot of events scheduled out there and do a lot more advertising for it to get a lot more tourists coming in there.
Although we have a lot of people that come by there.
They call the Sons of Confederate Veterans National Headquarters over in Columbia and ask if they can come to the forest home, and then they give them my phone number, and we set up a day for them to come out there.
Or I'm just working out.
Anytime I work out there, and I live in Nashville, and like I said, it's about 40 miles down there.
If I'm working there, I leave the front gate open.
And it's amazing how many people see the gate open and just come up the driveway.
Oh, we do have a driveway now.
You don't have to walk across the fields.
You've got more than that, my friend.
You have you and the others, but primarily you, let's be real.
You have built a sure enough tourist attraction now.
The house looks beautiful.
It is immaculate.
It is striking.
The grounds are so well kept, it looks like a state park.
Even better than that, it looks like a Disney theme park, really, because I mean, they just have gardeners out there all the time.
And then, of course, you know, something that when I saw it for the first time, I just got chills from head to toe.
This beautiful marble or stone engraving there on the gate at the front entrance to the property.
And there's an engraving there that reads, he rode from here into the legend of the land.
And again, we're talking about one of the most remarkable warriors in the history of Western civilization, Nathan Bedford Forrest.
And in this small little hamlet about 40 miles south of Nashville, Tennessee, you can visit it.
Now, we'll give you more information about that, but I just want to say again, Gene Andrews is the caretaker.
He works there year-round, year-round.
Gene is there, and his duties involve a little bit of everything.
You're still maintaining, well, I think there's still about 60 acres on the site.
But a lot of it's wooded, a lot of it's rocky, sinkholes, things like that.
But you maintain about 18 acres that are mowed and kept and the monuments and the house itself.
And the house has a little visitors, excuse me, a little gift shop in it now.
You can go in there, but you are working on a visitors center because people want to come.
People want to come and they can come.
And you're building something that will allow for meetings, weddings, other special events.
It is in the process of being constructed as we speak.
About how far along are you, Gene, in that process?
Well, we poured the concrete slab, got that, and of course stubbed off all the plumbing for the restrooms and kitchen and everything like that.
And our next project is put a roof on the long end of the building.
It's going to have a big room there, a meeting room area that's going to be 30 feet by 70 feet and going to have these wooden trusses and it'll be all open underneath there.
And what we're planning on doing, and we're pretty close to getting our finances ready to go on that, is put the roof on.
Well, put the trusses up, the interior roof, then the exterior roof on top of that, and leave it open for a while and have it just like a picnic pavilion at a state park or something.
And hopefully that end of the building will help finish paying for the other end of the building that would have like a storage room, an office, a gift shop, and something we're doing a little bit different.
One wing of the building, we're not going to have another museum.
Everybody's got a museum with rusty swords and pistols.
And in this area, display area, we're going to have 16 of these three by three cases with a three-dimensional contour map in there for 16 of the battles and campaigns that General Forrest fought in.
So you can start at one corner with Sacramento, Kentucky in December of 1861 and come around to Fort Donaldson, Shiloh, Bryce's Crossroads, Johnsonville, and wind up at the other end of the room with Selma, Alabama in April of 1865.
So we hope we can do a little bit more about the information about Forrest and just show the different types of combat he was in.
He wasn't just a raider behind enemy lines.
He fought in regular pitched battles, Fort Donaldson, Shiloh, Chickamauga.
Sure.
And then, of course, his classic battle was down at Bryce's Crossroads in Mississippi that's still studied today.
And they say that was the first tank battle in military history.
And you go, wait a minute, Andrews, tanks didn't come along until World War I in 1914.
But what Forrest did in his artillery, they would load these cannons with double loads of canister, which make it like a giant shotgun, roll these cannons up to about within 100 yards or sometimes even 50 yards of the federal lines and just blast holes right through the federal lines.
And then the dismounted cavalry would come in right behind this artillery shot.
And basically, that's what a tank does.
It's just an artillery piece mounted on tracks, and it clanks along and blows a hole in the enemy lines, and then the infantry comes through behind it.
So that's what Forrest and his artillery officers, like John Morton and Captain Rice, did at Bryce's Crossroads in 1864.
And that was a battle that they say is studied in military schools all over the world today because he took 3,800 men and defeated an army of over 8,000.
Not only defeated them, but he routed them off the field, captured 20 of their 22 pieces of artillery, and captured all 250 wagons that they were using to rob the civilians all the way across northern Mississippi.
So that was, that was, but that's typical of the type of fighting that Forrest did.
And he, I think, with my limited experience in the military, it was only three years in the Marine Corps.
But as an officer, I could see now what a brilliant strategist he was.
He was on the field with his men, and he didn't sit 20 miles back in a headquarters tent somewhere and send orders up and down.
Now, he did plan out every operation they went on.
He had his scouts go in behind enemy lines and find out where the strong points were, where the bridges were intact across streams, where there was a ford to get across if the bridges had been destroyed, where friendly civilians were, anything like that.
So when he left on a raid, before they took one step out of the camp, they knew exactly where they were going, what their objective was, where the enemy was, and how long it was going to take, approximately.
And then the thing I think was so great about Forrest was when he got into a battle, and they always told us in the military school there, the officer school at Quantico, Virginia for the Marines, said, your battle plans go out the window as soon as the first shot's fired.
So forget about your plan.
You better be able to adjust on the field.
And that's what I think Forrest did more than anybody in the war.
He could adjust under fire all the distractions and all the panic and pressure and everything while this battle was going on.
Very calm, like he was playing a chess game almost.
He said, okay.
And the thing that makes it so remarkable, Gene, I mean, it would be remarkable under any circumstances, but the fact that this guy had no military training whatsoever when he enlisted and became this guy, with a lowercase G, that is God-like.
That is mythological.
It is.
And just somebody with that much common sense and determination.
But I think one of the great things about Forrest, he knew what he didn't know.
And he knew that he needed other people to help him with this.
He had volunteered for Mississippi militia and went to Texas to fight in the war for Texas independence.
Never did get in a battle down there.
When he got down there, they said, well, we don't need you anymore.
And they were stuck with no money to get back home.
And so he had to work for six months in East Texas, splitting logs for 50 cents 100 to earn enough money to get a steamboat back up the river and get back to Mississippi.
So anyway, but that was his only military experience.
But nothing in command.
So he didn't go to West Point or VMI or the Citadel or anything like that.
But he just had a tremendous amount of common sense.
And like I said, he knew what he didn't know.
So he got on his staff a friend of his from Memphis that ran a hotel.
So when they would go on a raid, they would say, okay, we're going on this raid.
It's going to be three weeks.
We've got 3,000 men.
How much food do we need to carry to feed those people?
3,000 for three weeks.
Okay, you take care of it.
He had another friend that ran a livery stable in Memphis, which is where he was living before the war.
And so he told him, okay, we're going on a raid.
We've got 3,000 men.
That means we're going to have about 5,000 horses.
And we're going to hold it on for three weeks.
Hold on right there, Jeff.
The exports of forest.
If we did every hour with Gene in the month of April, we wouldn't come close to covering it all.
Thankfully, we got a lot of hours in the archives, though.
Talking about Forest with Gene Andrews, the caretaker of his boyhood home.
Stay tuned more on that next.
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On the day after the Battle of Shiloh, the rebels were falling back real slow.
And old William the Constitution with three negatives of men bought him my jack old rebels once again.
You know he wants to fight, and he's about to get one.
There's one man who stood in Sherman's way.
He said, Yankee, this just ain't your day.
One night than that frost, 300 by his side.
He said, boys, it's time to ride.
Come live, ride with the devil, for your sins making you pain.
Come live, ride with the devil.
The devil is burning your way.
Talk about Bryce's crossroads.
All of his exploits were worthy of an hour of radio.
Every battle that he was in, he did something remarkable.
And the retreat at Shiloh, Fallen Timbers, I mean, you just heard right there, three brigades versus 300 men.
And somehow he came out ahead.
This was just an absolute military genius.
And he was just so much more than that.
I mean, we talk about the fact that he was exempt from even serving in the war because he was a self-made millionaire, despite being born into poverty and having no formal education.
He was exempt, but not only did he choose to fight, he chose to enlist as a soldier of the lowest rank.
You know, no sitting back in the general's tent for him.
He was out there on the front lines, no matter what his rank was.
And then his studies, his maneuvers are still studied today.
He killed 30 enemy combatants.
I mean, if you're killing people at a 30 to zero ratio because he lived, we needed a few more of that.
But, Gene, all of that is in the archives.
We talk about a lot of these things.
I want to talk as quickly as we can because I got a lot of questions for you a little bit more about the home.
Folks, if you want to visit the home where, as a boy, Nathan Bedford Forrest lived, you can do that by appointment and hopefully soon by regular hours.
But we have actually set up some tours for Gene.
Warren Baylog and his father, Alan, have visited the property, and they just gushed about what a wonderful day it was there at the property with Gene giving them the history.
Dissident Mama has been there with her family and some others.
And of course, we've been there.
And we know a lot of people that have been there, but a couple of those we set up.
But Gene, you're the jack of all trades there at the Forest Home.
You are the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end for people who want to make contact.
And you take care of it all.
I mean, you don't just serve in an administrative capacity.
You paint the trim, you repair the logs, you kill the bugs, all limbs, you do it all.
I mean, whatever it takes, you do it.
But there are some exciting things going on.
Don't leave out cleaning toilets.
That was four years of college for that.
That's part of it.
That was the real small print on the job description.
They didn't tell me about that one.
Well, I'll tell you what, they're good toilets.
I mean, this whole thing, I mean, this is a house that if you visited it, you would pay a million dollars to buy it.
It is a beautiful house and a beautiful land.
I'm telling you, folks, you won't be disappointed if you can get up there.
But let's talk about something that happened more recently, and then I want to talk about something that's happening right now and will be happening in the future when you get this visitors' center finished.
And that is what happened a couple of years ago.
We're not going to go into the history.
This is another thing that's been covered in the broadcast archives about Forrest and Mrs. Forrest, General and Mrs. Forrest, being reinterred from Memphis and then buried again in Columbia, Tennessee.
But before they were laid to rest at the Sons of Confederate Veterans Museum there in Columbia, their headquarters, they laid in state at the boyhood home.
Gene Andrews was a pallbearer for the casket that contained the earthly remains of General Forrest.
Gene, what was that like?
Very, very emotional, and I'm not ashamed to admit that.
They brought the Hearsts up the road there or stopped at the front gate, actually, and we had a cavalry reenactment unit, 26 cavalrymen, came up the driveway that five-tenths of a mile from the road up the driveway.
And out in front, they had the riderless horse with the boots turned around and the stirrups, you know, like you have for a military funeral.
And then they stopped, oh, about 30 yards from the house, and they would bring each casket up about 10 yards and set it on one of those portable gurneys.
And another six reenactors could carry it about 10 yards and set it down.
And the group we had made the last trip from out in front of the rock wall in front of the house up to the porch to bring the caskets inside to where they were going to be on display.
And just thinking about walking with that casket and holding it, and about eight inches away from me or 10 inches, eight inches away from me was my hero, all-time military hero.
Bedford Forrest was about eight inches away from me.
And that was a very, very emotional experience because I started thinking about all the times I've been stung by a wasp out there, fell off the roof, splitting out rocks with a sledgehammer, a big shiver comes off and hits you in the shin, cutting trees up, and a limb flies back and hits you in the eye, knocks your contact lens out.
I've lost two or three contact lenses out there.
I don't know if they went to hell or Texas or what happened to them.
But anyway, you get hit in the eye with a tree limb.
And, you know, just all the things, just, you know, being sunburned in the summer and frozen in the winter.
But every bit of that was worth that five or ten minutes it took to carry that casket up to the house.
And just being so humbled and so honored to be asked to be a part of that and be that close to Forest.
And then we had it set up in one of the rooms there that had two doors open, front and back, where people could come in and view the casket.
We had an honor guard.
We had flags, Confederate flags on the two caskets, and then got to carry Mrs. Forest, Mary Ann Montgomery Forest casket as well.
And so they were there all day.
And we had people from all over the country, Hawaii, from Canada.
We had just a guest book.
We asked people, did you just give us their name in their hometown?
We didn't ask for a phone number or anything like that.
We weren't going to bother them or anything.
But we had, like I said, people from all over the country, mostly from the Mid-South or Southeast, but there were people from the West Coast, from Alaska.
We had Forest family members that were there, descendants that were there.
And it was a real honor to meet them and show them what we had done.
Most of them had never been to the Forest Home before.
And they'd come from all over the country to be there for this event this weekend, but they'd never been to the Forest home and never seen it.
So we were really glad to show them what we had done with the property out there.
That was back in 2021, the summer of 2021 is when that reinterment took place.
And he and his wife were once again laid to rest in Columbia, just a few minutes down the road from the boyhood home.
But there was a day that he laid in the state the day before.
And I had the chance to be there with my wife and kids.
And I can remember, I mean, it was just like any other funeral you would ever go to, ladies and gentlemen.
You know, you get to pay your respects in front of the casket.
And I was, like Gene said, just a foot away from the casket.
And I stood there with my kids, and I looked at them.
It was emotional.
And we said, never forget this day.
Never forget that we did this, that you did this, that you were here.
And I'll never have an opportunity to do that again in my life.
And hopefully they'll never have to move the two caskets from private property that's owned by the sons of Confederate veterans over there in Columbia, where the SCV headquarters is located.
So that was amazing.
You know, God works in mysterious ways when they moved.
Tell us where you're going with this.
I know where you're going with this.
And before you tell us, I just want to say very quickly, I know that there were, I want to, it was a great day.
Some of the people who were there are no longer with us.
Thankfully, Rich and Janice Hamblin are there.
Buddy and Patsy Kirtland were there.
Buddy has gone on to his statement.
And they were great supporters of the Forest College.
And Buddy and no, but when they removed, broke five felony laws and removed the Forest equestrian statue from the gravesite at Forest Park in Memphis.
I was so angry, I swore that I would never spend another dime in Memphis again.
But like I said, God works in mysterious ways.
That's the best thing that could have happened.
If that statue had been there in 20, what was it, 2020 when all the George Floyd riots were going on and monuments were being torn down all over the country, the wild animals would have attacked that statue and there'd been nothing left of it.
But as you can see, what happened?
If there's a confusion about the timeline, so he was reinterred in 2021.
But what happened was it was in December of 2019 where the city of Memphis, in violation of all these laws that Gene just mentioned, they came in right before Christmas in 2019.
They came in at around at midnight, almost midnight, with cranes and just took the beautiful equestrian monument that topped the tomb away.
And at that point, it was a long legal wrangling, but the monument had already been removed.
And, you know, sometime after, the graves were exhumed and moved.
But yet, you are right.
After that came the summer of George Floyd.
So before the funeral, but after the chain of events was set into motion.
And yes, had that monument still been there, it would have absolutely, which is, I think, the most magnificent equestrian monument that has ever been cast, is breathtakingly beautiful.
And it would have been destroyed.
The Forrest family and their lawyers and lawyers from the Sons of Confederate Veterans filed suit against the city of Memphis, the mayor and the alderman and people, because for several things.
First of all, they desecrated.
They sold this property at Forrest Park to a fake nonprofit group for about a fraction of what it was worth.
And then they said, okay, we won't send you to jail if you give us a statue and the two bodies.
And that's how the deal was worked out.
But the monument had been moved before the summer of Floyd, so it was preserved.
And then now General and Mrs. Forrest works again.
Rest in peace, not far from where he lived as a boy.
We'll be right back.
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I don't care if I'm in a box or not when they leave me down.
Just bury me in Southern Ground.
An appropriate song for this hour, if ever there were one.
And we are talking again about Nathan Bedford Forrest.
We're talking about the Forrest Boyhood home, but also some of the things that have happened there and the reinterment of General Forrest in 2021 and of his wife and Gene being able to sort of oversee that day where they laid in state at the boyhood home.
And Gene was a pallbearer and I and others, many others, got to come and stand right there and pay our respects to the man who fought for us and fought for our future, Nathan Bedford Forrest.
And Gene, as you say, it's a terrible thing.
It's ghoulish to have to dig up the dead.
And that's just the state of affairs when you live in a third world place or when you were buried in a third world place like Memphis.
Of course, when Nathan Bedford Forrest was alive, Memphis was a very different thing.
And at that first funeral procession.
That's a beautiful city.
Yeah.
And that was a beautiful park.
It was on the outskirts of town, but not anywhere.
Oh, yeah, Memphis was great until, you know, very, you know, just the last couple of decades.
You know, maybe going back to the 60s and 70s.
But, I mean, Memphis was a beautiful city well until the 20th century.
But that first funeral procession for Forrest, I mean, how many people showed up for that first funeral?
They estimated the crowd at about 20,000, and about 3,000 of that 20,000 were blacks that he had worked with after the war.
He not only tried to help out his family and the widows and orphans of his soldiers, but he tried to help blacks after the war because they were free, but their plantation homes had been destroyed.
Their homes had been destroyed.
There was no way to get any food, no way to get any work.
So what were they going to do?
So one of his projects was building that Memphis, Marion, and Selma Railroad.
He hired blacks to work on the railroad, and he paid the blacks the same wages he was paying the whites, which caused a real uproar because back in that day, you didn't do that.
But he said, hey, they're doing the same work as whites.
They're going to get the same money as whites.
And for all the people that talk about how terrible Forrest was, he was one of the first leaders in Memphis area, the Mid-South, to step up and say, well, we're going to pay the blacks the same thing we pay the whites.
And you mentioned uproar, and this is a fact.
So Nathan Bedford Forrest has been buried more times than most people.
He was originally buried at Elmwood Cemetery, which is just this ornate.
It's a tourist attraction in itself.
Elmwood Cemetery is where he was originally buried.
And then they reinterred him a couple of years later after his initial death and put him at this place of honor at Forrest Park in downtown Memphis.
And so there was another procession and another ceremony that drew huge crowds.
And actually, at that reburial, the second reburial, the third one, you were the ball bear.
But the second one, one of his former slaves was there.
And it was an elderly, feeble black man by the time, but he had a chicken in one hand and a skillet in the other.
And the crowd roared.
The crowd roared.
And there was a time in the March where he couldn't continue to walk.
And they set him at the position of honor in a horse-drawn carriage.
And anyway, so, but of course, as you say, Gene, stuff like that doesn't ever really get roll off the tongue when people are talking about Forest history.
But let me move forward to this.
And that is where we are now with this home.
Gene helped us with our first quarter fundraising drive.
We had some nice incentive gifts that included some greeting cards with the Forest Home, a photo of it, and also some bumper stickers.
Those have not been sent out yet.
We will have an update on that next week.
We do have them in stock.
They are going to be going out.
There's a reason they haven't gone out yet.
We're going to mail them all out to people who donated very soon.
We normally send them out.
Well, I'll just tell you why we haven't yet, because the other part of the fundraising incentive was Philip DeWinter's book, and they've been seized by U.S. Customs.
They have been sitting in New York since March the 6th, and they will not send them to me, and they will not return them to Philip.
So we must be telling the truth then.
We know how it's just a terrible.
Oh, it's just terrible because I try to operate efficiently.
I do what I say.
I say what I do.
And we have not been able to fulfill these orders because customs seized these books from Belgium.
This is a sitting member of the Belgian parliament.
He's the vice president of the Belgian parliament.
And his books, not only will they not let them come through, they won't even send them back.
They're just sitting there at great expense.
Anyway, I'll give you a full update on that.
I didn't even mean to mention that in this segment.
That's why we haven't mailed things out yet.
But we do have Gene's part of the fundraising package, and we've been waiting on these books.
And Philip has even assigned his secretary to deal with this, and she can't get anywhere.
I mean, it is just incredible what we're all put through constantly.
Anything that the system can do to be of disruption, they do it, and they do it without fail.
Every time I don't care what it is.
But Gene, the good news is, but if you did donate in the first quarter, you are helping the Forest Boyhood home, and you're helping us, and we will get something to you very soon.
That's why you haven't received it yet.
Gene, we appreciate your help.
We really do.
And every dollar helps.
You know, it's $3.85 for a gallon of diesel for the tractor.
So, hey, that's great.
Send in $385.
At least we get a gallon of diesel.
You will.
Hey, listen, $385 helps, okay?
You just heard it.
And if you go to our website on Monday, thepoliticalsalespool.org, we're going to have a full information on how you can donate to the Nathan Bedford Forest Boyhood Home and help them finish this brand new visitor center.
Now, Gene, if I'm not mistaken, don't you already have weddings there?
But you're going to have a full-on event center where you can do more things.
Yes, exactly.
We've had six weddings out there.
And a lot of times the ladies like to dress up in the antebellum dresses and the gentlemen in the Confederate uniforms.
And then they have to rent a big tent for a reception, which runs about $2,500 to $2,800.
Well, this room that we have, we'll say, well, we'll rent that to you for half that price.
And when we get this building finished, the restrooms will be inside.
They won't have to have the Porter Lincolns to use.
And there's going to be a small kitchen in there for a caterer.
And then there'll be another room in there for like a changing room for bridesmaids and so forth and so on like that.
So this would be really a nice place to have a wedding with a very, you know, functional building that they can use for a reception.
It doesn't matter if it rains, you know, or anything like that.
We'll have the indoor facility ready to go for them.
So that's what we have.
Oh, excuse me.
Go ahead, James.
Well, I'm just going to say, go to thepoliticalaccessible.org.
You will have a mailing address there on Monday how you can send a contribution to help complete the visitor center here.
So many southern monuments and structures have been taken down in recent years.
Gene is building something new that will host events on this property where people can be near the home and have their meeting or conference or whatever.
And we're real excited about that.
Because I tell you, Gene, it's not just us.
I mean, folks, if you think that the only people who care about this history are the people who appear on this program or people who listen to this program, Gene will set you right straight on that.
What is the overall reception to Nathan Bedford Forest in this present day, in the current year, in Chapel Hill, Tennessee?
I know there are Confederate flags around that town, even in front of the public library.
What is the general reaction of just the common men and women of Chapel Hill, Tennessee to the history of Nathan Bedford Forest and the fact that that's where he lives?
The people in Chapel Hill are fighting for their history.
Unfortunately, Chapel Hill and Marshall County has been overrun with carpetbaggers.
They want to get away from Detroit and Chicago and Nashville and get away from these cities.
And then as soon as they like, it's like a swarm of locusts coming in.
They want to change everything about the local history.
And the high school there in Chapel Hill is Forest High School.
And it's had that name ever since they built the school.
And they're very proud of it.
And about once every two or three years, one of these transplant carpetbaggers goes before the school board and starts whining about the name and how they're offended and how it upsets them.
And, oh, they just can't stand going to a school.
It's named after Forrest or somebody like that.
And I will give this credit to the Marshall County School Board and the people of Chapel Hill.
I've been to some of those meetings, and they just stand up and tell them, if you don't like it, why don't you go back where you came from?
We're doing fine before you got here, and we'll be doing a lot better when you leave.
And that pretty much shuts it off right there.
Very good.
So the actual people who live there and that have lived there, they're proud of their history.
This isn't anything that is just enjoyed by a select few or people who come into town even to visit this.
This is something that the town generally is behind.
Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
And during the George Floyd summer of terror or whatever they call that thing, they had one protester out there in front of the Forest Monument in Chapel Hill.
There's a tall obelisk there, and it's got two flagpoles on it.
One always flies the Forest Cavalry Corps flag, and the other, and we swap out.
We have First National Flag or the Bonnie Blue Flag or, you know, South Carolina secession flag.
Anyway, he was doing his protest there, and some of the local boys didn't shoot at him or drag him off and beat him up or anything.
They just came by and advised him to probably do a lot better protesting somewhere else.
Hey, very good to hear.
We are out of time, but I want to thank you again, Gene, for your work there at the Forest Home for keeping Forest History alive on this show every year during Confederate History Month.
And give me a 10-second answer on this because I never did actually find out if you were serious or not.
We played the song, Bury Me in Southern Ground.
Are you going to spend eternity there on the property?
Was that true?
My ashes will.
I've already said that.
I heard that.
Well, very good.
We'll be able to visit with you for a long, long time, even after you're gathered up to your father's when we go up to the property.
But I'll tell you what, that is a fitting place for you, my friend.
And, folks, help Gene out before he goes to heaven by helping out the forest home.
Hopefully, Gene will be around for a long, long time to come.