LINES OF THE DAY

". . . But the past does not exist independently from the present. Indeed, the past is only past because there is a present, just as I can point to something over there only because I am here. But nothing is inherently over there or here. In that sense, the past has no content. The past -- or more accurately, pastness -- is a position. Thus, in no way can we identify the past as past." p. 15

". . . But we may want to keep in mind that deeds and words are not as distinguishable as often we presume. History does not belong only to its narrators, professional or amateur. While some of us debate what history is or was, others take it into their own hands." p. 153

Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995) by Michel-Rolph Trouillot

Thursday, August 1, 2013

N.B. F. -- Slave Trader, Butcher of Fort Pillow, KKK Grand Wizard

Yesterday, the FB Papers yielded a folder of correspondence between FB and a Memphis lawyer, a close, personal, life-long friend of Forrest, since they were five-year-old boys.

FB asked his correspondent many questions about Forrest the slave trader.  It went fine for a few exchanges, though from the beginning the lawyer objected to FB's interest in Forrest's slave trading.  It was unfair and ungentlemanly to bring up what this man had overcome by his own bootstraps (nevermind that his bootstraps was getting rich by selling human beings -- and by all accounts, perhaps due to his horrid temper, cruelty to his possessions).  Morever this man was in every respect an excellent citizen and valued member of his community.  But soon the correspondence closed acrimoniously on the lawyer's side and snarkily on FB's, over the KKK and Fort Pillow. The lawyer, however, did, no matter how reluctantly, confirm that FB was correct in the details of Forrest the slave trader, right down to the description of where, and how and why he lynched African Americans who earned his fiery ire.

Interesting, that PBS's Antique's Road Show doesn't see slave trading as a stain upon the man's character.* It's not even mentioned. However, Antiques Road Show decrees:
The reputation of General Forrest, under whom Ellen's great-grandfather served during the latter half of the war, has come to be defined by two infamous, yet brief, chapters in his life: his controversial assault on the Union-held Fort Pillow in 1864; and his post-war involvement with the first incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan. So closely is Forrest's name associated with the Klan, in fact, that he is sometimes incorrectly referred to as its founder. If not for these two black marks on his reputation, the ribbons and regalia appraised by Christopher Mitchell at around $10,000 would undoubtedly be quite a bit more valuable. 
It was fairly exciting to run into this sequence of letters.  The whole folder is filled with FB's research correspondence with southerners who were there for it all: the trade, the auctions, the owners, the overseers, the emancipated and participants in the Civil War.

Bruin's Slave Jail
The letter that perhaps most spoke to me, wasn't a letter at all, but an interview FB conducted with a now elderly gentleman in New Orleans, who gave an account of his progressive sales, first from his original Virginia plantation owner, sold again in Richmond, the journey by sea around the Gulf to New Orleans, sale to the jail on Esplanade, to a brick yard owner, and from the owner to his brother-in-law, the whippings, the treatment and all of it, until Emancipation.  There was not a single ray of golden glow to be found in this terrible tale, repeated countless times by numberless people.

But then -- that's what Frederick Bancroft was doing: he was putting numbers to the centuries of this economic system, the numbers of human beings, not the number of sacks of cotton their hands could fill in a single hour.

--------

*  Another instance that demonstrates television, like movies, is absolutely unreliable when it comes to historical truth, accuracy or facts.  Or as el V's put it in The Year Before the Flood: "Movies told me lies, music told me the truth."

1 comment:

Craig said...

Forrest delivered a surrender speech or farewell to his troops on May 9, 1865, in Gainesville, Alabama, a few miles north on the Tombigbee River from where my great great grandfather was with his regiment at McIntosh's Bluff on that date. Following that speech a flotilla of Confederate naval vessels came south on both the Tombigbee River and the Alabama River and proceeded to Mobile. My Civil War ancestor's Union regiment returned to Mobile on one of those vessels after pursuing rebels who had fled upriver when Spanish Fort and Fort Blakely fell. I'm still trying to determine if Forrest came to Mobile with the fleet following his surrender or returned overland to his estate in Mississippi.