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.

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*  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."