ABOUT THE BOOK

Nathan Bedford Forrest did not invent mobilized guerilla warfare, but he did modernize and polish it to an extent that has left few theoretical areas for improvement.    Tanks and jeeps, it could even be said, do not possess the mobility relative to the main force which they attach that Forrest’s dedicated band of horsemen enjoyed.     Following in the footsteps of Francis Marion and Lighthorse Harry Lee, American practitioners of the devastating hit-and-run cavalry attach of the Revolutionary War, Forrest raised their effective but geographically limited campaigns to an art-form spread over the widest possible tactical theatre.    He accomplished this with superior knowledge of terrain and of horses coupled and with an iron will, a complete disregard for physical exhaustion (his own and that of his men) and, this book will demonstrate, by the most admirable sort of sheer country orneriness.

Forrest, a man of simple upbringing, is the perfect symbol for the odd mélange that was the Confederate Army; patrician West Pointers like Lee side by side by unregenerate racists like Forrest.    These well-bred students of battles and from the classical era were not prevented by an almost unimaginable difference in class from being able to recognize the tactical genius of a farmer from the low country.    Nor were they sufficiently threatened by Forrest’s innate comprehension of the sort of war required to prevent Forest from becoming the only enlisted man in the entire Civil War to achieve the rank of a General.

That any scholar of this history of warfare would have to judge Forrest rather more harshly for his conduct after the war than this conduct during it is just another tragic aspect of the larger tragedy that generated The War Between the States.    Heroes rose from unlikely places and returned, when the time for heroism had past, to their more unheroic pursuits. Whether than return negates the valor shown during the conflict is only for you to determine, after you have learned of Forrest’s life in all it’s aspects, heroic, and less so.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Robert Selph Henry, (20 October 1889 - 19 August 1970), was born at Clifton, Wayne County, Tennessee on 20 October 1889, the son of Robert Allison Henry and Jemima Emily Selph.    His parents were married 28 Dec 1887 in Clifton.    Jemima Emily Selph was the daughter of Dr. Irby N. Selph, noted physician in Clifton.     Not long after his birth, Robert Selph Henry moved to Nashville, Tennessee with his family.    He graduated from Vanderbilt in 1911 and did post graduate work at Queens College in Cambridge, England.    He was admitted to the Tennessee bar in 1911 and practiced law in Nashville, Tennessee from 1915 to 1921.    In 1921 he became assistant to the president of the Nashville, Chattanooga and St. Louis Railroad and remained in that position until 1934.     Henry was a student of the South and the Civil War. His book, "The Story of the Confederacy" published in 1937, was considered for many years to be the definitive history of the rise of the Confederate States of America and the Civil War (or War of Rebellion/ War Between the States).     Robert Selph Henry died in Nashville, Tennessee, 19 August 1970.

- Now Available at the Quartermaster's Table -