Forrest is Leaving the State Capitol!

Nathan Bedford Forrest is leaving the state capitol. For years a bronze bust of N. B. Forrest has decorated (or marred, depending on your opinion of public art) the state capitol building in Nashville. The bust is a decent piece of art, but it was completed in 1978. It does not date back to the Civil War.

Nathan Bedford Forrest was a major part of Civil War history. He should be rememembered, but not commemorated. The bust will not be melted down, but relocated to a local history museum. N. B. Forrest was a tactical genius in wartime. Before the Civil War, he was a slave trader. During the Civil War he was responsible for the Fort Pillow Massacre. After the Civil War, he was a founding member of the KKK and its first grand wizard.

If we were actually in a civil war, instead of a few protests and minor civil unrest, the bust would have been stolen, broken into smithereens, and melted into bullets.

Forrest was born 1821 in Chapel Hill, Tennessee. He died 1877 in Memphis, TN. He was originally buried in Elmwood Cemetery, but he and his wife were moved to what is now Health Services Park in 1904 (it was originally called Nathan Forrest Park). After a great deal of fuss and controversy, the statue of General Forrest on horseback was removed from the park, but the bodies of him and his wife still rest there. Were it my decision, they would be re-interred in Elmwood. But no one asked me. In Tennessee, as in many southern states, it is illegal to demolish or remove “war memorials.” It doesn’t matter if the war memorial was erected a half-century or more after the war.

To my mind, there is a great deal of difference between a memorial to the local boys who marched off to war and never limped home, and a factory — cast statue of someone who never visited or lived in a particular town, whose statue was erected during the Bad Old Days of Jim Crow laws to prevent “certain folks” from getting uppity.