Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [154]
April 4: Forrest crosses the Cahaba River to Marion to join Chalmers and William H. Jackson, meeting his artillery and wagons just arriving from Mississippi. He and his escort collapse there.
April 8: Lee surrenders at Appomattox. Forrest, arm in a sling from the April 1 saber cut, meets Wilson at Cahaba to discuss prisoner exchange.
April 10: Wilson shoots 500 horses to keep them from carrying Confederates and heads east to Montgomery. Forrest, having re-collected his troops still at large, moves northwest toward Gainesville.
April 15: President Lincoln is assassinated.
The first black soldiers are mustered into the Confederate Army at Richmond shortly before Richmond falls.
April 25: Forrest instructs his troops to disregard rumors of surrender.
April 29: Forrest’s commander, General Richard Taylor, meets Union General E. R. S. Canby near Mobile and agrees to surrender.
May 3: Secessionist Tennessee governor Isham Harris and Mississippi governor Charles Clark invite Forrest to go with them to join still resisting Confederates in Texas. Forrest declines, stating “Any man who is in favor of a further prosecution of this war is a fit subject for a lunatic asylum.”
May 4: Taylor and Forrest make speeches announcing the surrender to their men assembled at Meridian, Mississippi. “We have made our last fight,” Forrest told his troopers. “Men, you have been good soldiers; a man who has been a good soldier can be a good citizen.”
May 9: On the day paroles are to be signed, Forrest rides out with his staff member and sometime secretary Charles Anderson, to whom he describes his impulse to go to Mexico, where some nonsurrendering Confederates have ambitions. Anderson persuades Forrest that he has an obligation to stand by his men, whereupon the two together draft a farewell address to the troops. In this speech, Forrest advises his men to purge themselves of “feelings of animosity, hatred and revenge … when you return home, a manly straightforward course will secure the respect even of your enemies.”
May 15: In conversation with a Northern reporter, Bryan McAlister, Forrest states: “I have lost 29 horses in the war, and have killed a man each time. The other day I was a horse ahead but at Selma they surrounded me, and I killed two, jumped my horse over a one-horse wagon and got away.”
May 18: Forrest is erroneously reported killed (following rumors that the family of the Kentuckians he had ordered shot for desertion had sworn vengeance).
End of May: Forrest returns to his Coahoma, Mississippi, plantation. Some of his former slaves return from Georgia, where they had waited out the war, to work for him as freedmen. While pursuing his application to President Andrew Johnson for a pardon, Forrest invites seven Union Army officers into Mississippi and goes into partnership with one, Major B. E. Diffenbacher, in farming concerns. A party of uniformed Union cavalrymen visiting Forrest’s premises out of curiosity is attacked by Forrest’s reluctantly retired warhorse, King Philip, supported by Forrest’s personal servant Jerry.
The black population of Memphis increases from 3,000 to 60,000.
1866
March 31: Forrest exhorts Thomas Edwards, a freedman on his plantation, to stop beating his wife; Edwards attacks him with a knife and wounds him, then Forrest kills Edwards with an ax.
April 6: Forrest begins sharecropping on land he had owned before the war.
May 1–3: During race riots in Memphis, forty-six black people are killed, with ninety-one of their houses, twelve churches and four schools destroyed.
September 25: Having lost much of the property he owned before the war, and plagued by various accusations connected to events at Fort Pillow, Forrest places a notice in a Memphis paper advertising his services as a cotton factor.
December 6: In a letter Forrest describes his involvement in a new project: construction of