I have read Chapter 5 of Mr. Bill O’Reilly and his co-author’s book, Confronting Evil: The Worst of the Worst. This chapter deals with Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest. Congratulations, gentlemen! You got almost every important fact wrong.
First, the personal data. Forrest (who was called “Bedford”) was married, but he had only two children, although the authors were kind enough to give him two extra. The two who actually existed were Captain William M. “Willie” Forrest (1846-1908), who was 19 years old at the surrender, and Francis Ann “Fannie” Forrest (1849-1854), who died at age five,[1] although one source lists her age as seven. They are buried in Elmwood Cemetery, Memphis, Tennessee, near General Forrest’s first grave site.
O’Reilly labels Forrest a “brutal” slave trader but does not elaborate. Actually, he was considered the best of a bad lot in the 1850s. He did not ever beat his slaves, refused to separate families when he sold them, and kept a list of people who were brutal slave traders—and he would not do business with them. (Refusing to beat slaves was not altogether altruistic. If a potential buyer saw that a slave had been beaten, it signaled to him that this was a troublesome slave. The last thing a master wanted was an unruly slave, so he would lower the offering price, if he didn’t cancel the sale altogether.)
O’Reilly points out that, in April 1861, Forrest was visiting the Gayoso House, a hotel which, according to Bill, included a brothel. He states that Forrest visited the Gayoso because he wanted to play cards and enjoy the “company of women.” He probably did want to play cards, but he had absolutely no romantic or sexual interest in any woman except his wife and would not tolerate men who felt otherwise. No man was even allowed to tell a questionable joke in a woman’s presence if Forrest were present.
Mr. O’Reilly asserts that Forrest’s favorite adult libation was Barbados Rum and water. The problem here is that Forrest never tasted Barbados Rum. He drank one time. As a teenager, he wondered what it was like to be drunk, so he went into the woods alone with a jug of whiskey. He drank and woke up the next morning with a hangover—and typhoid fever. Many people in those days died of this disease, and Forrest came close. He promised God that if He let him live, he would never drink again—and he didn’t. The only exception to this rule occurred in 1863, when he was wounded. The physicians had no chloroform, so they used whiskey as an anesthetic.
Like all human beings, Forrest had his faults. When no ladies were around, he was quite profane. He had a violent temper and enjoyed a fight—even to the death. During the war, he killed thirty Northerners in one-on-one combat and wounded about twice that many. He also killed a gunfighter antebellum in the streets of Hernando, Mississippi, and crippled another. Additionally, he killed two Confederates. (Running away when Forrest was there was not a good idea.) He also killed a wife beater who was pounding his spouse with a whip. Forrest demanded the brutal husband cease at once or he (Forrest) would beat him and see how he liked it. The husband stopped the whipping but attacked Forrest with a knife instead. Forrest knocked him down. When the man retrieved his weapon and attacked Forrest again, the general hit him in the head with an axe. He made no attempt to use the flat side.
Nathan Bedford Forrest was also an exceptionally good gambler. On at least three occasions, he won the modern equivalent of $50,000 each night at the poker table. Once it equaled $100,000, when adjusted for inflation. After the war, he was down to his last $10 ($269.98 in today’s money). He went out to play poker that night. When he returned home, he had $2,500 ($67,495 in 2025 money).[2]
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O’Reilly asserts that Forrest earned the moniker “Wizard of the Saddle” after his victory at Fort Sanders, Knoxville, Tennessee, in November 1863. There are three problems here. First, Fort Sanders was a bloody Confederate defeat and a pretty convincing one at that. The Rebels suffered 813 casualties, the bluecoast lost 13 men—a 62.5 to 1 casualty rate in favor of the North. It was one of the most lopsided Federal victories of the war. Second, James Longstreet was in command of the Southern forces; and third, Forrest was nowhere near the place. He was organizing his new cavalry command in northern Mississippi.
There was never an 1864 Confederate offensive to reconquer the Mississippi River, as O’Reilly wrongly asserts. President Davis, who was more than seven hundred miles away, did not order Forrest to launch the final assault on Fort Pillow on April 12, as O’Reilly incorrectly states (p. 88). So, why did Forrest attack Fort Pillow? One word: chivalry. Forrest respectfully idolized women and put them on pedestals. Once, he cashiered one of his best friends for having sex outside of marriage. “I will not have in my army any man who would do that to a woman,” he declared. In April 1864, he was returning to Mississippi after another successful raid in western Tennessee and western Kentucky. He had no interest in Fort Pillow, which had no military value and had not had since 1862. En route home, however, he was met by at least two delegations of women. Much of the Fort Pillow garrison consisted of outlaws or former slaves, and they had been rough on the ladies of west Tennessee. There were threats, robberies, and several rapes. They had also insulted Confederate widows and orphans and had inflicted many indignities on Dr. George Harris, a highly respected Methodist preacher, whom they had imprisoned.[3] The women begged Forrest to destroy the garrison.
Forrest was the self-ordained protector of Southern womanhood, and any woman who needed Forrest’s help was sure to get it, if at all possible. When he heard their stories, Forrest went into a cold rage. “I will take the fort if it costs me my life,” he declared.
The authors ran off the tracks on the first page and never found the rails again. True, the Union soldiers at Fort Pillow were surrounded, but they were not terrified, as O’Reilly states. Many of them were drunk. Their commander had the absurd idea to make barrels of whiskey, ale, and beer, complete with dippers, available to them, and they freely availed themselves of his generosity. Half of the six hundred Federal troops were Black, fresh off the plantation. On the typical antebellum plantation, most black males were given one shot of whiskey, once a year, on Christmas Eve. Less than two years out of slavery in the spring of 1864, they had little practice “holding their liquor.” They shouted and hooted at the Southern soldiers, daring them to attack, said they would take no prisoners if they did, and told them to do things to themselves that are anatomically impossible. Naturally, this infuriated the Rebels, who believed that using former slaves as combat troops was immoral in the first place. Forrest grinned and said: “Good! I’ll give them time to get good and drunk.” He delayed his attack a few hours and simultaneously brought up his wagons, because he was low in ammunition.
Mr. O’Reilly mentions that Forrest had 1,600 men against 600 in the garrison, which means, O’Reilly calculates, Forrest outnumbered the defenders 4 to 1. Arithmetic, anyone?
O’Reilly states that the Union troops were from the 6th U.S. Artillery. Wrong again, O’Reilly. They were from the 6th U.S. Colored Heavy Artillery Battalion, a different kind of unit altogether. Instead of the eighteen to thirty heavy guns it should have had, however, this battalion had only four light artillery pieces. Company D, 2nd U.S. Colored Light Artillery Battalion, which had two guns, was also present. The only white Federal unit in the fort was the 13th Tennessee Cavalry Regiment, made up of “home grown Yankees” or “Tennessee Tories,” which O’Reilly doesn’t even mention. It was composed mainly of Confederate deserters, outlaws, renegades, and assorted rapists and pillagers. Its morale was low, and twenty of its men deserted on April 10, 1864, when they heard that Forrest was coming. They didn’t want to be anywhere around if he showed up—and the rumors were true. (This is also why it is impossible to pinpoint the number of Yankees in the fort. It was a moving target, with men coming in and going out every day.)
“For the last thirty days, Confederate forces have bombarded Fort Pillow,” the authors assure us. Wrong again. There were no Confederate forces anywhere near the place until the early morning hours of April 12, 1864, when Colonel “Black Bob” McCulloch of Forrest’s Cavalry arrived with his brigade to capture the Union pickets or silence them with their knives. Enough escaped, however, to raise the alarm.
The authors’ account features a colorful description of a thirty-day siege, which never took place, and how the starving Union soldiers were reduced to eating rats, bloated on human flesh, which scurried among the dead cattle and human corpses. This is pure fiction, but at least it is amusing for that very reason.
The authors state that Fort Pillow “is a one-acre facility.” Wrong as usual. That was the Redan, built on the west (open) end of the fort. Fort Pillow itself was constructed by Confederate Major General Pat Cleburne and covered 1,642 acres, according to the Fort Pillow State Historic Park. It was designed to be defended by 20,000 men. The three lines of entrenchment are partially filled in but still clearly visible, so it is obvious that neither author ever bothered to visit the place.
I enjoyed Mr. O’Reilly’s Killing Lincoln and Killing Patton. Frankly, I am embarrassed for him, having his name on this piece of nonsense, which he probably did not write. But to continue.
O’Reilly has the Yankees on top of a one-hundred-foot bluff, looking down on the Rebels. It shouldn’t surprise the reader at this point to learn that the authors are facing the wrong direction. The one-hundred-foot bluff (which was actually only eighty feet high) faced the Mississippi River to the west. To the east (where the Confederates were) lay the one-acre Redan, which was six to eight feet high and eight feet thick, with a trench at the base. It was an extremely badly selected final defensive position because the Union artillery could not depress the barrels of their guns enough to fire into the trench. The Rebels simply sat there safely, while Forrest attempted to persuade the garrison to surrender; also, the Redan was lower than the surrounding hills, so the Confederates could control by fire the inferior of the fort. As a result, the first Union commander, Major George Lamming (alias Lionel Booth) lost his life when a Confederate sniper shot him in the chest. Meanwhile, the graycoats were resupplied with ammunition. When the talks collapsed, Forrest’s men were ready and had little trouble scurrying over the wall.
In the Civil War, Black combat troops almost always suffered higher casualty rates than white units. White Yankees lost fourteen percent as opposed to twenty-three to thirty-seven percent for African-Americans, depending on one’s source. There are several reasons for this, but the main one was bad leadership. Men who could not get commissions in white units were promoted in African American regiments. As soon as Forrest’s men scaled the wall of the Redan, their commander (Major William F. Bradford, who had replaced Booth) bolted to the rear, screaming “Boys, save yourselves!” The Federals had wasted no time training their Black charges. and many of them were armed with nothing but clubs. The leaderless nephytes did not have much of a chance against Forrest’s veterans, who were armed with six-shooters (called “Navy sixes”).
If one defines a massacre as a battle in which all or nearly all of one side is killed, such as Little Big Horn, the Alamo, or Thermopylae, then Fort Pillow was not a massacre—although one could not tell it by reading this chapter. According to O’Reilly, “Nearly all the Union soldiers are dead, just a handful manage to escape” (p. 90). Actually, of the six-hundred-man garrison, half were killed. (Of the 585 to 605 men in the garrison, between 277 and 297 were killed.) The rest were taken prisoner. When the battle ended, the Federals were surrounded on three sides with their backs to the Mississippi River. No doubt Forrest could have wiped them out if he had wanted to. He just didn’t want to. Atrocities, however, did occur. Some Blacks were shot after they surrendered. Sixty-four percent of the Black troops were killed, as opposed to thirty-one to thirty-four percent of the whites, depending on one’s source. There is no proof, however, that Forrest approved of these actions, although he no doubt lost control of some of his men at Fort Pillow—especially those who captured Union whiskey barrels intact. At one point, Forrest actually rode between some African Americans (who were trying to surrender) and a group of his own men, who were about to murder them.
Ironically, the deserters fared worse than the African Americans. Of the sixty-four deserters known to be in the garrison, all but seventeen were killed. Many of them were forced to their knees and shot in the back of the neck. The Rebels believed that real men died on their feet. The USCT who were executed were shot standing up, which is, I suppose, a bit of a compliment. It is a distinction without a difference, however, since they were still dead.
After the battle, General Forrest allowed badly wounded U.S. troops to be handed over to a U.S. gunboat, which transported them to a hospital. Seventeen of these were African American. Black prisoners were also treated better than white prisoners. Some of the Blacks were sent back into slavery, but most of them were placed in labor battalions, mainly in the Mobile sector. They subsisted on beans and rice, and it certainly wasn’t Boca Raton, but one can live on beans and rice, and the end of slavery was only a year away. Most of the white prisoners ended up in Andersonville.
Chapter 5 states that the southern lawmakers passed a new law in 1863 ordering that any Black person captured in battle was not to be taken prisoner. Wrong again. The law returned them to the state, which returned them to slavery or put them in work battalions. The law, however, did provide for the execution of the white USCT officers for engaging in servile insurrection.
O’Reilly states that the Fort Pillow Massacre was the reason the Union ended the prisoner exchange with the South. Not true. The exchange system, which was called the Dix-Hill Cartel, was suspended by Abraham Lincoln on June 30, 1863 (General Order No. 252) because the Confederates refused to agree to treat Black prisoners the same as white prisoners. Large scale prisoner exchanges had ceased by August 1863.
Lincoln ordered an investigation, and at least two of his “eye witnesses” were in Memphis on April 12. Like George S. Patton or Erwin Rommel, the “Desert Fox” of World War II fame, Forrest had developed some indefinable charisma that worked wonders on the battlefield, and at least part of the purpose of Lincoln’s investigation was to discredit him in the eyes of the Union soldier. He ordered the printing and distribution of 40,000 copies of the report to defame Forrest and boost Republican election chances in the upcoming election. (Many copies of the report went to newspapers.) Apparently, General Sherman also found the report highly suspect because he ordered his own investigation. No copy of this report has come down to us, but after he received it, Sherman did nothing—and he was not a man who was afraid to retaliate if he considered it justified.
On page 90, O’Reilly noted that Robert E. Lee was the Confederate commander on the Eastern Front, while Forrest was the commander in the West. This would come as quite a surprise to General Joseph E. Johnston, who was really in charge of the Western Front, and Lieutenant General Leonidas Polk, the commander of the Army of Mississippi, to whom Forrest reported. Actually, there were more than a dozen generals on the Western Front who were senior to Forrest at this time.
According to O’Reilly (p. 94), Lee surrendered 8,000 men at Appomattox. Actually, Grant’s provost marshal paroled 26,765 captured Confederates at Appomattox, according David J. Eicher in his excellent account of the war (The Longest Night, p. 823).
Off the rails until the end, O’Reilly also got Forrest’s last words and the date of his death wrong. He died on October 29, not on Halloween (October 31). He was buried on Halloween. Twenty thousand people attended his funeral. At least 3,000 were Black.
These are not the only mistakes of fact that O’Reilly and his co-author made, but I think the reader has the idea by now.
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After the war, Forrest joined the Ku Klux Klan and became its Imperial Wizard (i.e., its leader). The authors continue their pattern of committing error after error by having Forrest join the KKK in December 1865. He did not. The Klan was formed on Christmas Eve of that year in the chambers of Judge Thomas Jones. There were six men present, three of them lawyers. There is no evidence that Forrest had even heard of it before March 1866. He joined it that spring and was soon elected its leader.
The Klan was never benign, but it was not yet the terrorist organization it later became. Initially, it was a social club but soon morphed into a protective association, a political/paramilitary organization, and occasionally a vigilante group.[4] As the Carpetbagger regimes receded and the KKK deteriorated into something he never intended for it to be (i.e., something of a terrorist organization), Forrest essentially ordered it disbanded in February 1869. Unfortunately, not all the dens disbanded, but Forrest took no active part in the Klan activities after February 1869.
Four years later, fighting broke out in Colfax, Louisiana, in which 150 Blacks were killed. (This occurred after the Carpetbaggers who incited them to riot fled down the Red River in a steamboat.) The authors imply that, somehow, Forrest was responsible, even though, according to them, he was in Memphis, 600 miles away. (They got that wrong, too. Memphis is only 350 miles from Colfax. They can’t even get that right—but why am I not surprised?)
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This chapter is absolutely hopeless and borderline pitiful. I won’t say their research was superficial—it wasn’t even that good. Quite apart from its total absence of objectivity, this entire chapter is characterized by the shoddiest research I have seen in a long time. If a first-year graduate student had submitted this chapter to me as a term paper, I would have little choice but to recommend that he or she find an alternative to an academic career, and I was not considered a particularly difficult professor.
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[1] Find-a-Grave, “Frances Ann ‘Fannie’ Forrest,” accessed 2025.
[2] CPI Inflation Calculator.
[3] He was the brother of Isham Harris, the Confederate governor of Tennessee.
[4] Organizations change over time. In 1865, for example, the Democratic Party, transitioned from the party of slavery to the party of white supremacy. Later, it became the party of segregation, before it became the party of integration and the Civil Rights movement. After some years as America’s liberal party, it seems to be transitioning again—into what, I do not know.
The views expressed at AbbevilleInstitute.org are not necessarily those of the Abbeville Institute.
I’m not sure why you’d capitalize black and not White. Forrest could have remained merely a local legend if not for the War. Instead, he was the man for the moment.
Thank you for your work to support truth. O-riley’s not a West Pointer, but Forrest will live on long after O-riley’s long forgotten…like all the rest of Forrest’s defeated opposers; posers all.
I do not capitalize Black in my writings unless I also capitalize White, and most times I do not capitalize either.
The idea of capitalizing Black and not White is intentional on the part of DimocRats and the Ministry of Truth, to attempt to make the minority race, black, superior to the majority race, white.
I once asked a journalist abou the Black vs. white spelling in an article. She stated that it is standard in Pulitzer journalism rules.
Cowards pander…pulitzer should not be capitalized if woke is their agenda.
O’Reilly. Ha. He IS the quintessential NYer – from the NYC area. Full of himself and full of $#@!^. Thanks for the real history Dr. Mitcham!!!
The sadness is not that sapheads like OReilly are lurking out there but that there are only a few spots that point it out. He is (and has been) one of the worst. How people like him make it through life is beyond me.
According to Wilmur L. Jones in “After The Thunder: Fourteen Men Who Shaped Post-Civil War America”, the wife beater Thomas Edwards that Forrest fought in defense and killed was black (and presumably so was his wife). (This point is ignored by Wilbur)
Wilbur, in PC fashion dismisses Forrest as “Again Forrest had taken out his rage on a black man and resorted to violence to solve a problem” (I wonder what Wilbur would do in Forrest’s place?) and concludes his chapter on Forrest with “In the final analysis, Nathan Bedford Forrest was a man out of control who solved his problems through violence.” (What does he think war and fighting involve?) “Above all else, he was a racist.” (oh…nothing is more important than a 20th century leftist term). “It is difficult to see him as a man to admire.” (And that’s all Wilbur learned…?)
He does admit that when the deputy sheriff took Forrest into custody over Edwards’ death and they went aboard steamboat filled with Union soldiers, Forrest wanted to be discreet about his identity worrying what they might do. Nevertheless, when word leaked out of who Forrest was they treated him with great respect and high regard and even offered to throw the deputy overboard.
(Still it looks like Wilbur at least got more facts than O’Reilly)
First, Bill O’Reilly is an effing idiot. As for Forrest and Ft. Pillow, according to some of his biographers, he attacked Fort Pillow because a delegation came to him in Jackson, Tennessee, complaining about the conduct of the Thirteenth Tennessee Cavalry (USA), who were billeted there. There were also horses, guns and ammunition there he wanted. This is the first I’ve seen of it having to do with abuse of women, although Homegrowns and Northerners routinely abused Southern women. wre
confronting evil 2: a chapter devoted to lying commentators and authors
Three of my ancestors rode with Forrest, and I heard stories from my grandmother, thrilling my child’s heart, so I suppose I have as much stake in Gen’l. Forrest’s memory as anyone. I was so proud, then, to have attended the memorial and reinterment of Gen’l and Mrs. Forrest back in ’21. The mainstream narrative of the War’s history, supporting the greater Narrative, has been repeated so many times, is so set in the minds of so many, including, sadly, Southerners, that it is well nigh impossible to shift. To do so opens one up to charges of “racism” and “fascism” at worst, pedantry and obsession at best.
Nonetheless, we must fight for our people’s history and so I thank you, Dr. Mitcham, for this answer to Those Peoples’ libelous claims!
Thank you, William for sharing your history and Amen to the fight for our people’s history.
I have done extensive research using original sources on the founding and disbanding of the original KuKlux. The topic of Bedford Forrest and the original KuKlux is one of the worst lies upon lies – many revisionist and based upon changes in sense and designation over the years. The FACTS on Forrest and the Klan are amply detailed by Dr. Michael Bradley. There’s no way Bedford had anything to do with any sort of guerilla activities after August 1868, when he and 12 other mostly Confederate generals went, in person, before the TN legislature and called an end to such activities. In Dec 1868, one of those generals – and later TN governor during the 1871-1872 Congressional KuKlux hearings – John Calvin Brown, a Grand Master Mason – had a public meeting – with Frank McCord, one of the acknowledged six founders of the KK and THE guy who created the very name KuKlux, as secretary – issued the press release (Nashville Union and American, PAGE 1, 29 Dec 1868). Brown was from Pulaski and Nashville; Bedford was over in Memphis. Much of the problem is that throughout the decades, to “Ku-Klux” became another term for guerilla activities – having nothing to do with whether or not anyone was a member, let alone founder, of any group. Laps McCord, Frank’s brother and subsequent editor of the Pulaski Citizen (the source of the original KK oathbooks and all the ‘official’ notices), stated in the 1880s – prior to all the mythmaking – that there was NEVER any network. As with the lies about Fort Pillow, the Cincinnati Commercial lies (during the 1868 political campaign) – the fake “interview” with Bedford Forrest are repeated ad nauseam, with few knowing that that interview and the interviewer were attacked as Yankee liars by Bedford Forrest and others AT THE TIME. As for what Thomas Dixon did in 1905 – elevating Bedford into the head of the Klan – Dixon said he would out-Harriet Beecher Stowe and the myths of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and unfortunately, he succeeded in tarnishing both the truth and Bedford Forrest. Though no one today believes that Thaddeus Stevens, the original of Dixon’s Austin Stoneman, ever joined hands with his white Southern brothers, ppl continue to believe Dixon’s fairy tale about Bedford Forrest (and George Washington Gordon, especially) – despite the clear evidence of Capt. Morton’s inclusion of Dixon’s article, NOT Morton’s own words, which is the “source” of all the lies through the years. There was a time where the myth of the resolution of Reconstruction was the myth of the guerilla militias ‘restoring order’ – a myth which served the progressives, North and South, during the first two decades of the 20th Century. We Confederates are told, today, to leave behind the “Lost Cause” and other myths of the Jim Crow Era – by those who do not see, in their racialism, just how much they spread their myths and causes. The upshot is that Bedford Forrest needs to be LET ALONE. He was never a member of the KuKlux, let alone a leader and founder. It’s all there, in his sworn testimony, for those who care about the truth.
Thank you, Catherine for more real history!!!
I “like” O’Reilly about as much as Levin and Beck. All of these repulsive Lincolnites spend a lot of time, virtually daily, twisting history, never admitting to the north’s crimes, always defending their alleged moral high ground…..and deriding the South and our heroic ancestors.
Like the text above states….and I believe a good prescription for Mr. O’Reilly; he too can do to himself that which is anatomically impossible.
And O’Reilly continues to bolviate.