“Better Confederates never lived.”

-Nathan Bedford Forest, on the 49 Negro members of his command

I was having a talk with young white nationalist two days ago and he balked, and denied my assertions that National Socialist Germany was a safe place to be a black African, and that at least one black man fought as an SS infantryman on the Leningrad front. He refused to consider that these things could be true, so I piled on about how Hitler and the German athletes were kind and complimentary to Jesse Owens, unlike the propaganda we have been fed in the Post-Factual Universal Media States of Fantasia. But it cannot be. In America, one cannot be proud of one’s own identity without having someone else’s identity degraded in your mind’s eye. Such is the curious bipolar nature of our national psychosis.

We are taught that the Union combatants in the civil war were angels and the Confederates devils. However, a reading of Bust Hell Wide Open: The Life of Nathan Bedford Forest, an excellent book by Samuel W. Mitcham, JR., which avoids repeating details of Forests’ life revealed in Brian Steele Wills’ A Battle from the Start, by utilizing first hand sources, letters and diaries from men who fought with and against Forest, one gets a different picture.

Even as Forest and other Confederate commanders prohibited mistreatment of prisoners, paroled ordinary soldiers [some Union soldiers even cheered Forest when he freed them] invited captured officers to dinner and leant them money to play in card games and fought and defeated rioters looting Nashville, Yankees in Tennessee committed the following war crimes:

-Murder

-Lynching

-Burning prisoners alive

-Cussing and harassing old women

-Raping young women

-Kicking the crutches out from under and beating a paralyzed war hero from the Mexican War, a fallen companion to their own general Grant.

-Jailing this cripple after he defended himself with a pistol

-Black Union troops wore patches declaring that they would take no prisoners

Recent movies have credited black Union troops with victories they did not win even as schools teach that no blacks fought on the Confederate side. The fact is that many of the whites fighting as Confederates were Union men who were defending against an invasion even after they and their state had voted to stay in the Union—they were fighting against betrayal by a tyrant. Below is a brief of the most hated Confederate’s record on dealing with Negroes:

-As a slave trader Forest declared that his slaves were never beaten or mistreated and guaranteed their good behavior. He then divested himself of that business to become more respectable.

-Not only did he not order the massacre of mixed-race troops at Fort Pillow, he and his co-commander, Chalmers [who deserves more credit than Forest as Forest was trying to figure out how to blow up a Yankee gunboat with a captured cannon while the massacre erupted and was late to putting a stop to the rampage, which was nevertheless understandable since the black troops had sworn no quarter and some of the white troops being executed had been raping and murdering families of the Confederates] stopped it. He then wrote a letter to a local Union commander scolding him for encouraging black-on-white war crimes as the practice would blow back on the “poor, deluded negroes” and cause them grief.

-Forest promised 40 slaves, that if they manned his camp as commissary and supply staff that he would free them at war’s end if victorious and pointed out that if the Union won they would be free anyway. When it became obvious that the South would lose, Forest freed the slaves and all but 1 stayed with him through the war, many after the war as employees.

-Union officers reported Negroes fighting under Forest.

-7 members of the best cavalry unit in the entire war, Forest’s personal guard, were black men.

-After the war Forest had meetings with black community leaders and sat down to eat barbecue with them, listening to their concerns and acting cooperatively.

-Forest proposed, to make up for labor shortfalls in the post war South, to pay African kings for black slaves and then free those people so that they could work for wages in the U.S.

Private Louis Napoleon Winbush, who lived from 1846-1934, and who, in a photo circa 1930, appears in a Confederate uniform with his grandson Nelson at a Confederate Reunion, fought with Forest as a combat cavalryman at his greatest victory, Brice’s Crossroads after having served first as a cook. He also served as a Chaplain. His Unit was company M. of the Tennessee Cavalry Regiment, indicating that more Negro troopers fought under Forest than the 7 in his personal guard or Escort Company. Blacks also served in cavalry units from Georgia and Texas.

Such are the truths that cannot be known in the Fairyland of Lies occupied by our betrayed minds.

The Foundational Falsehoods of the American Dream