Blake Hall
The destruction of ancient landmarks and cultural artifacts in Syria and Iraq at the hands of the Islamic State (ISIS) has been bandied about in the past year’s news cycle a fair amount.
Maybe perhaps a bit too much, because it was recently cited in a controversy involving Tennessee Democrats and their desire to rename Nathan Bedford Forrest State Park (who, ironically, was this extremely accomplished man’s namesake) because the former Confederate military commander just so happened to be one of the founders of the Klu Klux Klan — the hooded hate group otherwise known as the KKK.
Republican Senator John Stevens, the rep of the area where the park is located, was the culprit who somehow decided to wield the allusion while speaking with a reporter from a local paper.
“What separates us from ISIS? Because that’s what they do, they go around and tear down history in those nations that they’ve conquered,” Stevens said. “If that’s what America is about now, then it concerns me.”
When asked directly about whether or not the park should be renamed, however, he went diverted from the path it appeared he was headed on, and made his initial point duller than a plastic butter knife.
“It’s a slippery slope when you start changing names and taking down statues.”
But what if the statue shouldn’t have been there in the first place?
These words are from a letter written by one of Forrest’s Confederate officers, Achilles Clark, who sent it to tell his sister of the horrors he saw at Fort Pillow on April 12, 1864:
“The slaughter was awful. Words cannot describe the scene. The poor, deluded, negroes would run up to our men, fall upon their knees, and with uplifted hands scream for mercy but they were ordered to their feet and then shot down. I, with several others, tried to stop the butchery, and at one time had partially succeeded, but General Forrest ordered them shot down like dogs and the carnage continued. Finally our men became sick of blood and the firing ceased.”
Oh, and there’s also this, from historian Andrew Ward:
“In the spring of 1867, Forrest and his dragoons launched a campaign of midnight parades; ‘ghost’ masquerades; and ‘whipping’ and even ‘killing Negro voters and white Republicans, to scare blacks off voting and running for office.'”