NATHAN AL-TIKRITI FORREST? This One Hand Clapping post (via Insta Pundit) is a useful followup to the latest recreational reading, April 1865: The Month that Saved America (details or compare prices.) This passage from pp. 274-275 is of particular interest.

Of all the men whom one would choose to carry out a prolongued guerrilla campaign against the Union, none was more suited to it than Nathan Bedford Forrest, an incongruous amalgam of the proudest and the darkest sides of the Confederacy, walking not in awkward contradiction, but boldly and comfortably hand in hand.

Forrest, as Rev. Sensing notes, stood his command down. He later became involved with the Ku Klux Klan, which evolved into a terrorist organization.

An expert in the surprise assault and a virtuoso at overcoming impossible odds, Nathan Bedford Forrest was the South's legendary answer to the Union's fighting general, William Tecumseh Sherman: ornery and innately brilliant, an uneducated farmer from the low country and an unabashed racist, a self-made millionaire and a tactical genius, inflammatory, headstrong, imperious, he was the South's most innovative and ruthless fighter. Admirers called him "the wizard of the saddle." Sherman himself once praised Forrest as "the most remarkable man our civil war produced on either side." But he also called him "that devil" or "the very devil" or simply "the devil," and demanded that Forrest be "hunted down and killed if it cost ten thousand lives and bankrupts the Federal Treasury." To friends and foes alike, even before the war was over, Forrest's reputation had become the stuff of folklore legend, and he himself had become almost a living myth.

And yet Forrest was never schooled in the operational arts.

Elsewhere in the book one discovers precisely how harsh a lesson General Sherman's troops, in particular, delivered to civilian supporters of the rebellion.