.: Bedford Forrest and His Critter Company by Andrew N. Lytle

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Bedford Forrest and His Critter Company
by Andrew N. Lytle
Softcover .J.S.Sanders & Co. So. Classic Series.1984. 399 pages
This book was written over 70 years ago and it creaks in many ways, but anything reasonably done on Bedford Forrest still makes for lively reading, and this is no exception. There just aren't that many commanding generals who personally lead from the front, charging headfirst into hand to hand combat, often ahead of his own troops, surrounded time after time and personally cutting his way out and through the Yankee forces. and, of course it wasn't just a matter of his courage or skill with pistol and sword, he was clearly the true self-taught military genius of the war. This is a peculiar sort of historical work, with nary a footnote to bless yourself with, so one must take a lot of what the author says on faith, or not. It's a very preachy work in the first half, as Forrest represents the ideal yeoman farmer for the author and he goes to considerable length early on to promote this thought while denigrating the wealthy cotton plantation owners who solely pursue financial profit from the land. For those of you who are William Faulkner fans, you may find this fascinating, but the rest of humanity in the 21st century will likely find this portion dreadfully dull. And, to counterbalance Bedford Forrest as the ultimate ideal of the Southern farmer, the author feels compelled to present the devil himself for Forrest to wrestle with over and over again in the war, not Sherman or Grant, but Braxton Bragg. The author is so obsessed with the archdemon Bragg that for a considerable amount of the first half of the book it deals so much with Bragg that Forrest himself tends to disappear and we learn next to nothing about his pre-war life, aside from a few stories of his youth, when he kilt a bar when he was only three. Jefferson Davis and John Bell Hood also come in for a number of deserved lumps, but no one else gets the Bragg treatment.
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