It is indeed difficult to compare the two great generals, but I am voting with General Sherman on this one.
Quote:
He was the only soldier South or North to join the military as a private and rise to the rank of Lieutenant General. Two years after Appomattox he became the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and to this day is despised and hated as the engineer of the massacre at Fort Pillow. He has been described as "a soft-spoken gentleman of marked placidity", and as "an overbearing bully of homicidal wrath." Nathan Bedford Forrest, the South's "Wizard of the Saddle" was an uneducated backwoodsman and self made millionaire who inspite of having no formal military training has been described by Lee, Sherman, and other leaders of both sides as the greatest cavalry commander of either army. Perhaps his greatest compliment was paid by his enemy, William T. Sherman, who called him "the very devil" and is reported to have pronounced Forrest "the most remarkable man our civil war produced on either side . . . He had a genius which was to me incomprehensible." Forrest himself summarized his military genius with a few brief words, "War means fighting and fighting means killing." Inspite of his maxim to "get there first with the most men," he faced overwhelming odds on almost every battlefield yet never lost a battle that he personally commanded until his last battle in 1865 when he was hopelessly out manned by cavalry with the new repeating rifles.
Blake, I don't know how you can accuse Forrest of facing third-rate commanders when Jackson faced Banks, a political general whose incompetence persisted throughout the war, and Fremont, who failed in every military command he had, in the Valley campaign that made him famous.
If Forrest stood up to incompetent commanders, Stonewall arrested competent subordinates like General Dick Garnett and A P Hill,
Garnett for retreating at Kernstown when his men ran out of ammo. To my knowledge, Stonewall never served under an incompetent commander during the war. And if Forrest threatened to thrash Hood, who was missing the use of an arm and a leg when Forrest served under him, I must have missed it. He did save the remnants of Hood's army after the ill-advised Nashville campaign though.