pay. Finding himself in a strange country without friends or money, Forrest, with the characteristic energy which distinguished him in after life, split rails at fifty cents per hundred and made the money necessary to bring him back to his family and home.
Without tracing him through the steps by which he accumulated a fortune, it is enough to say that at sixteen years of age he was left fatherless, with a mother and large family to support on a small leased farm, and at forty years of age he was the owner of a large cotton plantation and slaves, making about one thousand bales of cotton per annum, and engaged in a prosperous business in Memphis, the largest city of his native State. His personal courage had been severely tested on several occasions; notably at Hernando, Mississippi, where he was assaulted in the streets by three Matlock brothers and their overseer Bean. Pistols and bowie-knives were freely used, and after a terrible fight, in which thirteen shots were fired, the three Matlocks and Forrest all wounded, his assailants fled and left him master of the field.
LIEUTENANT-COLONEL OF A CAVALRY BATTALION.
On the 14th of June, 1861, Nathan Bedford Forrest was enrolled as a private in a Confederate cavalry company, and went into camp near Randolph, Tennessee. About the 10th of July, 1861, Hon. Isham G. Harris, the great war Governor of Tennessee, knowing Forrest well and having a high regard for the man, telegraphed him to come to Memphis, and there, through the aid of General Polk, procured authority for him to raise a regiment of cavalry for Confederate service. This was somewhat difficult authority to obtain at that time, for in the beginning of the war neither side regarded cavalry as of much value for fighting purposes; and it is, perhaps, more due to Forrest than to any other man, that the cavalry was subsequently so largely increased and played such an important part on both sides. But Forrest's men were not properly called cavalry—they more nearly resembled the dragoons of the sixteenth century, who are described as "mounted foot soldiers." Jackson's corps were called "web-footed cavalry," and Forrest's troopers might well be called "winged infantry."
On the 20th of July, Forrest mustered his first company into service, and about the same time smuggled out of Louisville, Kentucky, though closely watched, pistols and saddles to equip them. During the second week of October, 1861, he organized a battalion of eight companies, of which he was elected Lieutenant-Colonel, and the day after its organization moved for Fort Donelson, and commenced his active and brilliant career, which knew no cessation until the armies of the South were surrendered. I shall not in this address undertake to follow in detail his successful and marvellous career, nor shall I indulge in any flowers of rhetoric to adorn my story. I will attempt by a plain and simple recital of his most prominent deeds, to raise up the monument he hewed out for himself, and leave to other hands to polish its surface and crown it with appropriate wreaths of beauty.
