Born to Battle: Grant and Forrest—Shiloh, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga: The Campaigns That Doomed the Confederacy

Hurst (Nathan Bedford Forrest: A Biography) juxtaposes Ulysses S. Grant and Nathan Bedford Forrest during the period when each began demonstrating the abilities that made them respected opponents. They first faced each other at Shiloh in April 1862. By the summer of 1863, Forrest had developed a reputation as the western Confederacy’s “wizard of the saddle,” master of the lightning strike and the long-distance raid. Grant was established as an artist of maneuver. His feints and slashes had confounded his opponents and culminated in the capture of Vicksburg. At Chattanooga he showed he could fight and win a head-to-head battle as well. Making sophisticated use of archival and printed sources, Hurst maintains that the marginalization of Forrest, a blacksmith’s son, by a Confederacy insisting on “blue-blood leadership” was “a chief cause of the Confederacy’s death.” The Union, by contrast, made effective use of the equally lowborn and unpolished Grant. Both, Hurst asserts, exemplified the common men who did most of the war’s dying. Both understood what soldiers could do in particular situations. And both were accustomed by peacetime hardship to the fears and anxieties of wartime command. The comparison, if not entirely convincing, is original and provocative. Photos. Agent: Deborah Grosvenor, Grosvenor Literary Agency. (June)