dcharles
Banned
"...since the bulk of Kentucky fell under the United States' control in mid-1914, there was perhaps no figure whom the U.S. Army had been as interested in capturing or, preferably, killing as Nathan Bedford Forrest II, who quickly surpassed his ancestor in infamy through his command of the Irregulars Division, which by the end of the war was not so much a division as a loose network of fireteams spread across the Midlands and central Alabama who conducted acts of sabotage, ambush, and assassination against not only Yankees but freedmen and even suspected collaborators. Their abilities to dynamite bridges and railroad tracks had dwindled as the war continued but their numbers grew, as did their access to considerably cheaper rifles, pistols and bullets. As the Confederate Army declined as a cohesive force, the intentionally decentralized Irregulars swelled to replace them as the closest thing to state authority that existed in certain parts of Dixie, interwoven with the increasingly brutal Home Guard that suspected everyone as a deserter and carried out a horrifying campaign of not only intimidation but rape, torture and murder against the civilian population.
As such, the postwar Irregulars and Home Guard formed the nucleus of a massive paramilitary active in almost all states but with no central authority to control them and, unlike the regular infantrymen who were so shell-shocked from the horrors of frontline combat that they had simply lost the will to fight, were convinced that the "Holy Confederacy" had failed to repel the Yankee because, in the words of one anonymous commander, "we had insufficiently matched their savagery." It was simply taken for granted amongst the ex-Irregulars that the Yankees mutilated white women and encouraged freedmen to do the same, and that massacres - that nobody actually ever saw evidence of - were happening across the Confederacy simply because that was what they believed was necessary to justify their worldview.
The Treaty of Mount Vernon thus offended the opinions of the Irregulars more than anybody else in the Confederacy, and it was such ex-Irregulars and Home Guardsmen who were often most involved in the Bloody Wednesday Riots and similar actions. News of the treaty's passage "under duress" and the emerging debate over how to proceed with the "Gunbarrel Amendments" broke the dam, and Forrest - who had been careful to control his movements for years, aware that Yankee assassins were looking for him eagerly - emerged in public near Anniston, Alabama on April 10, 1917 [1] to denounce the Treaty's passage but also go one step further.
The Anniston Declaration, also known as the Appeal of April 10th, marked an important chapter in the postwar Confederacy as it was an all-out call to arms by Forrest. The Declaration included a document which Forrest signed in the presence of several of his commanders and asked be photographed and then published which called upon "all Confederates of ability - man, woman and child alike - to with their whole spirit and body embark in a total and unyielding resistance to Yankee barbarism and the threat of the abolition." In the speech he gave, Forrest was considerably less legalistic. Waving the signed Declaration over his head, Forrest announced, "I call forth today The Great Resistance, the most potent rising in human history of free men, to drive from our lands the Yankee through immeasurable bloodshed, and to never yield to the nigger!" With those words, the Red Summer of 1917 had effectively begun.
Forrest was fortunate in that he had commanded the Irregulars for three years and was regarded as nearly a god amongst men by his subordinates, and this translated to his ability to rapidly reorganize his vast force into what he titled "the National Resistance Organization," as the Confederate Army, in his view, no longer represented the people through its deposition of Vardaman and acquiescence to Mount Vernon. The Anniston Declaration formed the NRO's founding document, and proclaimed that it would "resist the Yankee occupation in all areas by force, politics and commerce," opening the door to it serving as an alternative government in certain parts of the Confederacy as opposed to the now vehemently-unpopular Congress run by what was left of the Bourbon and Tillmanite movements.
While the National Resistance served as the formal underpinning of the mass rejection by White Dixie of what Mount Vernon represented, in reality it was much more of an incoherent force than its detractors and proponents alike made it out to be. Forrest was wily and good at avoiding being caught but he had exaggerated his own capabilities as a guerilla commander frequently and his notoriety was as much myth as it was based on actual results. Rather, what was so important about not just his new organization but also the Appeal of April 10th was that it inspired the dozens of small, localist paramilitaries across the Confederacy that his men were famously bad at incorporating under their wings, paramilitaries that quickly took on the colloquial and romantic name "hillboys" who formed the much more lethal and successful auxiliary component of the Great Resistance and before long chafed just as much at Forrest's personalist project as they did the Patton-Martin government in Charlotte that they dismissed as Yankee stooges, thus maintaining operational independence.
There was not one 'Great Resistance' of White Dixie rejecting peace and abolition - there were several of them, all in different states, with different leaders, agendas and campaigns, and that would only exacerbate the bloodshed to come as the Red Summer began..."
- A Freedom Bought With Blood: Emancipation and the Postwar Confederacy
[1] This date chosen as an homage to "The Death of Russia"
Excellent work! One of my favorite chapters so far, which is really saying a lot.