Hey everyone, thanks for tuning in to episode 95 of our Civil War podcast. I'm Rich.

I'm Tracy. Hello y'all. Welcome to the podcast. Tracy and I had originally planned on releasing a short

bonus episode on Nathan Bedford Forest once we were finished with the Fort Henry Fort Donaldson

story arc. But after thinking it over, we decided to just expand it a bit and make it into our regular

episode for this week. So for those of you who tuned into this episode, expecting to hear us start

discussing Sibley's New Mexico campaign, you guys will have to wait one more week for that. Sorry.

During the most recently completed story arc, Rich and I mentioned Nathan Bedford Forest a

couple of times, especially in connection with his escape from Fort Donaldson. And because of that,

and because we'll be mentioning Forest's name quite a few more times during the course of the

podcast, we thought this might be a good time to take a quick look at Forest's background

and then go into just a bit more detail about that breakout that he led from Fort Donaldson.

Nathan Bedford Forest, however controversial you consider him to be, is undeniably one of those

small handful of men who rose from relative obscurity to unexpectedly become great fighting

generals during the Civil War. The other two such men who come immediately to mind are you

Lizzie Sess Grant and William to come to Sherman. And it's interesting that if you look at Grant

and Sherman and Forest, they were all very different of course. But one thing they had in common

is that they were men who didn't hold any idealized, fanciful notions about war. Grant said,

the art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is, get out of him as soon as you can,

strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving on. Sherman bluntly declared,

war is cruelty, and you cannot refine it. And then Forest went straight to the heart of the matter

when he said, war means fighting, and fighting means killing. Another thing that Grant and Sherman

and Forest had in common is that they didn't just talk the talk, they walked the walk. That is,

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