The vaktovian empire wrote:Nathan Bedford Forrest - (1821 - Present)(Image)
Account Name: The Vaktovian Empire
Occupation: Archduke of Memphis & Her Provinces
Motives: Building a New Confederacy, Increase Economic Strength on a Localized Area Level, Disloyal to the Emperor and any idea of an organized Southern Empire
Background:
Before the war, Nathan Bedford Forrest had already amassed incredible amounts of wealth as a cotton plantation owner, horse and cattle trader, real estate broker and slave trader. He enlisted in the Confederate Army in June 1861, and was one of the few individuals to enlist as a private and be promoted to general without any prior military training. Forrest as an adolescent was born into a poor settler family out of a secluded frontier cabin near Chapel Hill hemlet, part of Bedford County, Tennessee. Forrest's family lived in a log house, a one room building with a loft and no windows. His father died in 1837 and Forrest became the primary caretaker of the family aged 16, learning quite young how to handle himself.
Forrest had success as a businessman, planter and slaveholder prior to the war, in the Memphis-Delta region of West Tennessee and became a slave trader at a time when demand for slaves was booming in the Deep South; his slave trading business was based on Adams Street in Memphis. In 1858, Forrest was elected a Memphis city alderman, otherwise recognized as a high ranking member on the cities' council, as a Democrat and served two consecutive terms. By the time the American Civil War started in 1861, he had become one of the richest men in the South, having amassed a personal fortune he personally described as being close to $1.5 Million dollars.
Forrest was well known as a Memphis speculator and Mississippi gambler. In 1859 he bought two large cotton plantations in Coahoma County, Missippin, and a half-interest in another platation in Arkansas. By October 1860, he owned at least 3,345 acres in Mississippi.
Forrest had 12 brothers and sisters, two of his eight brothers and three of his four sisters died of typhoid fever at an early age, all at about the same time. He also contracted the disease. but survived. In 1845, Forrest married Mary Ann Montgomery (1826 - present), the niece of a Presbyterian minister who was her legal guardian. They had two children, William Montgomery Bedford Forrest (1846 - present), who enlisted at the age of 15 and served alongside his father in the war, and a daughter, Fanny (1849 - 1854) who dies in childhood. Forrest's son had a son in 1872, Nathan Bedford Forrest II). William Montgomery Bedford Forrest often referred to as "Monty" by those who he served in the later years of the war, was appraised a large sum of land in Province of Dayton (present day 2020 Henderson, TN). He was also put second in command of all elements of the military forces in what his father would found as the Grand Duchy of Memphis & Her Provinces in 1871. In Nobility-achieved speaking terms, given that Forrest had first adopted to announce a Grand Duchy rather than a Kingdom, on account of the small approximate area of relative land they controlled, as well as out of respect to the Emperor at the time, Cornelius Vanderbilt, William Montgomery was awarded the respective house rank of Earl of Dayton.
During the war, Forrest was well respected for his military-wit and strategy. Forrest was renowned as an expert cavalry leader, and was given command of a corps and established new doctrines for mobile forces, earning the nickname "The Wizard of the Saddle". His methods influenced future generations of military strategists (post 19th century period) although Confederate high command is seen by some historians now and in the present day to have underappreciated his talents. Forrest gained praise throughout the war, starting at the very beginning when first enlisting. He surprised many of his superior officers and those of the early-stage Confederate high command by enlisting whilst being such a prominent figure out wealth and prominence, especially since major planters had been exempted from service. They commissioned him as a lieutenant colonel and authorized him to recruit and train a battalion of Confederate mounted rangers. With no prior formal military training, Forrest gained major attention from superiors and high command by demonstrating leadership early on, and proved he was a very capable and successful tactician. There was a popular question among the population of Tennessee on whether to join the Confederacy, albeit the state voted to secede, being the last to do so in June of 1861, whilst East Tennessee held firm against separation till the bitter end. Forrest's command included his Escort Company (his "Special Forces") for which he selected the best soldiers available. This unit, varied in size from 40 to 90 men constituted the most elite of his cavalry. At the start of the Grand Duchy, the "Escort Company" was split into two powerful entities, those of the Duke's Royal Guard, which consisted of around 10-15 of the most versatile men; duelists, marksmen, and cavalry riders, and the rest being grandfather into the 1st Royal Cavalry Brigade.
One of the most skeptical moments of Forrest's military career during the war was the Fort Pillow Massacre. Much of what was reported by eyewitness accounts by both Union survivors and Confederate deserters from the units under commander of Brigadier General James Chalmers, Forrest's commanding officer at the time, was true to the tee. The Confederate forces under Forrest had subjected Union captured soldiers, of which two thirds of the black Union soldiers were killed, while only a third of the white soldiers were killed, to extreme brutality; back-shooting soldiers who fled into the Mississippi adjacent West to Fort Pillow, shooting wounded soldiers, burning men alive, nailing men to barrels and igniting them, crucifixion, and hacking men to death with sabers. Forrest had seen all of it done, and had stopped none of it. The event was well known to have been appalling to even some of Forrest's most loyal men, where one recounted in a letter to his sisters after the battle that the slaughter was "awful, words cannot describe the scene.
"The poor deluded negroes would run up to our men fall upon their knees and with uplifted hands scream for mercy, but they were ordered to their feet and then shot down. The white men fared but little better. Their fort turned out to be a great slaughter pen. Blood, human blood stood about in pools and brains could have been gathered up in any quantity,"
Following the capture of the remaining men, Captain John Goodwin, of Forrest's cavalry command, was able to forward a dispatch listing the prisoners captured. Thist list named the 7 officers and 219 white enlisted soldiers, but failed to include any reputable information of the black prisoners. Northern press and public viewed Forrest as a war criminal, while the Southern press defended Forrest's reputation. No discourse was able to be taken by the North, as the South ended up winning the war and ending it with the Treaty of Conestoga, formally drawing Confederate-Union borders at the Mason-Dixon line. At the conclusion of the war, Forrest was found in home-state Tennessee, where he had successfully helped repel any advance by Union forces in the Western Theater and front-line, under the direction of General John Bell Hood, his commanding officer, who died in 1872 in New Orleans Louisiana from Yellow Fever. Hood had been a great late-stage mentor to Forrest.
Upon the end of the war, Forrest had so much invested in Memphis and the surrounding areas aforementioned in Arkansas and Mississippi, that when the South started to capitulate from an organized system of government to a breakaway modernized variant of Feudalism, Forrest was all in on the spoils. He already was one of the wealthiest men in the Midwest, albeit the richest man in Tennessee by far and large. The Confederate Army, though disbanded, had major elements salvaged by Forrest, including his "Escort Company" as described previous. Forrest had crossed paths at one point or another with one Bernard Kelsey, who's company had taken the liberty of taking over finishing the Memphis & Little Rock Railroad, which would connect the crown jewel of Forrest's Grand Duchy to a sizable trade hub and growing bastion in that of Little Rock, Arkansas.
By 1875, Forrest had become a prominent figure in Tennessee, tenfold to that at the very climax and end of the Civil War. Forrest's reach had been able to travel as far as the Tennessee River, which marked the very Eastern border of his territories to date in 1877. Men of great privilege and those who Forrest had both served with and served under were awarded land and titles to behold such territory. All of Tennessee from the Mississippi to the Tennessee Rivers and from the border of Kentucky with that of Mississippi, had pledged their allegiance to Forrest. Forrest, in tern, and by lawful decree, with a blessing from the late Emperor, had the land immediately encompassing that of Memphis and its surrounding small villages and towns made hereditary in terms of his namesake. Forrest had divided the land up into large chunks, allowing the Viscounts and Barons he rewarded the large chunks of land to independently name the cities, towns, and in some areas simple villages, of which they would organize and operate the daily functions of their politics and economy. Forrest relatively speaking was quite well in leading what he considered his "shining achievement" to date in his lifetime. He allowed the Barons of both his rural and urban "Provinces" to exercise whatever local powers that be and which they saw fit, from judge and jury proceedings to military tribunals for civilians. The orderliness of the whole endeavor was quite perplexing, and the effectiveness of it as well as its efficiency were to be reckoned with. Mostly, the great shining achievements of the territories of which Forrest could claim, was they were well protected, well respected, well run for the most part, and modern progress and industrialization had crept in little by little in the more centralized areas close thereof to Memphis than your simple cotton plantation or irrigation plot of farming land. Coming across Kelsey, once in his lifetime, Forrest had paid handsomely for the construction of two major railways, one which traveled on a slightly raised angle Northeast bound from Memphis, ending in a substantially sized town of Wilkinstown, in a large sum of territory which hadn't been formally subdivided to appropriate applicable members of his court of which held no actual land proceedings, just administrative positions in his government. The economy up to the point of 1877 was nothing to say of exceptional, but it was far better regulated by Forrest, and those he had delegated positions to controlling and monitoring finances and banks across the territory of Memphis' rule. By the time of 1877, when the late Emperor had passed, those all the way as far as the Western incline of the Appalachian Plateau and the Great Smoky Mountains had heard of, and were considering becoming declaring allegiance and administering respects to some part of Forrest's reach and protection. With the rise of Benedict Church in the Eastern portion of the Tennessee to the East however, it was hard to convince neighboring towns to the Appalachian Plateau themselves, especially with those that bordered the Union as well respectively.
The elements of the Confederate Army in Tennessee, at least those that had been organized under the late General John Bell Hood and Forrest were integrated quite well into being the armies that would serve as full-time enlisted men in the new organized group in Memphis. Many would take part-time status and become sheriffs in some of the rural or urbanized towns both near and far to the Capital Province, which included both the city of Memphis itself and the residing villages and towns approximate to it. The elements of the Army, both infantry, some artillery elements, and mostly cavalry were prominent to a degree in the early days and the first year or two of the formation of the "Grand Duchy of Memphis". They only intensified however, when Forrest had written a letter to Thomas Jonathan "Stonewall" Jackson, enlisting the help of one J.E.B Stuart, another prominent Confederate War General, and one of Stonewall Jackson's closest friends during the conflict. He had written Jackson in 1876, just a year prior to the late Emperor passing. Forrest, though outranked by Stuart during the war, felt that the young General had modeled much of his success in the Cavalry to what Forrest had done in the Confederate Army. Though that would be a great compliment, nothing could be more false on the state of Stuart's view of Forrest. Although both Confederate radicals, and men who were highly patriotic of the South in their own rights, Stuart was much thereof concerned with keeping the South corroborated as one. Having a man who possessed a much greater respect and honor to the cavalry in almost a sense of royalty or status, Stuart was well known to have sported an immensely attractive cavalier image.
Although following the war Stuart had settled down in Virginia following the war, and had been severely involved in the Emperor's direct military before the Empire had dissolved shortly thereafter, he had little jobs which had taken his direct interest aside from strategics, advisor, and militia trainer for several of the small, medium and large scale paramilitaries which were spurned from the ashes of the collectivized Empire, as the fragments had started forming long before the Emperor's death in 1877. With that being said, when Forrest requested an audience with Stuart through Jackson, Stonewall, with the preservation of an organized Southern state clearly in his mind, jumped on the opportunity to place a man close to his own heart; in that of Stuart firmly in place in one of the more red-flagged uneasy and unbalanced parts of the now fragmenting South. Having a passionate slave-driving, Pro-Confederate and Pro-War man at the helm such as Forrest, despite his wisdom for lack of a better word considering his age, he couldn't be trusted and with the impending death of the Emperor due to pneumonia, Jackson didn't miss a beat. He had wired Stuart in Virginia, just a hop, skip and jump from the Biltmore Estate in the Carolinas, and with something to now attend to, Stuart jumped at the opportunity to not only help assist his former superior officer, but maintain the pride and united approach to keeping the South unified under one leader and government, even if it was under George Washington Vanderbilt III.
Titles/Positions: Archduke of the Grand Duchy of Memphis and Her Provinces
Holdings: Grand Duchy of Memphis, formally encompassing territory of Tennessee to the West of the Tennessee River.
Politics: In favor of South's independence based on birthplace and patriotism towards the virtue of an independent South, Pro-sectionalism and intrigued with the idea of broadening own power politically, economically, and socially, rather nationalizing to better suit the South as a whole. Anti-Union, scoffs at the idea of sympathizers, rebels in the form of those in the Appalachians, and any local territories be it villages, towns or cities that would look to be incorporated into the Union from Eastern Tennessee.
Faith: MethodistJames Ewell Brown "Jeb" Stuart - (1833 - Present)(Image)
Account Name: The Vaktovian Empire
Occupation: Inspector General of the Grand Army of the Grand Duchy of Memphis & Her Provinces
Motives: Maintain loyalty to Nathan Bedford Forrest, a longtime fellow Confederate high-ranking officer, while assisting in directly and subversively editing and propitiating his government in order to ensure it will be able to unify or to the very least ally with other rival large fragments of the Confederacy and the Southern Empire, in order to maintain civil rest and unity to discourage any thought of Northern restarts to a second wave of war. Increase military funding, spending, and the level to which troops and forces are trained, maintained, and administered in Forrest's new Duchy, as in the likelihood of a Northern invasion, these would be the first troops on the Western front-line that would see combat.
Background:
James Ewell Brown "Jeb" Stuart was born in Patrick Country, Virginia on February 6, 1833 to Archibald and Elizabeth Letcher Pannill Stuart. He was the eight of eleven children, and the youngest of five sons to survive past early age. His father was a War of 1812 veteran, slaveholder, attorney, and Democratic politician who represented Patrick County in both houses of the Virginia General Assembly, also serving one time in the United States House of Representatives, and his mother ran the family farm and was known as a strict religious woman with a good sense for business.
Stuart attended Emory and Henry College when he was fifteen from 1848 to 1850. He then went on to to attempt to enlist in the U.S Army but was rejected for being underaged. He obtained an appointment in 1850 to the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York. He graduated 13th in his class of 46 in 1854. He also enjoyed the civil engineering curriculum at the academy and exceeded in mathematics.
He spent a brief amount of time as a Cavalry Officer with the rank of first lieutenant in the United States Army. He met his wife, Flora Cooke, daughter of Lieutenant Colonel Philip St. George Cooke of the 2nd U.S Dragoon Regiment (Cavalry) in 1855, the same year he was promoted to first lieutenant. Flora gave birth to a girl in 1856 but she died the same day, next in 1857 to another daughter, whom her parents named Flora, after her mother. The family relocated to Fort Riley where they remained for three years before the start of the war. In 1860 Flora gave birth to a son, James Ewell Brown Stuart Jr, of whom followed his father when he ventured to Memphis as per Stonewall Jackson, to become a part of what Nathan Bedford Forrest had created in the Western Regions of Tennessee.
During the Civil War he was renowned for his military prowess, especially in the Cavalry. He circumnavigated the Union Army of the Potomac twice, bringing fame to himself and embarassement to the North before their inevitable loss in the War, and subsequent armistice signed at the Treaty of Conestoga.
Immediately following the war, Stuart was a valued commodity. He was sought after by countless local and big time lords of the slowly matriculating fragments of the at-first shining Southern Empire to train their most loyal and skilled soldiers, both in infantry combat, shooting, and cavalry operations, all of which Stuart had first mastered and shown his knowledge in through his well-known success at West Point, and then in the field during the war. Stuart did this for a time for the first few years following the war, but soon grew tired of the inability to have direct access to combat, or a sense of more leverage in a position. Afterall, he had made his way all the way up to the rank of Major General by the war's end. With the Confederate Army disbanded and the Emperor's organized elements of an Army slowly losing initiative under his flail and Pro-Union style of rule and political policy, Stuart retired to his homestead to spend time with his family and directly tutor his son in military strategy and novelties at a much earlier age than he was afforded at West Point.
Stuart was wired at his home in Richmond by his longtime friend Thomas Jonathan "Stonewall" Jackson. Jackson, who had taken the occupation and initiative of becoming the Chancellor of the Emperor's Council in his last years, had a similar proposition for Stuart. Nathan Bedford Forrest, a well known but varying respected General from the Confederate Army, had enlisted Jackson to put him in contact with Stuart. He wanted Stuart to have the type of oversight that Stonewall was well known for having for the Emperor for the past several of years.
Jackson had reasoning behind asking Stuart; not only for the sake of the fact any men and body of government politically, economically, and socially that Forrest was running would be right on the border of that with the North, who had tensions from losing as it was, but also for the sake Forrest's reputation was varied throughout the South. Some bought into the bigotry he had exemplified in Fort Pillow in the years that followed the war, some were weary of him, despite officially converting to a Southern Methodist in the years recent, never truly upholding the values of a "Christian" man, as his now long-devoted wife's Presbyterian Uncle had once taken a notice to when he first made her his fiancee. To add insult to injury, Stonewall in his duties as Chancellor had done his best to keep the Southern Empire unified. It was well known the unity wouldn't last following the Emperor's death, however if Stonewall could put one of his most trusted men in an area of instability and proximity to the Northern border where order and discipline and at least the very image of a "Unified South" could be personified for onlookers on the Northern border to take note of, that would suffice with Jackson, and though Stuart would be free to try and implement his own agenda into Forrest's plans, he knew that despite Forrest seemingly wanting a divided South, he and Stuart were cut from the same patriotic cloth as the South being "one nation".
Titles/Positions: Inspector General & Lord Commander to the Archduke's Grand Army & Subsequent sub-dependencies, Grand Inquisitor of Espionage, Chief Justice of Military Laws Within the Confines of His Excellencies Borders
Holdings: Holds Considerable Weight and Command of All Military Aspects of Grand Duchy of Memphis & Her Provinces, and surrounding adjacent areas of influence in middle-Kentucky
Politics: In favor of the South's independence on account of his birthplace and undivided patriotism towards a united Southern State, under one centralized government, both politically, economically, and socially, undecided and impartial to the idea of Slavery in the South, more-so concerned with the independence of the Southern State as a collective and its ability to maintain that independence Geographically South of the Mason-Dixon Line.
Faith: Christian, Denomination Undeclared Presently
Bumping this up for Vak.
