While Nathan Bedford Forrest captured a future American commander in Cuba, Sherman was accompanied by a young Spanish officer who would also serve in Cuba. Military attaché and observer Valeriano Weyler admired Sherman and as a Spanish general 30 years later in Cuba, he adopted scorched-earth tactics to starve rebellious Cubans and established concentration camps for women and children.
Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org
Forrest Captures a Future General
“The two other regiments which [Nathan Bedford] Forrest had on the field – Biffle’s Ninth Tennessee and Cox’s Tenth – he had sent on a wide swing to the right. Coming in from that flank, they cut across the turnpike in [Northern Colonel John] Coburn’s rear, deployed, dismounted . . . and drove home the charge which . . . ”decided the fate of the day.”
When the charging line was within twenty feet of the Union troops, Forrest reported, they “threw down their arms and surrendered.”
Among the losses of the day was the death of Captain Montgomery Little . . . [a] planter and Memphis businessman of middle age . . . a Union man in sentiment before the outbreak of the war.
The bag of Union prisoners at Thompson’s Station numbered 1,221, including seventy-eight officers, among them Colonel Coburn himself and Major William R. Shafter, the same who thirty-five years later was to command the American forces before Santiago de Cuba.”
(First With the Most, Forrest, Robert Selph Henry, Mallard Press, 1991, pp. 130-131)