For our final pick, team mjdemaine pick one of the great generals of American history, a man who got the haters furious by winning, killing, and completely owning other dudes. Figuratively, of course.
Forrest is universally regarded as one of the best generals of the American Civil War, pioneering the concept of mobile warfare. He was also slightly racist. A self-educated man, he made a fortune in slave trading in the 1850s and enlisted in the Confederate Army as a private, giving him the distinction of being one of a handful of American Civil War generals who enlisted as private.
Like Charlie Sheen, Forrest learned that nothing gets the haters angrier than winning. And Forrest did a lot of winning, raiding the Union supply lines and defeating Union cavalry forces that sometimes outnumbered his own forces 2 or 3 to one. An associate of Grant said that "Forrest was the only Confederate cavalryman of whom Grant stood in much dread." Forrest didn't lose a battle until the summer of 1864, three years into the war.
While Union soldiers were among his haters, they are certainly not his core constituency. Forrest got African-Americans FURIOUS. He was the commander of a raid that captured Fort Pillow, garrisoned by 600 Union troops, 300 of which were black. After a short battle, 60% of the white soldiers and 20% of the black soldiers were taken prisoner by the Confederated forces. While it is unclear exactly how events transpired, one Confederate sargent described the aftermath of the battle: "the poor, deluded negroes would run up to our men, fall upon their knees, and with uplifted hand scream for mercy, but were ordered to their feet and then shot down. The New York Times described the battle
Quote:
The blacks and their officers were shot down, bayoneted and put to the sword in cold blood... . Out of four hundred negro soldiers only about twenty survive! At least three hundred of them were destroyed after the surrender! This is the statement of the rebel General Chalmers himself to our informant.
Whether the massacre was ordered by Forrest is unclear (and indeed, it is unclear the extent of the war crime), but it became known as the Fort Pillow Massacre in the north, and Forrest was the man held responsible. "Remember Fort Pillow" became a rallying cry for the North.
But Forrest was just getting warmed up. After the war, he became (probably) the first Grand Wizard of a little origination called the Ku Klux Klan. When first told about the Klan and its philosophy, Forrest is alleged to have said "That's a good thing; that's a damn good thing. We can use that to keep the ******s in their place." While Forrest denied any involvement with the organization in public, he later became known as the most prominent member of the Klan, and even the founding of the much-hated KKK has often been incorrectly attributed to him.
Team mjdemaine:
Osama bin Laden
Adolf Eichmann
Nikita Khrushchev
Tony Blair
The Shah
Dick Nixon
Robespierre
Malcolm X
Alexander the Great
Nathan Bedford Forrest