>>17925687
Every man who's ever been a little boy obsessed with battles and heroes has to revere Forrest as a soldier, though.

It's not like Forrest was exclusively a southern hero. There's a massive list of honors heaped upon him by his Union opponents, guys like Sherman, etc, after the war.

I am interested in what would've happened if the ACW had devolved into a guerrilla war, though.

There are some very interesting Nathan Bedford Forrest interviews about it and why the KKK was founded in the first place, basically as a guerilla army to ensure the north played fair with reconstruction and Confederates weren't rounded up and hung for alleged war crimes, etc.
I think there was something like 55,000 men in the KKK when it was first founded by Forrest, most of them veterans -- it was very clearly a political bludgeon, a warning that the Confederacy would be true to its oaths but only so far as there were no outrages committed against them.

The idea of Forrest leading an insurgency is interesting because he was incredibly gifted with shit like that, a true military genius.