Catharine

Catharine (born ?) was an enslaved woman of Tennessee in the United States who may have been associated with slave trader and Confederate cavalry commander Nathan Bedford Forrest. Her life is poorly documented, and she could be a propagandistic device. She is known primarily from one unsigned anti-Forrest newspaper article that appeared in the wake of the Battle of Fort Pillow, but there are two, other sources that may at least confirm her existence.

Historical records

Per an unsigned item about Nathan Bedford Forrest and his brothers that was credited only to a "Knoxville, E.T." correspondent of the New-York Tribune and published in a number of U.S.-aligned newspapers in 1864:" Forrest's most recent major biographer, Jack Hurst, described the Knoxville–Tribune report of 1864 as, overall, "inflammatory but in some ways accurate," and specifically in the case of Catharine: "The partisan invective of the brief article might make it dismissable were it not intriguingly stressful of the name 'Catharine' (while Mary Ann's goes unmentioned) and supported by several other Forrest family names and business activities whose accuracy is verifiable."

Hurst also surfaced a record from the Shelby County register, book 16, page 125: [It may be] Forrest's initial purchase as an individual slave trader of which there remains a recordand apparently the only such transaction he ever made with a firm in which he was a principal—involved the new Hill & Forrest firm around this time. He bought from it 'a Negrow woman named Catharine aged seventeen and her Child named Thomas aged four months boath of which we warrant sound in body + mind and Slaves for Life and the title fully guaranteed.'...The purpose of this seemingly special purchase appears impossible to ascertain now. The woman may have been bought to be a housekeeper or simply as an investment, since the value of slavesparticularly that of young, child-bearing femaleswas rapidly rising. There is also the possibility that this Catharine was, or became, something more.

There is also a Cath Forrest (Cath with a C, and Forrest with two Rs), mulatto, age 36, listed in the 1870 U.S. census in Memphis, Tennessee, living and/or working in what is likely a boarding house.

A Catherine Forrest also appears twice in the Memphis city directory in the 1870s:

"Forrest, Catherine, col, r 199 Monroe" in the 1874 Boyle-Chapman directory "Forrest, Catherine, col'd, domestic, r 239 Madison" in the 1877 Sholes directory

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