Nathan Bedford Forrest (July 13, 1821October 29, 1877) was a Confederate general, noted for his aggressive cavalry tactics and rapid rise from private to general during the American Civil War. After the war, Forrest was inaugurated as the first Grand Wizard of the Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan.
Born into a poor family, as a young man Forrest would amass substantial wealth as a horse and cattle trader, real estate broker, and cotton plantation owner, and was also directly involved in the interstate slave trade, including operating a slave jail in Memphis. In June 1861, shortly after the Civil War began with the splitting of the United States into the Union and the Confederacy, Forrest enlisted in the Confederate Army. Forrest became one of the few soldiers during the war to enlist as a private and be promoted to general without previous military training. An expert cavalry leader, Forrest was given command of a cavalry corps and established new doctrines for mobile forces, earning him the nickname "The Wizard of the Saddle". He used his cavalry troops as mounted infantry and often deployed artillery as the lead in battle, thus helping to "revolutionize cavalry tactics".: "...Nathan Bedford Forrest, whom his superiors did not recognize for the military genius he was until it was too late..."
In April 1864, at the Battle of Fort Pillow, Confederate forces under Forrest's command killed a large number of Union troops after the fort had effectively ceased resistance, most of them black soldiers. Contemporary Northern newspapers and congressional investigations held Forrest responsible, while later historians have differed over whether the killings resulted from explicit orders, loss of control during the assault, or racialized battlefield practices within the Confederate army.
Forrest joined the Ku Klux Klan in the fall of 1866, and was elected its first Grand Wizard in the spring of 1867. The group was a secretive network of dens across the post-war South, where politically active black people and their allies were threatened, assaulted and murdered. During Forrest's tenure as Grand Wizard, Klan organizations across the South used violence and intimidation to suppress Black political participation in the elections of 1868, although historians disagree about the extent of Forrest's direct control over local operations. In 1869, Forrest expressed disillusionment with what historians have described as the Klan's campaign of racial terror and its lack of centralized discipline,: "Although Forrest repudiated the group's activities after less than two years, he transformed the budding terrorist organization into an effective mechanism for promoting white supremacy in the Old South" and issued a letter ordering the dissolution of the Ku Klux Klan as well as the destruction of its costumes; he then withdrew from the organization. Forrest later denied being a Klan member, and in the 1870s twice made statements in support of racial harmony and black dignity. During the last years of his life, he served on the board of a railroad and farmed President's Island using convict labor. Forrest died of illness in 1877, at the age of 56.
Early life and career
Nathan Bedford Forrest was born on July 13, 1821, to William and Miriam (née Beck) Forrest, a poor settler family living in a secluded frontier cabin near the hamlet of Chapel Hill in Bedford County (present day Marshall County), Tennessee.
His father was of English descent, and while most of Nathan's biographers state that his mother was of Scotch-Irish descent, an article published by the Tennessee Genealogical Society asserts that she, too, was of English descent.: "It is time to publish the truth about Miriam Beck Forrest and her family. They were of English origin and came from Pennsylvania and North Carolina. Miriam's parents, John Emasy Beck and his wife, Frances Watts, were among the earlier settlers of Bedford Co., Tenn. John Emasy's grandfather was Jeffrey Beck, born in Bucks Co., Pa., to Edward and Sarah Beck and moved via Virginia to North Carolina"
He and his twin sister, Fanny, were the two eldest of twelve children. Their great-grandfather, Shadrach Forrest, moved between 1730 and 1740 from Virginia to North Carolina, where both his son (Bedford's grandfather) and grandson (Bedford's father) were born. They moved to Tennessee in 1806, and he died in Bedford, Tennessee, the year before Nathan Bedford was born. Forrest's family lived in a log house (now preserved as the Nathan Bedford Forrest Boyhood Home) from 1830 to 1833. John Allan Wyeth, who served in an Alabama regiment under Forrest, described it as a one-room building with a loft and no windows.: "The cabin, which was his mother's home, claimed no more than eighteen by twenty feet of earth to rest upon, with a single room below and half-room or loft overhead. One end of this building was almost entirely given up to the broad fireplace, while near the middle of each side swung, on wooden hinges, a door. There was no need of a window, for light and air found ready access through the doorways and cracks, and down through the wide chimney. A pane of glass was a luxury as yet unknown to this primitive life. Around and near the house was a cleared patch of land containing several acres enclosed with a straight stake fence of cedar rails, and by short cross fences divided into a yard immediately about the cabin; rearward of this a garden, and a young orchard of peach, apple, pear, and plum trees."
William Forrest continued blacksmithing in Tennessee until 1834, when the family moved to Salem, Mississippi. When his father died in 1837, Nathan became the primary caretaker of the family at age 16. Forrest ventured into a business partnership with his uncle, Jonathan Forrest, in Hernando, Mississippi in 1841. His uncle was subsequently killed at the business in 1845 by the Matlock brothers during an argument. In retaliation, Bedford shot and killed two of them with his two-shot pistol and wounded two others with a borrowed knife that was thrown to him. One brother later served under Forrest's command, for a time, during the Civil War. Forrest's early business ventures included a livery stable, a stagecoach line, and a brickyard. He became well known as a Memphis speculator and Mississippi gambler.
In 1858, Forrest was elected a Memphis city alderman as a Southern Democrat and served two consecutive terms. He purchased two large cotton plantations in Coahoma County, Mississippi and bought a one-half property interest in an Arkansas plantation in 1859; by October 1860, he owned at least 3,345 acres in Mississippi. He also acquired several cotton plantations in the Delta region of West Tennessee. By the time the American Civil War started in 1861, he had become one of the wealthiest men in the Southern United States, having amassed a "personal fortune that he claimed was worth $1.5 million".
Forrest stood tall, weighed about , rarely drank, and abstained from tobacco use. He was known as a tireless rider in the saddle and a skilled swordsman. Forrest was noted as having a "striking and commanding presence" by Union Army Captain Lewis Hosea, an aide to Gen. James H. Wilson. He was often described as generally mild-mannered, but according to Hosea and other contemporaries who knew him, his demeanor changed drastically when provoked or angered. Although he was not formally educated, according to Spaulding, Forrest was able to read and write clear and grammatical English, though he was a poor speller. He was initiated into Freemasonry, but did not progress beyond the Entered Apprentice degree.
Marriage and family
Forrest had twelve siblings; 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; his father initially recovered but died from its residual effects of the disease five years later, when Bedford was 16. His mother, Miriam, then married James Horatio Luxton of Marshall, Texas, in 1843 and gave birth to four more children. All of Forrest's younger brothersin order, John N. Forrest, William H. Forrest, Aaron H. Forrest, Jesse A. Forrest, and Jeffrey E. Forrestworked as slave traders with him before the war. All but Johnwho was a disabled veteran of the Mexican–American Warserved as Confederate military officers in Tennessee and Mississippi during the American Civil War. Forrest's son William M. Forrest served as his aide-de-camp, and his half-brother Mat Luxton was a sergeant and scout in his cavalry.
In 1845, Forrest married Mary Ann Montgomery (1826–1893), the niece of a Presbyterian minister who was her legal guardian. They had two children, William Montgomery Bedford Forrest (1846–1908), who enlisted at the age of 15 and served alongside his father in the war, and a daughter, Fanny (1849–1854), who died in childhood. There are also reports from 1864 that Forrest had two children, Thomas and Narcissa, with an enslaved woman named Catharine.
Forrest's grandson, Nathan Bedford Forrest II (1872–1931), became commander-in-chief of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia and secretary of the national organization. His granddaughter, Mary Forrest Bradley, served as president of the Tennessee Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. A great-grandson, Nathan Bedford Forrest III (1905–1943), graduated from West Point and rose to the rank of brigadier general in the U.S. Army Air Corps; he was killed during a bombing raid over Nazi Germany in 1943, becoming the first American general to die in combat in the European theater of World War II.
Slave trading
Nathan Bedford Forrestdisparaged by Parson Brownlow in 1864 as a "sin-hardened negro trader, and livery stable man of Memphis"was a notable slave trader of the United States from 1851 to 1860. Forrest was considered one of the "big four" "phenomenally large" traders in Memphis, which was the "first-class market" for slave trading in Tennessee. He is believed to have sold thousands of slaves during his career and to have earned profits of hundreds of thousands of dollars in 1850s currency. Primarily based in Memphis, he was able to open a second storefront in Vicksburg in 1858. During the American Civil War, Forrest cited his business experience in a written request for an independent command: "I have resided on the Mississippi for over twenty years, was for many years engaged in buying and selling negroes, and know the country perfectly well between Memphis and Vicksburg, and also am well acquainted with all the prominent planters in that region, as well as above Memphis."
After initially working as an independent slave trader, he was first in partnership with Seaborne S. Jones; second, in partnership with Byrd Hill (a more experienced manager of negro marts); third, in partnership with Josiah Maples; then again a sole proprietor; and finally reunited with Jones.