Forrest, Nathan Bedford, 1821-1877

Nathan Bedford Forrest was a Confederate cavalry commander and later the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

Born on July 13, 1821, in Bedford County, Tennessee, he became his family’s caretaker at age sixteen when his father died. He pursued numerous types of business as a young man, including gambling, farming, and slave trading. When the Civil War began in 1861, Forrest was one of the wealthiest men in the south, owning more than three thousand acres in Mississippi, as well as plantations in Tennessee and Arkansas.

He volunteered for Confederate service in 1861 and soon received command of the Third Tennessee Cavalry Regiment. He had no formal military training—and little formal education—yet, proved a natural leader and military tactician. He scored numerous military victories as a cavalry commander, and showed skill in avoiding capture or defeat by Union troops. In February 1862, when Ulysses S. Grant’s troops besieged Confederate troops at Fort Donelson, Forrest led nearly four thousand southern soldiers in escaping across the Cumberland River before the fort fell to the federal units. During the Vicksburg Campaign in Mississippi in 1863, Forrest was a brigadier general leading Confederate raids on Grant’s supply lines, causing havoc and frustrating federal efforts to stop his cavalry force.

By 1864, Forrest had been promoted to major general. He continued to see great success in raids behind Union lines and through mounting attacks against smaller contingents of Union soldiers. In April 1864, he led Confederate troops against a federal garrison at Fort Pillow, Tennessee. Forrest’s men overran the fort and, according to many witness accounts, began murdering Black Union soldiers who had surrendered to the Confederates. The event became one of the most famous atrocities of the Civil War, widely publicized and investigated by federal officials.

While much of the Confederacy’s military future grew dim in 1864, as William Tecumseh Sherman’s Union army advanced upon Atlanta, and Grant’s Union forces backed Robert E. Lee into a defensive position around Richmond, Virginia, Forrest remained mobile and dangerous, scoring notable victories even when outnumbered, such as the Battle of Brice’s Cross Roads in June 1864 in Mississippi. He was promoted to lieutenant general in February 1865, and remained in the field until April 1865, when he surrendered to Union forces in the wake of the Confederacy’s collapse. By the time the Civil War ended, Forrest had been wounded four times, reportedly had twenty-nine horses shot out from under him, and claimed to have killed or defeated thirty Union soldiers in hand-to-hand combat.

Following the war, Forrest lived in Memphis, Tennessee, and pursued a career in railroad development. His ventures ultimately were not successful, and he was nearly bankrupt. He moved onto a large plantation on the Mississippi River that used convicts for labor, in a system similar to slavery. Apart from his financial efforts, Forrest’s early postwar activities involved a prominent role in the Ku Klux Klan. Elected the terror organization’s first Grand Wizard in 1867. He helped recruit former Confederates and white southern men to the group as an effort to resist Reconstruction and Republican policies. However, Forrest became disenchanted with the lack of order and discipline he saw during the Klan’s its rapid expansion. In 1869, he tried to dissolve the Klan and ordered its members to destroy their robes and hoods. By the mid-1870s, Forrest began making public speeches advocating for better protection of Black civil rights. These actions caused rebuke from many of his former Confederate colleagues.

Forrest died of diabetes October 29, 1877. He was married to Mary Ann Montgomery and had two children. Forrest was initially buried at Elmwood Cemetery in Memphis, Tennessee. Then, in 1904, city officials moved his remains (and those of his wife) to a city park named in his honor. In 2021, his remains were moved again, this time to Columbia, Tennessee.

(Wikipedia; FindaGrave; American Battlefield Trust)

Nathan Bedford Forrest belonged to the following social groups: