Nathan Bedford Forrest (July 13, 1821 – October 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.
Before the Civil War, Forrest amassed 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".
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, 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.
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.
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.
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 6 feet 2 inches (1.88 m) tall, weighed about 180 pounds (82 kg), 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.
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 brothers—in order, John N. Forrest, William H. Forrest, Aaron H. Forrest, Jesse A. Forrest, and Jeffrey E. Forrest—worked as slave traders with him before the war. All but John—who was a disabled veteran of the Mexican–American War—served 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.