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Nathan Bedford Forrest (July 13, 1821 – October 29, 1877) was a Confederate Army general during the American Civil War and was later the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan from 1867 to 1869. Before the war, Forrest amassed substantial wealth as a cotton plantation owner, horse and cattle trader, real estate broker, and slave trader. In June 1861, he enlisted in the Confederate Army and 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 corps and established new doctrines for mobile forces, earning 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". "Forrest never failed to destroy the military reputation of the Federal commanders encountered by him" succinctly characterizes the perception held by opponents, reporters, and historians alike, of his martial tactical achievements. While scholars generally acknowledge Forrest's skills and acumen as a cavalry leader and military strategist, he is a controversial figure in U.S. history for prewar slave trading, his role in the massacre of several hundred U.S. Army soldiers at Fort Pillow, a majority of them black, and his postwar leadership of the Klan. In April 1864, in what has been called "one of the bleakest, saddest events of American military history", troops under Forrest's command at the Battle of Fort Pillow massacred hundreds of surrendered troops, composed of black soldiers and white Tennessean Southern Unionists fighting for the United States. Forrest was blamed for the slaughter in the U.S. press, and this news may have strengthened the United States's resolve to win the war. Forrest's level of responsibility for the massacre is still debated by historians. Forrest, who was a Freemason, joined the Ku Klux Klan in 1867 (two years after its founding) and was elected its first Grand Wizard. The group was a loose collection of local factions throughout the former Confederacy that used violence or threats of violence to maintain white control over the newly enfranchised, formerly enslaved people. The Klan, with Forrest at the lead, suppressed the voting rights of blacks in the Southern United States through violence and intimidation during the elections of 1868. In 1869, Forrest expressed disillusionment with the lack of discipline in the white supremacist terrorist group across the 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. In the last years of his life, Forrest denied being a Klan member and, disturbed by anti-black violence, made statements in support of racial harmony and black dignity. In June 2021, the remains of Forrest and his wife were exhumed from Health Sciences Park, where they had been buried for over 100 years, and where a monument of him once stood. They were later reburied in Columbia, Tennessee. In July 2021, Tennessee officials voted to move Forrest's bust from the State Capitol to the Tennessee State Museum. Early life and career Nathan Bedford Forrest was born on July 13, 1821, to a poor settler family in a secluded frontier cabin near Chapel Hill hamlet, then part of Bedford County, Tennessee, but now in Marshall County. Forrest was the first son of Mariam (Beck) and William Forrest. His blacksmith father was of English descent, and most of his biographers state that his mother was of Scotch-Irish descent, but the Memphis Genealogical Society says that she was of English descent. He and his twin sister, Fanny, were the two eldest of 12 children. Their great-grandfather, Shadrach Forrest, moved between 1730 and 1740 from Virginia to North Carolina, where his son and grandson were born; they moved to Tennessee in 1806. 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 worked as a blacksmith in Tennessee until 1834, when he moved with his family to Salem, Mississippi. William died in 1837 and Forrest became the primary caretaker of the family at age 16. In 1841 Forrest went into business with his uncle Jonathan Forrest in Hernando, Mississippi. His uncle was killed there in 1845 during an argument with the Matlock brothers. In retaliation, Forrest shot and killed two of them with his two-shot pistol and wounded two others with a knife thrown to him. One of the wounded Matlock men survived and served under Forrest during the Civil War. Forrest's early business ventures included a livery stable, a stagecoach line, and a brickyard. Forrest was 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. In 1859, he bought two large cotton plantations in Coahoma County, Mississippi and a half-interest in another plantation in Arkansas; by October 1860, he owned at least 3,345 acres in Mississippi. He 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) in height and weighed about 180 pounds (82 kg). He was noted as having a "striking and commanding presence" by U.S. Army Captain Lewis Hosea, an aide to Gen. James H. Wilson. Forrest rarely drank and abstained from tobacco use; 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. He was known as a tireless rider in the saddle and a skilled swordsman. Although he was not formally educated, according to Spaulding, Forrest was able to read and write clear and grammatical English, although he was a poor speller. Marriage and family Forrest had twelve brothers and sisters; 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 recovered but died from 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. 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 llll (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 chi.... Discover the Brett Forrest popular books. 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