Nathan Bedford Forrest

• 1. Introduction

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  Nathan Bedford Forrest enlisted in the Confederate Army on the 14th of June 1861, as a private. He left it as a lieutenant general. No other soldier in the Civil War made that journey without prior military training. The man who would earn the nickname "The Wizard of the Saddle" had built his fortune buying and selling enslaved people in Memphis, operating what became one of the largest slave-trading businesses in Tennessee. After the war, he became the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, presiding over a campaign of racial terror across the South. Then, in his final years, he gave a speech before a Black civil rights organization and kissed a young Black woman on the cheek. What makes Nathan Bedford Forrest so difficult to place in history is not that he defies easy summary. It is that the full record, read carefully, refuses to let any single label stick entirely. The questions his life raises are uncomfortable ones: about command responsibility, about violence as a political instrument, and about whether a man can be remade by his last acts when the earlier ones drew blood.

• 2. From Frontier Poverty to Plantation Wealth

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  Forrest was born on the 13th of July 1821, in a one-room log cabin near the hamlet of Chapel Hill, Tennessee. His family was poor. His father, William Forrest, worked as a blacksmith and died in 1837, leaving 16-year-old Nathan as the primary caretaker of twelve siblings. Two of his brothers and three of his sisters had already died of typhoid fever, a disease that also struck Nathan but did not kill him.

  By 1841, Forrest had entered a business partnership with his uncle Jonathan in Hernando, Mississippi. When the Matlock brothers killed Jonathan during an argument in 1845, Forrest shot and killed two of them with a two-shot pistol and wounded two others with a borrowed knife thrown to him in the fight. One of the surviving brothers later served under Forrest's command during the Civil War.

  Forrest moved rapidly through early business ventures: a livery stable, a stagecoach line, a brickyard. He became well known in Memphis as a speculator and was elected a city alderman as a Southern Democrat in 1858. By 1860, he owned at least 3,345 acres in Mississippi alone, having purchased large cotton plantations in Coahoma County and a half-interest in an Arkansas plantation. By the time the Civil War began, he had amassed a personal fortune he claimed was worth $1.5 million, making him one of the wealthiest men in the Southern United States.

  Union Army Captain Lewis Hosea, an aide to General James H. Wilson, described Forrest as having a "striking and commanding presence." Hosea and other contemporaries noted that he was generally mild-mannered until provoked, at which point his demeanor changed drastically. He stood 6 feet 2 inches tall, rarely drank, and abstained from tobacco.

• 3. The Slave Trader of Memphis

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  Between 1851 and 1860, Forrest was one of the four largest slave traders in Memphis, a city that served as the first-class market for the trade in Tennessee. He is believed to have sold thousands of enslaved people during that decade, earning profits of hundreds of thousands of dollars in 1850s currency.

  His operation was headquartered at 87 Adams Street in Memphis, a cluster of slave pens and auction yards. He eventually expanded to a second storefront in Vicksburg in 1858, and later moved from 87 Adams to 89 Adams, increasing his holding capacity from a maximum of 300 people to a maximum of 500. He worked at various points with partners including Seaborne S. Jones, Byrd Hill, and Josiah Maples.

  After the war, a woman named Nellie Harbold placed a family reunification advertisement hoping to find her children, Lydia, Miley A., and Samuel Tirley. All three had been sold to separate buyers out of "the yard of Forrest the Trader" in Memphis in 1854.

  In 1859, media coverage of Forrest's business included an advertisement for an enslaved girl described as the daughter of abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Historian Tim Huebner asserts the girl was likely Anna Marie Bailey, a niece of Douglass. That same year, a federal investigation found that Forrest had also sold 37 individuals illegally imported from Africa aboard the slave ship Wanderer. Forrest later told an interviewer that he had been an initial investor in that shipment and that he advocated reopening the transatlantic slave trade.

  In January 1860, the firm's building in Memphis collapsed and caught fire, killing two people. Forrest subsequently sold his interest in the business and reinvested the proceeds into plantations. A marker at the former site of his slave mart, on land now owned by Calvary Episcopal Church in downtown Memphis, was dedicated on the 4th of April 2018.

• 4. The Cavalry Commander

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  Forrest enlisted as a private and was almost immediately commissioned as a lieutenant colonel after Tennessee Governor Isham G. Harris was surprised that a man of his wealth and prominence had enlisted at all. Significant planters were legally exempted from service.

  His early record showed both brilliance and brutality. He earned praise at the Battle of Sacramento in Kentucky and distinguished himself at Fort Donelson in February 1862, rallying nearly 4,000 troops and leading them across the Cumberland River as the Confederate position collapsed. At Shiloh, fighting alone through a Union line he had charged without his men, he was shot through the pelvis, the ball lodging near his spine. A surgeon removed it a week later without anesthesia, which was unavailable.

  Forrest's approach to discipline was violent by the standards of his own army. When a scout returned with wrong information, Forrest struck the man's head against a tree. A soldier who refused to paddle across the Tennessee River was hit with an oar by his general. Two men who fled a rout were beaten with a branch; Forrest shot the one who had been carrying the colors. Many soldiers and junior officers refused to serve under him as a result.

  His advertisements to recruit soldiers carried the slogan, "Let's have some fun and kill some Yankees!" His elite escort company, which varied in size from 40 to 90 men, was drawn from the best soldiers available.

  Newspaper correspondent Sylvanus Cadwallader, who traveled with Grant for three years, wrote that Forrest "was the only Confederate cavalryman of whom Grant stood in much dread." Union General William Tecumseh Sherman called him "that devil Forrest" in wartime communications and considered him "the most remarkable man our civil war produced on either side." Civil War scholar Bruce Catton wrote that Forrest used his horsemen the way a modern general would use motorized infantry: fast movement to the field, then dismounted fighting on foot. Forrest himself said the way to win was "to get there first with the most men."

• 5. Fort Pillow

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  On the 12th of April 1864, Confederate forces under Forrest's command attacked Fort Pillow, located 40 miles upriver from Memphis near Henning, Tennessee. The fort was defended by 557 Union soldiers, 295 white and 262 Black, under Major L.F. Booth. Booth was killed early in the fighting.

  Forrest arrived at 10 a.m. after a hard ride from Mississippi during which two horses were shot out from under him. By 3:30 p.m., he had concluded the Union position was untenable and demanded surrender under a flag of truce, warning, as he often did before assaults on fortifications, that he could not be held responsible for what his men might do in the heat of battle. The Union commander refused, expecting rescue from the gunboat USS New Era on the Mississippi. The gunboat did not come.

  What followed became known as the Fort Pillow Massacre. According to historians John Cimprich and Bruce Tap, although Black and white Union soldiers were present in roughly equal numbers, two-thirds of the Black soldiers were killed while only a third of the white soldiers were killed. Atrocities continued through the night. Allegations included back-shooting soldiers who fled into the river, burning men alive, and setting fire to a barracks with wounded soldiers inside.

  The most direct evidence came not from Union survivors but from a Confederate soldier, Achilles Clark of the 20th Tennessee Cavalry, who wrote to his sisters immediately after the battle: "The slaughter was awful. Words cannot describe the scene. The poor deluded negroes would run up to our men fall upon their knees and with uplifted hands scream for mercy but they were ordered to their feet and then shot down. The white men fared but little better. Their fort turned out to be a great slaughter pen. Blood, human blood stood about in pools and brains could have been gathered up in any quantity."

  Forrest described the battle in a subsequent letter as a warning about the use of Black troops, recounting exaggerated Union casualty figures and writing, "It is hoped that these facts will demonstrate to the Northern people that negro soldiers cannot cope with the Southerners." President Lincoln asked his cabinet how the United States should respond. Historian S.C. Gwynne later wrote that no direct evidence suggests Forrest ordered the killing of surrendering men, but that fully exonerating him from responsibility is also impossible. At the Battle of Brices Crossroads the following June, retreating Black soldiers stripped off their commemorative badges reading "Remember Fort Pillow" to avoid provoking Forrest's pursuing forces.

• 6. The Klan's Grand Wizard

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  The Ku Klux Klan was formed in Pulaski, Tennessee, in the spring of 1866 by six veterans of the Confederate Army. Forrest became involved sometime in late 1866. A common account holds that he arrived in Nashville while the Klan was meeting at the Maxwell House Hotel in April 1867, reportedly at the encouragement of former Confederate general George Gordon, a state Klan leader. In Room 10 of the Maxwell House, John W. Morton swore Forrest in as a member.

  Forrest was elected the Klan's first Grand Wizard that spring. The title was chosen because of his wartime nickname "The Wizard of the Saddle." Klan member James R. Crowe later stated, "After the order grew to large numbers we found it necessary to have someone of large experience to command. We chose General Forrest."

  In an 1868 interview with a Cincinnati newspaper, Forrest claimed the Klan had 40,000 members in Tennessee and 550,000 total throughout the South. He described the organization as "a protective political military organization" and said he sympathized with it, while denying any formal connection. During the presidential election of 1868, Klan violence and intimidation were used to suppress Black and Republican voting across the South. In Louisiana alone, an estimated 1,000 Black people were killed to suppress Republican voting. Grant, who had defeated Forrest's old opponent at Fort Donelson, won the presidency with 214 electoral votes to 80 for the Democratic candidate.

  In January 1869, facing a membership he could no longer control and methods he described as increasingly counterproductive, Forrest dissolved the Klan, ordered their costumes destroyed, and withdrew. Few Klansmen complied. When he testified before a Congressional investigation on the 27th of June 1871, he denied membership and pleaded failure of memory on multiple questions. His biographer George Cantor wrote that Forrest later admitted to "gentlemanly lies" and felt honor-bound to protect former associates. Under the Enforcement Acts passed by Grant and Congress between 1870 and 1871, more than 5,000 Klan members were indicted and over 1,000 convicted.

• 7. The Last Years

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  After losing his prewar fortune when slavery ended, Forrest spent his postwar years in a series of business ventures that mostly failed. He helped found what became Forrest City, Arkansas, by building a commissary to supply the thousand Irish laborers laying track for the Memphis and Little Rock Railroad. He became president of the Marion and Memphis Railroad, which went bankrupt under his direction.

  His final enterprise was an 800-acre farm on land he leased on President's Island in the Mississippi River, worked by more than a hundred prison convicts. A description published in May 1877 said the convict labor operation was indistinguishable from slavery in its use of bloodhounds, shotgun-wielding guards, and corporal punishment.

  In August 1874, Forrest wrote to Tennessee Governor John C. Brown volunteering to personally lead a posse to punish the "white marauders" responsible for the lynch mob murder of four Black people who had been arrested for defending themselves in a brawl. Brown politely declined.

  On the 5th of July 1875, Forrest gave a speech before the Independent Order of Pole-Bearers Association, a post-war organization of Black Southerners working to improve economic conditions and secure equal rights. When the daughter of a Pole-Bearers officer offered him a bouquet, Forrest accepted the flowers, thanked her, and kissed her on the cheek. The New York Times described it as a "friendly speech." The Confederate Cavalry Survivors Association of Augusta voted unanimously in response to amend its constitution to expressly forbid publicly advocating for any association between white women and girls and "females of the negro race."

  Forrest died on the 29th of October 1877, from complications of diabetes at the Memphis home of his brother Jesse, at the age of 56. His funeral procession stretched more than two miles. The crowd of mourners was estimated at 20,000 people, and writers present noted many Black citizens among them. He was buried at Elmwood Cemetery in Memphis with military honors. A great-grandson, Nathan Bedford Forrest III, graduated from West Point, rose to brigadier general in the U.S. Army Air Corps, and 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.

• 8. Monuments and Memory

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  Tennessee had, at one point, 32 dedicated historical markers linked to Forrest, more than were dedicated to the three former U.S. Presidents associated with the state combined: Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk, and Andrew Johnson.

  A high school in Jacksonville, Florida, was named for Forrest in 1959 at the urging of the Daughters of the Confederacy, specifically because they were upset about the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling. The school remained all-white until Duval County was ordered to desegregate in 1971. In 2014, it was unanimously renamed Westside High School.

  Middle Tennessee State University used Forrest's image as an official mascot beginning in 1951. In 1978, the university president removed Forrest's likeness from the school's official seal. The university's latest mascot, a winged horse named "Lightning" inspired by Pegasus, was unveiled at a basketball game against Tennessee State University on the 17th of January 1998. A petition to rename the ROTC building on campus, which had been called Forrest Hall since 1958, was denied by the Tennessee Historical Commission on the 16th of February 2018.

  The monument erected over Forrest's grave in Memphis in 1905 became a focal point of decades of debate. In 2013, the park was renamed Health Sciences Park. After the 2015 church shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, the Memphis City Council voted on July 7 of that year to remove the statue and relocate the remains of Forrest and his wife to Elmwood Cemetery. The Tennessee Historical Commission blocked the move twice. The city eventually sold the park to Memphis Greenspace, a non-profit not subject to the Tennessee Heritage Protection Act, which removed the statue and a monument to Jefferson Davis on the same evening in December 2017. The Tennessee House of Representatives responded on the 18th of April 2018, by cutting $250,000 in appropriations for Memphis's bicentennial celebration.

  In September 2021, the remains of Forrest and his wife were reburied in Columbia, Tennessee, by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, after being temporarily held in Munford, Tennessee. The campaign to move them had been led by Shelby County Commissioner Tami Sawyer, who founded a group called Take 'Em Down 901 following the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. A bust of Forrest at the Tennessee State Capitol was removed in 2021 and transferred to the Tennessee State Museum, with only one legislator voting against the move.