US soldier, born in Bedford Co, Tennessee, USA. With little formal education, he became a wealthy livestock dealer, planter, and slave trader. When the Civil War commenced, he enlisted as a private in the Confederate army, but by 1861 was a lieutenant-colonel in command of his own troop of cavalry. He participated in many of the early battles, including Shiloh, then began to operate on his own, using his cavalry as a strike force. His motto was the phrase attributed to him: Git there fustest with the mostest. He struck often at Union lines (18624), and troops under his command carried out an infamous massacre of black Union troops at Fort Pillow, Tennessee. After the war, he had to rebuild his fortune through planting and railroading. He served as Grand Wizard of the newly organized Ku Klux Klan (18679), but resigned in protest at some of its tactics.
Nathan Bedford Forrest (July 13, 1821 – October 29, 1877), was a Confederate general and perhaps the American Civil War's most highly regarded cavalry and partisan ranger (guerrilla leader). Forrest is regarded by many military historians as the war's most innovative and successful general.
After the war, Forrest's reputation suffered due to allegations of brutality in the Battle of Fort Pillow, as well as his role as the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
Early life
Nathan Bedford Forrest was born to a poor Scots-Irish family in the Marshall County town of Chapel Hill, Tennessee. He was the first of blacksmith William Forrest's twelve children. After his father's death, Forrest became the head of the family at the age of 17, and through hard work and determination, was able to pull himself and his family up from poverty. His uncle was killed during a raid by outlaws, but Forrest killed two of them with his gun and wounded two others with his knife. One of the wounded men survived and served under Forrest during the Civil War. Forrest provided financially for his mother, put his younger brothers through college, and, by the time the Civil War broke out in 1861, he had become a millionaire and one of the richest men in the American South. Forrest was a Democrat.
Military career
Given that Forrest had earned much of his fortune engaging in the slave trade (as much as $50,000 per year), he favored the continuation of states' rights to determine the slavery issues, and therefore supported the Confederate side in the war. After war broke out, Forrest returned to Tennessee and enlisted as a private in the Confederate States Army. Upon seeing how badly equipped the CSA was, Forrest made an offer to buy horses and equip a regiment of Tennessee volunteer soldiers, using his own money. His superior officers and the state governor, surprised that someone of Forrest's wealth and prominence had enlisted as a soldier of the lowest rank, commissioned him as a colonel. In October 1861, he was given command of his own regiment, "Forrest's Tennessee Cavalry Battalion". Forrest had no prior formalized military training or experience. He applied himself diligently to learn, and having an innate sense of successful tactics and strong leadership abilities, Forrest soon became an exemplary officer. Forrest sought to recruit men eager for battle, promising them that they would have "ample opportunity to kill Yankees."
Forrest was also physically imposing—six-foot, two-inches tall (1.88 m), 210 pounds (95 kg) and as such, he could be an intimidating presence.
Cavalry command
Forrest first distinguished himself in battle at the Battle of Fort Donelson in February 1862, where he led a cavalry charge against a Union artillery battery and captured it, and then led a breakout from a siege by the Union army under Ulysses S. Forrest angrily walked out of a meeting and declared that he had not led his men into battle to surrender. These men followed Forrest across the river and were thus spared to fight again. A few days later, with the fall of Nashville imminent, Forrest took command of the city and evacuated several government officials and millions of dollars in heavy machinery used to make weapons, something the Confederacy could ill afford to lose.
A month later, Forrest was back in action at the Battle of Shiloh (April 6 to April 7, 1862). A union infantryman on the ground beside him fired a rifle at Forrest, hitting him in the side, and lifting him out of his saddle. Forrest is acknowledged to have been the last man wounded at the Battle of Shiloh.
Forrest recovered from the injury soon enough that he was back in the saddle by early summer, in command of a new brigade of green cavalry regiments. On Forrest's birthday, July 13, 1862, his men descended on the Union-held city of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and, in the First Battle of Murfreesboro, defeated and captured a force of twice their number.
Murfreesboro proved to be just the first of many victories Forrest would win; But he and Bragg could not get along, and the Confederate high command did not realize the degree of Forrest's talent until far too late in the war.
Forrest's early successes gained a promotion (July) to brigadier general and he was given command of a Confederate cavalry brigade.
Mobile cavalry warfare
In December 1862, Forrest's veteran troopers were reassigned by Bragg to another officer, against his protest, and he was forced to recruit a new brigade, this one composed of about 2,000 inexperienced recruits, most of whom lacked even weapons with which to fight.
Forrest protested that to send these untrained men behind enemy lines was suicidal, but Bragg insisted, and Forrest obeyed his orders. Forrest never stayed in one place long enough to be located, raided as far north as the banks of the Ohio River in southwest Kentucky, and came back to his base in Mississippi with more men than he had started with, and all of them fully armed with captured Union weapons.
Forrest continued to lead his men in smaller-scale operations until April of 1863, when the Confederate army dispatched him into the backcountry of northern Alabama and west Georgia to deal with an attack of 3,000 Union cavalrymen under the command of Col. Forrest chased Streight's men for 16 days, harassing them all the way, until Streight's lone objective became simply to escape his relentless pursuer. Finally, on May 3, Forrest caught up with Streight at Rome, Georgia, and took 1,700 prisoners.
Forrest served with the main army at the Battle of Chickamauga (September 18 to September 20, 1863), where he pursued the retreating Union army and took hundreds of prisoners. Bragg failed to do so, and not long after, Forrest and Bragg had a confrontation (including death threats against Bragg) that resulted in Forrest's re-assignment to an independent command in Mississippi.
Battle of Fort Pillow
Forrest went to work and soon raised a 6,000-man force of his own, which he led back into west Tennessee. He led several more raids into the area, from Paducah, Kentucky, on March 25, 1864, to the controversial Battle of Fort Pillow on April 12, 1864. In that battle, Forrest demanded unconditional surrender, or else he would "put every man to the sword", language he frequently used to expedite a surrender. What is known is that Forrest's men stormed the lightly guarded fort, inflicting heavy casualties on its defenders who quickly fell into disarray as the Union command—already short several officers—collapsed. Sherman did not find any fault with Forrest.
Conclusion of the war
Forrest's greatest victory came on June 10, 1864, when his 3,500-man force clashed with 8,500 men commanded by General Samuel D.
Forrest led other raids that summer and fall, including a famous one into Union-held downtown Memphis in August 1864 (the Second Battle of Memphis), and another on a huge Union supply depot at Johnsonville, Tennessee, on October 3, 1864, causing millions of dollars in damage.
In 1865, Forrest attempted, without success, to defend the state of Alabama against the destructive Wilson's Raid. Wilson, was one of the few Union generals ever to defeat Forrest in battle. On May 9, 1865, at Gainesville Forrest read his farewell address to his troops.
In the four years of the war, reputedly a total of 30 horses were shot out from under Forrest and he may have personally killed 31 people. (Raised 7th Tennessee Cavalry) Promoted, Colonel February 1862, Battle of Fort Donelson.
Impact of Forrest's doctrines
Forrest was one of the first men to grasp the doctrines of "mobile warfare" that became prevalent in the 20th century. mostest" quote may be apocryphal, as it first appeared in print in a New York Times story in 1917, written to provide colorful comments in reaction to European interest in Civil War generals.) A report on the Battle of Paducah stated that Forrest led a mounted cavalry of 2,500 troopers 100 miles in only 50 hours.
Forrest became well known for his early use of "guerrilla" tactics as applied to a mobile horse cavalry deployment.
Many students of warfare have come to appreciate Forrest's somewhat novel approach to cavalry deployment and quick hit-and-run tactics, and how this may have affected mobile tactics in the modern mechanized era.
One of Forrest's most well known quotes is, " War means fightin', and fightin' means killin'."
Postwar years and Ku Klux Klan
After the war, Forrest settled in Memphis, Tennessee, building a house on a bank of the Mississippi River.
It was during this time that he became the nexus of the nascent Ku Klux Klan movement. In an 1868 newspaper interview, Forrest boasted that the Klan was a nationwide organization of 550,000 men, and that although he himself was not a member, he was "in sympathy" and would "cooperate" with them, and could himself muster 40,000 Klansmen with only five days' notice.
| Wikisource has the Text of an 1868 interview with Nathan Bedford Forrest. |
Because of Forrest's prominence, the organization grew rapidly under his leadership. In 1869, Forrest, disagreeing with its increasingly violent tactics, ordered the Klan to disband, stating that it was "being perverted from its original honorable and patriotic purposes, becoming injurious instead of subservient to the public peace." Subsequently, Forrest distanced himself from the KKK.
Forrest died in October 1877, reportedly from complications of diabetes, in Memphis and was buried at Elmwood Cemetery. In 1904 his remains were disinterred and moved to Forrest Park, a Memphis city park.
Posthumous legacy
Controversy still surrounds his actions at Fort Pillow, and his reputation has been marred by his involvement in the first incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan. Forrest will always be regarded as a military leader of great native ability, and one who advanced the principles of wartime cavalry deployment and mobile strike capabilty that has remained down to the present philosophy and tactics of modern mobile warfare.
Nathan Bedford Forrest remains a hero to many Tennesseeans. There is a bust of Forrest (sculpted by Jane Baxendale) at the state capitol building in Nashville and another statue of General Forrest stands in Nathan Bedford Forrest Park in Memphis. A massive statue of Forrest on horseback stands just off Interstate 65 to the south of Nashville (where, in an ironic 2002 incident, bullets were fired at the statue, and all of them struck the horse). The statue is disliked by many, including those with favorable opinions of Forrest. He is portrayed with a comical growl, his mount is bronze colored (while Forrest is silver), and the mount is undersized for the scale of the rider. Memorial obelisks have been placed at his birthplace in Chapel Hill and at Nathan Bedford Forrest State Park near Camden, and there are thirty-two other N.B. Forrest state historical markers. Polk, and Andrew Johnson, but Forrest has had more markers and monuments placed than all three of these presidents combined.
There is a monument to Forrest in the Old Live Oak Cemetery in Selma, Alabama. Nathan Bedford Forrest. Forrest's unwavering defense of Selma, the great state of Alabama, and the Confederacy, this memorial is dedicated.
There are also high schools named for Forrest in Chapel Hill, Tennessee, and Jacksonville, Florida.
Forrest's great-grandson, Nathan Bedford Forrest III, also pursued a military career, eventually attaining the rank of brigadier general in the United States Army Air Forces during World War II. Forrest III was killed in action, in 1943, while participating in an airborne bombing raid over Germany.
In the 1994 motion picture Forrest Gump, the eponymous Tom Hanks character states that he was named after an ancestor "General Forrest" and there is a photo montage that shows N.B. Forrest in military uniform and Ku Klux Klan robes, also played by Hanks.
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