In a private letter to his brother John, he was more direct:
The Regiment did break, move to the rear and gather behind the flanks of a Brigade I held in reserve. We afterwards gathered up the muskets on the ground. I only found 3 dead secessionists on the ground, killed by the skirmishers in advance. The Regiment itself killed none.
Despite the uneven ground, the sheer fury of Forrest’s first charge scattered both the Union infantry regiment and its supporting cavalry. But then Forrest refused to halt and rode into Sherman’s entire reserve brigade. Suddenly he found himself quite alone, far in front of his retreating rangers—and now surrounded by hundreds of Union riflemen. “Shoot him! Stick him! Knock him off his horse,” they yelled as dozens rushed Forrest. He fired off his pistol and wheeled around—only to be showered with a hail of bullets that rent his coat and slammed into his horse. Then one soldier ran up and shot his rifle point-blank into Forrest’s hip, the bullet driving up through his lower back to lodge next to the spine. His right leg went immediately numb and useless. Forrest was about to be dragged off his mortally wounded mount, no doubt to be summarily executed by hordes of furious bluecoats.
With a severe spinal wound, his right leg unusable, bullets whizzing through his coat and peppering his exhausted horse, and thrashing about in a sea of bluecoats, Forrest, according to some witnesses, “reached down, caught up a rather small Federal soldier, swung him around and held him to the rear of his saddle as a shield until he was well out of danger, and then gladly dropped his prisoner, who doubtless saved his life.” It is difficult to understand how an exhausted man of forty, bleeding with a near-fatal spinal wound, without the use of one leg, might lift up a man of at least some 130 pounds (with one hand as he gripped the reins with the other?), and throw him onto his mount—the soldier himself then apparently offering no resistance, neither shooting nor knocking his wounded captor off his mount.
Yet if the story seems supernatural, even more inexplicable is how Forrest made it out of the Union swarm in the first place. How a large target of a man over six feet could escape a hail of hundreds of bullets and ride back through a mob of enemies is equally perplexing—and suggests that Forrest used some type of cover, whether human or otherwise, that might account for his miraculous survival. In any case, Sherman ceased pursuit as his humiliated skirmishers regrouped. An exhausted and bleeding Forrest made it back to Corinth that evening, where he was treated and given a sixty-day furlough, his horse at last dropping dead when its rider reached safety.
During the next few weeks, the Southern public, initially buoyed by preliminary reports of a great “victory” on Shiloh’s first day, sorted through the conflicting accounts of the battle’s aftermath. The death of Albert Sidney Johnston, the horrendous casualties, and the presence of a huge and victorious Union Army deep in Tennessee and now moving south, all eroded any lingering faith in its generals. Yet a lowly colonel—who had plunged into the Hornet’s Nest, where the Confederates obtained their greatest victory, who in the early hours of the fateful Monday morning had vainly tried to organize a final assault on Pittsburg Landing, and who had single-handedly stopped Sherman’s pursuit—proved blameless and soon by word of mouth was becoming the South’s new hero of the hour. Two prominent Confederates emerged from Shiloh with their reputations enhanced. One was the dead Albert Sidney Johnston; the other soon-to-be-general Nathan Bedford Forrest.
So a recuperating Forrest—the last man to be wounded at the battle of Shiloh—was summarily promoted to brigadier general and put in charge of a much larger cavalry command in central Tennessee. And if Shiloh brought Forrest to the attention of the Southern public and its top military and political leadership, it also changed the new general’s entire attitude to the conduct of war. Gone was any modicum of respect he harbored for professional military men like Bragg, Hardee, or Beauregard, who had so bungled operations at Shiloh. From now on he would trust his own instincts, operate independently whenever possible, and avoid or ignore his educated superiors as he saw fit. Such intransigent independence ensured havoc for all Union forces in Tennessee for the next three years, but also guaranteed that Forrest would never, like Lee, Bragg, or Hood, exercise command of entire Confederate armies—with fortuitous results for Union generals like Grant, Sherman, and Thomas.
Still, the fame from Shiloh gave Forrest increased rank and public prestige. In the three years following the battle, the once-obscure colonel became the South’s great hope for the preservation of Tennessee. There through a three-year resistance to Union incursions, he grew to be the most renowned cavalry commander in American history. By July, little more than two months after being wounded at Shiloh, Forrest had captured a much larger Union garrison at Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and established his terrifying practice of treating all captured black Union soldiers as chattel and returning them to the South as slaves. Rumors—and they would only increase in the next three years—abounded that he had also shot under murky circumstances one and perhaps two black captives. Then throughout most of December 1862, Forrest raided western Tennessee, attacking Union base camps and railroads and generally creating chaos by disrupting supplies destined for Grant’s Vicksburg campaign. As the regular Confederate Army retreated farther south, most haphazard resistance was left to Forrest, who was determined to make the Federal occupation of his home state so costly that a Union withdrawal into Kentucky would seem preferable to a costly occupation of Tennessee.
After a brief setback at Dover, Tennessee, in early 1863, Forrest participated in a string of successes at Thompson’s Station, Brentwood, and Franklin, capped off by the successful pursuit and capture of the Union cavalry expedition of Col. Abel Streight into northern Alabama. In all these engagements, Forrest’s trademark way of war was becoming famous to the Southern public: near-complete autonomy of operations, constant aggression despite inferiority in numbers and matériel, reliance on ruse and speed, savage fighting characterized by occasional charges of brutality and gratuitous killing, relentless pursuit of the defeated to ensure their complete destruction—all peppered with swaggering political proclamations threatening vicious treatment of captured blacks, Southern Unionists, and white officers of black regiments. In addition, rumors abounded of Forrest’s pride in individual combat; by war’s end he bragged that he had killed twenty-nine men in battle, and had lost thirty mounts. Wilder stories spread about occasional beatings and even shootings of his own disobedient soldiers and deserters.
By fall 1863, Forrest’s rangers played a key role at the Southern victory of Chickamauga, a battle where the combined casualties exceeded even those of Shiloh. As Forrest’s reputation grew, he felt no compunction about engaging in verbal assaults with Generals Wheeler, Van Dorn, and Bragg over their failure to press home initial Confederate advantages. Most infamous was his face-to-face denunciation of Braxton Bragg, which ended with threats of physical violence:
I have stood your meanness as long as I intend to. You have played the part of a damned scoundrel, and are a coward, and if you were any part of a man I would slap your jaws and force you to resent it. You may as well not issue any orders for me, for I will not obey them, and I will hold you personally responsible for any further indignities you endeavor to inflict upon me. You have threatened to arrest me for not obeying your orders promptly. I dare you to do it, and I say to you that if you ever again try to interfere with me or cross my path it will be at the peril of your life.
After his flare-up with Bragg, Forrest was transferred to southern Tennessee and northern Mississippi, where his success only continued. He pulled off another successful surprise raid in western Tennessee, and then forced Gen. William Sooy Smith’s Union raiders to leave Mississippi and retire northward. In spring 1864, Forrest attacked the Union garrison on the Mississippi at Fort Pillow. Here transpired the most controversial event in his entire military career. After storming the fort on April 12, 1864, he purportedly either ordered or allowed his men to butcher black Union soldiers and their white officers; whatever the truth of such allegations, it was indisputable that of the garrison’s nearly 605 defenders, nearly half were killed during the final assault, many of them trying to surrender or flee. In Northern eyes he would now become forever “Forrest of Fort Pillow.”
But despite the uproar over the killing of prisoners, Forrest’s greatest military triumph was yet to come two months later at the battle of Brice’s Cross Roads. There Forrest outmaneuvered a much larger Union force sent to expel him from Tennessee and for all practical purposes destroyed it in the space of a single day. In pitched battle and lengthy pursuit, Forrest crushed the expedition of Gen. Samuel D. Sturgis, and with its demise the Union hope of ending Forrest’s effort to disrupt the supply lines of Sherman’s march toward Atlanta. Sherman himself was appalled:
I cannot understand how he could defeat Sturgis with 8,000 men. . . . Forrest is the very devil, and I think he has got some of our troops under cower. . . . I have two officers at Memphis that will fight all the time—Smith and Mower. . . . I will order them to make up a force and go out and follow Forrest to the death if it costs 10,000 lives and breaks the Treasury. There will never be peace in Tennessee till Forrest is dead.
Even as Forrest prepared to encounter another huge punitive force of Union cavalry in Tennessee, the fame of his incredible victory at Brice’s Cross Roads resulted in entreaties from Southerners throughout Georgia to save them from Sherman’s march south by attacking his rear and disrupting his supply lines. Only Lee and Stonewall Jackson had achieved a similar level of renown and trust among the Southern public. Yet Forrest was never sent to Atlanta. Indeed, he could scarcely manage to stay alive, as he was surrounded by superior Union strength at Harrisburg, Mississippi, in July 1864. Given his infamy up north, he naturally attracted a series of would-be avengers. Forrest would spend the rest of the war pursued throughout Tennessee and northern Alabama and Mississippi by a host of numerically superior and better supplied Union armies until being assigned to the doomed army of John Bell Hood, and then finally ending up boxed in by the vastly superior mounted forces of the extremely capable Union general, James Harrison Wilson.
At war’s end, contrary to suggestions from the deteriorating Confederate government and the fears of Sherman, Thomas, and other Union generals, Forrest disbanded his command a few weeks after Appomattox and chose to return home rather than conduct guerrilla warfare or settle outside the newly reconstituted United States. “Men, you may all do as you please, but I’m a-going home.” He then ended his speech to his troops in early May 1865 with, “Any man who is in favor of a further prosecution of this war is a fit subject for a lunatic asylum, and ought to be sent there immediately.”
When the conflict closed, Forrest may well have been the most infamous and hated Southerner in America. President Andrew Johnson’s increasing efforts by 1866 to kill radical Reconstruction and reinstate state governments that had not ratified the Fourteenth Amendment only acerbated sectarian divisions. Northerners saw ex-Confederates like Forrest thriving rather than suffering from their treasonous defeat. Forrest himself confessed his ignominy to President Johnson in connection with his pardon request of November 1866, “I am also aware that I am at this moment regarded in large communities, at the North, with abhorrence, as a detestable monster, ruthless and swift to take life, and guilty of unpardonable crimes in connection with the capture of Fort Pillow on the 12th of April 1864.”
Indeed, threats in the press abounded to try him on charges of murder at Fort Pillow. Flamboyant Northern veterans like Sherman’s cavalry commander, Judson Kilpatrick, boasted that they would kill him on sight. Radical Republicans opposed the very idea of Forrest ever receiving a general pardon. He was formally charged with treason and forced to post a ten-thousand-dollar bond for his 1864 raid on Memphis. When a general amnesty was finally granted to Forrest in 1868 by the lame-duck President Johnson, the ensuing fury was still intense. “A foul fiend in human shape,” one irate Union veteran wrote in demanding not pardon but punishment for Forrest, which “his atrocious crimes so richly deserve.”
In contrast, Northern politicians felt that most Confederate ex-generals like Lee—as much a proponent of slavery as Forrest—had personally killed no Union soldiers, were of the genteel aristocracy, kept to circumspect pronouncements, and adopted conventional methods of war making, and so deserved a measure of Northern forgiveness if not sympathy. Sherman, who had first met Forrest at Fallen Timbers and developed great respect for him as a skilled marauder, had once written to Gen. George Thomas near the close of the war that “I would like to have Forrest hunted down and killed, but doubt if we can do that yet.”
Forrest, then, was a different case altogether, a fanatic as admired for his rabid skill as a raider as he was hated for his alleged murder of prisoners. And he was an easy target for the Northern press. He could hardly read or write; his speech was often crude. And his demeanor reflected the ruggedness of his prewar status as a cocky slave trader who had struck it rich in the traffic of human chattel. Worse still, there were the rumors that he had bragged of killing Union soldiers in personal combat—what kind of general engaged in hand-to-hand fighting, much less kept such statistics of his victims? And he had shot civilians both before and after the war in a series of duels and heated arguments.
Again, unlike Lee, who laid down his arms in a formal ceremony at Appomattox, Forrest had weeks later simply quit on his own accord, reinforcing the idea that he had never been defeated in the field by his Northern adversaries, but on his own accord had wisely seen the futility in fighting on alone after the Southern command had capitulated. And while his final address was measured and realistic, just a few months earlier Forrest had issued a fiery written proclamation promising no peace ever with the Yankees and a fight to the death if the war continued.
It was entirely fitting, then, that later rumors abounded that after Robert E. Lee was first offered leadership of the Klan—which he refused on grounds of health (but not of disapproval)—he purportedly recommended Forrest as his second choice: “There is no man in the South who can handle so large a body of men so successfully. Will you pay my respects to General Forrest and tell him I hope he will accept.” While those sympathetic to Lee dispute his remarks, his own private letters and testimony before Congress in 1866 reflect support for many of the positions later adopted by the Klan.
The degree to which Forrest was hated in the North gave him commensurate prestige in the humbled South of the late 1860s; enmity, not praise, from the Northern press was proof enough that popular ex-Confederate leaders had not joined their former enemy for personal gain. Moreover, as the fury over Reconstruction grew in the postwar decade, it became nearly impossible to fulfill the original humanitarian promises of the Union victory—especially under the administration of the unelected and Southern President Andrew Johnson, the ex-governor of Tennessee. The pledge to black Americans of absolute equality with their white counterparts in the South was problematic without the constant presence of Union troops of enforcement stationed throughout the old Confederacy. Yet such an open-ended commitment to change the hearts and minds of the white South would prove too much for a war-weary Northern public, which had already spent millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives in ending slavery.
The dismissive view of many Northerners toward blacks was not all that different from their former Southern enemies anyway (why else not urge aggrieved ex-slaves to migrate to New England, where they could be afforded integration, economic security, and political protection?). And Southerners were quick to point out the hypocrisy and sanctimony of Reconstructionists who were not so utopian in their own home states. The rise of shrill radical Republicans of the Northeast who would give the vote to blacks but not to prominent white ex-Confederates, and the accompanying calls for the suspension of habeas corpus in putting down night raiding and terrorism, also bothered many Midwesterners. Besides, the destruction of Southern infrastructure during the war and the ensuing growing poverty were felt by many north of the Mason-Dixon to be punishment enough for the former Secessionists. And the Union Army’s terrible past experience with Confederate cavalrymen like Forrest’s raiders in Tennessee suggested to many seasoned officers of occupation that it was preposterous that thousands of static garrisons of Northern soldiers in the South could stamp out nocturnal bands of skilled horsemen.
Among an impoverished and disconsolate people, it was the unrepentant Forrest, not its mostly ineffectual aristocratic planter and discredited political class, who best symbolized unapologetic pride in defeat. The self-made man who rose out of poverty only to lose his fortune through unstinting service to the Confederacy became the popular ideal of Southern sacrifice and recalcitrance. It mattered little that Forrest would mellow considerably or that his tenure as the Klan’s head would be short and finally at odds with his membership. In fact, his previous years as a slave trader seemed after the war to have made him more, not less, sympathetic to blacks. Despite his occasional fervent rhetoric, he sought out Union investors and partners and suggested that freedmen enter the mainstream of public life. His funeral was attended by hundreds of ex-slaves. Finally, either out of worry over his tenuous business ties with Northern capitalists or in real concern over the spate of killings, Forrest disassociated himself from the Klan in January 1869 and as grand wizard purportedly ordered its official end as a national organization. Always the realist, Forrest saw that the Republican victory in the national election of 1868 would strengthen radical Reconstruction in Tennessee, whose government now was mustering a militia to stamp out the Klan.
Most of Forrest’s moderation came later; any earlier indications of a softening of his fury were lost in the immediate chaos of the postwar months, as Southerners were bewildered by former servants assuming superior positions in government and opportunistic scalawags and carpetbaggers purportedly buying up Southern property and assuming public office. The radical Republican reaction to Andrew Johnson’s efforts at reinstating popular governments of Southern conservatives only acerbated the already tense situation, as calls went out to treat recalcitrant ex-Confederate states as mere territories under martial law.
Out of that conundrum grew the Ku Klux Klan. It apparently first appeared in Pulaski, Tennessee, sometime in spring 1866 and spread rapidly to other states between 1866 and 1867. True, in its original organization the Klan was not as radically racist as its second incarnation in the 1920s, with its far larger membership and more inclusive targets of hatred—Jews, Catholics, and foreigners. Ostensibly, the initial Klan arose as something of a lark, a secret society among displaced and irate veterans who were baffled by the disenfranchisement of prominent Southerners and the emerging political power of loyalist whites and freed blacks. Indeed, in its first manifestation it may even have enrolled a few conservative blacks who distrusted Northern radicalism. Forrest in later congressional testimony claimed that the Klan “was intended entirely as a protection to the people, to enforce the laws, and protect the people against outrages.”
Still, inherent in its creation was the broad theme of returning the Negro to inferior status vis-à-vis the white man by destroying white-black unity leagues and black schools and private businesses—the logical precursors to the later intimidation of beating and lynching black political figures and sympathetic whites. At first the macabre secret rites, white sheets, and night riding were designed to instill terror more than to commit murder: the ghosts of the Confederate dead took over the night to do what they could not in broad daylight. But within a few months after its founding, the Klan became both more respectable and powerful—and increasingly was directly linked with the Democratic Party, which likewise championed a return of near-servile status to emancipated blacks. What distinguished the Klan from myriads of similar ad hoc secret societies and Southern white groups—the Confederate Relief and Historical Association, the Order of Pale Faces, and the Order of the White Camellia—were its mystic pretensions and professed fraternity of the defeated that helped it to cross state lines, form some type of general cohesiveness, and achieve a modicum of respectability and goodwill even as it ratcheted up the level of brutality and intimidation against targeted individuals.
Klan messages were often a mix of professed concern for the white poor and calls for retribution against the forces of Reconstruction. During a visit of Forrest to Georgia in March 1868, the Atlanta Intelligence published a proclamation emanating from the “headquarters of the mystic order of the Ku Klux Klan.” After bragging that it had done “justice to the afflicted and oppressed!” and had sought “to defend the orphan and protect the weak!” the published notice went on to proclaim that a sentence of death had been passed against “a traitor,” and a “cowardly slayer of the innocent.” Apparently in secret session, the Ku Klux Klan’s leadership ordered the murder of an anonymous prominent Southerner who was to be “offered up as a sacrifice upon the altar of the innocent and lost.” Shortly afterward, George W. Ashburn, a Columbus, Georgia, Republican leader, was killed by a mob of thirty-five disguised men. Rumors that Forrest was grand wizard of the Klan, evidence that the death sentence came from the organization’s “headquarters,” and the fact of the general’s presence in Georgia at the time of the proclamation all suggest that he either ordered or knew in advance of the hit.
The circumstances of Forrest’s exact role in the Ku Klux Klan are mysterious to this day—given the key role of secrecy among the klaverns, and the general’s own worry that his public involvement might harm his efforts to forge partnerships with Northern businessmen or jeopardize his recent pardon. If in its infancy the Klan was still mostly a local Tennessee crackpot organization of white supremacists and misguided ex-Confederate zealots, it looked toward expansion through enlistment of a national figure who would galvanize support and increase membership—especially in light of the threat of newly enfranchised black voting in the election of 1867.
So, early in the spring of 1867 the nominal heads of the newly formed Klan, under the auspices of Forrest’s former subordinate, Capt. John W. Morton, approached Forrest. Under somewhat disputed circumstances, he quickly emerged as the group’s first grand wizard—a role that he would later deny in official congressional testimony. The bitter postbellum fights in Tennessee between ex-Confederates and Union loyalists, and Forrest’s own famous career during the past four years in expelling Northern forces from the state, made the Tennessee native the natural choice for leadership of an in-home organization.
The Klan’s birth was also overseen by an array of Confederate ex-veterans. And under Forrest, the Civil War hero, the Klan never lost its close connection with its military origins—the white sheets and night rides were originally intended to scare blacks into thinking the feared but long dead cavalrymen of the South had been called back to arms. Just as Forrest and other defeated Confederate generals believed in the fable of the Lost Cause—that chance, fate, or the singularity of Northern evil had quashed the South, not Northern power and skill—so the Klan tapped the same roots of Southern mysticism. The Klan was to be portrayed in the future in films like Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind not as the terrorist organization that it was, but, as Forrest hoped, a fraternal bulwark against dangerous Negroes and traitorous whites who preyed on innocent Southern women and destitute veterans.
Forrest, who was seeking to resurrect his fortune by forging railroad and insurance ventures with Yankee investors, was always cagey in admitting his presidency—even as he used his frequent travels on business to unify and expand the Klan organization beyond his home state. At forty-six he was famous, well-connected, eager to regain his prewar fortune and recapture the excitement of his Tennessee war years—and convinced that black enfranchisement would ruin the South. “Forrest commanded more brave men in the invisible army,” a Klansman now bragged, “than he did while in the Confederate army.” He at least admitted to a congressional committee in 1871 that he was receiving 50 to 100 letters a day from Southerners urging some type of reaction against Northern efforts to elevate the Negro to political equality with whites—inadvertent proof that he was generally recognized as a figure to whom the more desperate might turn. Given his later denials and the absence of written records, it is difficult to assess precisely Forrest’s pivotal role in terms of active recruitment—though his itinerant career from 1867 to 1870 no doubt was useful for Klan activity. Usually his visits to various Southern cities on “insurance business” coincided with an upsurge in local Klan visibility and activity.
When reports grew that the Klan was turning more murderous, and as its more respectable supporters began to get cold feet after a series of harsh Federal countermeasures were promised, Forrest took pains both to “reform” the Klan—and finally distance himself from its more odious work. Yet his later renouncement of the Klan and his ostensible efforts to disband its local affiliates do not mask the reality that the general’s name and support had done much to ensure its initial spread and leave his own ardent stamp on Klan activity. Indeed, in a controversial interview published on September 1, 1868, Forrest bragged to the Cincinnati Commercial that the Klan already had enrolled 40,000 members in Tennessee and about 550,000 throughout the old Confederacy. He went on to describe in intimate detail the general organization of the Klan and to assure the reporter that he could raise an army of 40,000 Klansmen “in five days” should trouble arise: