Background
FORREST, Nathan Bedford was born on July 13, 1821 in Chapel Hill, Bedford County, Tennessee, United States, United States. Son of William and Mariam (Beck) Forrest.
Businessman General military planter
FORREST, Nathan Bedford was born on July 13, 1821 in Chapel Hill, Bedford County, Tennessee, United States, United States. Son of William and Mariam (Beck) Forrest.
Public school.
The family moved to Tippah County, Mississippi, in 1834. Young Forrest received little education himself, although he helped to educate his brother. He was a Presbyterian and a Democrat.
He had a son and a daughter by his marriage to Mary Ann Montgomery on September 25, 1845. He was a blacksmith and a hill farmer, and by 1840 he began to prosper. In 1842, he moved to Hernando, Mississippi, where he became a planter, dealing in horses and slaves.
In 1851, he went into the real estate business in Memphis, where he was also a town alderman from 1858 to 1860. By 1859, he had returned to planting. When the war began, Forrest enlisted as a private in the Tennessee Cavalry.
As lieutenant colonel of his own battalion, he defended Fort Donelson, and he was colonel of the 3rd Tennessee Cavalry at the battle of Shiloh, where he also covered the Confederate retreat in the spring of 1862. Forrest, who has been called a bom military genius, was promoted to brigadier general on July 21, 1862. In 1862-1863, he was engaged in west Tennessee, where he captured the Union garrison at Murfreesboro.
He was shot by a subordinate during one of his raids, and upon his recovery he clashed with Braxton Bragg after the battle of Chickamauga. President Davis later gave him an independent command in north Mississippi and west Tennessee. Promoted to major general on December 4,1863, he participated in the Fort Pillow Massacre in April 1864, and in June of that year, he won his greatest military victory against overwhelming odds at Brice’s Crossroads, Mississippi.
He became a lieutenant general on February 28, 1865. Although Forrest’s forces were finally overwhelmed at Selma, Alabama, in April 1865, he had the distinction of winning all the major engagements which he led. He surrendered in May and was soon paroled.
Impoverished after the war, he returned to planting in Tennessee. Forrest was also an employee of the Selma and Memphis Railroad during the 1870s. He was the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
"Peculiar institution" of slavery was not only expedient but also ordained by God and upheld in Holy Scripture.
Stands for preserving slavery, states' rights, and political liberty for whites. Every individual state is sovereign, even to the point of secession.
Married Mary Ann Montgomery, 1845.