Postwar life and the Ku Klux Klan

Forrest’s postwar business career was not as lucrative as his antebellum ventures. He had exhausted his fortune during the war, and with the abolition of slavery he lost one of his most valuable avenues for making money. After serving as the president of the Selma, Marion and Memphis Railroad, he settled on managing a plantation manned by convict labour.

Forrest’s notoriety only increased when, in 1867, he became the first grand wizard of the original Ku Klux Klan (KKK), a secret hate organization that employed terror in pursuit of its white supremacist agenda. Although the extent of Forrest’s influence in the KKK is disputed, at the very least his prestige served to expand membership rolls. The KKK embarked upon a campaign of intimidation and violence against Southern Blacks and Republicans until Forrest ordered the organization disbanded in 1869. Nevertheless, local chapters of the KKK continued to be active, and Forrest was ordered to appear before a congressional hearing in 1871. In his sometimes contradictory testimony, he denied membership in the organization. A combination of age, exhaustion, and a conversion to Christianity seem to have caused Forrest’s fiery temper and racial attitudes to moderate in his later years.

Legacy and controversy

Forrest has proved to be one of the Civil War’s most controversial figures. Unsurprisingly, given his culpability in the Fort Pillow Massacre and the formation of the KKK, Forrest and his image have come under attack by many sectors, especially from African Americans. On the other hand, many white Southerners continue to admire Forrest for his wartime record, common-man origins, and masculine bearing. In recent decades Forrest has come to rival the less-controversial Robert E. Lee and Thomas (“Stonewall”) Jackson as the foremost human symbol of Confederate identity. Consequently, debates have emerged wherever Forrest has been commemorated. Schools, streets, and buildings named in the general’s honour have sometimes been renamed, and Health Sciences (formerly Nathan Bedford Forrest) Park in Memphis—the location of the general’s grave—has been the focus of both KKK and civil rights demonstrations. The park was once also home to a large equestrian statue of Forrest, but it was removed in 2017 amid a nationwide movement to remove or relocate Confederate monuments.