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General Nathan Bedford Forrest went to work and soon raised a 6,000-man force of his own, which he led back into west Tennessee. He did not have the resources to retake the area and hold it, but he did have enough force to render it useless to the Union army. He led several more raids into the area, one of which ended in the controversial Battle of Fort Pillow on April 12, 1864. In that battle, General Nathan Bedford Forrest demanded unconditional surrender, or else he would "put every man to the sword" - language he frequently used to expedite a surrender. Only this time, he meant it, and his men stormed the fort and began killing the men inside. The Confederates seemed to target several hundred African American soldiers inside the fort, and very few survived. Forrest eventually called off the slaughter and accepted the surrender of the survivors, but only 80 of the 262 black troops survived.
But General Nathan Bedford Forrest's greatest victory came on June 10, 1864, when his 3,500-man force clashed with 8,100 men commanded by General Samuel D. Sturgis at the Battle of Brice's Crossroads. Here, his mobility of force (he deployed his men as mounted infantry) and superior tactics won a remarkable victory, inflicting 2,500 casualties against a loss of 492, and sweeping the Union forces completely from a large expanse of southwest Tennessee and northern Mississippi.
General Nathan Bedford Forrest led other raids that summer and fall, including a famous one into Union-held downtown Memphis in August 1864, and another on a huge Union supply depot at Johnsonville, Tennessee on October 3, 1864, causing millions of dollars in damage. In December, he fought alongside the Confederate Army of Tennessee in the disastrous campaign that ended in the Battle of Nashville (15 December - 16 December 1864), distinguishing himself by commanding the Confederate rearguard in a series of actions that allowed what was left of the army to escape. For this, he earned promotion to the rank of lieutenant general.
In 1865, General Nathan Bedford Forrest attempted without success to defend the state of Alabama against Union attacks, but he still had an army in the field in April, when news of Lee's surrender reached him. He was urged to flee to Mexico, but chose to share the fate of his men, and surrendered. General Nathan Bedford Forrest was later cleared of any violations of the rules of war in regard to Fort Pillow, and was allowed to return to private life.
General Nathan Bedford Forrest was one of the first men, if not the first, to grasp the doctrines of "mobile warfare" that became prevalent in the 20th century. His one directive to his men was to "get there firstest with the mostest", even if it meant pushing his horses at a killing pace, which he did more than once. Forrest's victory at Brice's Cross Roads became the subject of a class taught at the French War College by Marshal Ferdinand Foch before World War I, and his mobile campigns were studied by the German general Erwin Rommel, who as commander of the Afrika Korps in World War II emulated his tactics on a wider scale, with tanks and trucks.
Shortly after the war, Lee was asked to identify the best soldier he ever commanded. Although General Nathan Bedford Forrest only came under his command in the last month of the war, when Lee became overall Confederate commander, Lee replied: "A man I have never met, sir. His name is Forrest."
Postwar Activities
General Nathan Bedford Forrest lost almost all his fortune during the war, since much of it was tied up in slaves, and of what was left, he gave much to the men who had served under him, but who had come home to find they had nothing.
Embittered by the state of his homeland after the war, in May 1866, General Nathan Bedford Forrest became "Grand Wizard" of the Ku Klux Klan, an organization of Confederate veterans. Because of Forrest's prominence, the organization grew rapidly under his leadership. In addition to aiding Confederate widows and orphans of the war, many members of the new group began to use force to oppose the extension of voting rights to Blacks, and to resist other measures - introduced as part of Reconstruction - to end segregation. In 1869, Forrest, disagreeing with its increasingly violent tactics, ordered the Klan to disband. However, many of its groups in other parts of the country ignored the order and continued to function.
General Nathan Bedford Forrest returned to private business in the Memphis area and remained engaged in such for the rest of his life. In his final years, Forrest encouraged his followers to live in peace with the freed slaves who lived among them. He also continued to support his old soldiers so long as he lived, and when he died on October 29, 1877, of diabetes, thousands of them congregated at his funeral. His funeral oration was given by his old boss, Jefferson Davis himself.
Forrest's great-grandson, Nathan Bedford Forrest III, also followed a military career, reaching the rank of Brigadier General in the U.S. Army during World War II before being killed in action in 1943.
In the motion picture Forrest Gump, Tom Hanks' character Forrest Gump states that he was named after General Nathan Bedford Forrest.
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