How Is Nathan Forrest Responsible

Nathan BADford Forrest: Morally Questionable, Militarily Genius

As once said by Ivan Figueroa-Otero,“There are no bad people, just those that have not yet realized their goodness” (Otero). Operating on the basis that this is factual, Nathan Bedford Forrest was one person who must have gone practically his entire life without realizing just how much good was buried deep within him. Nathan Bedford Forrest, 1821-1877, was a Confederate general during the United States Civil War and the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan (Glaze). Known by some as an excellent role model and the perfect example of Southern masculinity, and known by others as a cruel white-supremacist and menace to society, even today he is hailed as one of the most controversial

In the Confederate states, he was revered as an example of the perfect Southern gentleman, while Union abolitionists hated him for being such a prolific slave owner and racist. This controversy only spread around the official beginning of the Civil War, when in 1861, Forrest decided to enlist in the Confederate army, along with his youngest brother and young son. He originally enlisted as a private, but under the orders of the governor of Tennessee, he sent out a recruiting notice as a lieutenant colonel. He sent this advertisement through a local newspaper, and encouraged “none but those who desire to be actively engaged”, and who desired “a heap of fun and to kill some Yankees”, to join his command (Nathan Bedford Forrest, American Battlefield Trust). Despite having no previous military experience, he was quickly recognized as what some would even characterize as a “born military genius”, and was promoted multiple times, working his way up the ranks. While he remains an extremely controversial figure, what is not controversial is his pure military capability. In a short amount of time, Forrest became known as a brutally determined commander with a natural acuity for battlefield tactics. Over the course of the Civil War, he had 29 horses shot from under him, killed or seriously wounded at least 30 enemy

The Ku Klux Klan, more commonly referred to as the KKK, is a secret hate organization that operates on the basis of white supremacy, committing extreme acts of violence towards African Americans and other minorities. Although Forrest later quit from the position and attempted to disband the group due to too much publicity, branches of the organization continued to live on, and still exist even today. Despite his efforts to deny any affiliation with the KKK, this combined with his previous history of racism and aggression thoroughly cemented the way most Americans viewed him. Even in current society, there are still many protests advocating against (or, less commonly, for) Forrest, and multiple locations where he has been commemorated have been forcibly renamed (Glaze). However, as put by a recent biographer of Forrest, “The reality is that over the length of his lifetime Nathan Bedford Forrest's racial attitudes probably developed more, and more in the direction of liberal enlightenment, than those of most other Americans in the nation's history” (Hurst,