Nathan Bedford Forrest
From Dixiepedia: The PC-Free Encyclopedia
Biography
Nathan Bedford Forrest (13 July 1821 – 29 October 1877) was born to poor Scotch-Irish parents in Chapel Hill, Tennessee. Uneducated but not illiterate, he had amassed a fortune estimated at $1,500,000, as a slave trader and plantation owner before enlisting in the Confederate army as a private in Josiah H. White's cavalry company on 14 June 1861. He recruited men who could furnish their own weapons and he equipped the group at his own expense. He developed raiding tactics that made his cavalry a superb strike force. Nicknamed "That Devil Forrest," he was feared by both Generals Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman.
He died of diabetes at Memphis, Tennessee at the age of 57. Services were held at Court Avenue Presbyterian Church with an oration given by Jefferson Davis. A funeral procession formed at the church by thousands of marchers who then proceeded to accompany the body to Elmwood Cemetery where it was interred. In 1905, the remains of he and his wife were moved to what is now known as Forrest Park on Union Avenue in downtown Memphis.
His Involvement in the Ku Klux Klan
Forrest testified in 1871 before the Joint Congressional Committee on Affairs in the Insurrectionary States that the Ku Klux Klan organization "was intended entirely as a protection to the people, to enforce the laws, and protect the people against outrages" (Report of the Joint Congressional Committee on Affairs in the Insurrectionary States [Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1872], Volume XIII, page 3).
His Reported Conversion
In his book, Nathan Bedford Forrest (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993, page 370), author Jack Hurst gave the following account of Forrest's reported conversion to Christianity near the end of his life:
On the evening of November 14, 1875, the Reverend George T. Stainback, minister of the Court Street Cumberland Presbyterian Church in Memphis, preached on the parable of the builders in Jesus Christ's Sermon on the Mount. Present as usual was Mary Ann Forrest, but beside her this night sat her husband. In those verses from the Book of Matthew, he saw all the withered fruit of his life's grand enterprises. At the service's end, he stopped at the church door and waited for Stainback to come out and bid a customary farewell to the flock. "He took my arm, and we passed [to] the pavement below," the clergyman, who had known Forrest for a quarter century, would remember two years later. At the sidewalk, Stainback said, Forrest suddenly leaned against the wall and his eyes filled with tears. "Sir, your sermon has removed the last prop from under me," he said, "I am the fool that built on the sand; I am a poor miserable sinner." He looked "all shaken," recalled Stainback, who recommended that he study Psalm 51 to find spiritual relief. The next evening the minister visited him for a talk and prayer, and after the latter, Forrest rose from his knees to say he felt "satisfied. All is right. I put my trust in my Redeemer."
Not long afterward, when asked what had brought about his sudden abandonment of a lifetime of respectful non-acceptance of the faith, he replied with humor. "Why, it was perfectly simple," he said. "I was down on my plantation on the island and I took sick and thought my last chance had come and I took it!"
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