Civil War: General Bedford Forrest 12-inch Figure

Description

With no formal military training, Nathan Bedford Forrest became one of the leading cavalry figures of the Civil War. The native Tennesseean had amassed a fortune, which he 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 June 14, 1861. Tapped by the governor, he then raised a mounted battalion at his own expense.

When Forrest captured Fort Pillow a controversy developed over reports of a massacre of the largely black garrison. Apparently a massacre did occur there are numerous Confederate firsthand accounts of it. He defeated Samuel D. Sturgis at Brice's Crossroads and under Stephen D. Lee fought Andrew J. Smith at Tupelo. He again faced Smith during August 1864 and then provided the cavalry force for Hood's invasion of middle Tennessee that fall. Finally the force of numbers began to tell when he proved incapable of stopping Wilson's raid through Alabama and Georgia in the final months of the war. His diminished command was included in Richard Taylor's surrender.

Wiped out financially by the war, he resumed planting and became the president of the Selma, Marion & Memphis Railroad, which he helped to promote. Joining the Ku Klux Klan shortly after the war, he was apparently one of its early leaders. Forrest once summed up his military theory as "Get there first with the most men." He died, probably of diabetes, at Memphis on October 29, 1877, and is buried there.