July 13, 1821 - Nathan Bedford Forrest
His career traced a consistent arc from slave trader to Confederate general to Klan leader, each role reinforcing the others in ways that made him a central figure in both the Civil War and the violent resistance to Reconstruction. The massacre at Fort Pillow — where Union soldiers, disproportionately Black, were killed after resistance had effectively ended — remains the most scrutinized episode of his military command, with historians still debating the degree of his direct culpability. His later position as the Klan's first Grand Wizard placed him at the head of an organization that used systematic terror to undermine Black civil and political life in the postwar South.
From Wikipedia
Nathan Bedford Forrest (July 13, 1821 – October 29, 1877) was a Confederate general during the American Civil War, noted for his aggressive cavalry tactics and rapid rise from private to general, and later served briefly as the first Grand Wizard of the Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan.
Before the Civil War, Forrest amassed substantial wealth as a horse and cattle trader, real estate broker, and cotton plantation owner, and was also directly involved in the interstate slave trade, including operating a slave jail in Memphis. In June 1861, shortly after the Civil War began with the splitting of the United States into the Union and the Confederacy, Forrest enlisted in the Confederate Army. Forrest became one of the few soldiers during the war to enlist as a private and be promoted to general without previous military training. An expert cavalry leader, Forrest was given command of a cavalry corps and established new doctrines for mobile forces, earning him the nickname "The Wizard of the Saddle". He used his cavalry troops as mounted infantry and often deployed artillery as the lead in battle, thus helping to "revolutionize cavalry tactics".
In April 1864, at the Battle of Fort Pillow, Confederate forces under Forrest's command killed a large number of Union troops after the fort had effectively ceased resistance, most of them black soldiers. Contemporary Northern newspapers and congressional investigations held Forrest responsible, while later historians have differed over whether the killings resulted from explicit orders, loss of control during the assault, or racialized battlefield practices within the Confederate army.
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