Nathan Bedford Forrest Quotes

“[Shelby] Foote also displayed an intricate sympathy for the early KKK, which ex-Confederates formed immediately after the [Civil] War to combat what they regarded as the cruel excesses of Reconstruction. "The Klan takes some careful talking about, it's easy to misinterpret what I'm fixing to say," Foote cautioned. "But in some ways the Klan was very akin to the Free French Resistance to Nazi occupation. To expect people who fought as valiantly as these people did to roll over and play dead because there was an occupying army is kind of crazy."

Foote also admired Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Klan's first Imperial Wizard, a slave trader before the War, and a rebel commander who allegedly permitted the slaughter of surrendering black troops at a battle called Fort Pillow. Foote regarded Forrest as one of the "two authentic geniuses" of the War (Lincoln being the other). A daring cavalry commander, Forrest was the only soldier on either side to rise from private to lieutenant general in the course of the War, and his lightning tactics later inspired Rommel's use of blitzkrieg in World War II.

In Foote's view, Forrest was also "a fine man. My black friends abhor him. They want to take his statue down, dig up his and his wife's bones, and throw them to the wind. But it is not known generally that he dissolved the Klan when it turned ugly."

Disbanded around 1870 (owing not only to Forrest, but also to a government crackdown), the Klan revived in 1915 following the success of the movie Birth of a Nation and quickly became a potent force nationwide. "The Klan that people remember today is the Klan of the 1920s," Foote said. "Anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish, anti-black. Forrest's Klan was anti-black but not opposed to all black people. It was trying to keep illiterate blacks from occupying positions like sheriff and judge.”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

“But his best seller by far was a T-shirt emblazoned with another fierce Confederate: Nathan Bedford Forrest, the “Wizard of the Saddle” and first Imperial Wizard of the Klan. “[Robert E.] Lee, of course, used to be our best seller,” Dresch said. “But Forrest has eclipsed Lee fivefold in the last few years.”

Dresch’s success in selling Forrest T-shirts gave commercial confirmation to the trend I’d sensed across the South: a hardening, ideological edge to Confederate remembrance. As Dresch put it, “Southerners are getting tired of taking it on the chin. They’re getting more aggressive. Lee’s the Southern gentleman who represents reconciliation with the Union. Forrest represents the spirit of going after them with everything you’ve got.”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War