Still, inherent in its creation was the broad theme of returning the Negro to inferior status vis-à-vis the white man by destroying white-black unity leagues and black schools and private businesses—the logical precursors to the later intimidation of beating and lynching black political figures and sympathetic whites. At first the macabre secret rites, white sheets, and night riding were designed to instill terror more than to commit murder: the ghosts of the Confederate dead took over the night to do what they could not in broad daylight. But within a few months after its founding, the Klan became both more respectable and powerful—and increasingly was directly linked with the Democratic Party, which likewise championed a return of near-servile status to emancipated blacks. What distinguished the Klan from myriads of similar ad hoc secret societies and Southern white groups—the Confederate Relief and Historical Association, the Order of Pale Faces, and the Order of the White Camellia—were its mystic pretensions and professed fraternity of the defeated that helped it to cross state lines, form some type of general cohesiveness, and achieve a modicum of respectability and goodwill even as it ratcheted up the level of brutality and intimidation against targeted individuals.
Klan messages were often a mix of professed concern for the white poor and calls for retribution against the forces of Reconstruction. During a visit of Forrest to Georgia in March 1868, the Atlanta Intelligence published a proclamation emanating from the “headquarters of the mystic order of the Ku Klux Klan.” After bragging that it had done “justice to the afflicted and oppressed!” and had sought “to defend the orphan and protect the weak!” the published notice went on to proclaim that a sentence of death had been passed against “a traitor,” and a “cowardly slayer of the innocent.” Apparently in secret session, the Ku Klux Klan’s leadership ordered the murder of an anonymous prominent Southerner who was to be “offered up as a sacrifice upon the altar of the innocent and lost.” Shortly afterward, George W. Ashburn, a Columbus, Georgia, Republican leader, was killed by a mob of thirty-five disguised men. Rumors that Forrest was grand wizard of the Klan, evidence that the death sentence came from the organization’s “headquarters,” and the fact of the general’s presence in Georgia at the time of the proclamation all suggest that he either ordered or knew in advance of the hit.
The circumstances of Forrest’s exact role in the Ku Klux Klan are mysterious to this day—given the key role of secrecy among the klaverns, and the general’s own worry that his public involvement might harm his efforts to forge partnerships with Northern businessmen or jeopardize his recent pardon. If in its infancy the Klan was still mostly a local Tennessee crackpot organization of white supremacists and misguided ex-Confederate zealots, it looked toward expansion through enlistment of a national figure who would galvanize support and increase membership—especially in light of the threat of newly enfranchised black voting in the election of 1867.
So, early in the spring of 1867 the nominal heads of the newly formed Klan, under the auspices of Forrest’s former subordinate, Capt. John W. Morton, approached Forrest. Under somewhat disputed circumstances, he quickly emerged as the group’s first grand wizard—a role that he would later deny in official congressional testimony. The bitter postbellum fights in Tennessee between ex-Confederates and Union loyalists, and Forrest’s own famous career during the past four years in expelling Northern forces from the state, made the Tennessee native the natural choice for leadership of an in-home organization.
The Klan’s birth was also overseen by an array of Confederate ex-veterans. And under Forrest, the Civil War hero, the Klan never lost its close connection with its military origins—the white sheets and night rides were originally intended to scare blacks into thinking the feared but long dead cavalrymen of the South had been called back to arms. Just as Forrest and other defeated Confederate generals believed in the fable of the Lost Cause—that chance, fate, or the singularity of Northern evil had quashed the South, not Northern power and skill—so the Klan tapped the same roots of Southern mysticism. The Klan was to be portrayed in the future in films like Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind not as the terrorist organization that it was, but, as Forrest hoped, a fraternal bulwark against dangerous Negroes and traitorous whites who preyed on innocent Southern women and destitute veterans.
Forrest, who was seeking to resurrect his fortune by forging railroad and insurance ventures with Yankee investors, was always cagey in admitting his presidency—even as he used his frequent travels on business to unify and expand the Klan organization beyond his home state. At forty-six he was famous, well-connected, eager to regain his prewar fortune and recapture the excitement of his Tennessee war years—and convinced that black enfranchisement would ruin the South. “Forrest commanded more brave men in the invisible army,” a Klansman now bragged, “than he did while in the Confederate army.” He at least admitted to a congressional committee in 1871 that he was receiving 50 to 100 letters a day from Southerners urging some type of reaction against Northern efforts to elevate the Negro to political equality with whites—inadvertent proof that he was generally recognized as a figure to whom the more desperate might turn. Given his later denials and the absence of written records, it is difficult to assess precisely Forrest’s pivotal role in terms of active recruitment—though his itinerant career from 1867 to 1870 no doubt was useful for Klan activity. Usually his visits to various Southern cities on “insurance business” coincided with an upsurge in local Klan visibility and activity.
When reports grew that the Klan was turning more murderous, and as its more respectable supporters began to get cold feet after a series of harsh Federal countermeasures were promised, Forrest took pains both to “reform” the Klan—and finally distance himself from its more odious work. Yet his later renouncement of the Klan and his ostensible efforts to disband its local affiliates do not mask the reality that the general’s name and support had done much to ensure its initial spread and leave his own ardent stamp on Klan activity. Indeed, in a controversial interview published on September 1, 1868, Forrest bragged to the Cincinnati Commercial that the Klan already had enrolled 40,000 members in Tennessee and about 550,000 throughout the old Confederacy. He went on to describe in intimate detail the general organization of the Klan and to assure the reporter that he could raise an army of 40,000 Klansmen “in five days” should trouble arise:
I have no powder to burn killing Negroes. I intend to kill the radicals. I have told them this and more. There is not a radical leader in this town [Memphis] but is a marked man; and if trouble should break out, not one of them would be left alive. I have told them that they were trying to create a disturbance and then slip out and leave the consequences to fall upon the Negro; but they can’t do it. Their houses are picketed, and when the fight comes not one of them would ever get out of this town alive. We don’t intend they shall ever get out of the country.
Although he claimed in a letter to the Commercial and in later congressional testimony that he had been misquoted and in fact had never been a Klan member, many of his public pronouncements confirm the content of the interview and reflect his fervid views about the proper role of the Klan in the reconstructed South. Earlier he had addressed a crowd in Brownsville, Tennessee, in the same apocalyptic terms:
I can assure you, fellow citizens, that I, for one, do not want any more war. I have seen it in all its phases, and believe me when I say, that I don’t want to see any more bloodshed, nor do I want to see any Negroes armed to shoot down white men. If they bring this war upon us, there is one thing I will tell you—that I shall not shoot any Negroes so long as I can see a white Radical to shoot, for it is the Radicals who will be to blame for bringing on this war.
Forrest then went on:
But if they send the black men to hunt those Confederate soldiers whom they call kuklux, then I say to you, “Go out and shoot the radicals.” If they do want to inaugurate civil war, the sooner it comes the better, that we may know what to do.
Even after his offi
cial order to disband the formal Klan, Forrest still made it known that he approved of the general policy of terrorizing any who attempted to implement the aims of Reconstruction. In early 1870, a year after Forrest’s purported disassociation from the Klan, Republican probate judge William T. Blackford was attacked in his home in Greensboro, Alabama. Over sixty Klansmen surrounded his house. Blackford in desperation immediately asked Forrest for clemency and protection—again evidence of the generally held belief that Forrest still controlled such night riders. After initially saving his life, Forrest nevertheless advised the judge to leave the South, remarking in explanation of his sudden departure that “he had given bad advice to the Negroes, and kept them in confusion, and off the plantations.” Indeed, well after the official “end” of the Klan, Congress passed in 1870–71 a series of anti–Ku Klux Klan acts that equated the Klan with treason and allowed the President to ignore habeas corpus to hunt down suspected members. Congress clearly was reacting to the terrorist activity that continued or even accelerated well after Forrest’s much publicized termination of the klaverns.
What, then, made the Klan so much more resilient and dynamic than numerous other hate organizations in American history? The answer lies not in its ideology per se, which was shared by many other racist groups. Rather, the Klan spread so rapidly due to its grassroots appeal to working middle- and lower-class whites, who saw its message as populist and reactive rather than merely hateful and xenophobic. The planning of assassinations, lynchings, and torture of targeted individuals also created a general climate of terror that no one was safe from the “invisible” empire. Klansmen postured as protectors of the working poor, defenders who feared the elevation of the blacks as threats both to their jobs and to their sense of privilege. Forrest told congressmen in 1871 that the Klan had arisen for just such a noble purpose. “My understanding is that those men who were in the organization were young men mostly; men who had been in the southern army, and men who could be relied upon in case of difficulty—of an attack from the Negroes—who could be relied upon to defend the women and children of the country.”
Forrest further took pains to paint the rise of the Klan as a necessary unifying bulwark for the defenseless:
There was a great deal of insecurity felt by the southern people. There were a great many northern men coming down here, forming leagues all over the country. The Negroes were holding night meetings; were going about; were becoming very insolent and the southern people all over the state were very much alarmed. I think many of the organizations did not have any name; parties organized themselves so as to be ready in case they were attacked. Ladies were ravished by some of the Negroes, who were tried and put in the penitentiary, but were turned out in a few days afterward. There was a great deal of insecurity in the country, and I think this organization was got up to protect the weak, with no political intention at all.
In Forrest’s mind—and this would become a hallmark of Klan ideology—the “Negroes,” not whites, were the aggressors. His organization was not offensive but simply defensive, formed to safeguard downtrodden poor Southerners from hostile blacks and their Union allies. Forrest himself had been born into poverty and had a natural affinity for the white poor, prompting Gen. Viscount Wolseley to suggest that his bleak upbringing—“what Napoleon termed the best of military schools, that of poverty”—was critical to his later military success. Forrest, the antiaristocrat and underappreciated general, understood perfectly the nature of the class resentment in Southern culture that became more manifest in the closing years of the Civil War—a seething of the nonslaveholding poor who had died on behalf of the rich plantation class and their wishes to protect Negro slavery.
In the immediate postwar years and before he entered into a series of entrepreneurial partnerships, Forrest helped draw on this rising Southern hatred toward Northern “radicals,” who were trying to take the last vestige of pride—superiority over the Negro—away from the white Southern lower classes. “During the war our servants remained with us and behaved very well,” Forrest admitted to the congressional inquiry, “but when the war was over our servants began to mix with the Republicans, and they broke off from the Southern people, and were sulky and insolent.” That the Klan ostensibly became an organization of the masses, who in the short-term were not worried about endangering the influx of Northern cash or necessarily the efforts of the Confederate officer corps to regain their citizenship, was in part due to its first president, whose renegade past and unorthodox career gained him rapport across class lines.
Forrest himself was far more than an illiterate former slave trader. Beside his brilliant military record he was a cagey student of politics. His speeches and dictated letters in the decade after the Civil War reveal a constant theme of aggrieved whites, who alone were following the original intent of the Constitution against revolutionary efforts of radical New England Republicans to change the very nature of the federal government. In his way of thinking, he was not violating the laws of the United States inasmuch as the Northern-dominated Congress had consistently adopted legislation that was at odds with the spirit of the Founding Fathers. His folksy mixture of half-educated populism, grievances against Northern banks and insurance companies and their carpetbagger and scalawag hirelings, and threats to kill and return to the battlefield if need be, helped give the Klan its trademark character of unrepentant grievance for a forgotten constituency.
Under Forrest the Klan settled in on a pattern of predictable behavior: nighttime attacks on blacks coupled with daytime disavowals of violence. In his infamous interview with the Cincinnati Commercial, Forrest was canny in emphasizing the Klan’s benevolent image. “I am not an enemy to the Negro. We want him here among us; he is the only laboring class we have; and more than that, I would sooner trust him than the white scalawag or carpetbagger.” Again, the irony is that Forrest’s own efforts at organizing resistance to Reconstruction were undermining his private plans to enlist Northern money in his own various farming and rail projects. When he realized that his public pronouncements to garner help from the North were at odds with his secretive life in the Klan, he seems to have attempted either to hide or end his active prominent role—perhaps a belated admission of his own culpability for a mass movement that had harmed the reputation of a struggling South.
No doubt the Klan or something like it would have emerged from the ashes of the Confederacy had Nathan Bedford Forrest either remained in obscurity as a lowly colonel on sentinel duty at the “damned” Lick Creek, or had a Union bullet at Fallen Timbers plowed a few more inches into the interior of his spinal column—or had the later renowned Forrest not agreed in 1867 to be the organization’s first president. But without the prestige of Forrest as its initial national leader, the incipient Klan would have remained a different, far more fringe and ineffectual organization—something like the ephemeral Order of the White Camellia, without either the pretensions of political legitimacy or broad class appeal. The Klan, after all, also bragged among its members a handful of other ex-Confederate generals like Zebulon Vance, Wade Hampton, and John B. Gordon. But in most cases such boasts were either groundless or, if true, made no difference to the Klan’s spread, given most ex-officers’ lack of a popular following among middling Southerners or any rapport with the poor.
With Forrest it was a completely different case. He had gained a huge audience and possessed the temperament and skill to galvanize grassroots support. Lee was correct that no Southerner was better equipped to lead a large number of dedicated followers. His career as devilish marauder in the Civil War lent a natural aura to the Klan’s trademark early practice of nocturnal rides of stealth and terror. Forrest himself may well have recoiled at the Klan’s descent into murder and riot. And had he lived, he may well have been appalled at the later rebirth of the Klan as an exclusively racist organization—although his grandson became cyclops of the Atlanta Klavern Number One in 1921, an office gained largely through the prestige of his founding ancestor. But the v
ery legacy of the Ku Klux Klan as America’s premier hate group was in large part due to Nathan Bedford Forrest’s own excessive temperament and unapologetic determination to return the South to its antebellum racial culture, to shoot down Northern radicals, and restart the Civil War if necessary in the process.
Forrest’s career, like Sherman’s, took off only after Shiloh and his remarkable charge into the Hornet’s Nest, his late-night scouting of the Federal reinforcements, and his heroism in the final melee at Fallen Timbers. Just weeks earlier his sound advice at Fort Donelson had been ignored, and he was generally considered an iconoclastic nuisance to the Union Army rather than a military genius to whom a significant theater of cavalry operations might be entrusted. Guard duty at Lick Creek was completely in line with his previous commands. Only his precipitous charges at Shiloh freed him from that obscurity and at last allowed his genius to emerge.
Just as Sherman was also attacked first in the battle and fought last, so too Forrest seems to have never slept through the two days before being the last man shot at Shiloh. Each was repeatedly nearly killed in his reckless efforts to ward off catastrophe and thereby emerge from either shame or obscurity. Such aggression at Shiloh had brought Forrest success while the indecisiveness of Beauregard and the unimaginativeness of Bragg spelled defeat for his cause. From Shiloh, Forrest learned of the poverty of Southern generalship and the wisdom of his own aggressive brand of war. The battle made him famous, but famous in a particular manner as one at odds with rather than as part of the Confederate command.
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