Early Life
Nathan Bedford Forrest was born to a poor family in Bedford County, Tennessee. He was the first of blacksmith William Forrest's twelve children with wife Miriam Beck. The Forrest family had migrated to Tennessee from Virginia, via North Carolina, during the second half of the 18th Century, while the Beck family had moved from South Carolina to Tennessee around the same time. After his father's death, Forrest became head of the family at age 17. In 1841 Forrest went into business with his uncle Jonathan Forrest in Hernando, Mississippi. His uncle was killed there in 1845 during an argument with the Matlock brothers. In retaliation, Forrest shot and killed two of them with his two-shot pistol and wounded two others with a knife which had been thrown to him. One of the wounded Matlock men survived and served under Forrest during the Civil War. Forrest became a businessman, a planter who owned several cotton plantations in the Tennessee Delta, and a slave owner. He was also a slave trader, with a business based on Adams Street in Memphis. In 1858, Forrest (a Democrat), was elected as a Memphis city alderman. Forrest supported his mother and put his younger brothers through college. By the time the American Civil War started in 1861, he was a millionaire and one of the richest men in the South, having amassed a "personal fortune that he claimed was worth $1.5 million".
Before the Civil War,
"Forrest was well known as a Memphis speculator and Mississippi gambler. He was for some time captain of a boat which ran between Memphis, Tennessee and Vicksburg, Mississippi. As his fortune increased he engaged in plantation speculation, and became the nominal owner of two plantations not far from Goodrich's Landing, above Vicksburg where he worked some hundred or more slaves," according to his obituary. "He was known to his acquaintances as a man of obscure origin and low associations, a shrewd speculator, negro trader, and duelist, but a man of great energy and brute courage."
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