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Nathan Bedford Forrest was a Confederate Army general during the American Civil War. Although scholars admire Forrest as a military strategist, he has remained a highly controversial figure in Southern racial history, especially for his alleged role in the massacre of black soldiers at Fort Pillow, his 1867–1869 leadership of the white-supremacist/terrorist Ku Klux Klan, and his political influence as a Tennessee delegate at the 1868 Democratic National Convention.