After the war, Forrest settled in Memphis, Tennessee, building a house on a bank of the Mississippi River. Slavery abolished and financially ruined, Forrest was said to have been "wiped-out" at this time. He was eventually employed by the Selma, Marion & Memphis Railroad and became the company president. As a private citizen, Forrest was well known for his kindness and generosity to former comrades who called on him.
It was during this time that he became the nexus of the nascent Ku Klux Klan movement. According to one oral report, George Gordon, a former Confederate brigadier general, went to Forrest in Memphis and told him about the new organization, to which Forrest replied, "That's a good thing; that's a damn good thing. We can use that to keep the niggers in their place." He was acclaimed at a Nashville, Tennessee, KKK convention (1867) as the first Grand Wizard, or leader-in-chief of that organization. In an 1868 newspaper interview, Forrest boasted that the Klan was a nationwide organization of 550,000 men, and that although he himself was not a member, he was "in sympathy" and would "cooperate" with them, and could himself muster 40,000 Klansmen with five days' notice. He stated that the Klan did not see blacks as its enemy so much as "carpetbaggers" (northerners who came south after the war ended) and "scalawags" (white Republican southerners).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Bedford_Forrest
