Jesse A. Forrest

Jesse Anderson Forrest (April 9, 1834 – December 15, 1889) was an American slave trader, Confederate cavalry colonel, livery stable owner, and cotton plantation owner of Tennessee and Arkansas, United States.

Biography

Before the war, the Forrest brothers were engaged in the slave trade at Memphis and up and down the Mississippi River. Jesse Forrest fought alongside his brother Lt. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest in the American Civil War, as well as under command of other Confederates such as Gideon J. Pillow. He enlisted as a private in the Tennessee Mounted Rifles and was a lieutenant colonel by 1862. News reports during and after the war describe him as a colonel; the Confederate Officers' Card Index lists his highest rank as lieutenant colonel. He was listed as colonel commanding the 21st Tennessee Cavalry Regiment when he was injured in a fight near Decatur in 1864. After the war he worked as an "extensive levee and railroad contractor, farmer, and dealer in livestock." A father of six, in later life he owned three large plantations at Walnut Bend, Arkansas. He died of "malarial hemaeturia" in Memphis, Tennessee in 1889.