A Battle from the Start: The Life of Nathan Bedford Forrest

Wills, a history professor at Georgia Southern University, effectively synthesizes archival and other printed sources in this first modern biography of the Confederacy's greatest cavalry leader. The narrative approach employed reflects the subject's marginal literacy, which forces us to see Forrest (1821-1877) largely through the eyes of his contemporaries. He emerges as a product of the Southern frontier, a self-made man of limited vision, iron will and an ungovernable temper. Forrest, a onetime slave dealer, viewed blacks as commodities. This attitude shaped his wartime treatment of black POWs as property rather than men, and facilitated his central postwar role in the Ku Klux Klan. A master of tactical ruses and deceptions, Forrest led from the front; he killed as many as 30 men in personal combat. His raids and battles had a high nuisance value, but were never integrated into an overall strategy. They remained correspondingly sterile, the work of an unusually gifted amateur of war. Illustrations not seen by PW. History Book Club alternate. (June)