The Myth of Nathan Bedford Forrest

Journalism professors Ashdown and Caudill, authors of The Mosby Myth, give an even-handed account of the life of the controversial Confederate cavalry leader, but the focus of this engaging monograph, the latest in The American Crisis Series of Civil War-era studies, is more on the legend than the facts. Lost Cause apologists, they find, have celebrated Forrest as an untutored military genius and backwoods avatar of Southern chivalry, while Northern detractors and African-Americans view him as the epitome of brutal Southern racism, noting his pre-war slave trading, the Fort Pillow massacre of black Union prisoners by troops under his command and his post-war involvement in the Ku Klux Klan. To Agrarian intellectuals he was an ""idealized yeoman farmer"" championing an organic ante-bellum society against the soulless industrialism of the North, a guise that could make him either ""the Southern equivalent of a fascist Aryan Superman leading a rebellion of the volk"" or an insurgent against the centralizing fascist state. To writers like Faulkner he embodied a cherished but defeated and compromised Southern honor. In contemporary terms, he has become both an emblem of defiant Southern machismo, eclipsing the aristocratic Robert E. Lee himself, and the namesake of Forrest Gump, America's favorite historical naif. Delving into newspaper reports, obituaries, biographies, fiction, cinema, monuments, children's books and comic books, the authors offer a sophisticated but accessible reading of the transformations of Forrest's life into myth. If they find his character too protean to yield a stable interpretation, theirs is nonetheless a fascinating survey of the shifting cultural meanings of the Civil War. 26 b&w illustrations and maps.