The Klansman. The slave trader. The Confederate general. These three pillars fundamentally define the legacy and image of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a legacy that remains deeply rooted in racism and white supremacy. Yet Forrest’s image piques considerable interest because of its malleability. No group viewed him in the same way. He was a hero to some and a villain to others. With a combination of self-awareness, fabrication, and exaggeration, Forrest invented a mythic persona throughout his lifetime allowing his legacy to live on.
Historian Court Carney takes a chronological approach as he reveals how the Forrest myth transformed over time. What Reckoning with the Devil illustrates are moments where history and memory become an ongoing conversation, negotiation, and reinterpretation reflecting the culture of the moment. Despite the infamy and notoriety that surrounded the massacre at Ft. Pillow, Forrest continued to craft his own public persona by collaborating with the press to publish his own narrative or seeking presidential pardon to minimize his reputational damage.
Carney’s book identifies sites of memories where the Forrest myth flourished and faded. Specifically, the author examines how Forrest’s memory prospered in Memphis. The Tennessee city became the site of a monument to the controversial Confederate, a statue erected to symbolize the importance of white supremacy within postbellum southern culture. Forrest’s memory and Memphis’ history were thereafter inextricably intertwined. Carney effectively demonstrates how this created growing tension that finally boiled over during the Civil Rights revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s, when Black voices began to permeate the public sphere. When Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in the shadow of a monument to the founder of the KKK, it triggered widespread reconsideration of how we should remember racists and enslavers.
But Carney is careful to note the many ebbs and flows of Forrest’s place in public memory of the Civil War era. Briefly, after the unveiling of the Memphis monument in 1905, Forrest began to fade from national consciousness. This lull did not last long, however, as biographies on Forrest proliferated in the late twentieth century. Forrest was remembered for his maneuvers and tactics, and he was referenced throughout World War II as the “inventor” of the German Blitz.
The memorialization continued when Jack Kershaw, a supporter of racism and segregation, sculpted a monument to Forrest in Nashville. Such statuary, however, always aroused ire, particularly among Memphis’ sizeable Black population. It was frequently vandalized until the tensions reached a breaking point in recent years. Activists finally succeeded in having the statue removed in 2021 as the nation confronted Confederate iconography.
In multiple chapters, Carney brilliantly deals with the historiography on Forrest, analyzing how various authors remembered the general in ways that added to the popular and gendered Forrest myth.
Most interesting is what occurred at the end of Forrest’s life. In 1875, Forrest stood in front of a Black audience and claimed that, “I am with you in heart and land” (57). But in examining this critical moment of Forrest’s life––a speech that his admirers have continuously cited as a moment that reveals his civil rights sympathies––Carney fails to thoroughly examine the memory of Forrest as it emerged within the Black community. One wonders how the Black press reacted to this speech. Freed people and their descendants must also have been building their own form of the Forrest myth, and examining those would have added more depth to Carney’s analysis.
But this minor issue pales in comparison to Carney’s overall achievement. By examining Forrest across so broad a sweep of time, Reckoning with the Devil distinguishes itself as the most informative and comprehensive account of Nathan Bedford Forrest’s life and legacy to date.
Madelaine Setiawan is a doctoral student in the Department of History at Texas A&M University.
