The Myth of Nathan Bedford Forrest

Ashdown and Caudill explain how one of the Civil War's most colorful and controversial characters became a legend during the war and evolved into a mythical figure after the war and into the 21st century through literature, art, cinema, and TV. As Tony Horwitz discovered in Confederates in the Attic, the legacy of Nathan Bedford Forrest continues to polarize the South even today: as a symbol of the Lost Cause and hero to working-class Southerners on one hand, and emblem of slavery and lingering racial tensions on the other.