Nathan Bedford Forrest was not born a villain, but he certainly became one. In Reckoning with the Devil, Court Carney offers a close examination of a lesser-known subject of Lost Cause mythmaking. Unlike more prominent Confederate icons, Forrest’s legacy is defined as much by his postbellum activities as his wartime military service, a fact that has presented distinct challenges for generations of apologists. He is perhaps most widely remembered for his post-surrender affiliation with the Ku Klux Klan and, consequently, the violent insurgency waged against the radical social transformations set in motion by slavery’s abolition and the Confederacy’s defeat. His brief tenure as Grand Wizard of the Klan was marked by a single, and widely ignored, official order declaring the Klan’s formal disbandment sometime around 1869. The study of Forrest’s life and subsequent commemoration thus offers a signal opportunity to expose the mental gymnastics demanded of sympathizers past and present willing to defend or excuse the actions of this exemplary “unreconstructed rebel.” Reckoning with the Devil should be read with interest by scholars seeking insight into Forrest’s biography, as well as those concerned with his relationship to the vicissitudes of Confederate memory.

Although Reckoning with the Devil begins by recounting the life of the man himself, much of the book focuses on the evolution of Forrest’s legacy in the century and a half following his death in 1877. Chapter one presents a condensed outline of Forrest’s upbringing and adulthood centered upon his antebellum professional exploits as a wealthy slave merchant, his military career, including Forrest’s involvement in wartime atrocity connected with the Battle of Fort Pillow, and his postbellum activities, including his documented ties to the Ku Klux Klan. Chapters two through five demonstrate how Forrest first became a fixture of the powerful cultural movement dedicated to the Lost Cause, sparking a protracted contest over his legacy that has continued into the twenty-first century. In highlighting long-neglected histories of Black resistance to Confederate statues and monuments, the book also joins recent scholarship working to bring the study of struggles over the southern past closer to our own time, lending valuable context to stalled efforts to grapple with the mythic foundations of white supremacist ideology.

Carney surveys the many hagiographic portrayals formulated since Forrest’s passing, including reverent works of amateur historical scholarship, as well as sensualized literary and cinematic representations, all of which sought to capture his stony magnetism. Reckoning with the Devil also attends to the larger-than-life monuments erected in his memory – one dedicated at the beginning of the twentieth century, and the other at its close. Carney convincingly demonstrates the extent of Forrest’s enduring prominence and the often-surprising sources of his lasting appeal. Local efforts by the United Daughters of the Confederacy to pay homage to Forrest sputtered by the 1930s, as Carney explains. Still, the mythic Forrest remained a salient image of an embattled antihero whose connections to slavery, the Confederacy, and Reconstruction-era racial violence proved less an obstacle to commemoration than the impetus for defiant counter-representations of a virile white masculinity. Featured everywhere from mid-century men’s magazines to Ken Burns’s PBS documentary series, the fact of Forrest’s notoriety has paradoxically earned him many staunch defenders.

In order to achieve the expansive scope attempted by this book-length study, Reckoning with the Devil sometimes sacrifices close attention to the surrounding social, cultural, and political context in which Forrest’s memory took form. By stressing the contemporary prerogatives animating the construction of a monument to Forrest in Memphis, unveiled in his honor in 1905, Carney traces a line of argument outlined by scholars interested in the Lost Cause movement’s distinctive relationship to the culture of the Jim Crow South. Carney agrees with scholars who have stressed the key links between white southern domination of public memory and a hardening racial order taking shape in the early decades of the Jim Crow Era. Yet Lost Cause mythology did more than underpin white supremacist ideology. It played a key role in authorizing specific racial projects still in development in the minds of those who took to commemorating Forrest.

Carney’s chosen topic offers a unique vantage point from which to evaluate how the memory of Reconstruction-era terror informed the politics of racial violence. Reckoning with the Devil might have more closely examined Forrest’s status as a revered and reviled figurehead of the Ku Klux Klan. Forrest’s proclamation of the Klan’s disbandment in his General Order No. 1 carried little weight because most white insurgents identified as Ku Klux by observers did not necessarily view themselves as belonging to the organization he claimed to have led, and those who did appeared to relish in defying his futile attempts to command them. Yet this act remains a key feature of Forrest’s legacy as remembered by the Klan’s most committed defenders, who sought to define the Klan’s history in terms of Forrest’s vision of the organization and not those who rejected it and substituted their own.

Carney’s citation of a 1909 book penned by one of Forrest’s most committed allies points to this emerging mythology, but that text alone cannot ground Forrest’s relationship to the unfolding of a powerful revisionist retelling of the Klan’s history. Why did it take thirty years for such vociferous defenses of Forrest and his fellow Klansmen to emerge, and why then did their relationship to the organization remain an inconsistently featured aspect of their collective legacy? Such questions might have reframed the unveiling of the Memphis monument to Forrest, which precisely coincided with intensifying conflicts among white southerners over the Klan’s memory, inflamed by the release months earlier of Thomas Dixon’s 1905 novel The Clansman. Carney might have more deliberately probed the significance of the often subtextual character of allusions to the Klan that cast a metaphorical shroud over Forrest’s personal legacy.

Ultimately, Reckoning with the Devil leaves this and other questions for future researchers. Carney has made a useful contribution to multiple fields of inquiry, and his attention to the myth and memory of Nathan Bedford Forrest offers a new perspective for scholars of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era on the many twists and turns of the history of the Lost Cause movement.