In an era that produced Stonewall Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, and Robert E. Lee, Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest emerged as a legend in his own right--a notorious character of mythic proportions even in his day. In the twenty-first century, his legacy continues to polarize the South: 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. In this brisk...