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“The Most Man in the World” Nathan Bedford Forrest and the Cult of Southern Masculinity court carney In 1998, Nathan Bedford Forrest, brandishing a pistol and a sword, emerged from the Tennessee woods atop his horse, two stories tall and surrounded by Confederate flags and barbed wire. Located in a small private park outside of Nashville and sculpted by Jack Kershaw, an avowed segregationist and one-time attorney to Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassin, the Forrest statue ostensibly represented the New South in an amalgam of fiberglass and silver and gold paint. Local black legislators protested the statue as racist and decried in particular the Tennessee Department of Transportation’s decision to increase visibility of the private land by ordering state convicts to remove the brush from the nearby highway. Despite the protests, several hundred people gathered in the park to witness the unveiling, an event undeniably connected to issues of race. One attendee, for example, noted that he had “lived in an integrated neighborhood for 17 years, and that’s where I’ve learned that the mixing of the races doesn’t work.” The South Carolinian also blamed crime generally on African Americans, “who are primarily criminal as a group.” With destination unknown, Forrest once again led white southerners into battle. “He’s crying ‘Follow me!’” Kershaw said of the Confederate general. Still, the ranks were not without some rancor, as one Tennessean proclaimed the statue simply as “the ugliest piece of overblown yard art imaginable.”1 Racial controversy resonated from the Kershaw statue, but this fiberglass ef- figy also suggested a more contemporary identity: Forrest as a new archetype of violent, white southern masculinity. The racial context of Confederate flags gives way to the exaggerated—and near comic—virility of the general himself with his raised sidearm, aggressive horse, and phallic saber. Since the Civil War, admirers of Forrest have generally accentuated the general’s virile heroism. In the late 1860s, for example, a Tennessean asserted that “no man more unflinchingly true and gallant is to be found than General N. B. Forrest.” At his death in 1877, one eulogist remarked that Forrest was “the greatest man eviscerated” by the Civil War. In 1905, another speaker placed Forrest in a global context and declared him “the most masterful and marvelous man that ever figured in the world’s great history .” The next year an orator proclaimed Forrest a “manly man, fearless and true.” Following World War II, Forrest’s connection to issues of masculinity grew more pronounced as the general came to serve as a particular illustration of southern honor through virility and violence. More than any other admirer of the general, the writer Shelby Foote faithfully promoted Forrest as a paradigm of southern manliness.2 By the late 1990s, due in large measure to Foote’s work, the Forrest image had developed into a complicated symbol of southern honor and manhood as well as racial prejudice and intolerance. The general’s military service obviously played a large role in this image, as did his recalcitrant attitude of forgoing submission . A southern hero to be sure—especially when his image was emblazoned with Confederate iconography—but Forrest also stood for a more primeval tradition of manliness and courage. Women (and women’s organizations) certainly played a role in honoring Forrest, but unlike Robert E. Lee or Stonewall Jackson, Forrest noticeably appealed more to men. By the late twentieth century, groups like the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) eclipsed the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) as gatekeepers of Confederate legitimacy, and Forrest (more than any other Civil War personality) personified violent masculinity. Forrest became quite clearly, in the words of Foote, “the most man in the world.” Almost single-handedly, Shelby Foote contorted Forrest into a symbol of martial virility. By downplaying the racially charged aspects of the general’s life—he was an antebellum slave trader, a commanding officer during a racially motivated massacre, and an early leader of the Ku Klux Klan—Foote ably constructed a useful symbol of southern honor and masculinity. A native of Greenville, Mississippi, who moved to Memphis as an adult, Foote first became interested in the Civil War and Forrest as a young man living among the folk history, memorials, and other shadowed remembrances of the general. Throughout the 1950s, as he established a career in writing, Foote implicitly and explicitly began to create and define a us173 “The Most Man in the World” [18.116...

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