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Devil’s Dream: A Novel About Nathan Bedford Forrest

by Madison Smartt Bell, Pantheon, 2010, $26.95

Why would Madison Smartt Bell, the author of three novels chronicling the servile revolution in Haiti and the biographer of the revolt’s enigmatic leader, choose to write a meandering, fictionalized life of one of the South’s preeminent slave traders—and perhaps the Confederacy’s most reviled, celebrated and legendary Civil War generals?

Perhaps it’s because Bell sees Toussaint Louverture of Haiti and Nathan Bedford Forrest of Tennessee as the black-and-white embodiments of the same world historical figure: a doppelgänger of humble origins at once complex and imperfectly understood, existing simultaneously in the collective memory of his respective society as larger-than-life myth and tragically flawed mortal.

In Devil’s Dream—the title refers to a frenzied jig danced by Forrest and to the sobriquet given him by Union General William T. Sherman—Bell links the two men through the character of Henri, the mysterious, ethereal Creole, and it’s through his eyes that much of the novel’s action is revealed.

Each chapter illuminates a particular Forrest character trait, including his compulsion to gamble, his offer to free any of his slaves willing to fight with him, his carnal desire for women of any color, his abhorrence of military bureaucracy and his instinctual ferocity in battle.

Bell makes no pretense of providing a balanced, dispassionate analysis of Forrest. He soft-peddles the general’s role in the 1864 Fort Pillow Massacre and completely ignores Forrest’s postwar life, including his association with the Ku Klux Klan. As a fictionalized biography of a complicated and still only partially understood man, Devil’s Dream is a flawed, yet brilliantly daring, artistic portrait—much like the life of the man its author strives to portray.

 

Originally published in the September 2010 issue of America’s Civil War. To subscribe, click here