He was a fierce and controversial Civil War officer, an unschooled but brilliant cavalryman, an epic figure in America’s most celebrated war. A superb tactician and ferocious fighter, Nathan Bedford Forrest revolutionized the way armies fought in the course of rising from private to lieutenant general in the Confederate Army.

In this detailed and fascinating account of the legend of the “Wizard of the Saddle,” we see a man whose strengths and flaws were both of towering proportions, a man possessed of physical valor perhaps unprecedented among his countrymen. And, ironically, Forrest—the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan—was a man whose social attitudes may well have changed farther in the direction of racial enlightenment over the span of his lifetime than those of most American historical figures.