Getting Nathan Bedford off His High Horse

The Lost Cause and a Horse Named Roderick

By: Clelly Johnson, Middle Tennessee State University

The sound of gunshots must have been deafening, and the smell of gunpowder and blood was thick in the air to those with keen senses. While other animals around the Battle of Thompson's Station had taken refuge in barns, dens, or nests, one particular animal remained on the battleground. As legend has it, a horse named Roderick was injured with a gunshot wound in an early volley of the battle. The general who owned Roderick sent his horse away to be looked after by his seventeen-year-old son. As his master fought during the day, Roderick broke free from his young handler to be with his master. As the loyal steed galloped to be with his master, he was struck twice more with bullets, but Roderick continued. It was the fourth bullet, however, that ended the equine’s life. While the general had won the day at the Battle of Thompson's Station, he still faced a devastating loss. As the general wept over his steadfast horse, his soldiers bowed heads to the tragic scene. The man who lost his favorite horse on March 5, 1863, was General Nathan Bedford Forrest.[1]

In the decades that followed Roderick's death and the Confederate loss of the Civil War, the inhabitants of Tennessee forgot neither Forrest nor his warhorse. Because he was from Tennessee, there are streets named after Forrest, town squares and parks with statues of Forrest, often depicted on a horse that might be Roderick.  In addition to the memorials devoted to Forrest, there are even housing communities and squares bearing Roderick's name, as well as a Roderick Award of Courage presented to individuals by Thompson’s Station in Middle Tennessee. The award honors locals who perform heroic acts, the first recipient was a ten-year-old girl who performed the Heimlich maneuver saving the life of her grandmother.[2] In 2009, 146 years after Roderick's death, a statue was unveiled in his honor in Thompson’s Station, Tennessee. The statue was unveiled at a time when the United States was led by its first African American president. Although the influence of the Lost Cause ideology persisted among some Southerners, a growing number of people were beginning to recognize the true nature of certain so-called "Confederate heroes." The once-lauded Nathan Bedford Forrest was becoming a tarnished figure in the United States and Tennessee.  His statues were a cause of controversy in public memory, and there were calls for them to be removed.  Nevertheless, during this time, some in Thompson Station believed the best way to commemorate a battle that witnessed the death of nearly a thousand people was to erect a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest’s horse.[3]

Long seen as a venerated hero of the South, Forrest was unlikely to be revered for his actions before and after the Civil War. Forrest was born in Chapel Hill, Tennessee, on July 13, 1821. By 1841, when he was just twenty years old, Forrest murdered two men in Mississippi in retaliation for the murder of his uncle. At age forty, he owned cotton plantations in the Tennessee Delta and forty-two enslaved humans; however, Forrest quickly realized that more money could be made in human bondage than cotton. Forrest became wealthy from a slave-trading business located in Memphis. The sweat and blood of the enslaved garnered Forrest so much wealth that it is estimated that he was worth one million dollars. During the Civil War, Forrest proved himself as a general while still holding on to the brutish nature he was known for before the war. In the aftermath of the Civil War, like many other southern aristocrats his fortune turned. Forrest was financially ruined and was no longer able to make his riches in human trafficking which led to him seeking legitimate work. He was president of the Marion and Memphis Railroad; however, it went bankrupt under his stewardship. He also worked as a warden of a state prison farm.[4]

After Forrest's death, his legend grew in the South, especially in his native state Tennessee. Many Southerners, unable to come to terms with the Confederacy's defeat, turned to creating legends and idols out of the defeated men of the Confederacy. Part of Forrest's legend comes from his depiction of the everyman in the Deep South. He was a Southern man who was the antithesis of Northern modernity, a man who was uneducated and born poor who made his own wealth, albeit from selling black bodies. Forrest's appeal could have also been due to his representation of Southern masculinity. The fact that he was a slave trader displayed a rejection of Northern law and morals. In addition, his legacy as a violent brute may have been instilled in many Southern men as an admirable character trait. Bertram Wyatt Brown states, "No less intense than the influence of slavery was the parental insistence upon early signs of aggressiveness, demanded by notions of white masterhood, before the child met the outside world at school. The male child was under special obligation to prove early virility, an obligation in which shame and honor played a crucial, if not exclusive role.”[5]

In 1905, a twenty-one-foot-tall equestrian statue of Forrest was erected in Forrest Park in Memphis. Along with the statue, the graves of Forrest and his wife were exhumed and moved to the park. When the monument was erected, the Forrest Monument Association stated, “the children of white Memphis could look to Forrest as a civic role model since the General had instinctively done what was morally right.”[6] Over time, change saw Memphis become a predominately African American city. In 2015, the Memphis city council, reflecting the new South, sought to remove the Forrest statue after the years of strife it had caused.  However, the Tennessee Historical Commission rejected the application, because "the Tennessee Heritage Protection Act of 2013 prevents cities or counties from relocating, removing, renaming, or otherwise disturbing war memorials on public properties.”[7] The city of Memphis was not deterred, and eventually, the parks and statues were sold to Memphis Greenspace Inc., which removed the statues from the park. The Daily News reported after the removal of the statue, "[Van] Turner, an attorney and Shelby County commissioner, says there have been inquiries about the Davis and Forrest statues from several Tennessee legislators and white separatist groups as well as several Civil War sites, and the city of Savannah, Georgia.” White supremacists and cities alike were still eager to be home to Forrest and his unpleasant legacy.[8]

Known as the "Wizard of the Saddle," statues of Nathan Bedford Forrest are almost exclusively equestrian figures. Another notable statue of Forrest on horseback appeared in 1998 off Interstate 65 outside of Nashville. The twenty-five-foot grotesque statue of a mounted Forrest was faced repeated outcries for removal both because it was of Forrest, as well as funded by the attorney who defended James Earl Ray, the man who assassinated Martin Luther King, Jr. The statue was the subject of multiple vandalizations and shootings from people who were angered by the message the statue sent. After decades of dispute over the statue, it was finally removed in 2021. With all the controversy surrounding the monuments of Forrest, how did the Roderick statue come into existence?[9]

It has been said that Nathan Bedford Forrest had twenty-nine horses that died under him during the Civil War, yet Roderick became the most renowned horse he lost. Forrest even had another well-known horse after Roderick's death, King Philip, which became his favorite horse. However, King Philip survived both the war and Forrest. Roderick's noble death, coupled with the fact that he was Forrest’s horse, created a space for him in the zeitgeist of Tennessee. In November of 1944, during the Second World War, the Nashville Banner took a moment to devote an article titled “The Thoroughbred” about Roderick.  The article conveys the death of the horse and Forrest's response, which carries on the legacy and idolization of Forrest.[10]

As Forrest became an icon of the Lost Cause, so did Roderick. On March 5, 1956, deep within the Montgomery bus boycott, the Nashville Banner ran an entire page devoted to Roderick. The full page consisted of an epic poem about Roderick by Jack Knox. Knox wrote of Roderick's death:

He was racing with the shouting horsemen now, He was straining hard, To reach the General’s side, Five good strides ahead. Bleeding. Straining hard. Three good strides. When the killing bullet hit him in the chest.

The poem continued, saying, "Bedford Forrest died a little there." A week before the publication of the whole-page poem, the Nashville Banner ran an article leading up to its release. The article stated, “It will be a work of art that no Tennessean can afford to miss.” The fact that a newspaper used a full page during the Cold War and the Civil Rights movement devoted to a horse that died ninety-three years earlier displays the strength of the Lost Cause in Tennessee and the power that was still behind Nathan Bedford Forrest. Additionally, in 1961, celebrating the Civil War centennial in Tennessee, the Daughters of the Confederacy sold commemorative plates of Forrest mounted upon Roderick.[11]

The propaganda of the Lost Cause swept a dead horse up into the legacy of a slave trader and Klansman to such an extent that in 2009, a statue of a solitary Roderick was unveiled in Thompson’s Station. The statue was part of the 145th anniversary of the Battle of Thompson’s Station, and is located at Roderick Place, an eighty-acre mixed-use development. The development came from land belonging to Roderick Farm, also named after the horse. There is nothing odd about a horse statue. Humans have been creating horse forms for thousands of years. There are many statues of notable racehorses, such as Seabiscuit and Secretariat.  However, there are few examples of statues of warhorses without their riders. This makes the Roderick statue noteworthy and suspicious.[12]

In an era of social unrest regarding public memory and the Civil War, a small Tennessee town dedicated a statue to a Confederate horse. Thompson’s Station would have known about the controversies surrounding the other Forrest statues. To circumvent these controversies but still honor Forrest is not far-fetched, which is why they chose to honor his horse instead. The legacy of the two is so deeply entwined that one cannot be honored without the other. Furthermore, Roderick could also be perceived as a means of recuperating the image of a man who was a murderer at twenty, a slave trader, and a Klansman to a twenty-first century public. Today, people are more empathetic toward animals than in Forrest's nineteenth century. It should not be forgotten that he lost twenty-eight other horses during the war, and where are their statues? It should also not be forgotten that nearly a thousand individuals died that day.

Why does Thompson’s Station continue to honor Roderick, while statues of Forrest himself have been removed across the South? Could memorializing animals, like Roderick, suggest a different cultural and emotional approach to history than monuments of controversial human figures? Furthermore, what does this reveal about how communities grapple with historical memory and legacy, when they can use sentimental proxies for controversial figures. Although statues of Forrest himself have been taken down because of his connections to the Confederacy and the Ku Klux Klan, a monument to his horse keeps his legacy present in public spaces, and is still a monument to the Confederacy and the Ku Klux Klan. This type of memorial may unintentionally downplay or obscure the more controversial aspects of his past. It also raises questions about whether these monuments help communities move beyond their history or simply present it in a way that is easier to accept.

Photos From Left to Right:

1: Thomas Machnitzki, March 6, 2010, Photo, Nathan Bedford Forrest State Park Camden, Tennessee, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NBFSP_Camden_TN_03_Museum_NBF_Bust.jpg.

2: Charles Niehaus, Nathan Bedford Forrest Monument, 1915, Glass, 8 x 10 (inches), Memphis, Tennessee, https://loc.getarchive.net/media/statue-of-nathan-bedford-forrest-forrest-park-memphis-tenn.

3: Thomas Machnitzki, January 6, 2008, Photo, Memphis, Tennessee, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NBF_Memorial_Memphis.jpg.

4: Thomas Machnitzki, July 5, 2010, Photo, Memphis, Tennessee, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Forrest_Park_Memphis_TN_16.jpg.

Notes

[1] John R. Scales, The Battles and Campaigns of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, 1861–1865 (2016), 126; Ann Moss Betts, "Times Past," The Tennessean, August 3, 1988, 1.

[2] "Young Franklin Girl First Roderick Award Recipient," Williamson Herald, accessed January 12, 2025, https://www.williamsonherald.com/features/w_life/young-franklin-girl-first-roderick-award-recipient/article_3f1bcf3f-cb10-5b0e-b360-de9fe70b0e9e.html.

[3] "Civil War Markers, Mansions Keep History Alive," The Tennessean, November 17, 2010, 4.

[4] Alan Axelrod, Generals South, Generals North: The Commanders of the Civil War (Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2011), 83–91.

[5] Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South, 25th Anniversary Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 154; Robert Glaze, “Saint and Sinner: Robert E. Lee, Nathan Bedford Forrest, and the Ambiguity of Southern Identity,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 69, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 167.

[6] Jody Stokes-Casey, “Richard Lou’s ReCovering Memphis,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 75, no. 4 (Winter 2016): 324–325.

[7] Jay Miller, “Nathan Bedford Forrest Statue Won't Be Relocated,” News Sentinel, October 21, 2016.

[8] Bill Dries, “Greenspace Nonprofit Details Offers for Confederate Monuments,” The Daily News, January 19, 2018.

[9] “Statue of Civil War General Forrest Still Draws Fire,” NPR, April 15, 2011; Nick Beres, “Nathan Bedford Forrest Statue Along I-65 Removed After More Than 2 Decades,” News Channel 5 Nashville, December 27, 2021.

[10] M.B. Frost, “The Thoroughbred,” Nashville Banner, November 17, 1944.

[11] Nashville Banner, March 3, 1956; Nashville Banner, “The Horse Refused to Die Until It Saw Forrest Again,” February 27, 1956, 1; Nashville Banner, “Know Work,” June 15, 1961, 2.

[12] The Tennessean, November 17, 2010, 4; Kholland, “Tennessee Town Memorializes Nathan B. Forrest’s Horse,” Historynet, August 22, 2009.