The controversy over confederate statues and monuments needs to be addressed. Connor O’Neill was in all the right places at the right times to reveal the depths and depravity of the movements to preserve and promote them. He has written a book, Down Along With That Devil’s Bones, to document his recent travels, research and interviews. It is as ugly as you would expect, and less than it could be.

He picks Nathan Bedford Forrest, a name little known outside the southern United States, as his poster child. There are statues, monuments, halls and schools named after him all over the southern states. This estimable gentleman of the south, worthy of everyone’s respect and idolatry, was a slave auctioneer and Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, restoring white supremacy to several southern states after the south lost the civil war. That anyone would want to remove his monuments is something for all good citizens to rise up and fight against.

O’Neill visited Charlottesville for the battle over monuments, where one supporter drove his car though a crowd of protestors, killing a woman. He visited Selma, always the epicenter of controversy, Nashville, Memphis, Montgomery and more. Their links to slavery and the civil war are all noted. He asked people for their thoughts, dug into history and followed the removal of statues, often in the dead of night. It’s all very descriptive, with lots of mood setting and color. And minimal impact.

What he found should come as no surprise. Southerners are apologists for their flawed heroes. They willfully ignore the slave ownership, the beatings , the lynchings and the exhortations to slavery as highly ethical Christian living. Instead, they cite heroics in battle, or success in business – without mentioning the business was slave auctioning or that the battles were actually lost.

For whites, the old south way of life has become The Lost Cause, worthy of pity rather than criticism. O’Neill calls it all magical thinking, which also absolves white supremacists of the nastiness of their lives. They love to cite the heritage they want to honor, without the hate it specifies. Magical thinking honors the fighting but not the reason for the fighting, O’Neill says. White supremacy rests entirely on magical thinking.

Down south, the statues, monuments and flags are a ”palliative” to the white victims of the loss of the civil war. Their civil war statues always face north, i.e. never retreating. Entire universities gather in football stadiums to wave their rebel flags and hoot and holler like the victors they were not. It is (and is meant to be) a very intimidating sight, especially for black students. Weekly, throughout the fall months, every year. Blessed by the administration as good clean fun. Inspiring future generations of white supremacists.

Nathan Forrest was a self-made man. He came from the dirt poor, learned to buy and sell, and found slaves the best commodity to move. His Negro Mart, situated right between his home and the Calvary Church (still standing) on Adams St. in Memphis, saw over a thousand slaves sold every year, providing Forrest with profits of $50,000 (one million in today’s dollars) every year. He stored them there, beat them bloody and sold them off, either in auctions or to passing shoppers. He bought farms and plantations to be worked by the slaves he was unable to sell at his standard 20% markup, so the overall profits remained stellar. He was rich enough to fund his own regiment when the civil war broke out, and led it to several victories, as well as numerous defeats, for all of which he earned great praise – and the rank of lieutenant general in the confederate army. He was famous for slaughtering northern soldiers after the battle was already won, and making the rivers run red with their blood.

When the war ended, the prospect of racial equality led him to join the emerging KKK, which soon made him its leader. This allowed Forrest to command all kinds of troops again, this time committing all kinds of murder, arson, threats and intimidation in order to prevent blacks from assuming any kind of role in society. Instead, the KKK placed whites back in control like they had always been, infiltrating the police, the courts and civic institutions to ensure enforcement. When he had “redeemed” six states for white supremacy, he finally took his retirement, and catching dysentery, died at the age of 55, a hero for his exemplary life.

O’Neill says the rebel flag was uncommon until the 1940s, when overt racists like Strom Thurmond stirred white supremacist feelings. With constant setbacks at the hands of FDR, Truman and Johnson, the confederate flag took on new symbolism and became ubiquitous. But to be honest, it was never really absent. It was baked into state flags, for example. Thurmond’s Dixiecrat rebellion made no bones about white supremacy. For them, desegregation was the crisis. They were there because blacks were there. It was a clue the civil war had not been carried to its full conclusion.

O’Neill is white, and feels guilt and shame. He ends his book at a slave memorial, suitably revolting in his description. But the book left me totally unsatisfied. There are two giant factors obviously missing from it. I find it astonishing he could write this book without them, since he tries to be so thorough and fair in his descriptions and in his questioning of his subjects:

1.Ancient history shows us that the way to assimilate a conquered people is to destroy their statues. With their gods and heroes gone, they must gravitate to accepting the conquerors’ values, heroes and gods. Hundreds, if not thousands of gods have disappeared this way. (HL Mencken once tried to list them all. It was impressive.) By allowing the losing South to build new statues and monuments to their own, and through allowing them to promote the confederate flag, the United States utterly failed to acknowledge the history of the world, and is suffering that failure even today. There is no excuse for permitting white southerners to build legends around failed rebels.

Nowhere else will you see monuments to the losers. Nowhere else do they glorify criminal ideology. The whole idea is to vanquish the failed ideology, not let it fester and thrive again. That’s what the war was about. The USA never bothered to finish the civil war. Just like in Afghanistan and Iraq, it lost interest in finishing the job and reintegrating the country as something cohesive.

2. History also shows that the conquerors won the wars when they seized the flag of the vanquished. They then banned it, never to fly again. In any war, the flag will change when it is reissued. The old flag is a symbol of the defeated regime and has no right to appear ever again. To fly the rebel flag and build memorials to defeated secessionists is what is called treason in the United States, as it is in the rest of the world. Governments cannot and must not tolerate it, if only to keep the country as one. The business of it being history and that all history must be preserved is bogus, a canard for racism. Treason outranks history. Flying the confederate flag should be punishable by long prison terms.

I wanted O’Neill to challenge all the people he met and interviewed with the fact they were committing treason against the USA. Palliatives for whites is a trivial apology and a pathetic answer. Rewriting history to avoid the mention of slavery is intellectually dishonest. But honoring and glorifying a defeated enemy of the state is treason. Their disloyalty to the USA is not merely disgusting; it is a national security threat.

What would they have all said to that?

We’ll never know.

David Wineberg

A thought-provoking with personal analysis going in-depth on our dark history of racism and the representation of monuments. The journalist Connor Towne O'Neill examines the background and the fruition of white supremacy in America. But most importantly, the author covers the on-going battle over monuments dedicated to the infamous confederate generals Nathan Bedford Forrest.

Connor Towne O'Neill's delves into American history to highlight that knowledge in itself is essential for our ability to look into our past and present at the same time. However, knowledge in itself cannot redeem the damage that's been done nor create change. But the importance of acknowledgment is necessary to begin reforming. Many of the author's analysis and points were eye-opening. Through his fascinating approach in providing both perspectives, I was absolutely intrigued with how history is remembered differently individually. The term "cafeteria Catholicism" - "the picking and choosing parts of the faith that align with your worldview and discarding the rest" is used to support his analysis. The author writes with grace, delivering astonishing outlook that truly illuminates our devastating part of American history in slavery.

Thank you to Net Galley and Algonquin Books for providing this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This was a terrific, thoughtful read. The author is a Northerner who spent time in college in the South. He decided to look at aspects of the current racial unrest by examining the cases of four monument/statues honoring Nathan Bedford Forrest, Confederate general and KKK Wizard.

So O'Neill travels to Selma, Nashville, Memphis and Murfreesboro where different elements of the community have been agitating about old Confederate monuments for years. O'Neill talks to the Confederate Heritage crowd who just don't understand why anyone would be offended by honoring old heroes. And he talks to the black community members and activists who seethe daily from the hypocrisy and pain of looking at memorials to a man who was a slave trader and mostly unrepentant white supremacist.

It is interesting that none of these memorials was put in place in the immediate post Civil War era. One was erected as late as 2000. He weaves in the story of the demographic changes in the South and the legal barriers to removing these statues -- even when the local governing bodies vote to get rid of them.

He ends the book by visiting Bryan Stevenson's National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, a stark and moving statement about racial lynchings in the U.S. This isn't a huge tome, but it is packed with ideas and emotion that will linger for quite a while. Thanks to the publisher and to Net Galley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Down Along With That Devil’s Bones: A Reckoning with Monuments, Memory, and the Legacy of White Supremacy by Connor O’Neill is a book about the Confederate General and first Grand Wizard of the KKK Nathan Bedford Forrest, the monuments that honor him, and one white man’s journey to reckon with the legacy of the Confederacy and White Supremacy. O’Neill has written an amazing book that weaves the biography of Forrest and his impact on the present day very nicely. The book specifically focuses on the campaigns to remove Forrest monuments in four cities: Selma, AL; Murfreesboro, TN; Nashville, TN; and Memphis, TN. O’Neill does a phenomenal job providing the views of supporters and opponents of the removal of the monuments in all four cities. As can be expected some of the four stories end with these structures coming down while others remain standing to this day. O’Neill does a great job in this book showing that the erection of these monuments were more about responding to racial tensions than they were to actually commemorate Southern/Confederate heritage. A recent Southern Poverty Law Center study bears this out using data. As you read this book you will learn that Confederate monuments were used as “palliatives” for Americans to console themselves of the racial changes that were happening in the country at the time of Civil Rights movement and the end of Jim Crow. Near the end of this book O’Neill leaves us with the important question about what happens after the monuments comes down. Readers will learn that bringing down the monument is the easy part, tearing down the “thought monuments” and other structural forces is the hard task that remains. Readers of history and race relations will enjoy this fascinating work.

I am usually an avid non-fiction/biographical book reader, but this one left me cold. I just couldn't seem to get into the lengthy information about a Southern town's issues over a statue of a KKK leader, soldier, and confederate. I understand the poorly concealed racism and bigotry at work, but the style of writing didn't move me.

For most Northerners, the Civil War seems remote. However, in the South, the legacy of the war is very much alive and memorialized in monuments of Confederate heroes, With the exception of Lee, none of these heroes is more revered than Nathan Bedford Forrest, skilled commander, slave trader, folk legend and de facto figurehead of the Ku Klux Klan. The author visits monuments to Forrest in several cities to examine why they continue to haunt the modern landscape. Using historical research and in depth interviews, Connor Towne O'Neill examines why these monuments to Forrest should be removed.

Thank you to the publisher, the author and NetGalley for the ARC of this book.

This was a very timely read! The author takes us on a journey to the south in an effort to understand why Confederate statues are more than history. Why are statues/monuments that oppress black Americans still standing? Other statues are gone (King George, Nazi statues in Germany, Saddam Hussein statues in Baghdad) are all gone. Why does America keep statues of people who lost the Civil War?

It also touches a bit on the history of the Klan, both the original Klan and the variations that have come along since. I found myself nodding my head when he talked about how black success threatens white power. I had no idea how prevalent lynchings were and some of the stories were hard to read (the story of Thomas Moss in particular).

This reads like a history book with the author's own personal story mentioned along the way. Highly recommend this if you are interested in the history of the South.

I had downloaded this advanced reader copy days before George Floyd was killed. I have a degree in history and a strong interest in the Civil War, and was looking forward to reading about a topic that I have struggled with.

Connor Towne O'Neill had what one would consider a lightning bolt moment. Racing to attend the anniversary of the Selma March with President Obama participating, he was trying to find a parking spot. He pulled into a cemetery and witnessed a local Confederate group around a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest. This dichotomy, of a gathering to remember a pivotal moment in Civil Rights history, versus this other gathering a few blocks away, set him on a journey to try and understand both sides of the debate around Confederate statues and buildings in the South.

Both sides are passionate, and truly believe in their cause. But those who want to keep these statues in place have very narrow ideas of history. Forrest was a notorious slave trader, who made a lot of money selling slaves up the river from Memphis. But "that was then" is the excuse, and all of these organizations only want to remember him, and others for their bravery during the Civil War, and refuse to recognize the daily pain inflicted on the descendants of those slaves. So much of the history is truly white-washed in the name of preserving the old South.

Come October when this book comes out, I believe there will still be plenty of statues, and protests around this issue. Though it was gratifying to know that the Mississippi Flag came down the day before I finished reading this excellent book.

An important and timely book that examines the life of the notorious Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest - the man behind many monuments in the south. Forrest made his fortune selling humans, was known for his brutality as a confederate general, and went on to become the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. It's a chilling history and I hope this book will help more people to think about these monuments of white supremacy and why they need to come down.