Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (Vintage Departures)

by Tony Horwitz

Roughly half of modern-day white Southerners descended from Confederates, and one in four Southern men of military age died in the War. For Yankee men, the death rate was about one in ten, and waves of post-War immigration left a far lower ratio of Northerners with blood ties to the conflict.

“Lord, give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, to change the things I can, and the wisdom to hide the bodies of those people I had to kill because they pissed me off.”

told those doctors to quit everything. No more chemo.” He tipped his cap. “Life’s a bitch and then you die. If God wants me, he can take me. I’m ready.”

“Dr. King said you must be willing to stand for something or you will fall for anything. Jesse Jackson said it doesn’t matter what boat brought you to this country. We’re all in the same boat here. So let’s come together. Let’s hold hands now and smile at each other.”

Incredibly, the only fatality during the thirty-four-hour artillery duel was a Confederate horse. But when Beauregard permitted his foes to fire a 100-gun salute before lowering the Stars and Stripes, one of the shots misfired and killed two Northern soldiers—the first of 620,000 men who would die in the four-year struggle that followed.

“Columbia has no business running us,” he said of the state capital. “It’s in the goddamned Bible Belt. I grew up being told that Baptists don’t fuck standing up because people might think they were dancing. That’s how staunch they are.”

the neo-Confederate view, North and South went to war because they represented two distinct and irreconcilable cultures, right down to their bloodlines. White Southerners descended from freedom-loving Celts in Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Northerners—New England abolitionists in particular—came from mercantile and expansionist English stock.

Viewed through this prism, the War of Northern Aggression had little to do with slavery. Rather, it was a culture war in which Yankees imposed their imperialist and capitalistic will on the agrarian South, just as the English had done to the Irish and Scots—and

Abraham Lincoln was a son of a bitch, His ass ran over with a seven-year itch, His fist beat his dick like a blacksmith’s hammer, While his asshole whistled the Star-Spangled Banner. Foote chuckled. “When I was thirteen or so, I knew reams of obscene doggerel about Lincoln, but that’s the only bit I remember.”

The difference between North and the South in the War is that there was no stigma attached to the Northern man who paid two hundred dollars to not go to war, or who hired a German replacement. In the South you could have done that, but no one would. You’d have been scorned.”

It was in 1945 that Mississippians finally dropped their eighty-year ban on celebrating Independence Day. This was also when many Southerners stopped referring to the Civil War as the War Between the States.

Forrest was the only soldier on either side to rise from private to lieutenant general in the course of the War, and his lightning tactics later inspired Rommel’s use of blitzkrieg in World War II.

One in four became casualties of the two-day battle, and the toll on both sides—24,000 in all—surpassed the combined American casualties in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the Mexican War.