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

by Tony Horwitz

Southerners are very strange about that war. —SHELBY FOOTE

Like most returning expatriates, I found my native country new and strange, and few things felt stranger than America’s amnesia about its past.

“Look at these buttons,” one soldier said, fingering his gray wool jacket. “I soaked them overnight in a saucer filled with urine.” Chemicals in the urine oxidized the brass, giving it the patina of buttons from the 1860s. “My wife woke up this morning, sniffed the air and said, ‘Tim, you’ve been peeing on your buttons again.’ ”

Stice had worked in Salisbury a year, long enough to recognize that memories endured here much longer than in his native Oklahoma. “In school I remember learning that the Civil War ended a long time ago,” he said. “Folks here don’t always see it that way. They think it’s still half-time.”

Connor and I sat in the car with the heater running as smoke belched from the denim plant and clouded the graveyard. The place depressed me, but Connor didn’t see it that way. Gazing out at the graves, he said, “Their dying was my freedom, straight up.”

As the meeting got under way, the twenty or so men in the room pledged allegiance to the Stars and Stripes. Then the color sergeant unfurled the rebel battle flag. “I salute the Confederate flag with affection, reverence and undying devotion to the Cause for which it stands,” the men said, effectively contradicting the pledge they’d just made to “one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

Actually, Gettysburg was the rare clash in which the Confederates weren’t badly outmanned. If the battle proved anything, it was that Lee could blunder and that Northerners could fight as doggedly as Southerners.

Violet smiled proudly. “You have to set them on the straight and narrow at an early age. Then, even if they stray, they’ll come back to the faith.” I wasn’t sure which faith she meant: the Confederacy or Christianity.

Her son sat quietly completing a connect-the-dot picture of the rebel flag and filling in a coloring-book map of America: gray for the Confederacy, blue for Union, green for border states. “Warren,” his mother said, “tell this nice man from Virginia, is there anything you hate more than Yankees?” “No sir! Nothing!” he shouted. Then he dove under the table, yelling, “Someone told me there’s Yankees around here! They hate little children!”

“To tell you the truth, I was kind of embarrassed to come today,” she said. “When I told a friend at school about it, she said, ‘What’s that, some kind of redneck thing?’ ” Beth frowned. “I’m not prejudiced and I don’t agree with all this ‘South is great’ stuff. I’m sure there were some good things about the North.” She looked around. “I hope nobody hears me say that.” Even so, Beth served as president of her C. of C. chapter and reckoned she’d join the UDC when she aged out.

I told him about the Lee-Jackson gatherings I’d attended and asked how he felt about people still celebrating the Confederacy. “I’m happy they have the freedom to celebrate those men, the same way we celebrate King here,” he said. “But you didn’t see nobody black at those meetings, did you? We had white folks here, at least a few. Anything you got to do with your own kind in secret, something’s wrong with it. You feel bad about it inside.” A wry smile creased his lips. “I got one word for those folks—Appomattox. The game’s up, you lost. Get over it.”

In reply, King had received hate mail. His protest also prompted an avalanche of letters to the local paper stating that the monument wasn’t racial, it was just a symbol of great-grandfathers who fought and died for their beliefs. “The way I see it,” King said, “your greatgrandfather fought and died because he believed my great-grandfather should stay a slave. I’m supposed to feel all warm inside about that?”

I asked King if there was any way for white Southerners to honor their forebears without insulting his. He pondered this for a moment. “Remember your ancestors,” he said, “but remember what they fought for too, and recognize it was wrong. Then maybe you can invite me to your Lee and Jackson birthday party. That’s the deal.”

“One guy even asked me why so many Civil War battles were fought on national parks,” McGill said.

A horse-drawn carriage clip-clopped past, piloted by a coachman in nineteenth-century livery. A leather diaper dangled beneath the horse’s hindquarters to keep the animal from soiling Charleston’s streets. This daintiness extended to the tour guides’ vocabulary: slave quarters were called “dependencies” or “carriage houses,” and privies were airbrushed into “houses of necessity.”

For the rest of the afternoon, Williams prowled restlessly around the studio, delivering a monologue that skipped from the Lost Cause to lost souls to Christian evangelists to calculating how long a pair of wool army socks would have lasted in 1863 (“until the stink became too much,” he hypothesized). Often, he spanned two or three topics in a single sentence. And every fifteen minutes or so, he’d lasso a runaway thought and rope it back toward his central theme: the ineradicable divide between North and South.

We were back to the Civil War, though Williams didn’t call it that. “A civil war is an internal revolt. But this was a war between two independent nations, one of which was exercising its constitutional right to secede.” Like many Southerners, Williams preferred the phrase War Between the States, or the War of Southern Independence. “Of course, the War to Suppress Yankee Arrogance is also acceptable,” he said.

It was sunset. We’d been talking for hours; or rather, Williams had been talking and I’d been trying to sift what sense I could from his torrent of art criticism, car criticism, profanity, political philosophy. Much of what Williams said seemed little more than a clever glide around race and slavery, rather like the slick-tongued defense of the Southern “way of life” made by antebellum orators, South Carolinians in particular.

But in South Carolina and several other states, the better-known battle flag had been hoisted over capitol domes a century after the War, in the midst of civil rights strife. Flag defenders now maintained that the flag was raised to honor soldiers’ valor and sacrifice on the occasion of the War’s centennial. But for many white Southerners, the flag had also symbolized defiance and segregation at a time when they felt under siege again by the federal government and by Northerners who wanted to change the South’s “way of life.”

I asked if he had any Civil War ancestors. Carter shrugged. “Yeah, but I don’t know the details. Anyway, that’s not why we’re here. This fight’s about today, about the ethnic cleansing of Southern whites—same thing that’s happening in Bosnia. There’s black history month, there’s a black Miss America pageant, there’s even a black yellow pages in South Carolina. Can you imagine a yellow pages for whites? No way. Anything for whites is PIC—politically incorrect.”

I asked Sharpe if things would be better if the South were still segregated. “Damn right, they would,” he replied. “In my town, there were no blacks until recently—they knew they wasn’t supposed to live with white people. Now, they’re all around. They even have interracial dating.” Sharpe paused, trying to contain himself. “Look, I’m a labor foreman. I’ve got blacks working for me. We eat lunch together. But at the end of the day I go to my home and they don’t come along. This isn’t hate, it’s just not wanting to mix your seed with another race.”

For the past several weeks people had been talking to me about “heritage.” But, like the flag, this obviously meant very different things to different people. For the Sons of Confederate Veterans I’d met in North Carolina, it meant the heritage of their ancestors’ valor and sacrifice. For Bud Sharpe, it was the heritage of segregation and its dismantling over the past forty years. Was it possible to honor one heritage without upholding the other?

The waitress came over to refill my coffee. She’d served the CCC at breakfast and formed her own views about the flag dispute. “You know what the state should’a done? Send someone to the capitol in the dead of night to take the flag down without telling anyone. I’d bet a week’s worth of tips that not a single person in South Carolina would’a noticed it was gone.” She sighed. “It’s too late now. As soon as you make an issue of something, everyone feels they got to pick sides, same as they done back in eighteen-whatever.” This was the most concise analysis of the flag controversy—or of events in eighteen-whatever—I’d yet heard in South Carolina.

Walt shrugged and walked me to the door. Then he reached into a pigeonhole and planted a sticker on the cover of my notebook. “Earth’s Most Endangered Species: THE WHITE RACE!” He thrust out his hand, as genial as he’d been that morning at breakfast. “It’s been real nice talking to you,” he said. “Come again, will ya?” “I just might.” His words seemed genuine and so were mine. There was a feisty iconoclasm about Walt that I couldn’t help admiring, even if he was on the mailing list of every hate group in America.

The South had surprised me plenty already, as had Padgett’s words. They echoed the same sense of Southern grievance I’d picked up across the Carolinas: from the gunshop crowd in Salisbury, from Manning Williams at his Charleston art studio, from the rebel-flag protestors at the state capitol. In their view, it was the North—or Northern stereotypes—that still shadowed the South and kept the region down. But something was wrong with this picture. An Arkansan occupied the White House. The vice president came from Tennessee. A Georgian served as Speaker of the House. States’ rights, or “devolution,” was the political fad of the day. And the South had become the nation’s most economically vibrant region.

That same weekend, a nineteen-year-old named Michael Westerman drove through Guthrie with a rebel flag flying from his pickup. Several carloads of black teenagers gave chase; one of the youths shot Michael Westerman dead. Then crosses started burning in Guthrie. The FBI, the KKK, the NAACP, and reporters from Kentucky and Tennessee all hustled to the stateline town. So did I, startled by a newspaper squib—“Rebel Flag Is Catalyst to Killing”—that appeared in Carolina newspapers. Until then, I hadn’t realized the nineteenth-century conflict I’d set out to explore was still a shooting war.

While Jim kept pitching God, Race and Nation, Velma showed me snapshots of her grandchildren. She talked about her crafts shop, the macramé she’d made for Christmas, and an upcoming crossburning she hoped to attend. Before going, Velma had to pass an exam that would qualify her for full citizenship in the Realm. “It’s like a driver’s test where they try and foul you up,” she said. “I need to know the whole book of knowledge. Like if someone asks, ‘Why do we hate Jews?’ I didn’t know before, but I found out. It was Jews that put Christ on the cross.”

The waitress explained that Todd County Central High School called its sports teams “the Rebels” and took as its logo two flag-waving Confederates. But just before Michael Westerman’s shooting, a committee of prominent citizens had quietly recommended that the school drop the rebel motif to ease racial tension.

As soon as I sat down, she showed me a newspaper story quoting her recent comments on a local radio show. “Slavery was not all that bad,” she’d declared. “A lot of people were quite happy to be living on large plantations.” Chapman smiled sweetly. “Blacks just need to get over slavery,” she said, as though talking of the flu. “You can’t live in the past.” I gently observed that she herself might be accused of living in the past by defending the rebel flag.

THE NEXT DAY at Elkton’s library, I learned a strange thing. Todd County wasn’t rebel country, at least not historically. According to the volumes of local history I perused, most Todd Countians supported the Union in the Civil War. Like much of the upper South, the county split along geographic lines. Whites from the county’s fertile plantations bordering Tennessee tended to side with the South. But the more numerous yeoman farmers in Todd County’s hilly north (where slaves were few) supported the Union.

But in the intervening decades, something curious had happened, an act of what psychologists today might term “recovered memory.” Locals had reclaimed a past of their own creation, in which Todd County was staunch rebel territory, a pastoral land of Southern belles and brave Confederates. “History, like nature, knows no jumps,” Robert Penn Warren once wrote. “Except the jump backward.”

The meeting went on like this for two hours. As the twentieth or so woman spat venom at the school board, it struck me that recent media attention lavished on “angry white males” neglected the considerable depths of female rage on display here, and everywhere else I’d been in Todd County. Nor did their wrath have much to do with the rebel flag’s historic symbolism. The banner seemed instead to have floated free from its moorings in time and place and become a generalized “Fuck You,” a middle finger raised with ulceric fury in the face of blacks, school officials, authority in general—anyone or anything that could shoulder some blame for these women’s difficult lives.

Another woman had the blank, haunted look of a shell-shocked soldier. Before Michael Westerman’s death, she said, white rancor toward blacks was contained. “We were living with it. I felt like they respected us.” But now she wondered if she’d been fooling herself her whole life. “That flag opens up a racial door we’ve been keeping closed for so many years. It’s a way of saying what white people have kept bottled up.” She paused as the sound of chanting—“equal rights for whites!”—drifted through the open gym door. The woman shook her head. “They’ve gone loco on us,” she said.

IN THE WEEK FOLLOWING the school meeting, I made the rounds of local officials, ministers and long-time residents, searching for clues about what was happening to Todd County. From both blacks and whites came the same, bewildered refrain. Though Jim Crow hadn’t been as rigid in Kentucky as it was farther South, the past three decades had witnessed extraordinary change. Blacks and whites mingled freely at schools, workplaces, restaurants and other public places. Yet for reasons no one fully understood, this intimacy had spawned a subterranean rage, which had boiled over with the shooting of Michael Westerman and the tumult following his death.

Though black hostility to Confederate totems lay relatively dormant for two decades after the civil rights struggles of the early 1960s, it resurfaced in the mid-1980s and had escalated ever since.

“How would I describe Mike? Goofy and obnoxious, kind of ignorant,” said a twenty-two-year-old named Lydia. “He’d do a few dishes, then sit reading comic books and annoying anybody who walked by. He took things to extremes.” One night Michael had argued with a waitress, then picked her up and carried her around the kitchen. The waitress screamed “Put me down!” and struggled to get free, but Michael wouldn’t let her go. When a black cook intervened, Michael shouted “nigger” and other slurs. “Mike had a racial hang-up,” Lydia said. “He thought the races shouldn’t mix.” Soon after the incident—the third for which he’d been reprimanded—Michael was fired. The waitress Westerman harassed that night had since taken another job. She wasn’t surprised by the news that Westerman had been killed while flying his rebel flag. “I hate to walk on a dead man’s grave, but the best word to describe him is bully,” she said. “Everyone around him needed to know he was bigger than them.”

This apocalyptic spin on a small-town tragedy appeared to confuse and alarm many Todd Countians, including Michael’s aunt Brenda. When I visited her a few days after the rally, she opened a trunk stuffed with literature that had begun turning up in her mail. “Some of this stuff is a little wild,” she said, handing me neo-Nazi newspapers, white supremacist screeds, and paranoid militia-style tracts. “South-Hating Liberals Are to Blame for This!” read the headline of one story on Michael’s death. Another, in a newspaper called Confederate Underground, described Michael’s assailants as “menacing black gangsters” and alleged that the cross-burnings following his death were a ploy by civil rights agitators to attract sympathy.

Freddie shrugged and looked at me impassively. “I thought it was just the Dukes of Hazzard sign,” he said. The Dukes of Hazzard was a popular TV show that featured a car decorated with a rebel flag. Growing up in Chicago, that’s all Freddie had known about the Confederate banner. After moving to Guthrie, he gradually began to sense whites’ attachment to the flag and blacks’ hostility toward what they considered a symbol of slavery. “They was telling me about how they had a war for it back in the days and all this,” Freddie said. That was all he knew of the Civil War. To him, the banner was simply something whites knew that blacks hated. He suspected whites brandished the flag as a sort of schoolyard taunt, “just doing it out of spite, to see what we would do.”

Freddie’s words fit the picture of events I’d begun to form during my weeks in Todd County. What happened on that lonely road outside Guthrie wasn’t the portentous clash that outsiders—from the Southern League to the NAACP to journalists like me—imagined it to be. It seemed instead a tragic collision of insecure teenaged egos: one prone to taunts and loutishness, the other to violence and showing off. In a way, Michael Westerman and Freddie Morrow had a lot in common.

Batie groused that Hannah and her family were bigoted rednecks. To Michael’s mother, Freddie’s crippled mother was a “motormouth with a motor,” an uppity city black just like her son. Watching the scene, it was hard not to see a depressing adult mirror of the anger and racial stereotyping that had afflicted their sons.

The men pulled out pieces of store-bought beef jerky, minus the plastic, and Marlboros repackaged in old cigar cases. As we ate and smoked and urinated, I asked my fellow soldiers what they thought of hardcore reenactors. “We try to be authentic,” O’Neill said. “But no one wants to eat rancid bacon and lie in the mud all night. This is a hobby, not a religion.”

O’Neill cut in with a safety tip about dying. “Check your ground before you go down,” he said. “I’ve gotten bruises from falling on my canteen. Also, don’t die on your back, unless you want sunburn.”

The freedom of slaves didn’t figure much in this picture. Although Glory inspired several units modeled on the black regiment depicted in the film, the Wilderness reenactment and a half-dozen other battles I later attended were blindingly white affairs. This, too, was an issue both blue and gray preferred to sidestep.

“Have some hardtack?”

*clack clack*

Reaching the highway, I stopped for coffee at a 7-Eleven. The store was crowded with black shoppers. Several of them stared quizzically—and, I sensed, with some hostility—at my Confederate uniform. Clunking self-consciously to the counter in my hobnailed boots and gray trousers, I felt like blurting out, “I’m just playacting,” or “It’s only a game.” Instead, I returned to my car feeling confused and ashamed. This, too, was an aspect of the twentieth century that reenactors were fleeing: a heterogeneous society still raw with historic wounds and racial sensitivities.

Foote’s retroactive allegiance to the Confederacy surprised me. It was the honor-bound code of the Old South. One’s people before one’s principles. The straitjacket of scorn and stigma. “It’s a bunch of shit really,” Foote conceded. “But all Southerners subscribe to this code to some degree, at least male Southerners of my generation.”

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. “It was a big admission, if you think about it,” Foote said. “A civil war is a struggle between two parts of one nation, which implies that the South was never really separate or independent.”

“Slavery was the first great sin of this nation,” Foote said. “The second great sin was emancipation, or rather the way it was done. The government told four million people, ‘You are free. Hit the road.’ Three-quarters of them couldn’t read or write. The tiniest fraction of them had any profession that they could enter.”

Foote’s views on the Confederate battle flag were equally nuanced. In his view, those who saw the banner as synonymous with slavery had their history wrong. The battle flag was a combat standard, not a political symbol. “It stood for law, honor, love of country,” Foote said, and the banner was revered as such by the veterans who had fought under it. At the same time, Foote recognized that the flag had become “a banner of shame and disgrace and hate.” But he pinned the blame for this on educated Southerners who allowed white supremacists to misuse the flag during the civil rights struggle.

That’s when right-thinking people should have stepped in and said, ‘Don’t use that banner, that’s not what it stands for.’ But they didn’t. So now it’s a symbol of evil to a great many people, and I understand that.”