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

by Tony Horwitz

“farb” was short for “far-be-it-from-authentic,

“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.

why was memory of the War so enduring?—Foote smashed it straight back. “Because it’s the big one. It measures what we are, good and bad. If you look at American history as the life span of a man, the Civil War represents the great trauma of our adolescence. It’s the sort of experience we never forget.

“Now I’m living to see another terrible thing—the South joining the party of Lincoln.”

Foote reminisce about his childhood in Greenville, Mississippi. In the 1920s and 30s, he said, the sting of Civil War defeat was still so vivid that Mississippians refused to observe July 4th, the day Vicksburg fell. Only the post office—a federal facility—closed for the day.

When drugs weren’t available, soldiers bit bullets during surgery. Gerache showed me a minié ball scarred with teeth marks. “Soldiers bit so hard that they’d throw their jaws out. So it was determined that two bullets were better, one on each side. That way the bite was more even.

“I’m peaking,” he said, gazing at the rolling hills and pastures verged by dry-stone walls. “It TKOs you, this one-two punch of history and landscape. You don’t get that in Ohio, or almost anyplace outside Virginia.

“I think of myself as a liberal Confederate,” he said. “I want the history preserved, and I think the Confederacy’s a great story about men who did incredible things. But I don’t subscribe to a lot of the politics that comes with it.” “Like what?” “Like race. I don’t give a shit if my sister marries a black guy. Unless he’s a farb.”

“Sir,” Johann said to Rob, “the Tourists of Northern Virginia are close on our rear.

“Better to be an old man’s darlin’ than a young man’s slave,” she said.