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

by Tony Horwitz

strange and wondrous rivers—Shenandoah, Rappahannock, Chickahominy—and wrapping my tongue around the risible names of rebel generals: Braxton Bragg, Jubal Early, John Sappington Marmaduke, William “Extra Billy” Smith, Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard.

many interests that comfortably bridged such a wide range of

“At work, I mix dyes and put them in a machine. I’m thirty-six and I’ve spent almost half my life in Dye House No. 1. I make eight dollars sixty-one cents an hour, which is okay, ’cept everyone says the plant will close and go to China.” He put the book back on the shelf. “I just feel like the South has been given a bum deal ever since that War.”

lost forty thousand. Do you know one reason North Carolinians are called Tar Heels?”

Reading through the rest of the Catechism, I began to hear echoes of defeated peoples I’d encountered overseas: Kurds, Armenians, Palestinians, Catholics in Northern Ireland. Like them, Southerners had kept fighting their war by other means.

It was near there, he said, that black Union troops launched a suicidal attack on a Confederate redoubt called Battery Wagner. The assault, which formed the climax of the movie Glory, changed white attitudes both North and South about the fighting ability of black soldiers.

Every item in the museum seemed to carry a similarly Gothic tale, told with the same blend of decorum and dirt that left me guessing whether Wells meant to praise or skewer her subjects.

Faulkner !!!!!!!!!!

“But then the men went off to war and the women were left to take care of the homes, the businesses, the farms. They suddenly had to be self-reliant, and they found that they could be.” By 1865, one of every three Confederate soldiers had died from battle wounds or disease. Those who straggled home, from Northern prisons or the killing fields of Virginia, were defeated, dispirited, often maimed. “But the women had found in a strange way that they were stronger than before,” Wells said. “They took care of the widows and orphans and wounded men. And they felt a solidarity and sentimentality about the South.”

Fascinating

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.”

This shouldn’t have surprised me; statistically, Southern cities were far better integrated than Northern ones.

In 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.

Two thousand people turned out for the statue’s dedication. A Confederate colonel delivered a stem-winder, which was received with “enthusiastic sympathy by the staunch old vets in the audience, no one of whom respect the molly coddles who feel regret for acting the part of men in obeying their country’s call.”

Stem winder

In fact, secessionists had originally gathered in Columbia to vote themselves out of the nation; they only moved to Charleston because of a smallpox scare in the capital. “I think we’re not yet sure we want to be part of the Union,” Boineau went on. “We still think this little state of ours has the right to decide a lot of the questions that big government is taking over.” As I spoke with Boineau, her neo-Confederate views were enjoying a degree of vindication at the nearby capitol. A conservative, statesrights governor was taking the oath of office, having pledged to keep the battle flag flying (a promise on which he would later attempt to renege). South Carolina had also elected a Republican majority to its legislature for the first time since Reconstruction. The party of Lincoln, anathema to earlier generations of Southerners, now spoke to antigovernment tendencies across the region. There was even a striking consonance between the GOP’s “Contract With America” and the Confederate constitution; both called for term limits, budget balancing, curbs on taxation and other restraints on the state. “Our ancestors were a little off with their timing, but their rebellion against federal government is finally seeing fruition,” a Republican legislator told me as we chatted in his office beneath paintings of Lee and Jackson.

Judith check this one out! Trump captured these folks

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.”

Totally

“Southern heritage is as much a part of American history as Plymouth Rock,” he said with a jarring New England accent. “But for me, the flag’s mainly a symbol of resistance against government control, not a symbol of the South.”

Told u

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.”

Though Carter and his lieutenants had reviled the media over breakfast, they now rushed forward to pose for the cameras, waving rebel flags and chanting, “Never take it down!” Carter brandished a pro-flag petition with 40,000 signatures and lambasted companies whose executives in South Carolina had spoken out against the banner. AT&T came in for extra vitriol. “We won’t spend any of our rebel money on a phone company that likes queers!” Carter yelled. What exactly this had to do with the rebel flag wasn’t

“We may have lost the War, but at least we should have this to look back on.” It seemed a wistful logic; the Cause was lost but the Lost Cause shouldn’t be.

“I feel like the flag’s the only thing working people like me have left,” he went on. “All my life it’s been one thing after another. First they integrated the schools. Then they integrated everything. Then they say ‘colored’ ain’t right anymore, it’s got to be ‘black,’ then ‘African-American.’ But nothing changes for us. We’re still ‘crackers’ and ‘peckerwoods’ and ‘rednecks.’ I feel like I’ve swallowed enough for one lifetime.”

It was tempting to dismiss the CCC as a dinosaur remnant, an evolutionary dead end of Southern bigotry. But maybe such an offhand dismissal was an exercise in prejudice, too. Right-wing extremism was thriving across America; it behooved me to hear it out.

Walt, who was forty-nine, had once demonstrated against the Vietnam War. He opened a drawer where he kept the beads and McCarthy button he’d worn back then. His fondness for berets, long hair, organic vegetables and Star Trek also were vestiges of a sixties self that he’d otherwise left behind. Somewhere in the intervening quarter century, Walt’s instinctive rebelliousness had turned reactionary.

“All those things Southerners say they hold dear they’re selling out now for a mess of pottage,” Huff said. “So there’s this feeling, ‘If I wrap myself in the flag, maybe Grandma will forgive me for selling the farm and dealing with the Yankees.’

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.” If

O m g

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. Tonight, at least, these trailer-bound, factory-trapped women could vent their rage and affirm the race consciousness that blacks had exhibited for decades, even flashing their “RESPECT” shirts with Aretha-like pride.

But this growing militancy provoked a backlash among Southern whites, many of whom already felt aggrieved over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, affirmative action, and other race-tinged issues. Self-styled “Southern heritage” or “Southern nationalist” groups mushroomed across the region, preaching the gospel of states’ rights, regional pride and reverence for the Confederacy. These groups also cleverly tapped into the culture of self-esteem and identity politics common across the land.

Southern heritage groups now planned a major memorial in Todd County for Confederate Flag Day in early March. Organizers had asked Brenda to read a short biography of her nephew. She handed me a flyer for the Flag Day event. It was headed: “In Honor of a Fallen Confederate Patriot.”

But the Flag Day speeches weren’t really about the South, and Michael Westerman had metamorphosed once again, from a fallen Confederate patriot to a front-line soldier in a contemporary war, one that pitted decent God-fearing folk against what Michael Hill called “an out-of-control government and its lawless underclass.”

Out of control gov and lawless underclass

Reenactors called this “galvanizing,” the Civil War term for soldiers who switched sides during the conflict.

Galvanizing

The South also won hands-down when it came to romance. Conformist ranks of blue couldn’t compete with Jeb Stuart, Ashley Wilkes and the doomed cavaliers of the Confederacy. This also helped explain why foreign reenactors, bred on Gone With the Wind, almost always donned gray, even though their forebears in 1860s Europe and Canada had typically supported the other side.

Reenacting evolved from the reunions, called “encampments,” held by Civil War veterans themselves. Veterans bivouacked at actual battlegrounds, donned their old uniforms, and occasionally performed mock versions of the heroic deeds of their youth.

to celebrate their common valor rather than their sectional differences.

“It’s not the U.S. we’re rebelling against, it’s the black-hearted businessmen who want to lord it over the working man.” He gestured at his comrades, adding, “We’ve been squeezed, laid-off, down-sized, put down. We’re fighting for our freedom, on and off this battlefield.”

hooker from Joe Hooker, the Union commander famed for his tolerance of female camp followers; sideburn from Ambrose Burnside, the Union general with bushy muttonchops; tampon from tompion, a wooden plug used to protect rifle barrels from dirt and rain; heavy metal from mid-nineteenth-century slang for large artillery pieces.

a pleasant taste of the enforced leisure and sociability of nineteenth-century life: chatting with the women as we peeled carrots, lazing beside Rob as he slow-cooked his breakfast, ambling down the mile-long country lane between the Union and Confederate camps, a distance that a car would have covered in a minute. Modern life rarely allowed for these simple, unhurried pleasures.

In principle, remembrance of the War could be a way to probe these scars, many of which trailed back to the 1860s. But reenactments did precisely the opposite, blandly reconciling North and South in a grand spectacle that glorified battlefield valor and the stoicism of civilians.

Omg of course : we r waaaaay too scared to do the former

The battle flag was a combat standard, not a political symbol. “It stood for law, honor, love of country,”

So did the swastica

Henry Stanley was but one among a cast of future celebrities at Shiloh. The Union generals included Grant (then still an up-and-comer shadowed by rumors of alcoholism), his deputy William Tecumseh Sherman (who had recently returned to the army after a nervous breakdown) and Lew Wallace, later to become author of Ben Hur. Also on hand were John Wesley Powell (who lost an arm here, but still navigated the Colorado River and Grand Canyon after the War), William Le Baron Jenney (a future Chicago architect and “father of the skyscraper”), and a young soldier named Ambrose Bierce, whose morbid short story, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,”

I asked Mays why it was so important to track his great-grandfather’s precise movements 133 years ago. “I’m here because the issues are still here,” he said. “People still want to be independent of central authority. The evidence suggests that rebels like Elijah believed strongly in their individual right to determine what their government should be.” He started to open his briefcase, then paused, as though realizing he wasn’t in court. “I’m a Republican,” he went on. “Tracking down Elijah gives me some perspective on what it is I believe in, and what commitment to your beliefs is all about.”

But accidental tourists rarely turned up at Shiloh. “It’s not on the way to anyplace,” Hawke said, “so you tend to get a very devoted breed.”

Maybe if we played at war more instead of really using weapons, our world would be a better place.”

We do!!!! Its called football, soccer and tennis!

But at twenty-two my Civil War virus still lay in remission; blues bars and Ole Miss coeds stirred me more deeply than cannons and cemeteries.

Then, in 1911, while working as a handyman in Illinois, Cashire was hit by an automobile and taken to the hospital with a leg broken close to the hip. The doctor who examined Cashire discovered what the Illinois veteran had so long concealed; Cashire was a woman, an Irish immigrant née Jennie Hodgers. Hodgers was eventually sent to an insane asylum and forced to wear women’s clothing until her death in 1915.

now swaddled by miles of housing tracts, fast-food joints and car dealerships.

Its not ugliness per se. Its the volume of people. We had ugly cheap arxhitecture when there were less than half the residents. But u could escape easily.

“Round here,” another man barked, “we don’t like the Feds.” Rob nodded approvingly. “If the government doesn’t stop telling people how to live,” he bellowed like a rebel of old, “there just might be another Civil War.” “Damn right! The government isn’t going to take away my guns!”

It was easy to align each grim portrait with the bucolic farmland across which the soldiers fell: flung promiscuously along a split-rail fence by the Hagerstown Turnpike, surrounding artillery caissons near the Dunker church, sprawled across a cornfield where advancing troops had been exposed by the glint of their bayonets above the man-high stalks.

horrors of Spotsylvania.”

the ten-mile-square territory we’d traversed that afternoon claimed 100,000 casualties.

four-poster with ropes beneath the mattress and a jack to tighten the hemp before bed (hence the phrase “sleep tight”).

Ah!

Sic transit

Sic transit gloria mundi

The scale of Monument Avenue also amplified the weirdness of the whole enterprise. After all, Davis and Lee and Jackson and Stuart weren’t national heroes. In the view of many Americans, they were precisely the opposite: leaders of a rebellion against the nation—separatists at best, traitors at worst. None of those honored were native Richmonders. And their mission failed. They didn’t call it the Lost Cause for nothing. I couldn’t think of another city in the world that lined its streets with stone leviathans honoring failed rebels against the state.