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

by Tony Horwitz

The litany of heroic deeds and fallen martyrs. It was the same mournful refrain that ran through dozens of Confederate observances I’d attended. Almost every sentence began to carry familiar echoes. Irma Jackson told of “marching all day and sleeping in the fields” between Selma and Montgomery—just as rebel soldiers had done in Virginia. She recalled other hallowed fields of battle—Birmingham, Tuscaloosa, Little Rock—which resonated with her audience as powerfully as Sharpsburg and Shiloh did for many white Southerners. While working in small towns across the South, Jackson said, “We all suffered from nervous stomachs and sometimes went two days without eating because the restaurants weren’t integrated”— recalling, for me, the tales of lean Confederates foraging for green corn and green apples on their hungry march through Maryland.

What equivocating bullshit.