by Tony Horwitz
Acclaim for TONY HORWITZ’s
Confederates in the Attic
“The freshest book about divisiveness in America that I have read in some time.”
—The New York Times
“Horwitz’s economical style and understated humor make his writing a joy to read. He is the kind of writer who could make a book on elevators interesting.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Part travelogue, part social study, part ’90s war epic, Confederates in the Attic is a personal, penetrating glimpse at a slice of America many of us didn’t know existed or would rather believe did not.”
—The Boston Globe
“The South rises again in this remarkable study.”
—People
“Essential reading for anyone who really cares about America’s political and social conflicts.… You will find Tony Horwitz’s captivating narrative irresistible.”
—Louisville Courier-Journal
“One of the most important studies of the American South in recent memory.”
—The Oregonian (Portland)
“A deadpan guide to Dixie kinks and a dead-on analysis of the shifting ideological landscape…. Riding shotgun with him is a treat.”
—Newsday
“A remarkably balanced, bittersweet, eye-opening tour through a part of America most Northerners are utterly unaware of.”
—Chicago Sun-Times
“A work of American history like no other.… A profound investigation not just of the American past but also of the American present.”
—Preservation Magazine
“Outstanding journalism, artfully constructed and unfailingly vivid, as good a rendering as I’ve seen of the mysterious pull at the heart of the American identity.”
—Slate
“Hilarious and engaging, troubling and insightful, entertaining and eminently readable.”
—Charleston Post-Dispatch
“Jampacked with wonderful stuff.”
—Chicago Tribune
“The mystique of Southern attitudes about the War of Northern Aggression is explored in a way never done before. Horwitz’s book is simply excellent…. Put this one high on your nonfiction list.”
—Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
“It’s like having your brightest, most observant friend around, the one whose descriptive powers always crack you up.”
—The Hartford Courant
“Excellent and amazing.… Horwitz managed to get inside the South’s impossibly thick skull and have a long, unsettling look around.”
—Mobile Register
“Horwitz is a terrific storyteller, a writer with a wonderful ear for language and a sharp eye for nuance. Reading him is a delight.”
—LA Weekly
“Truly delightful.… His narrative is personal and searching, tender and funny.”
—The Orlando Sentinel
“Humorous, tragic, thoughtful, frightening, but always entertaining.”
—The Seattle Times
“This Southern-fried odyssey has enough oddball and occasionally dangerous characters to fill a Flannery O’Connor novel.”
—The San Diego Union-Tribune
To my father
who gave me the passion,
and to my mother
who gave me the paint
Southerners are very strange about that war.
—SHELBY FOOTE
CONTENTS
1 Confederates in the Attic
2 North Carolina: Cats of the Confederacy
3 South Carolina: In the Better Half of the World
4 South Carolina: Shades of Gray
5 Kentucky: Dying for Dixie
6 Virginia: A Farb of the Heart
7 Tennessee: At the Foote of the Master
8 Tennessee: The Ghost Marks of Shiloh
9 Mississippi: The Minié Ball Pregnancy
10 Virginia and Beyond: The Civil Wargasm
11 Georgia: Gone With the Window
12 Georgia: Still Prisoners of the War
13 Alabama: Only Living Confederate Widow Tells Some
14 Alabama: I Had a Dream
15 Strike the Tent
Acknowledgments
Reader’s Guide
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Also by Tony Horwitz
1
CONFEDERATES IN THE ATTIC
There never will be anything more interesting in America than that Civil War never.
GERTRUDE STEIN
In 1965, a century after Appomattox, the Civil War began for me at a musty apartment in New Haven, Connecticut. My great-grandfather held a magnifying glass to his spectacles and studied an enormous book spread open on the rug. Peering over his shoulder, I saw pen-and-ink soldiers hurtling up at me with bayonets.
I was six, Poppa Isaac 101. Egg-bald, barely five feet tall, Poppa Isaac lived so frugally that he sliced cigarettes in half before smoking them. An elderly relative later told me that Poppa Isaac bought the book of Civil War sketches soon after emigrating to America in 1882. He often shared it with his children and grandchildren before I came along.
Years later, I realized what was odd about this one vivid memory of my great-grandfather. Isaac Moses Perski fled Czarist Russia as a teenaged draft dodger—in Yiddish, a shirker—and arrived in Manhattan without money or English or family. He worked at a Lower East Side sweatshop and lived literally on peanuts, which were cheap, filling and nutritious. Why, I wondered, had this thrifty refugee chosen as one of his first purchases in America a book written in a language he could barely understand, about a war in a land he barely knew, a book that he kept poring over until his death at 102?
By the time Poppa Isaac died, my father had begun reading aloud to me each night from a ten-volume collection called The Photographic History of the Civil War. Published in 1911, the volumes’ ripe prose sounded as foreign to me as the captions of my great-grandfather’s book must have seemed to him. So, like Poppa Isaac, I lost myself in the pictures: sepia men leading sepia horses across cornfields and creeks; jaunty volunteers, their faces framed by squished caps and fire-hazard beards; barefoot Confederates sprawled in trench mud, eyes open, limbs twisted like licorice. For me, the fantastical creatures of Maurice Sendak held little magic compared to the man-boys of Mathew Brady who stared back across the century separating their lives from mine.
Before long, I began to read aloud with my father, chanting the 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. I learned about palindromes from the Southern sea captain Raphael Semmes. And I began to match Brady’s still-deaths with the curt stutter of farm roads and rocks that formed the photographer’s backdrop: Mule Shoe, Slaughter Pen, Bloody Lane, Devil’s Den.
In third grade, I penciled a highly derivative Civil War history of my own—“The war was started when after all the states had sececed,” it began—and embarked on an ambitious art project, painting the walls of our attic with a lurid narrative of the conflict. Preferring underdogs, I posted a life-sized Johnny Reb by the bathroom door. A pharaonic frieze of rebel soldiers at Antietam stretched from the stairs to the attic window. Albert Sidney Johnston’s death at Shiloh splashed across an entire wall. General Pickett and his men charged bravely into the eaves.
I’d reached the summer of 1863 and run out of wall. But standing in the middle of the attic, I could whirl and whirl and make myself dizzy with my own cyclorama. The attic became my bedroom and the murals inhabited my boyhood dreaming. And each morning I woke to a comfort
ing sound: my father bounding up the attic steps, blowing a mock bugle call through his fingers and shouting, “General, the troops await your command!”
TWENTY-FIVE YEARS LATER, the murals were still there and so was my boyhood obsession. I’d just returned to America after nine years abroad and moved to an old house in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. My Australian wife chose the spot; the fields and cows and crooked fences fit Geraldine’s image of outback America. For me, the place stirred something else. I stared at a brick church still bullet-scarred from a Civil War skirmish. In the lumpy village graveyard, I found Confederates and Yankees buried side by side, some of them kin to each other. Within an hour of our new home lay several of the battlegrounds I’d painted as a child, and to which I now dragged Geraldine on weekend drives.
At a picnic soon after our arrival, I overheard a neighbor ask Geraldine how she liked Virginia. “Fine,” she sighed. “Except that my husband’s become a Civil War bore.”
I’d always been one, of course, but my obsession had lain dormant for several decades. With adolescence had come other passions, and I’d stuffed my toy musket, plastic rebel soldiers and Lincoln Logs into a closet reserved for boyish things. A Day-Glo poster of Jimi Hendrix supplanted Johnny Reb. Pickett’s Charge and Antietam Creek vanished behind dart boards, Star Trek posters and steep drifts of teenage clutter.
But a curious thing had happened while I’d lived abroad. Millions of Americans caught my childhood bug. Ken Burns’s TV documentary on the Civil War riveted the nation for weeks. Glory and Gettysburg played to packed movie houses. The number of books on the Civil War passed 60,000; a bibliography of works on Gettysburg alone ran to 277 pages.
On the face of it, this fad seemed out of character for America. Like most returning expatriates, I found my native country new and strange, and few things felt stranger than America’s amnesia about its past. During the previous decade, I’d worked as a foreign correspondent in lands where memories were elephantine: Bosnia, Iraq, Northern Ireland, Aboriginal Australia. Serbs spoke bitterly of their defeat by Muslim armies at Kosovo as though the battle had occurred yesterday, not in 1389. Protestants in Belfast referred fondly to “King Billy” as if he were a family friend rather than the English monarch who led Orangemen to victory in 1690.
Returning to America, I found the background I lacked wasn’t historical, it was pop-cultural. People kept referring to TV shows I’d missed while abroad, or to athletes and music stars I’d never seen perform. In the newspaper, I read a government survey showing that 93 percent of American students couldn’t identify “an important event” in Philadelphia in 1776. Most parents also flunked; 73 percent of adults didn’t know what event “D-Day” referred to.
Yet Americans remained obsessed with the Civil War. Nor was this passion confined to books and movies. Fights kept erupting over displays of the rebel flag, over the relevancy of states’ rights, over a statue of Arthur Ashe slated to go up beside Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson in Richmond. Soon after my return, the Walt Disney Company unveiled plans for a Civil War theme park beside the Manassas battlefield. This provoked howls of protest that Disney would vulgarize history and sully the nation’s “hallowed ground.” It seemed as though the black-and-white photographs I’d studied as a child had blurred together, forming a Rorschach blot in which Americans now saw all sorts of unresolved strife: over race, sovereignty, the sanctity of historic landscapes, and who should interpret the past.
THEN, EARLY ONE MORNING, the Civil War crashed into my bedroom. A loud popping noise crackled just outside our window. “Is that what I think it is?” Geraldine asked, bolting awake. We’d sometimes heard gunfire while working in the Middle East, but it was the last sound we expected here, in a hamlet of 250 where bleating sheep had been our reveille for the past six months.
I went to the window and saw men in gray uniforms firing muskets on the road in front of our house. Then a woman popped up from behind a stone wall and yelled “Cut!” The firing stopped and the Confederates collapsed in our yard. I brewed a pot of coffee, gathered some mugs and went outside. It turned out that our village had been chosen as the set for a TV documentary on Fredericksburg, an 1862 battle fought partly along eighteenth-century streets that resembled ours.
But the men weren’t actors, at least not professionals, and they performed in the film shoot for little or no pay. “We do this sort of thing most weekends anyway,” said a lean rebel with gunpowder smudges on his face and the felicitous name of Troy Cool.
In the local paper, I’d often read about Civil War reenactors who staged mock battles with smoke bombs and reproduction muskets. It was a popular hobby in our part of Virginia. But when I asked about this, Troy Cool frowned. “We’re hardcores,” he said.
Between gulps of coffee—which the men insisted on drinking from their own tin cups rather than our ceramic mugs—Cool and his comrades explained the distinction. Hardcores didn’t just dress up and shoot blanks. They sought absolute fidelity to the 1860s: its homespun clothing, antique speech patterns, sparse diet and simple utensils. Adhered to properly, this fundamentalism produced a time-travel high, or what hardcores called a “period rush.”
“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.’”
In the field, hardcores ate only foods that Civil War soldiers consumed, such as hardtack and salt pork. And they limited their speech to mid-nineteenth-century dialect and topics. “You don’t talk about Monday Night football,” Tim explained. “You curse Abe Lincoln or say things like, ‘I wonder how Becky’s getting on back at the farm.’”
One hardcore took this Method acting to a bizarre extreme. His name was Robert Lee Hodge and the soldiers pointed him out as he ambled toward us. Hodge looked as though he’d stepped from a Civil War tintype: tall, rail-thin, with a long pointed beard and a butternut uniform so frayed and filthy that it clung to his lank frame like rags to a scarecrow.
As he drew near, Troy Cool called out, “Rob, do the bloat!” Hodge clutched his stomach and crumpled to the ground. His belly swelled grotesquely, his hands curled, his cheeks puffed out, his mouth contorted in a rictus of pain and astonishment. It was a flawless counterfeit of the bloated corpses photographed at Antietam and Gettysburg that I’d so often stared at as a child.
Hodge leapt to his feet and smiled. “It’s an ice-breaker at parties,” he said.
For Robert Lee Hodge, it was also a way of life. As the Marlon Brando of battlefield bloating, he was often hired for Civil War movies. He also posed—dead and alive—for painters and photographers who reproduced Civil War subjects and techniques. “I go to the National Archives a lot to look at their Civil War photographs,” he said. “You can see much more detail in the original pictures than you can in books.”
A crowd of blue-clad soldiers formed down the road. It was time for the battle to resume. Hodge reached in his haversack and handed me a business card. “You should come out with us sometime,” he said, his brown eyes boring into mine with evangelical fervor, “and see what a period rush feels like.” Then he loped off to join the other rebels crouched behind a stone wall.
I watched the men fight for a while, then went back inside and built a fire. I pulled down Poppa Isaac’s book from the shelf. The tome was so creased with age that the title had rubbed off its spine and the pages discharged a puff of yellowed paper-dust each time I opened the massive cover. Searching for pictures of Fredericksburg, I quickly became lost in the Civil War, as I’d been so often since our return to America.
Geraldine came in with a cup of coffee. She’d chatted with a few of the men, too. “It’s strange,” she said, “but they seemed like ordinary guys.” One worked as a Bell Atlantic salesman, another as a forklift operator. Even Robert Lee
Hodge had seemed, well, normal. During the week, he waited on tables and sometimes freelanced articles for Civil War magazines. I’d once worked as a waiter, and at twenty-eight, which was Hodge’s age, I’d been a freelancer, too, although writing about more recent wars.
Then again, I’d never spent weekends grubbing around the woods in urine-soaked clothes, gnawing on salt pork and bloating in the road. Not that my own behavior was altogether explicable, sitting here in a crooked house in the hills of Virginia, poring over sketches of long-dead Confederates. I was born seven years after the last rebel soldier, Pleasant Crump, died at home in Lincoln, Alabama. I was raised in Maryland, a border state in the Civil War that now belonged to the “Mid-Atlantic States,” a sort of regionless buffer between North and South. Nor did I have blood ties to the War. My forebears were digging potatoes and studying Torah between Minsk and Pinsk when Pleasant Crump trudged through Virginia with the 10th Alabama.
I took out the card Robert Lee Hodge had given me. It was colored Confederate gray; the phone number ended in 1865. Muskets crackled outside and shrieks of mock pain filled the air. Why did this war still obsess so many Americans 130 years after Appomattox? I returned to Poppa Isaac’s book. What did that war have to do with him, or with me?
A FEW WEEKS LATER I gave Rob Hodge a call. He seemed unsurprised to hear from me and renewed his offer to take me out in the field. Hodge’s unit, the Southern Guard, was about to hold a drill to keep its skills sharp during the long winter layoff (battle reenactments, like real Civil War combat, clustered between spring and fall). “It’ll be forty-eight hours of hardcore marching,” he said. “Wanna come?”
Hodge gave me the number for the Guardsman hosting the event, a Virginia farmer named Robert Young. I called for directions and also asked what to bring. “I’ve got a sleeping bag,” I told him. The voice on the other end went silent. “Or some blankets,” I added.
