by Tony Horwitz
Strolling down Salisbury’s main street, I passed a pawn shop, a Textile Products Outlet Store, the modestly named OK Wig, and an historical plaque stating that George Washington slept here in 1791. Reaching Spanky’s Cafe, I settled in for a cup of coffee and a scan of the tourist literature. At first glance it looked unpromising, like Salisbury itself: a drab textile town with a doomed tourist trade built around a few old homes, a smattering of graves, and a cavalry raid three days after Appomattox.
A young black man sat at the next table gazing into space. He wore a blue bandanna around his neck, beneath a carefully trimmed beard and mustache. From time to time he scribbled in a leather-bound notebook. I leaned over and asked what he was writing.
“I’m trying to figure out what I’m doing here.” He eyed the pen and pad I’d laid on my table. “How about you?”
“Same thing, I guess.”
He smiled, exposing a gold-capped front tooth. James Connor was thirty-two and had just separated from his wife of ten years. “We married too young. Never had a chance to explore on our own.” So after their split, Connor quit his hairdresser’s job in Atlanta and hopped a bus for Salisbury, where his uncle lived in a trailer outside town. “I wanted to see some of the world for myself. I was tired of relying on what people told me about it.”
He’d arrived in Salisbury at night. There were no blacks in sight. “I freaked,” he said. “I was wondering, ‘Where’s mine? What did they do to ’em?’” He laughed. That was three days ago. “White people here treat me like any human being. That’s the first thing I learned. I thought out here in the sticks it would be Deliverance and shit.”
He lifted his pen. “My turn,” he said.
“Fire away.”
“How would you define prejudice?”
“Hmm. Big question. Can I think on that?”
“Okay. Question two. If I was to ask you, what are you looking for and how do you fit into the big picture, what would you say?”
I glanced around the coffee shop. A half-dozen customers stared back. “Got any easy questions?” I asked.
“Yeah.” He pointed at the visitors’ map and audiotape. “What’s all that?”
“Driving tour of Salisbury. Want to come?”
We found the Civil War dead beside a denim plant with a billboard that said, “Bringing Fabric to Life!” On the other side of the cemetery stood a Frito-Lay warehouse. The din from the two buildings drowned out our audiotape, so we parked the car and walked among the headstones.
The first said “Unknown.” Then “Two Unknowns.” Then a monument that read: “Neither hunger, thirst, nor offered bribes affected their loyalty.” The memorial had been erected by the state of Maine.
“Where’s the dead rebs?” Connor asked.
I looked again at the tourist literature. The blandly named “national cemetery” was actually the burial ground for Northerners who died at a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp. We walked a bit farther and saw eighteen headstones in a line labeled “Unknown U.S. Soldier.” Each marked the foot of a burial trench almost the length of a football field.
We found the cemetery’s director in a small caretaker’s building adorned with an incongruously sunny painting of inmates playing baseball in the prison yard. Abe Stice kept a computer log of the men buried outside. The log for Union soldiers wasn’t long. “Most of the corpses were stripped of their clothes, tossed on dead-wagons and dumped in those trenches,” Stice said, “so we don’t know a whole lot of names.” Salisbury’s tiny graveyard held more unknown dead than any other national cemetery in America.
Most prisoners died from malnutrition and disease: smallpox, dysentery, scurvy and dengue or “breakbone” fever, so-called because it caused aches so intense that sufferers thought their bones were snapping. “The official figure’s eleven thousand seven hundred dead, but we’re really just guessing,” Stice said. If the guess was correct, over a third of the inmates perished, making Salisbury among the deadliest of all Civil War prison camps, including Andersonville.
Stice showed us a few books and diaries about the camp. One Iowan weighed 181 pounds when he arrived at the prison and 87 when he left six months later. Another prisoner wrote: “It is not hunger or cold, sickness or death, which makes prison life so hard to bear. It is the utter idleness, emptiness, aimlessness of such a life, with nothing to fill the vacant mind, which always becomes morbid and turns inward to prey on itself.”
Oddly, not all the prisoners were Yankees. There were also Southern deserters, Carolina Quakers jailed for being conscientious objectors, and convicts imprisoned for petty theft, drunkenness, or “trading with Yankees and inducing Negroes to go to Washington D.C.” The roster also listed the teenaged son of David Livingstone, the famous missionary and doctor in Africa. Robert Livingstone dropped out of school in Scotland and caught a ship to America, apparently in search of adventure. Fearing his family would disapprove, he enlisted under an alias. “To bear your name here would lead to further dishonoring it,” Robert wrote his father from Virginia, adding, “I have never hurt anyone knowingly in battle, having always fired high.”
Confederate guards at Salisbury weren’t so kind; they shot Livingstone dead during a mass break-out attempt. Hundreds of other inmates also died while trying to escape. “Our men will Shoot them now On every Occasion,” one rebel guard wrote his wife. “I saw one shot Down yesterday like a Beef.”
Like most Civil War buffs, I’d always focused on the grim but glorious history of battle. Salisbury was just grim: men eating mouse soup, “skirmishing” with lice, and “tiered up like sticks of wood” on dead-wagons. But none of this surprised the caretaker, Abe Stice. “You know what Sherman said: ‘War is cruelty and you cannot refine it.’” Stice turned around; the back of his jacket said Vietnam Remembered. “I dished out my share of cruelty in ’Nam and got some back.” A twice-wounded helicopter pilot, Stice spent fourteen months in hospital before coming home. “I can’t forget Vietnam. But I hope the next generation won’t be hung up on it the way mine is,” he said.
The same sentiment didn’t extend to the Civil War. 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.”
Stice scribbled down the phone number for Sue Curtis, who headed the local chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. “Go talk to this lady and you’ll see what I mean,” he said, closing up for the night.
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.”
Connor had a job tryout at a hair salon. I had a date with Fort Sumter, or so I’d planned. But Stice’s last comment intrigued me. “Want to meet a Daughter of the Confederacy?” I asked.
Connor laughed. “You heard what the man said. Some folks here think it’s still Scarlett and Mammy days.”
I remembered something. “You asked how I’d define prejudice. That’s it. Making assumptions about people you’ve never met.”
Connor shook his head. “You call it prejudice. I call it sense.” So I dropped him off at the hairdresser’s. He told me to stop by the salon next time I came through Salisbury. “Maybe by then you can answer my other question,” he said.
I found a phone booth and dialed Sue Curtis. She seemed oddly unsurprised when I explained that Abe Stice recommended I come speak to her about the Civil War.
“I’m so sorry, I’d ask you over but I’m getting ready for our meeting tonight,” she said. “It’s our annual Lee-Jackson birthday party.”
Robert E. Lee’s and Stonewall Jackson’s birthdays fell two days apart and were once major holidays across the South. I hadn’t realized anyone still commemorated the dates.
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br /> “Is the meeting open to the public?” I asked.
“Usually not, but it might be.” There was a pause on the line. “The Sons of Confederate Veterans are meeting across the hall from us. If you’d like, I can tell them to expect you.”
AT THE ROWAN COUNTY LIBRARY, I was greeted by three men who introduced themselves in order of rank. “Jim White, commander,” said a man with a pastor’s dog-collar and a long, coiffed beard.
“Ed Curtis,” announced a second. This was Sue Curtis’s husband, a tall, lean man with aviator glasses. “First lieutenant commander.”
“I’m Mike Hawkins,” said the third man, standing erect, like a marine cadet. “Color sergeant, Rowan Rifles, Army of Northern Virginia.”
None of the men wore uniforms. The army they served had disbanded in 1865, or so I’d last heard. The best I could do was stammer out my name and town, which at least lay in northern Virginia.
“And where were you raised, Tony?” the commander asked. I took this as a diplomatic allusion to my lack of a Southern accent. “Maryland,” I said. Actually, I was born and schooled in Washington, D.C., but my family lived a few blocks outside the one-time Yankee capital.
The commander clapped me on the back and sang out a line from Maryland’s state song: “Huzzah, she spurns the Northern scum!” Maryland stayed neutral in the War, but harbored many Southern sympathizers. Apparently, as a Marylander, I might still qualify as one—or at least not as Northern scum.
“We can’t boast Virginia’s claims to aristocracy,” the commander went on, “or South Carolina’s fame as the cradle of secession.”
“You know what they call North Carolina,” Ed Curtis added. “‘A vale of humility between two mountains of conceit.’” He smiled. “Of course that’s a conceited thing to say about yourself. But at least we’re humble about how much better we are than anyplace else.”
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.”
Then came a banner with N*C on one side. “I salute the North Carolina flag and pledge to the Old North State love, loyalty and faith,” the men intoned, with heightened fervor. Yet another flag appeared, this one showing the familiar rebel cross, but arranged on a field of white with a red stripe along the border. “As I’m informed,” the commander said, “the third national flag is still the official flag of the Confederacy.”
I looked quizzically at the color sergeant, who took his seat beside me. “That’s the last political flag of the South,” he whispered. “It can’t change until the Confederate Congress convenes again.”
The birthday party that followed was even stranger. First, the commander pointed to a table spread with food: lemon snaps to honor Stonewall Jackson, who allegedly sucked the sour fruit during combat, and a snack called “Chicken-in-a-Biskit” to honor Lee, who toted a pet hen in his wagon during the campaigns of 1863. Then one of the Sons stood up and recapped Lee’s military career—though only his successes up to July 1863. “Gettysburg—there were some mistakes made there, it’s a sad thing and I’m not going to go into that,” he concluded. “Then came the rest, to Appomattox. Lee died on October 12, 1870.” He sat down to polite applause.
The next speaker, Dr. Norman Sloop, spoke about Stonewall. “I’ll focus on the medical aspects of Jackson’s career,” he said, before discussing the general’s dyspepsia, myopia and famed hypochondria (Stonewall believed, among other things, that one arm and leg weighed more than the other). Sloop ended with Jackson’s mortal wounding by his own troops while leading the rebels to victory at Chancellorsville.
“Like the boxer Rocky Marciano, who died in a plane crash without ever losing a fight, Stonewall went out when he was still on top,” Sloop concluded. “And when he reached heaven, the Lord used the words, ‘Well done, thou good and faithful servant.’” The source for this last anecdote wasn’t entirely clear. But the audience loved it and applauded uproariously.
Then the men in the room split into two teams—the lemons and the chickens—for the evening’s main event: a Lee-Jackson trivia quiz. Ed Curtis, the lieutenant commander, stood at the front of the room and read from a pile of index cards.
“How did Jackson graduate in his West Point class?”
“Seventeenth!” Dr. Sloop called out.
“Correct. What wound did Jackson receive at First Manassas?”
“Shot in the left hand. Broke his middle finger,” the doctor said.
“Correct. What did Robert E. Lee weigh at the start of the War?”
“I’m wanting to say one eighty but maybe it’s one seventy-three,” called out the commander, who led my team, the lemons.
“No. One hundred seventy,” Sloop corrected.
“Right. Who played the part of Johnny Yuma in the TV series The Rebel?”
It quickly became obvious the chickens would triumph, thanks to Dr. Sloop. So midway through the quiz, the lemons resorted to satire.
“In the Mexican War, what hazardous action off the battlefield did Braxton Bragg encounter?”
“Gonorrhea,” the pastor-cum-commander shouted.
“No, I’m sorry. He was almost assassinated twice. General Lee’s most famous mount was Traveller. Name one other.”
“Mary Custis Lee!” the commander yelled again.
“Ajax,” Dr. Sloop corrected.
“Right. How many Confederate regiments went into Pickett’s Charge?”
“Too many,” the color sergeant said.
“Forty-six to be exact. What were the odds of surviving a head wound in the War?”
“Not too good,” I volunteered, getting into the spirit of things. The correct answer was one in six. Dr. Sloop again.
“Oh gee, fellahs, this one’s a giveaway,” Ed Curtis said, reaching the last question. “How many horses did Nathan Bedford Forrest have shot out from under him?”
“Twenty-nine!” the audience shouted in unison. Of sixty-five questions, only Jeff Davis’s middle name—Finis—had stumped everyone. I quietly resolved to hit the books. The store of Civil War trivia I’d carried around since childhood clearly wouldn’t suffice if I hoped to hold my own among latter-day rebels.
After the quiz, we were joined by the women of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, who had met across the hall. Sue Curtis was a stout woman with large-framed trifocals and a suit the color of strawberry daiquiri. Draped over her ample chest was a ribbon pinned with shiny medals, in the style of a Latin dictator.
“I’ve got seventeen Confederate ancestors I can prove,” she said, “and one who I think went Union.” She laughed. “I’m not doing any more research on him.”
I told her about the journey I’d just begun, and asked why she thought Southerners still cared about the Civil War.
“War Between the States,” she gently corrected me. “The answer is family. We grow up knowing who’s once removed and six times down. Northerners say, ‘Forget the War, it’s over.’ But they don’t have the family Bibles we do, filled with all these kinfolk who went off to war and died. We’ve lost so much.”
Strictly speaking, she was right. Roughly half of modern-day white Southerners descended from Confederates, and one in four Southern men of military age died in the War. For Yankee men, the death rate was about one in ten, and waves of post-War immigration left a far lower ratio of Northerners with blood ties to the conflict. Still, I was struck by Sue Curtis’s tone. She spoke as though her kinsmen died yesterday, not 130 years ago.
“Caleb Senter, my great-great-grandfather, was captured at Cold Harbor,” she said, fingering an “ancestor pin” that bore his name. “He was on his way to Elmira Prison, but a drunk telegraph man directed his train right into a coal freighter
in Pennsylvania. Poor Caleb was squashed to death and buried by the tracks.” Her eyes misted over. “I made a magnolia wreath for his grave.”
We were interrupted by her husband, Ed. “Sue boring you with her War stories?” he asked.
“Not at all. Actually, I’m kind of jealous. I don’t even know the names of my great-great-grandfathers.”
Ed winked. “Don’t get her started on her great-great-uncles.”
The others began drifting out of the library. It was almost nine o’clock. “We’re going across the street to Miss Lucy’s for some iced tea and French silk pie,” Sue said. “Would you care to come along?”
I suddenly didn’t feel in any rush to reach Charleston.
AWAKENING THE NEXT MORNING in a $27 room at Salisbury’s Econo Lodge (“Spend a Night, Not a Fortune!”), I recognized the appeal of dwelling on the South’s past rather than its present. Stepping from my room into the motel parking lot, I gazed out at a low-slung horseshoe of ferroconcrete called Towne Mall, a metal-and-cement forest of humming electricity pylons, a Kmart, a garish yellow Waffle House, a pink-striped Dunkin’ Donuts, plus Taco Bell, Bojangles, Burger King, the Golden Arches of McDonald’s and the equally gaudy signs for Exxon, BP and Shell hoisted like battle flags above the melee of competing brands. A few exhaust-choked bushes poked from the greasy asphalt.
I’d gone to bed reading about the Confederate general Albert Sidney Johnston, who urged his men into battle at Shiloh by declaring, “Remember the fair, broad, abounding land, the happy homes and ties that would be desolated by your defeat!” I wondered sleepily what Johnston would make of the view from the Econo Lodge.
Over coffee at the Waffle House, I also began wondering about the crowd I’d met the night before. It had included not only the doctor and pastor, but also a textile worker, a rose grower, a gun-shop owner, a state bureaucrat and several farmers in overalls. Apart from sports, I couldn’t think of many interests that comfortably bridged such a wide range of people. I was curious to know more of what drew them together.
