Confederates in the Attic

by Tony Horwitz

  Wells pointed at the uniform and said, “It’s very valuable because it has pants. Few pants survived because the soldiers just wore them till they gave out.” I asked what became of the old lady. “Oh, she still calls me from time to time, to check on grandpa.” Wells smiled. “She’s just as fine as she could be. But she doesn’t like her relatives. I think she gave me the uniform to spite them.”

  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. “Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard was a charming ladies’ man,” she said of the euphoniously named Creole. “This is one of his silver matchboxes, which shows his exquisite taste.” She paused, reaching for her pearl-handled stilletto again. “Did you know he brought a servant with him from Louisiana to wax his mustache every day? He also brought his own cow, by train from New Orleans. He had stomach troubles and claimed he couldn’t drink the milk of any other animal. Can you imagine?”

  Wells’s own family wasn’t spared. Both her grandfather and great-grandfather had fought for the Confederacy. “Very esteemed men in Charleston,” she said. At least outside the house. The two men lived together and both survived to ninety-five. “So my grandmother had to take care of these two ancient men, her husband and father, arguing about the War until the end of time. You know that lady had her hands full.”

  Wells had joined the Daughters of the Confederacy as a young woman. At that time, the group still included many true daughters of rebel soldiers and even a few widows. Wells often ferried them to meetings. “These were real Charleston ladies, in gloves, hats and heels. I’d do up their corsets. Eighty-five years old, sucking in their breath to show off their slender waists.”

  It was these women who had presided over the UDC during its heyday at the turn of the century, when the organization boasted 100,000 members and erected monuments of rebel soldiers on courthouse lawns across the South. It seemed strange to me that women had been so much more active than veterans in hallowing battlefield glory. But Wells, who once served as the UDC’s historian, felt the women were honoring themselves as much as their menfolk.

  “Before the War, Southern women—white Southern women of means—were basically protected people, they didn’t do much,” she said. “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.”

  They also cherished the War’s physical remains; it was the Daughters who had started the Confederate Museum in 1896. Many of the items still bore yellowed, handwritten labels scribbled by veterans themselves. A typical one read: “Button from the coat of C.P. Poppenheim, with stain of wound received at battle of Sharpsburg.” One veteran presented a glass box filled with pressed flowers from Manassas. Another hauled home the trunk of a bullet-riddled tree. Some even toted home rocks. “When they weren’t shooting Yanks they were hunting souvenirs,” Wells said.

  Nor did relic hunting end with the War. Wells showed me a letter with a lock of gray hair sewn to it. “This is our most popular item,” she said. The letter was from Robert E. Lee’s barber and read: “The lock of hair I send you was cut by me from the head of the great Hero after his death.” Another case contained a lock of Jeff Davis’s hair and splinters of wood from the tree under which he was arrested by Union troops in 1865.

  Hair. Bits of wood. Blood-stained clothing. The kindergarten was beginning to feel less like a museum than a saints’ reliquary. “Why do you work here?” I asked Wells.

  “Volunteer,” she corrected me. Then, in answer to my question, she showed me a pair of drumsticks with a caption that said, “Found in the hands of a lad killed in battle.” There was also a little trunk in which the drummer boy had carried his childhood belongings off to war.

  “I always show these to young people because I’m very anti-military,” Wells said. “That’s why I do this museum. Everything here is real. It isn’t television. I hope that people seeing these things will make them never want to fight again.”

  To Wells, defeat and devastation were the true legacy of the War; they set the South apart from a nation accustomed to triumph. She liked to think this made Southerners a little wiser and perhaps a little more considerate of one other. “I always felt sorry for Northern people,” she said. “I have a Yankee relative in New York and when I go to visit her I’m uncomfortable, people are so suspicious and cold.” She shrugged. “I guess I still feel the South is the better half of the world somehow.”

  There was a knock on the door and a weary-looking woman came in with a boy of about ten. Catching sight of the museum, the boy’s face brightened. “I’m so glad we finally found you,” his mother said. “He’s mad on the Civil War.”

  The boy pressed his face to a glass case displaying a pile of Confederate money. “When we were girls,” Wells told him, “we’d play house with this money and use it to start fires with.” Wide-eyed, the boy began wandering toward the weapons and uniforms, dragging his mother along.

  “We have some drumsticks used by a boy about your age,” Wells said. “Make sure I show them to you before you go.”

  BY DAY, CHARLESTON in January seemed quiet and genteel. By night it went wild. One evening, I was almost run down by a brigade of drunk college students charging through the streets shrieking, “Can’t lick those Cocks!” The “Gamecocks” of the University of South Carolina had recently triumphed in a football bowl game, prompting a week-long bender in the bars lining the Market. Not that Charlestonians needed much of an excuse. South Carolina had just elected a Christian Right governor. During the same election, Charlestonians passed a referendum allowing Sunday drinking.

  A few days after my arrival, I phoned a local woman whom a friend had recommended as a guide. She offered to take me on “the walk.”

  “The walking tour of the Battery? I did that. It was lovely.”

  She laughed and said she’d meet me at dark. “The Walk,” it turned out, was Charleston slang for a pub crawl that ended when its participants were too stupefied to stagger any farther.

  It seemed only fitting, then, that a saloon called Moultrie’s Tavern became my base for Civil War operations in Charleston. Moultrie’s looked at first glance like a tourist trap. Billed as a tavern “set in 1862,” it offered period music, Civil War decor and glass cases filled with minié balls and buttons unearthed by the bar’s relic-hunting proprietor. But while tourists hoed into cutely named dishes like Blockade Salad and Ham and Shrimp Sumter, a curious mix of well-dressed professionals and roughneck laborers clung to the bar, endlessly debating the Civil War.

  As I ate lunch one afternoon, I overheard a man bellowing to several other drinkers, “The whole Southern cause was manipulated by a bunch of Charleston fat cats and that’s what got us into the mess at Sumter. Don’t get me wrong. I’m real proud of states’ rights. Hell, I believe in city rights.”

  He paused to drain his beer, leaving me to wonder what depredation of the state government he was about to decry.

  “Columbia has no business running us,” he said of the state capital. “It’s in the goddamned Bible Belt. I grew up being told that Baptists don’t fuck standing up because people might think they were dancing. That’s how staunch they are.”

  I moved my lunch to the bar and offered to buy the man a drink. He ordered four beers, shoving one to me. “I drink beer so I can drink liquor,” he said. “You’ve got to lay down a foundation in your stomach before you start in on the hard stuff.”

  Idiosyncrasy was a
point of pride in Charleston. Several people had already boasted to me about the city’s police chief, a Berkeley-educated black Jew and former rodeo cowboy named Reuben Greenberg who roller-bladed his beat and decorated his office with miniature rebel flags. But even by Charleston standards, Jamie Westendorff ranked as a bonafide eccentric. Broad-shouldered, with watery blue eyes and a coronel of brown curls, Westendorff was, among other things, an alligator wrestler, fifth-generation Charlestonian, and descendant of a Confederate blockade runner.

  “Those captains did it for the Cause, and that cause was money,” he said. “Running the blockade back then wasn’t much different from running dope today. Except they were smarter than dope runners because they didn’t get into their own junk.”

  Westendorff worked as a seaman, too, gathering shellfish for his catering business. He specialized in Lowcountry feasts—fried shrimp, softshell crabs, hogs cooked in vinegar and pepper—and he always cooked on a Rabelaisian scale. “I’m like those blockade runners. Whatever you can do, do it for the most. So if I can cook for a hundred, why not a thousand?”

  Westendorff also worked as a plumber, which had led to his principal hobby: privy digging. Using nineteenth-century insurance maps of Charleston, he looked for small squares marked W.C. and tried to find their remains in present-day backyards. “Fortunes were thrown down those holes,” he said. Medicine bottles. Crockery. Kitchen utensils. And liquor jugs. “Guys who didn’t want anyone to know they drank used to do it in the outhouse. That’s where we get the phrase ‘shithouse drinker.’”

  Westendorff drained the last of his beers. “Got a hog to cook,” he said.

  “Mind if I tag along?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “If you don’t mind riding in the stankiest truck in the South.”

  Two reeking mutts, Rut and Rut-Lite, perched in the cab of his battered pickup. Plumbing snakes, peanut shells and Civil War shrapnel littered the dashboard and floor. Starting the engine with what looked like a paper clip, Westendorff asked what I’d seen of Charleston. I told him I’d visited Sumter, various museums, gone on a walking tour, poked my head in a few gardens and interiors.

  “In other words, you seen nothing yet,” he said, offering to show me a few of his favorite sites in “peninsula city,” as he called downtown. We stopped first at a street of grand homes by the harbor. “I’ve worked inside—or at least under—most houses in the Battery,” he said. “What they don’t tell you on those tours is what these houses really are—the world’s biggest money pits.” Termites, humidity and sea air corroded facades and porches. Simply painting the larger houses, in some cases an annual job, cost $40,000.

  Westendorff pointed at a sprawling mansion with a peeling front and rotted shutters. “That’s typical of old Charleston money,” he said. “Too poor to paint, too proud to whitewash.” He edged the truck forward and pointed to several homes in much better repair. “That’s new Charleston dough. Outside money. Nouveau riche.” One of the houses belonged to a Wall Street trader, another to the founder of Wendy’s, a third to a McDonald’s executive. Westendorff whistled. “Must be big bucks in burgers.”

  Where others saw grandeur, though, Westendorff saw dung. Pointing through an iron gate at an elegant garden, he said, “I reckon the privy would have been just over there. Could be a real gold mine a few feet down.” But Westendorff suspected he’d never plumb its depths. As new owners bought up Charleston, privy treasure was becoming endangered feces. “Used to be, I’d finish a job in someone’s house and they’d let me poke around the yard. But the new money people aren’t so prone to have you dig up their camellias.”

  A horse-drawn carriage clip-clopped past, piloted by a coachman in nineteenth-century livery. A leather diaper dangled beneath the horse’s 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.” Westendorff watched a gaggle of tourists poke cameras out the carriage window. “I call them ‘people of necessity,’” he said. “Got to have ’em, just like you got to have craphouses. But they’re turning this town into a fake.”

  Westendorff preferred the real thing, most of it tucked on back streets or torn down long ago. He turned down an alley and stopped at a slatternly wood building. “Last of the great hoe-hooses,” he said.

  “Great what?”

  “Hoe-hoose,” he repeated. “What are you, a goddamned Baptist?”

  Hoe-hoose. Whorehouse. Westendorff was the first white person I’d met with a true Charleston accent. The dialect had high and low forms, with the latter known as Geech or Geechee. “It’s a lazy way of talking,” he said. “Slurs words, cuts corners.” He began counting: one, two, shree, fo. The area between Shultz Lane and Michelle Court became simply “Shellcourt.” Then there was Charleston slang. Near the hoe-hooses had once stood dozens of “peanut shops,” hole-in-the-wall joints that sold pint bottles of booze after hours—with peanuts, cigars and other wares serving as fig leaf for their illicit trade. Charleston also once harbored countless speakeasies, known as “blind tigers.” It was at one such dive that black jazz musicians were believed to have created the dance known ever since as “the Charleston.”

  “As long as there’s been people in this town, there’s been parties,” Westendorff said. He did his best to uphold this tradition. Pulling over to the curb, he took me inside an unmarked brick building. Paintings of wigged colonials gazed down from the walls at a room filled with card and dice tables. This was the Fellowship Society, founded in 1762, one among scores of private clubs in Charleston. Westendorff had gambled there the night before. “I figured, why stay up all night? So I cut a card with a guy for five hundred bucks. He got a queen. I got a shree.” He shrugged. “Whatever you do, do it for the most.”

  Church bells chimed outside. Westendorff fingered an ancient pair of black and white orbs, once used to vote on potential new members and “black-ball” those who didn’t pass muster. “Growing up here, you can’t help being obsessed with the past,” he said. “Nothing ever dies in this town. It’s like a bottle of wine, just gets older and better.”

  Westendorff had to pick up a few things at his house, so we drove over the Ashley River to what looked like an ordinary suburban ranch home. Except that a huge missile perched where a boxwood should have been. “Union shell, two-hundred-pounder, dug it out of a privy,” he said.

  Outhouse treasure also filled the interior. Westendorff picked up a nineteenth-century bottle and showed me the words “to be returned” on the base. “People think recycling’s new, but back then people recycled everything. People didn’t throw shit away.” Except down privy holes, of course.

  Westendorff unearthed a yellowed notebook filled with invoices and letters of lading. This was the log of a company that managed blockade runners. “No romance here—all of this is strictly business,” he said. He opened the log to early 1863 and read aloud: “‘News has just arrived of another terrible defeat to the Yankees. We have offered our client the goods or any portion he may select at 300% on cost.’” Westendorff whistled. “These guys sure as shit didn’t give anything away.”

  He read on: “‘We think by the spring the Yankees will be tired of fighting. We have no more doubt of our ultimate success than we have in our own existence.’” Standard Confederate boosterism. Then business again: “‘We hope therefore to sell as many goods as possible before 1863 expires.’”

  Westendorff chortled. “The romance is that a blockade runner was so rich he could throw stuff around, like Robin Hood. But look at this journal—the guy’s so tight he fills every inch of paper rather than waste any.” Sure enough, tiny scribbles filled the margins and back of every page. “You can bet that for every pistol they ran in, there was twice that amount of perfume and ale. Even if you did fifty dollars for the Cause, you’d get rich.”

  Westendorff’s own blockade-running forebear hadn’t
done so well. Captain of a ship named the Bermuda, he sailed to Liverpool soon after the War started and loaded up with cannons. But the cargo made his ship too heavy to run the blockade. So he docked at a Caribbean island to refit and was seized by the Union navy. After his release from prison he was caught again. He never succeeded in running the blockade and died soon after the War, a destitute man whose four children ended up in an orphanage.

  “That’s where the Cause got most people,” Westendorff said. “Prison. Downward mobility. An early grave.” Even so, Westendorff had named his own boat Bermuda in honor of his seafaring ancestor.

  We climbed back into Westendorff’s truck and returned to town. I thanked him for the tour and asked directions to an old Jewish cemetery that Joel Dorfman had mentioned on the Sumter ferry. This gave Westendorff an excuse to tell me about his own tombstone. “I did a cook-out for a memorial company. The owner was broke so he cut me a stone instead.” The inscription read: “He loved life and tried everything. Take it back—two things he never tried. Sucking dick and suicide.” Westendorff laughed. “My mother about died when she saw that.”

  I left him cooking his pigs and walked a half-mile to the iron fence enclosing the Jewish cemetery. Charleston was the cradle not only of secession but also of Reform Judaism in America. Jews began arriving in Charleston in 1695; until the early nineteenth century, the city had the largest Jewish population in the country, with a quarter of all American Jews living in South Carolina. The nation’s first Reform congregation was founded in a converted cotton gin in Charleston in 1824. Jewish names still dotted businesses and law offices across the city. They also filled the headstones before me, mingling Hebrew lettering and Jewish stars with insignias of the Confederacy.

  One monument honored a twenty-two-year-old named Isaac and a seventeen-year-old named Mikell: “Victims in Their Early Youth to the Horrors of War, They Freely Gave Their Lives to Their Country’s Needs.” Other stones bore the names Moses, Hilzeim, Poznanski, and also told of early deaths on battlefields or in prison camps. One among the dead was the son of Charleston’s chief rabbi.