Confederates in the Attic

by Tony Horwitz

  I knew that several thousand Jews had fought for the Confederacy and a number had become prominent in the government. David Yulee, an ardent Florida secessionist, was the first Jew elected to the U.S. Senate. David De Leon served as the Confederacy’s surgeon general. And Judah Benjamin, a close confidant of Jeff Davis, became the Confederacy’s attorney general, secretary of state, and secretary of war.

  Still, the image of Southern Jewish foot soldiers discomfited me. I thought of my draft-dodging great-grandfather and of the Passover service, with its leitmotif of liberation from slavery in Egypt. Yet here were young Jews—a rabbi’s son, even, who had perhaps recited the four questions at his family’s seder—going off to fight and die in defense of the South and its Pharaonic institution. I was much more comfortable with the image Emily Haynes sang about while weaving her sweetgrass baskets. Abraham Lincoln, King of the Jews, killed by “the gang” because he brought blacks out of bondage.

  BLACKS, OF COURSE, had struggled hard to liberate themselves. A third of all Africans brought to this country as slaves first touched American soil in Charleston, and it was here that a free black named Denmark Vesey plotted one of the South’s most ambitious slave revolts. A carpenter and preacher who bought his freedom with winnings from a city lottery, Vesey planned to seize Charleston’s arsenal and arm slaves across the Lowcountry. Betrayed by one of his men, Vesey went to the gallows in 1822 with thirty-four co-conspirators.

  A famous shrine to Denmark Vesey still stood, though few people recognized it as such. After the failed revolt, Charleston erected a well-fortified arsenal to guard against future insurrections. This bastion became the Southern military college known as the Citadel (or “the house that Denmark built,” as some blacks called it). The Citadel was now best known for guarding against women, who were struggling to gain admission to the school at the time of my visit.

  The Citadel’s modern campus centered on a parade ground ringed by mock-Moorish fortresses that reminded me of sand castles I’d made from plastic molds as a child. At the school’s small museum, I found a room devoted to the Civil War.

  “FIRST SHOTS,” announced a sign at the start of the exhibit. I’d had my fill of Fort Sumter and was about to move to the next display when a line of text jerked me back: “On Jan. 9, 1861, cadets under command of Major P. F. Stevens opened fire.”

  January 9? Open any history book and you’ll learn that the War’s first shots were fired on April 12, 1861, when Beauregard attacked Sumter. But according to the Citadel, four of its cadets beat Beauregard to the punch—by three months.

  “Cadet George E. Haynsworth,” I read on, “pulled the lanyard firing the first shot across the bow.”

  Bow? Of a fort?

  Outside, I found a small monument by the parade ground with a bronze bas-relief of four cadets firing a small cannon out to sea. “In the early dawn of Jan. 9, 1861, the first shot of the War between the States was fired from Morris Island by Citadel cadets,” the plaque read, “and the defense of the South became real.”

  Had there been some sort of cover-up?

  I headed for the library and was greeted by a massive mural, depicting the same scene. I asked the librarian for material on the incident. She handed me a folder labeled “Star of the West,” bulging with yellowed clips and faded monographs that told the hidden history of the War’s beginnings. After South Carolina seceded, federal troops in Charleston moved from a land fort to the safer redoubt at Fort Sumter. Charleston officials responded by posting militiamen to the beaches and islands ringing the harbor. Among them was a detachment of Citadel cadets.

  A few weeks later, a Northern steamer called Star of the West left Brooklyn with supplies for the Sumter garrison. A Southern sympathizer in New York telegraphed Charleston. When the Star of the West tried to enter Charleston harbor at dawn on January 9, 1861, it was a Citadel cadet who sounded the alarm. He and three classmates then fired across the ship’s bow. Several other guns also opened fire. Three balls struck the ship’s side and the captain prudently steamed back to New York. That was it.

  Curious to know more, I went to see Colonel Bill Gordon, the Citadel’s resident expert on the Star of the West. Colonel Gordon was a ramrod-straight marine with close-cropped hair and black shoes polished to a blinding sheen. He said he took students on field trips to Morris Island, though the site of the famed cadet battery had eroded into the sea years ago.

  “I look at it this way,” he said. “It was Christmas, 1860, just before exam period. And someone says to these cadets, ‘Would you rather take your exams in calculus and English composition or go out to Morris Island and shoot at Yanks?’ It’s a no-brainer. You go.”

  The adventure quickly became a wretched camping trip. The cadets were housed in an abandoned hospital filled with coffins. It was buggy, cold, and most of all, dull. So one morning, when a Yankee ship appeared, the adolescent cadets fired their guns. “I don’t think these kids had a cotton-picking clue what they were getting into, unless they were lunatics,” Gordon said.

  The War that followed hadn’t been kind to the cadets. Two died in battle and a third fought four long years until the South’s surrender. Nor did he or the other gun-battery survivor enjoy any fame for their actions. “The romance set in later, when their families took an interest,” Gordon said. “The guys themselves probably didn’t give a rat’s ass about the War.”

  Gordon’s irreverence surprised me, and I told him so. He explained that he’d seen plenty of combat in Vietnam. “Nothing romantic, let me tell you,” he said. Also, like June Wells’s at the Confederate Museum, his study of the Civil War seemed to have bred a certain pacifism. “I guess it’s fair for the Citadel to claim the first shot of the War,” he said, “but given the slaughter that followed, I’m not sure that’s much to be proud of.”

  Others at the Citadel evidently disagreed. The school even had a prize called the Star of the West Medal, awarded each year to the best-drilled cadet. The prize consisted of a gold medal bearing a wooden star carved from what Gordon called “the sacred wood”—an actual sliver from the hull of the ship. The Star of the West also formed part of “knob knowledge,” the rote that first-year cadets—called “knobs” because of their shaved heads—were required to memorize and “pop off” whenever upperclassmen demanded it.

  Gordon walked me to the door. It was Friday, when cadets drilled in dress uniform across the parade ground. Clad in gray, they toted rifles and the same Palmetto flag displayed with such pride by South Carolinians during the War. With their close-cropped hair and crisp uniforms, the cadets didn’t much resemble the raffish, bearded rebels of old. But the drill ended with an appropriate flourish. A crew of artillerymen wheeled a cannon in front of the Star of the West monument. One of the cadets yanked the lanyard, a blank fired loudly, and a cloud of acrid smoke billowed out across the parade ground. The cadets in the gun crew smiled.

  After visiting the Citadel, I made a point of perusing the indexes of Civil War histories, searching for scraps on the Star of the West. I rarely found more than a footnote. In the view of historians who bothered mentioning the incident at all, the cadets’ action proved inconsequential, resulting in nothing more than the ship’s return to New York. So the Star of the West remained a lost shard of Civil War history, hermetically sealed inside the Citadel, as if in a pharaoh’s tomb. In a sense this seemed fitting. What better vault than the Citadel, arguably the most mummified institution in America?

  Nonetheless, I felt a furtive pleasure at being in on the secret. I doubted even the trivia whizzes back in Salisbury, North Carolina, knew this one. So I stored it away, looking forward to the day when I could slap a dollar on the bar while drinking with a Civil War buff and unleash my hidden weapon from the Citadel’s silo. “Buck says you don’t know who fired the first shots of the Civil War.”

  THE WAGER WOULD HAVE TO WAIT for some bar other than Moultrie’s Tavern, the one place I’d be sure to lose. Idling away another lunch hour there one afternoon, I noticed a viv
id portrait behind the bar. Titled The Relic Hunter, it showed the bar’s proprietor scanning the beach with a metal detector. I was struck by how well the portrait captured its subject and asked the bartender about its creator.

  “Manning Williams?” The bartender laughed. “Where to begin? As you can see, he’s a first-class artist. Also a college professor. A reenactor. Charleston’s leading secessionist. Among other things.”

  In other words, another Charleston eccentric. I phoned Williams from the bar and was immediately invited to his house. Following his directions to a neighborhood north of town, I wondered if I’d become lost. The area was predominantly black. This shouldn’t have surprised me; statistically, Southern cities were far better integrated than Northern ones. The second surprise was the figure who greeted me at the door of his bland modern home. Williams was a wiry, muscular man of about fifty, with piercing blue eyes, paint-stained fingers and a pointed beard that reached almost to his breastbone. He looked like a roguish rebel officer—a resemblance that was entirely intentional.

  “It seems peaceful out there,” he said, shutting the door behind me, “but don’t be fooled. The War is emotionally still on. I call it the thousand-year war. It’ll go on for a thousand years, or until we get back into the Union on equal terms.”

  Williams led me into a studio littered with half-empty coffee mugs, half-finished beers, half-smoked cigars. Civil War tomes and copies of a super-hero comic book called “Captain Confederacy” lay propped atop chairs and easels. “This is the work I’m finishing now, though the subject’s something I’ll never be finished with,” he said, pausing beside a large canvas. “It’s called Lincoln in Hell.”

  The oil painting brought to mind Hieronymus Bosch’s inferno in Garden of Earthly Delights. The sky was a florid orange and streaked with exploding shells. In the foreground, a gaunt figure in a black frock coat and stovepipe hat strode across a mound of skulls, cannonballs, and bits of blue and gray uniform. Behind him loomed other stacks of bones, with blurry figures perched atop each.

  “That’s Napoleon,” Williams said, “and over there’s Genghis Khan.” Like Lincoln, these leaders were warmongering tyrants who had therefore earned a place in Williams’s underworld.

  “I’ve done some studies for a painting called Southerners in Hell, too,” he added. “It shows a bunch of rebels sitting with their hands over their ears as Lincoln recites the Gettysburg Address for the rest of eternity.” Williams broke into a wide, tobacco-stained grin. “I poke holes in icons. I’m suspicious of all agendas, most of all my own.”

  For the rest of the afternoon, Williams prowled restlessly around the studio, delivering a monologue that skipped from the Lost Cause to lost souls to Christian evangelists to calculating how long a pair of wool army socks would have lasted in 1863 (“until the stink became too much,” he hypothesized). Often, he spanned two or three topics in a single sentence. And every fifteen minutes or so, he’d lasso a runaway thought and rope it back toward his central theme: the ineradicable divide between North and South.

  “Take driving habits,” he said, detouring from a discourse on regional voting patterns. “Down here, you stop in a line of traffic to wave someone in and a single car pulls in front of you. Up north, you pause five seconds and ten cars butt ahead.”

  Williams hated cars, particularly car tires, and railed against Goodyear and Firestone ads. Again, it took me a moment to see where this was leading. “Car tires are the footprint of Northern industrial society,” Williams said. As a subtle protest, he stuck tires into his paintings—a stray radial, say, perched anachronistically in the foreground of an unflattering portrait of William Tecumseh Sherman.

  We were back to the Civil War, though Williams didn’t call it that. “A civil war is an internal revolt. But this was a war between two independent nations, one of which was exercising its constitutional right to secede.” Like many Southerners, Williams preferred the phrase War Between the States, or the War of Southern Independence. “Of course, the War to Suppress Yankee Arrogance is also acceptable,” he said.

  In a convoluted way, Williams was introducing me to a subject dear to the hearts of latter-day rebels: neo-Confederate thought. This loosely defined ideology drew together strains of Thomas Jefferson, John Calhoun, the Nashville Agrarians (who took the title of their manifesto “I’ll Take My Stand” from a verse of “Dixie”), and other thinkers who idealized Southern planters and yeoman farmers while demonizing the bankers and industrialists of the North. 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.

  This ethnography even explained how the War was fought. Like their brave and heedless forebears, Southerners hurled themselves in frontal assaults on the enemy. The North, meanwhile, deployed its industrial might and numerical superiority to grind down the South with Cromwellian efficiency. A military historian and neo-Confederate guru named Grady McWhiney put it best: “Southerners lost the War because they were too Celtic and their opponents were too English.”

  Viewed through this prism, the War of Northern Aggression had little to do with slavery. Rather, it was a culture war in which Yankees imposed their imperialist and capitalistic will on the agrarian South, just as the English had done to the Irish and Scots—and as America did to the Indians and the Mexicans in the name of Manifest Destiny. The North’s triumph, in turn, condemned the nation to centralized industrial society and all the ills that came with it. Including car tires.

  “If you like the way America is today, it’s the fruit of Northern victory,” Williams said. Abandoning a lit cigar for a wad of chewing tobacco, he sent a stream of brown juice into his coffee mug. “The South is a good place to look at what America used to be, and might have become if the South had won. If something’s fucked up, the North did it, not us.”

  But the fight was far from over; as Williams had said, this was a thousand-year war. As an artist, Williams chose to take his stand on cultural grounds. “If the South had won the War, we never would have had a movie like Pulp Fiction,” he said. I’d recently seen the Quentin Tarantino film and been put off by its gratuitous bloodshed. But what irked Williams was a detail I’d missed.

  “Tarantino goes out of his way to turn every stereotype upside down—except one.” The boxer, played by Bruce Willis, was white. The drug dealers were yuppies. The hitman, John Travolta, made jokes in French and read novels on the toilet. “But when two good ol’ boys appear in the film, what do they do?” Williams asked. “They rape a black guy in front of the Confederate flag.” He paused, disgusted. “Rednecks are about the only group it’s still okay to kick around. Not counting Nazis, of course.”

  It was sunset. We’d been talking for hours; or rather, Williams had been talking and I’d been trying to sift what sense I could from his torrent of art criticism, car criticism, profanity, political philosophy. Much of what Williams said seemed little more than a clever glide around race and slavery, rather like the slick-tongued defense of the Southern “way of life” made by antebellum orators, South Carolinians in particular.

  But parts of his diatribe unsettled me. It was certainly true that Northern zeal for righting Southern wrongs had a way of evaporating when similar wrongs surfaced close to home. To a degree I’d succumbed to the same hypocrisy. Born and schooled in Washington, D.C., a city sharply divided along race and class lines, I’d gone to work after college as a union organizer in rural Mississippi, urging impoverished loggers, most of whom were black, to go on strike and confront their white bosses. I’d burned out after eighteen months, but clung nostalgically ever since to this one bright flare of youthful idealism. Williams, I felt sure, would put a different spin on my Mississippi sojourn. He’d say I behaved like sanctimonious abolitionists and 1960s Freedom Riders wh
o swooped down on the South while neglecting injustice in their own backyards.

  “Listen closely while you’re down here and take a hard look at your own prejudices,” Williams said, slapping me on the back as he saw me out. “We may just make an honorary cracker out of you yet.”

  4

  South Carolina

  SHADES OF GRAY

  Oh I’m a good old rebel, that’s what I am….

  I won’t be reconstructed, and I don’t give a damn.

  —INNES RANDOLPH, “A Good Old Rebel,” 1870

  Since my arrival in the Carolinas, hardly a day had passed without some snippet about the Civil War appearing in the newspaper: a school debate on whether to play “Dixie” at ball games; an upcoming Civil War reenactment; a readers’ forum on the rebel flag. But one morning a short feature jumped off the page like a tabloid item about Elvis on Mars.

  YANKEE STATUE FOUND IN KINGSTREE

  Kingstree, S.C.—Another Civil War soldier—AWOL for nearly a century—has been found deep behind enemy lines. While a Rebel statue stands watch over the cold New England coast, a granite Yankee keeps close watch over this small Southern town.

  Switched at birth?

  Neither community knows for sure.

  The story reported that townsfolk in York, Maine, had discovered that their decades-old Civil War memorial bore “a striking resemblance to Colonel Sanders.” Meanwhile, citizens of Kingstree, South Carolina, had long harbored doubts about their Civil War statue, which looked suspiciously like Billy Yank. “The mixed-up monument mystery,” the story concluded, “may never be unraveled, and it is growing weirder by the day.”