Confederates in the Attic

by Tony Horwitz

  “When you sign a book for a friend, it means something, but it means nothing if you sign everyone’s,” he explained. “Also, I find autograph-seekers obnoxious, very unmannerly. I rebuff them for that reason, too.”

  I was glad I’d forgotten to bring several of his books to sign. I also sensed that Foote’s initial aloofness, which I’d taken for a distinctly un-Southern frostiness on his part, was more akin to gentlemanly reserve: an old-fashioned, rather English sense of friendship and respect for personal space. There are people one knows and people one doesn’t. One shouldn’t cheapen the former by feigning intimacy with the latter. Like so much else about Foote, there was irony here. A private, almost reclusive man who wrote with a dip-pen and distrusted modernity, Foote had gained his greatest fame appearing before millions of television viewers in the guise of a warm and folksy raconteur.

  Many Southerners I’d spoken to felt betrayed by Foote’s appearance in the Burns series, which diehards regarded as wicked Northern propaganda. Foote disagreed, though he did feel “there is some justice to the claim that slavery was overemphasized.” To Foote, the Confederacy’s avowed commitment to states’ rights wasn’t simply a fig leaf for a defense of slavery. “It’s ridiculous now to talk about the right to secede; it was not ridiculous in 1861,” he said. “Not one of those thirteen colonies would have joined the Union if they hadn’t believed they could get out of it.”

  Foote’s views on race were also complex. He’d been raised during a period of frequent lynchings and unthinking bigotry. “Brazil nuts were called ‘nigger toes’ and a sling shot was a ‘nigger shooter,’” he said. But Foote had bucked the Southern trend and supported integration early on. He also quit his Sons of Confederate Veterans’ chapter when it chose to honor George Wallace on a visit to Memphis, and later abandoned plans to build a home on the Alabama coast because of a strong Klan presence there.

  Nor did Foote subscribe to romantic Southern views of the Lost Cause. Militarily, he believed, the Cause was always lost. Ideologically, the Cause was easy to mythologize precisely because it was lost. “The Civil War monument in my hometown calls the Confederacy the ‘only nation that lived and died without sin,’” he said. “Well, it’s easy to stay pure if you’re never put to the test.”

  The victorious North had been put to the test, and in Foote’s view it had flunked. “Slavery was the first great sin of this nation,” Foote said. “The second great sin was emancipation, or rather the way it was done. The government told four million people, ‘You are free. Hit the road.’ Three-quarters of them couldn’t read or write. The tiniest fraction of them had any profession that they could enter.”

  Foote felt the consequences of Reconstruction were still with us. But the fault wasn’t all with the government or with white Americans. “What has dismayed me so much is the behavior of blacks. They are fulfilling every dire prophecy the Ku Klux Klan made. It’s no longer safe to be on the streets in black neighborhoods. They are acting as if the utter lie about blacks being somewhere between ape and man were true.”

  Like the obscene ditty about Abraham Lincoln, this was a side of Shelby Foote that hadn’t come through in Burns’s documentary. Foote also displayed an intricate sympathy for the early KKK, which ex-Confederates formed immediately after the War to combat what they regarded as the cruel excesses of Reconstruction. “The Klan takes some careful talking about, it’s easy to misinterpret what I’m fixing to say,” Foote cautioned. “But in some ways the Klan was very akin to the Free French Resistance to Nazi occupation. To expect people who fought as valiantly as these people did to roll over and play dead because there was an occupying army is kind of crazy.”

  Foote also admired Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Klan’s first Imperial Wizard, a slave trader before the War, and a rebel commander who allegedly permitted the slaughter of surrendering black troops at a battle called Fort Pillow. Foote regarded Forrest as one of the “two authentic geniuses” of the War (Lincoln being the other). A daring cavalry commander, Forrest was the only soldier on either side to rise from private to lieutenant general in the course of the War, and his lightning tactics later inspired Rommel’s use of blitzkrieg in World War II.

  In Foote’s view, Forrest was also “a fine man. My black friends abhor him. They want to take his statue down, dig up his and his wife’s bones, and throw them to the wind. But it is not known generally that he dissolved the Klan when it turned ugly.”

  Disbanded around 1870 (owing not only to Forrest, but also to a government crackdown), the Klan revived in 1915 following the success of the movie Birth of a Nation and quickly became a potent force nationwide. “The Klan that people remember today is the Klan of the 1920s,” Foote said. “Anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish, anti-black. Forrest’s Klan was anti-black but not opposed to all black people. It was trying to keep illiterate blacks from occupying positions like sheriff and judge.”

  Foote’s views on the Confederate battle flag were equally nuanced. In his view, those who saw the banner as synonymous with slavery had their history wrong. The battle flag was a combat standard, not a political symbol. “It stood for law, honor, love of country,” Foote said, and the banner was revered as such by the veterans who had fought under it.

  At the same time, Foote recognized that the flag had become “a banner of shame and disgrace and hate.” But he pinned the blame for this on educated Southerners who allowed white supremacists to misuse the flag during the civil rights struggle. “Freedom Riders were a pretty weird-looking group to Southerners,” Foote said. “The men had odd haircuts and strange baggy clothes and seemed to associate with people with an intimacy that we didn’t allow. So the so-called right-thinking people of the South said, ‘They’re sending their riffraff down here. Let our riffraff take care of them.’ Then they sat back while the good ol’ boys in the pickup trucks took care of it, under the Confederate banner. That’s when right-thinking people should have stepped in and said, ‘Don’t use that banner, that’s not what it stands for.’ But they didn’t. So now it’s a symbol of evil to a great many people, and I understand that.”

  Foote paused to answer the phone, as he’d done several times. There had been a request to give a speech (denied), a query about Methodism in the War (answered), a question about slavery in Kentucky (deferred). And always the same curmudgeonly tone, as Foote glared at the phone, then picked it up, wearily telling each caller, “You’re speaking to him.”

  Reminded that I was yet another consumer of his scarce time, I moved to the topic I’d most wanted to ask Foote about. I’d enjoyed his novel Shiloh, and also read about his frequent visits to the battlefield, a place he evidently regarded with mystic awe. Shiloh lay several hours’ drive east of Memphis. I wanted to know what Foote found so special about Shiloh, and what I might look for during my own visit there.

  “For me, something emanates from that ground,” he said, “the way memory sometimes leaps up at you unexpectedly.” His great-grandfather fought at Shiloh. And it was a landscape Foote had traveled over many times in his literary imagination. “If you’ve drawn a picture or written about a particular historical incident in a particular place, the place belongs to you in a sense. I feel that way about Shiloh, a sense of proprietorship.”

  Foote had visited Shiloh over twenty times, and once escorted Faulkner there (stopping en route to find a bootlegger so the bibulous writer could down a Sunday morning whiskey). Foote always tried to visit on the anniversary of battle, if possible at dawn when the battle started, and then follow the fighting through the day. This allowed him to reconstruct the battle and appreciate how everything from the foliage to the angle of sunlight influenced the outcome. “If the light and the leaves and the weather are right,” he said, “I swear I can see and hear soldiers coming through the trees.”

  The phone rang again. Hanging up, Foote glanced at his watch. I’d been there all morning and sensed my audience was through. We stepped out of his study and back into the present. For all its faults, the late twentieth
century had its rewards, including the Mercedes sports car in which Foote offered me a lift to a hotel downtown.

  As we tooled into Memphis, past a hideous strip of franchise outlets, Foote retreated again to the 1860s. He’d recently read several soldiers’ memoirs and been struck, as so often before, by the essential difference between their mindset and ours. “It is the simplicity of the people that fascinates me,” he said. “Their minds don’t seem to have been cluttered like ours, they didn’t have all the hesitations about things being right or wrong. They knew, and they acted.”

  Foote pulled over at a small park, almost lost amid the mess of modern Memphis. Disheveled men with brown bags lay splayed across benches. At the center of the park rose a massive equestrian statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest. “They ruined it when they cleaned it,” Foote said. “It used to be a dark green bronze. Now it looks like it’s made out of Hershey bars.” The statue had also been vandalized on several occasions.

  Staring at the monument, I tried to understand a little of what drew Foote to Forrest. The cavalryman’s deep-set eyes, narrow face and long, pointed beard certainly matched the sobriquet Sherman had once given him: “the very Devil.” Here was a man who had little hesitation about right and wrong. He knew and he acted. “War means fightin’ and fightin’ means killin’,” Forrest famously declared.

  To Foote, Forrest also epitomized certain “antique virtues,” such as cunning and initiative, which had been lost in our own century’s warfare. “A soldier is no longer a thinking bayonet. He’s a blip on a radar screen. You can abolish him by pushing a button.” Forrest, by contrast, almost single-handedly changed the outcome of several battles. He also had twenty-nine mounts shot from under him, while managing to personally kill thirty Yankees—a feat that led Forrest to boast that he came out “a horse ahead at the end.”

  There was something else Foote admired about Forrest. The crude and contentious cavalryman offered an obvious contrast to the gentlemanly perfection of Robert E. Lee. “In my day, and I think still to a considerable degree, Lee was a Christ figure, without sin,” Foote said. “Nothing pleases me more than to find some shortcoming in Lee, because it humanizes him.”

  We returned to the car and pulled back into traffic. “I abhor the idea of a perfect world,” Foote said. “It would bore me to tears.”

  8

  Tennessee

  THE GHOST MARKS OF SHILOH

  History, n. An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.

  —AMBROSE BIERCE, The Devil’s Dictionary

  I’m late for Western Civ. A blue exam notebook lies on my desk. Everyone else is already taking the test. I open the blue book. A question about Greece swims before my eyes. “What’s wrong?” the student next to me asks. “Didn’t you study?”

  The motel alarm jolted me awake. I lay staring at the digital red 4:00 winking from beside the bed, wondering where I was. Corinth. Corinth, Mississippi. Corinthian columns. Western Civ.

  An all-night omelet shop cast a sallow glow across the motel parking lot. It looked like a place Edward Hopper might have gone to sketch a solitary diner. Except that the restaurant was packed. I wedged onto a stool beside a man with “Jerry” stitched on his work shirt. He drank black coffee and blew perfect smoke rings. I asked him why the place was so busy at 4 A.M.

  “Busy? Shit. You should’a been here an hour ago, when the bar crowd was here.”

  Bar crowd? Arriving in Corinth late the night before, I’d had trouble finding a hamburger, much less a beer. “Hard to believe, but this used to be a rowdy-ass town,” Jerry said. That was before the Baptist majority voted to go dry and close the town’s beer joints. Later, they repented and voted to permit hard liquor (which for some reason citizens judged easier to control). After several decades of losing beer revenue to nearby Tennessee, Corinthians had changed their mind again. “At the last election,” Jerry said, “we voted liquor out and beer in.” So the bars were hopping again.

  Jerry, though, didn’t look like the late-night drinking type. “What brings you here?” I asked him.

  “Force of habit. Ate here for ten years before punching in at the garment factory at six.” These days, Jerry raised laboratory mice instead. “Rat cage don’t open till eight,” he said. But he couldn’t break the predawn ritual. The other customers were mostly loggers, farmers and truckers. Jerry dropped his cigarette in a pile of grits. “How’s about you, stranger?”

  “Just passing through.” I paused. “It’s the anniversary of the battle of Shiloh. I’m headed up there to check things out.”

  “At four in the fucking a.m.?” Jerry said it so loud that everyone at the counter turned their heads.

  I looked into my coffee. “The battle started at five. I’d sort of planned to be out there by then.”

  Jerry shook his head. The others shrugged and returned to their eggs. “Guess you got to go the whole nine yards,” he said.

  The road north from Corinth climbed through gentle hills and crossed into Tennessee. My headlights picked up the occasional logging truck and the usual snapshots of rural Southern life: a railroad crossing called Cotton Plant, a G-Whiz convenience store, a trailer labeled Worms for Sale, a small wooden church with a huge sign that blared, PRAYER IS A TRUCK HEADED FOR GOD’S WAREHOUSE.

  In half an hour I sped across terrain that the rebel army spent three days slogging through in the muddy spring of 1862. Ulysses S. Grant and 40,000 Federals lay camped by the Tennessee River, near a log church called Shiloh. Grant awaited reinforcements so he could move south and attack the crucial rail junction at Corinth. But the Confederate commander, Albert Sidney Johnston, decided to strike first and dispatched his men north from Mississippi to surprise the encamped Federals. “Tonight we will water our horses in the Tennessee River!” he told his officers at dawn on the day of battle.

  Instead, at midafternoon, Johnston lay dead near Shiloh’s Peach Orchard after leading a charge on his horse Fire-eater. The rebels fought on, almost pushing Grant’s men into the river. But during the night, steamboats ferried Federal reinforcements across the river; the Union army counterattacked at dawn, recapturing the ground it had lost the previous day. The Confederates straggled back through the mud to Corinth, which they abandoned seven weeks later. At Shiloh, the South lost its last best chance to halt Grant’s conquest of the western Confederacy.

  In April 1862, the Shiloh church had ministered to a backwoods settlement of 150 souls who eked out a living from fruit orchards, beeswax and small plots of cotton and corn. Today, Shiloh wasn’t much more: an unincorporated crossroads with a gas station, a convenience store, and a run-down building labeled “Shiloh Souvenirs” with a window display of minié balls, rusted pocketknives, and slivers labeled “Petrified Wood. Very old.”

  Spotting a sign for the battlefield, I became suddenly giddy. Like Shelby Foote, I’d always felt drawn to Shiloh, though for me the tug came from childhood fantasy rather than family ties or firsthand visits. When I’d first read about and painted the battle as a boy, Shiloh—“place of peace” in the Bible—sounded haunting and beautiful, nothing like the bluntly named Bull Run or the Germanic towns of Gettysburg and Fredericksburg. Only Antietam rolled off the tongue in as lovely a way. But Antietam lay within the same fifty-mile orbit of my boyhood home as the Virginia and Pennsylvania battlefields.

  Shiloh lay a world away, in a wilderness of lazy rivers, log cabins and tersely named creeks: Dill, Owl, Snake, Lick. Deepening Shiloh’s mystique was the dearth of documentary images from the battle. Wartime photographers rarely ventured west of the Appalachians. The photographic history of the War I’d studied with my father included only one unstaged picture from Shiloh: a tantalizing shot of Union paddle wheelers docking at Pittsburg Landing, beside the battlefield. The wide, slow Tennessee snaked behind. I could almost see a log raft floating past with a boy in a straw hat and britches tossing a catfish line over the side.

  No
w, the real battlefield lay before me in the predawn gloom. I turned in at the park gate, switching off my headlights lest a ranger apprehend me for entering outside of official hours. Inching along in the dark, I parked near the spot on my tourist map labeled Fraley Field. It was here in J. C. Fraley’s cottonfield, at dawn on April 6th, that Northern sentries first encountered the oncoming rebel army.

  Crumpled Bud Lite cans lay on the ground beside a parked car. A match flared inside. Another Civil War addict waiting for dawn? I rapped lightly on the window. The glass came down just enough for me to glimpse two startled teenagers smoking in the front seat. “Do you know how I get out to Fraley Field from here?” I asked. The driver shook his head, started the engine and sped off. Shiloh, like many other battlefields, doubled as a lovers lane after dark.

  I stood in the gloom, shivering and feeling suddenly silly. My breakfast companion was right; what was I doing here at four-whatever in the fucking a.m.? If tramping through the woods before dawn was so damned transcendent, why hadn’t Shelby Foote accepted my invitation to come along?

  Twigs crunched and a voice called out from the dark. “Fraley Field’s over here, I think.” A figure approached and flicked on a cigarette lighter. He was heavyset, about my own age, and clad in a windbreaker and ski cap. “My great-great-grandfather was doing picket duty out here right about now, a hundred thirty-three years ago. Weird to think, isn’t it?”