Confederates in the Attic

by Tony Horwitz

  The lighter flicked off. It was 4:55—the precise moment when the battle began—and stars still winked in the pitch-black sky. “In the books they talk about ‘gray streaks of dawn’ when the fighting started,” the man said. “But I don’t see any gray or any dawn.” I was confused, too. Then it occurred to me. “They didn’t have daylight savings back then.” So 4:55 in April 1862 would be equivalent to 5:55 today. In Shelby Foote’s terms, we were an hour too early.

  We found a log and sat talking by intermittent Bic-light. Bryson Powers was a thirty-eight-year-old bus driver from Minneapolis. Laid off a year before, he’d moved in with his mother. To escape the house during the day, he visited the genealogy section at the local library and learned that his great-great-grandfather had served in the Civil War. Powers followed the paper trail from birth records to enlistment papers to muster rolls and finally to the files of the Cincinnati Sanitary Commission.

  “He joins the Sixteenth Wisconsin in the late fall of ’61, travels by train from Wisconsin to St. Louis, then by boat to Pittsburg Landing just in time to march out here,” Powers said. “Then he gets shot in the knee and sent to a hospital in Cincinnati. He dies there a few weeks later. That’s his war.”

  Powers’s war remained incomplete. “I want to know the whole story,” he said. Rehired to his bus-driving job, he’d saved enough money to take a week off and come down here. He flew to Memphis and rented a car because he didn’t want to tour the South with Minnesota plates. “In case I broke down on some back road,” he said. Even so, he’d been stricken with panic when the car rental agent told him the quickest route to Shiloh cut through the northern rim of Mississippi. Powers had taken the long way instead, through Tennessee. “This is the first time I’ve been South, just like my great-great-grandfather.” He laughed nervously. “Hope my trip ends better than his.”

  The sky had edged from black to dark gray, allowing us to make out a path through the woods. As we emerged at the fringe of Fraley Field, Powers grasped my arm and pointed at something in a clump of trees about fifty yards off. “A deer?” he whispered. The form shifted and split into two. There was a murmur of voices and I thought I could see the silhouette of a rifle. It was just as Foote had described; you could almost see soldiers coming through the trees.

  As we crept forward I heard a man say, “Breckinridge and Polk must have come up right through there.” It was the familiar banter of Civil War bores. I relaxed. But Powers still held back. I guessed he’d never met reenactors on his bus route in Minneapolis.

  “Looky there,” one of the men called out in an exaggerated drawl. “Some goddamn Yankee sentries.” He lowered the gun from his shoulder. “Twenty-fourth Tennessee,” he called out. “Who goes?

  “Sixteenth Wisconsin,” Powers called back.

  “We gave you blue-bellies a helluva time here, didn’t we?”

  “Shot me in the knee,” Powers replied. He checked his watch. “Right about now, my guys are breaking up campfires and saying ‘Oh shit’ as you guys start charging through the woods.”

  The four of us stood silently in the ankle-high dew, listening to the hum of truck traffic out beyond the shield of trees. Then, as the sky shifted from gray to pink, the scene around us began to unfold: a gently swelling field, a stream bed, dogwoods blooming white along the edge of the dark woods.

  We could also see each other’s faces and awkwardly introduced our modern selves. The man with the musket—and a Diet Dr. Pepper in his other hand—was Steve Oxford, a big, bushy-bearded man in a leather jacket and jogging pants. His friend, a lean, clean-cut man in jeans, was Mike Brantley. They both worked for phone companies in Nashville and timed their vacations to coincide with the anniversaries of Civil War battles.

  “This was my great-grandfather’s gun, so I thought I’d bring it back,” Oxford said. “Actually, he was shot here, dropped his gun and picked this one up from a Yankee.” He showed us where the gun’s original Northern owner had carved his name in the butt. “You didn’t have an ancestor named Melton, did you?” he asked hopefully.

  Powers shook his head. “My great-great-grandfather was in Peabody’s regiment, on picket.” He pointed back the way we’d come. “He would have been somewhere back there, I guess, standing behind a tree. The way I understood it, he stuck his leg out for a moment and got shot.”

  Oxford’s rebel forebear had charged out from the other side of the field. “His unit got waxed somewhere over there,” he said, pointing at the stream bed. “He took one in the hip.” Brantley’s great-grandfather traveled the same route. He survived the battle, but not the War.

  The three men turned to me. I explained that I had no ancestors here and told them about my visit with Shelby Foote. Then I asked why they were out here at dawn.

  “Time travel, like Foote talked about,” Brantley said. “I always think of Patton in the movie. You know the scene when he looks out at that ancient battlefield and hears a trumpet, like he’s been there before, way back when?”

  Oxford nodded. “I’m half hoping this gun will start glowing and shaking and getting real heavy. You know, telling me exactly where my great-grandfather picked it up.” He laughed. “He’s probably looking down from heaven at me now and thinking, ‘You damned fool, let it go. If I’d had any brains, I’d have hung back from the charge shouting “I’ll be right there!” like I had the Tennessee two-step.’” That was Civil War slang for the runs.

  Powers felt the same ancestral tug. “I guess I want to know more about him,” he said. “I mean, I’ve got the paperwork. He was born in 1834, had three kids, enlisted in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin. So did his father. It was fall, they probably wanted a paycheck. They were probably thinking, ‘It’s going to be winter in Wisconsin, not going to get anything done, so let’s go South.’ They put Xs next to their names. Couldn’t write a thing.”

  He paused. “I drive a city bus in Minneapolis. I’ve had lots of blacks on the bus call me names. There’s some kind of irony to that. My great-great-grandfather wore blue and got killed so blacks could come up North and call his great-great-grandson a motherfucker.”

  The others laughed. “What do you think of the South?” Brantley asked.

  “Well, your friend here has a gun so I don’t know what I should say. I’ve heard Southerners are more likely to knock your block off.”

  “We’ll let it slide this time, Yank,” Oxford drawled. “Have you tried some of our fine Southern food?”

  “Not yet. I’ve been hitting McDonald’s and Taco Bell so far. Food groups I’m used to.”

  “You got to try some scratch biscuits and red-eye gravy,” Brantley said.

  “What’s red-eye gravy?”

  “Basically water and grease.”

  A woodpecker banged madly in the woods nearby. “Machine gun!” Oxford joked, ducking to the ground.

  It was full dawn now. My feet were soaked with dew and I suddenly felt cold. The magic had slipped away, and so had the easy intimacy of standing in the dark telling personal history to strangers. “Well, this is going to be a regular thing for us,” Oxford said, extending a hand. “Maybe we’ll see you Yanks out here next year.”

  We strolled back through the woods. I noticed now that my sedan lay a few yards from a Nissan Sentra and a Chevy Bronco. Unlike the armies of North and South, we could take a break from battle, sit inside our vehicles and turn on the heat for a few minutes before marching on.

  When the Tennesseans drove off, Powers got out of his car and came over to mine. “I didn’t want to say it in front of the others,” he said, “but when that guy asked how I felt about the South, I wanted to say, ‘I’ve been to Canada and everyone talks and seems pretty much like me. But down here, it’s like a foreign country.’”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe it’s the Civil War thing, my being shot here—Henry Powers I mean. But I still feel like they look at me and say to themselves, ‘Damn Yank.’ I know it sounds silly but I almost feel like it’s dangerous down here. That guy w
ith the gun—I saw him at first and thought, ‘He’s pointing it at me.’”

  Powers laughed at himself, not so nervous now. “But you know, those guys were okay, and I found myself thinking, if they were up in Minnesota or I was down in Tennessee, maybe we’d be friends. Then I started thinking, maybe it was the same for my great-great-grandfather. That reb who shot him in the leg was probably a farmer like him, and about the same age. If they’d ever had a chance to talk instead of shoot at each other, maybe that whole bloody mess would have turned out different.”

  Powers had one more mission before leaving Fraley Field. Shiloh, like other battlefield parks, was dotted with historic markers recording the movements and deeds of individual units. Powers pulled out a map of Shiloh he’d bought at the park headquarters the day before. It looked like an oil prospector’s chart, with tiny, numbered dots and an index that you needed a magnifying glass to decipher.

  “I think I’m just over there,” Powers said, pointing to the edge of Fraley Field. We hiked over and found a post with a plaque that said: “21st Missouri and Pickets of Peabody’s (1st) Brig., Prentiss’s (6th) Div., Army of the Tennessee. The 21st Mo., 3 companies of 25th Mo., 2 companies of 12th Mich. and 4 companies of 16th Wisconsin were engaged here April 6, 1862.”

  Somewhere in this forest of numerals was an illiterate twenty-seven-year-old from Wisconsin named Henry Powers. I left his great-great-grandson there, silently studying the plaque and the field surrounding it.

  THE DAY DAWNED just as it had on April 6th in 1862—“clear, beautiful and still,” in the words of Sam Watkins, a Confederate private who wrote a famous memoir about the War called Co. Aytch. It was at Shiloh that Watkins experienced his first true taste of battle—“seeing the elephant,” as Civil War soldiers called it. Fully 85 percent of rebels at Shiloh and 60 percent of Federals had never seen the elephant before. Advancing toward what Watkins called the “bang, boom, whirr-siz-siz-siz” of battle, he saw many of his comrades stricken with loose bowels, and glimpsed one man shooting off a finger to avoid the fight. Watkins’s own bravado faltered at a field littered with dead and wounded. “I must confess that I never realized the ‘pomp and circumstance’ of the thing called glorious war until I saw this,” he wrote.

  A staggering number of soldiers at Shiloh would never see the elephant again. One in four became casualties of the two-day battle, and the toll on both sides—24,000 in all—surpassed the combined American casualties in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the Mexican War. This “grim arithmetic,” as Shelby Foote called it, sobered those both North and South who thought the War would end quickly and with little bloodshed.

  I left my car parked by Fraley Field and pushed north on foot, as the Confederates had done after crushing the thin blue line of Yankee scouts. My plan was to take Foote’s advice and follow the battle as it progressed through the first day. This would take me across a broad plateau that ended abruptly at a hundred-foot-high bluff by the Tennessee River. Apart from the cliff and several streams and ravines, there were few landmarks. Nor had the battle much altered the terrain. In 1862 generals still hewed to Napoleonic tactics; they thought trench-digging would demoralize troops and discourage them from going on the offensive.

  So early on the first day of battle, Confederates easily overran the surprised and unfortified Union camps. Some rebels paused to loot greenbacks, rations and clothes from their better-supplied foes. But the Federals quickly regrouped, and by midmorning Shiloh became a hot, pitched battle. Near Fraley Field, I found a marker quoting a rebel’s first sight of stiff Union resistance. T at last saw a row of little globes of smoke streaked with crimson, breaking out with spurtive quickness from a long line of bluey figures in front; and, simultaneously, there broke upon our ears an appalling crash of sound.” The author of this stilted prose was a young journalist-to-be from Arkansas who would later become famous for uttering another improbable phrase: “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”

  Henry Stanley was but one among a cast of future celebrities at Shiloh. The Union generals included Grant (then still an up-and-comer shadowed by rumors of alcoholism), his deputy William Tecumseh Sherman (who had recently returned to the army after a nervous breakdown) and Lew Wallace, later to become author of Ben Hur. Also on hand were John Wesley Powell (who lost an arm here, but still navigated the Colorado River and Grand Canyon after the War), William Le Baron Jenney (a future Chicago architect and “father of the skyscraper”), and a young soldier named Ambrose Bierce, whose morbid short story, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” would become a staple of junior high reading lists.

  Bierce also wrote a nonfiction essay called “What I Saw at Shiloh.” What he saw, through his Midwest farmboy’s eyes, was a forest so primeval that “I should not have been surprised to see sleek leopards.” Leaving the paved road and plunging into the woods, I sensed a bit of what Bierce described. Treetops blotted out the sun. Each path dwindled to a rutted trace before dead-ending in a tangled thicket or brambly streambed. Advancing through these woods, rebel units became so lost and confused that they began slaughtering each other. Friendly fire, or “fratricide incidents” as they were known then, were so endemic at Shiloh that a Louisiana colonel later recalled, “We feared friend more than foe.”

  Bushwhacking over moss-slick stones and fallen trees, I finally found my way back to a road. It was still an hour before the park’s opening time. But I spotted a man in what looked like a rebel uniform, marching alone with a walking stick and a flag I didn’t recognize. Catching up with him, I called out hello. He turned, nodded solemnly, and said, “It’s a good day to die.”

  The man’s long black hair, droopy mustache and unkempt beard looked appropriately nineteenth century. But his uniform was a mishmash: gray Confederate kepi, blue jeans, work boots, and camouflage jacket. It was the sort of motley getup of which Rob Hodge would disapprove. But Scott Sams wasn’t a reenactor, at least not in the usual sense. “This is a religious thing for me,” he said. “Christians have Easter Sunday and midnight mass. I’ve got Shiloh on the anniversary of battle.”

  Sams was thirty-five and worked at what he called “a pretty dull job,” putting phones in boxes at a factory in Chattanooga. Eight years ago, while driving home from Graceland, he’d stopped at Shiloh on what happened to be the battle’s anniversary. “The whole Elvis thing seemed so phony to me, but sunrise here was different. I felt this incredible rush I couldn’t explain.” So he’d returned every April 6th since, driving all night after work and sleeping in his car for the few hours until dawn.

  Each year, Sams explored a different aspect of the battle: the role of artillery, for instance, or a theme, such as fear. His costume was a way of getting deeper into the experience, a sort of pilgrim’s scallop. The army jacket was the one he’d worn during his own army service in Germany. The flag was a replica of the banner carried by a Tennessee unit at Shiloh.

  Sams also carried the same map of the park Bryson Powers had shown me, covered with topographical lines and tiny circles and squares labeling monuments and markers. “I’m a concrete person, not an abstract one,” Sams said. “I try to look out over the field and see what they saw. It doesn’t fall into place until I look hard at the ground, but then it’s click, click, click.”

  Running his finger across the chart, he explained that the hundreds of red circles denoted “the good guys,” while blue represented Union positions. Pointing at a rash of blue and red dots in an otherwise blank section of map labeled Lost Field, he plunged straight into the woods. “My theme for this year is chaos,” he called over his shoulder.

  I scrambled after him. Ten minutes later, scratched and sweaty, we emerged in a small clearing. This was the aptly named Lost Field. Several markers to Mississippi units skirted one edge. A marker labeled Burial Place: 49th Illinois Infantry perched at the field’s center. Judging from the close-packed graves, this lonely glade had witnessed one of the short, sharp clashes that together comprised what Foote called the “disorganized, mur
derous fistfight” that was Shiloh.

  Sams turned to me with a contented grin. “You always read about the confusion,” he said, “with all these panicked units wandering through the woods and bumping into each other.” He gazed across the cramped, grave-strewn field. “Click, click, click,” he said.

  As we straggled back to the road, Sams showed me another grave: a stone in the shape of an oak stump, etched with the name “J. D. Putnam.” A short text on the stump said: “His comrades buried him where he fell and cut his name in an oak tree which stood here. In 1901, Thomas Steele recognized the burial place, the name he helped to cut in 1862 still being legible on the stump.” The Wisconsin veterans replaced the stump with this granite replica as a permanent marker of their position at the battle.

  “I like to think of these old guys coming back and remembering what they went through as young men,” Sams said. “No other war in America could both sides come back and say, ‘This is where it happened, this is what I did.’”

  Glancing at Sams’s map, I realized we stood near the scene of the battle’s climax, at the so-called Hornet’s Nest. I asked Sams if he wanted to have a look. He shook his head. The park opened soon and he wanted to finish his mission before Shiloh filled with visitors. “I’ve got some chaos to check out over by Bloody Pond,” he said, vanishing into the trees.

  The Hornet’s Nest was a tangled copse of small trees and brush. A split-rail fence ran along its front, just beside a wagon trail known as the Sunken Road. On the other side of the road lay a bucolic pasture called Duncan Field. On the first day at Shiloh, 6,000 Federals crouched in the Hornet’s Nest and Sunken Road, fighting back eleven rebel charges across Duncan Field. The twelfth charge—aided by what was then the largest artillery barrage in U.S. history—finally forced the Union defenders to surrender. But the Yankees’ staunch defense of the Nest turned the whole battle, stalling the rebels long enough for Grant to regroup and take on reinforcements. Or so I’d always read.