Confederates in the Attic

by Tony Horwitz

  Stuart fell gamely enough, shot off his horse while emptying a pistol at George Custer’s cavalry just north of Richmond. Only thirty-one, he quickly joined Stonewall in the pantheon of Confederate gods. But the site of Stuart’s last battle seemed as elusive as the fleet horseman had been in life. The crossroads where the eponymous Yellow Tavern once stood now featured a car lot, a body shop, and a Go-Kart store. Even the name had vanished from the map. The commercial sprawl surrounding the crossroads now belonged to a Richmond suburb called Glen Allen. Apart from a roadside historical marker—perched beside the Cavalier Motel—there was no hint of the fight that claimed one of the War’s most colorful and courageous figures.

  Finally, after wandering a maze of cul-de-sacs and housing tracts—Jeb Stuart Parkway, Stonewall Glen, Lee’s Crossing—we found an obelisk within earshot of the interstate. Erected in 1888 by Stuart’s men, the monument bore a classic paeon to Southern manhood: “He was Fearless and Faithful, Pure and Powerful, Tender and True.” We stood there for a few minutes, trying to conjure the gallant Cavalier over the roar of truck traffic on I-95 and the insistent pock-pock of a tennis ball from a nearby court. Sic transit Yellow Tavern.

  Later, after talking to historians and touring other lost corners of the Civil War landscape, I began to grasp the melancholy logic of Yellow Tavern’s demise and that of so many other sites. While other wars on American soil occurred largely along the frontier, the major clashes of the Civil War were mostly fought for control of rail junctions, crossroads, and river or sea ports: Manassas, Atlanta, Charleston, Chattanooga, Fredericksburg, Petersburg, and so on. During America’s rapid industrialization in the fifty years after the War, many of these transportation hubs naturally grew into commercial and manufacturing centers. What highways and office blocks hadn’t yet claimed, suburbs were now devouring. Only at isolated battlegrounds such as Antietam and Shiloh was there much hope of the historic landscape remaining relatively pristine.

  LEAVING YELLOW TAVERN, we sidled around Richmond, as Lee and Grant had done in 1864. Once again, the armies met on ground they’d fought over before: the gentle hills and swampy streams east of Richmond, where Lee drove back George McClellan in 1862. We decided to tour only the latter campaign and headed for Cold Harbor, where the fighting climaxed in early June of 1864.

  Cold Harbor wasn’t actually a port and it certainly wasn’t cold; on the day we visited the temperature soared to 95. Harbor was believed to be an archaic English term for a tavern, and Cold a reference to the food served there. Either that, or Cold was a corruption of coal. Or, possibly, the whole name referred to a pleasant rest stop originally known as Cool Arbor. Whatever.

  The tavern had vanished along with much of the battleground, covered now in suburban homes, including one tract incongruously named Strawberry Fields. What remained was a small, peaceful glen with Union and Confederate trenches separated by a few hundred yards of flat, almost open ground. After the Wilderness and Spotsylvania, Grant believed Lee’s army was exhausted. So he ordered a Somme-style assault that he thought would crush his well-entrenched but badly outmanned foe.

  His soldiers knew better. On the night before the dawn attack, one of Grant’s staff officers observed: “Many of the soldiers had taken off their coats, and seemed to be engaged in sewing up rents in them. This exhibition of tailoring seemed rather peculiar at such a moment, but upon closer examination it was found that the men were calmly writing their names and home addresses on slips of paper, and pinning them on the backs of their coats, so that their dead bodies might be recognized upon the field, and their fate made known to their families at home.”

  At 4:40 A.M. on June 3rd, 60,000 Federals poured out of their trenches along a front of seven miles. The waiting Confederates replied with a fusillade so fierce that windows rattled in Richmond, twelve miles away. “The division in front seemed to melt away like snow falling on moist ground,” a Union soldier later wrote. In a matter of minutes the Federals lost over 6,000 men. “When I got by myself where I would not be ashamed of it,” a Vermont soldier wrote home after the failed charge, “I cried like a whipped spanniel [sic].”

  Grant later acknowledged that the assault was the worst blunder of his military career. But he compounded the slaughter by leaving hundreds of wounded men howling in the hot June sun. In one of the most callous episodes of this or any other war, Grant and Lee dickered for days over the terms of gathering the wounded from between their lines. Grant didn’t want to lose face by requesting a formal truce; Lee, who had none of his own troops in the no-man’s-land, saw little reason to give in. As the haggling went on, Shelby Foote wrote, “The cries of the injured, who now had been three days without water or relief from pain, sank to a mewling.”

  Grant finally caved and called for a ceasefire. When Union litter-bearers climbed out of their trenches, four days after the assault, they found only two men still alive amongst the piles of stinking corpses. One burial party discovered a dead Yankee with a diary in his pocket, the last entry of which read: “June 3. Cold Harbor. I was killed.”

  From Cold Harbor we crawled through dense traffic into downtown Richmond. The former capital of the Confederacy was now a bustling urban center of 750,000 and the tail of a megalopolis whose head lay at abolitionist Boston. But Richmond’s integration into the extended “Bos-Wash” corridor was relatively recent, and the city seemed somehow more Southern than I’d expected. There was a geniality and leisure in the way people spoke and smiled at each other that resonated much more of Memphis or Charleston, a day’s drive away, than of Virginia cities just a short distance north. At a diner, the waitress addressed me as “honey” and drawled the daily special: chicken and dumplings, buttermilk biscuits, fried squash. Somewhere on the stretch of I-95 we’d driven earlier in the day, we’d crossed the invisible line that still separated North from South.

  Southernness branded Richmond in another, spookier way. The city was a vast cenotaph of secession, with tens of thousands of rebel graves, countless monuments, and the remains of Confederate bulwarks, armories, hospitals, prisons, old soldiers’ homes. Confederate history formed such a rich humus beneath modern Richmond that the past sprouted in odd, forgotten spots, the way glimpses of pharaonic grandeur could suddenly appear amidst the chaos of twentieth-century Egypt. On a dead-end street in Richmond’s predominantly black East End, we found a towering shaft modeled on Pompey’s Pillar in Alexandria; a rebel perched on top, gazing out at abandoned factories, highway flyovers and downtown office towers (in one of which Jeb Stuart IV now labored as a stockbroker). At Hollywood Cemetery, Richmond’s answer to Cairo’s City of the Dead, a rough granite pyramid inscribed with the words “Alumni et Patriae Asto” (In Eternal Memory of Those Who Stood for Their Country) overlooked the graves of 18,000 Confederates.

  In a less classical vein, a plaque on a concrete floodwall by the James River stated: “On this site stood Libby Prison C.S.A.” The location of another infamous dungeon, Castle Thunder, was now a parking lot. Jeff Davis’s misnamed executive mansion, the pale-gray “White House of the Confederacy,” now sat in the shadow of a huge hospital complex. We skipped a tour of the house and headed instead for the much greater treasure adjoining it: The Museum of the Confederacy, finest of the Lost Cause’s many reliquaries and the repository of captured rebel flags returned to the South by an act of Congress forty years after Appomattox.

  Rob said we had time for only a fraction of the museum’s exhibit. Predictably, he made a beeline for glass cases containing clothes, mostly those of the men whose lives we’d spent the past few days touring. We began by inspecting the bullet-riddled overcoat worn by John Quincy Marr, whose death site at Fairfax had been the first stop of our Gasm. “This was probably a sumac dye, light purplish gray in the original,” Rob said of the coat’s muddy olive hue. “Oxygen and sunlight dulled its color.”

  We moved to a case displaying Jeb Stuart’s thigh-high boots, plumed hat, white gloves and a portrait of the general that he’d signed, characteristic
ally, “J.E.B. Stuart/Warpath Sept. 3d, 63.” Another glass box held the amputation kit used to sever Stonewall’s arm, as well as an aide’s jacket stained with the great man’s blood. “We’re starting to make those Gasm connections,” Rob said reverentially. “That jacket probably passed along the porch we slept on last night. And that Black and Decker set touched the arm we napped on top of yesterday afternoon.”

  But Rob reserved his deepest awe for the costumes of ordinary foot soldiers: crumpled kepis, tattered brogans and pants made of homespun jean cloth. “It was basically a twilled blend of cotton and wool,” Rob said, expertly studying the trouser fabric. There was also a sewing kit, called a “housewife,” used by soldiers to repair their garments.

  After racing through the other two floors of the museum, we sped across town to a cluster of buildings that had once comprised a Confederate Vatican: a city within a city devoted to a single faith. The enclave, spanning several blocks, embraced a former Confederate soldiers’ home and veterans’ hospital, the Confederate Memorial Chapel and the Confederate Memorial Institute, better known as the “Battle Abbey of the South” (an allusion to the shrine William the Conqueror built to honor the noblemen who fought with him at Hastings). The Abbey contained the most famous artistic tribute to the Lost Cause, a set of murals that mirrored the Bayeux Tapestry’s telling of William’s conquest of England.

  Painted in the grand style by a Frenchman trained at the École des Beaux-Arts, the murals followed a classical conceit, equating the seasons with the brief life-cycle of the Confederacy. “Spring” celebrated the South’s early successes. Stonewall sat astride Little Sorrel as soldiers marched past, waving caps and leaning forward, as though eager to do battle. “The colors are strong but Jackson’s off,” Rob opined.

  “Summer” showed the full Confederate pantheon: Lee, Jackson, Stuart, Longstreet and a half-dozen other generals. “These guys were never all together at once in real life,” Rob said. “Anyway, they look too rigid.”

  “Autumn,” the best of the murals, featured Jeb Stuart leading a charge in full Cavalier regalia. “The total Three Musketeers look,” Rob quipped. “Fluid motion, very nice.” The last mural, “Winter” depicted a collapsed artillery battery with dead horses and gaunt, retreating rebels. “A bit too sentimental,” Rob judged, returning to “Spring” and doing the cycle all over again.

  Rob’s stylistic critique surprised me. “You do any painting?” I asked him.

  “It’s a long story,” he said. I coaxed the short version. Rob, like me, had spent his childhood doodling Civil War scenes. Unlike me, he showed real talent. In high school, he won a statewide art contest with a painting of two rebels on a covered bridge. The prize was a trip to Washington for both Rob and the painting, which went on display at the Capitol for a year. This spurred Rob to major in studio art at Kent State.

  “I wanted to keep doing naturalistic Civil War scenes,” he said, “My teachers wanted me to go back to finger painting. Abstract expressionism, that sort of thing. One teacher called my stuff ‘cornball illustrative bullshit.’ He told me I should get out of art and into something else.” Rob laughed. “I took his advice. Dropped out of college and became a Civil War bum, which is more or less what I’ve been ever since.”

  Painting was a side of Rob I’d known nothing about. A more familiar talent—his flair for drama—emerged a few minutes later, when we crossed the street to the magnolia-girdled headquarters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The building was a mausoleum-like hulk with small windows, a locked front door and a side entrance protected by bulletproof glass, a security camera and a tiny speaker box. Rob pressed a button and asked to come inside. A woman’s voice responded that the building was open only for members.

  Rob stepped back so the camera could take in his gray uniform and the outraged expression on his face. “I’m a Sons of Confederate Veterans member,” he bellowed. “You’re saying that just because I’m a man you can’t let me in?”

  A young woman in a long dress appeared at the door. “I don’t want a scene here,” she sighed, agreeing to give us a brief tour. She led us briskly through hushed hallways lined with glass cases. I glimpsed a soldier’s Bible that deflected a bullet at First Manassas, a replica of Varina Davis’s engagement ring, and a framed picture of Lee’s family tree. In a side office, our guide pointed out a large doll made in the image of the UDC’s founder. Then, passing a closed door, she said, “That’s the room for the Children of the Confederacy.”

  “Is that where they cook up the questions for the catechism quiz?” I asked, recalling the contest I’d seen in North Carolina.

  “I’m not allowed to say,” she said. Rob also tried to engage her in conversation, with equally little success. But then, we’d been on the road for three days without a shower or a change of clothes. The few people we passed gave us a wide berth. I couldn’t blame our guide for whisking us through.

  At the door, I tried one last question: Was it strange, in this day and age, to be sequestered inside a shrine to the 1860s? The woman glanced over her shoulder and whispered, “Strange isn’t the word. Time warp’s more like it.” A recent migrant from New England, the woman had answered an ad in the paper for museum work. There was no mention of the UDC. “I think the only reason they hired me is because my family’s Southern Baptist.” She’d been in culture shock ever since. “Up North the War’s over. Not like here.” She smiled thinly, shut the heavy glass door, and withdrew into her cloister.

  As we sprawled beneath the shade of a magnolia tree, I complimented Rob on his acting job at the door. Rob looked at me quizzically. It turned out he was a Sons of Confederate Veterans member and frequently attended the group’s meetings. Somehow, I’d assumed Rob’s allegiance to the Confederacy didn’t go beyond the sartorial and sentimental. Many SCV members I’d met were rabid defenders of the rebel flag and reactionaries when it came to contemporary politics. As an Ohio-born art student whose personal philosophy seemed, if anything, anarchistic, Rob didn’t quite fit the mold.

  “I think of myself as a liberal Confederate,” he said. “I want the history preserved, and I think the Confederacy’s a great story about men who did incredible things. But I don’t subscribe to a lot of the politics that comes with it.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like race. I don’t give a shit if my sister marries a black guy. Unless he’s a farb.”

  Rob’s comments raised a question I’d been chewing on since the start of my trip. Was there such a thing as politically correct remembrance of the Confederacy? Or was any attempt to honor the Cause inevitably tainted by what Southerners once delicately referred to as their “peculiar institution”?

  The question loomed again—massively so—a few minutes later as we strolled down Richmond’s most famous, or infamous, street: Monument Avenue. The boulevard was lined with statues of the Confederacy’s Holy Trinity—Davis, Lee and Jackson—and of two of their ablest lieutenants, Jeb Stuart and Matthew Fontaine Maury, a naval commander and brilliant oceanographer.

  Having grown up near Washington, where most residents remained oblivious to ubiquitous pigeon-spattered statues of Union generals, I’d never really understood why people made such a fuss over Monument Avenue. But as we peered up at Robert E. Lee astride a rippling steed, I was taken aback. Lee’s bronze statue, set upon a white granite pedestal, stood sixty-one feet. The sculptor had substituted a French hunting horse for Lee’s wartime mount; Traveller was judged too slender a model for such a titanic equestrian. The other monuments were almost as imposing. And their placement on a tree-lined boulevard more than fifty yards wide gave the statues a dominating presence in what was otherwise a low-roofed residential district.

  The scale of Monument Avenue also amplified the weirdness of the whole enterprise. After all, Davis and Lee and Jackson and Stuart weren’t national heroes. In the view of many Americans, they were precisely the opposite: leaders of a rebellion against the nation—separatists at best, traitors at worst. None of
those honored were native Richmonders. And their mission failed. They didn’t call it the Lost Cause for nothing. I couldn’t think of another city in the world that lined its streets with stone leviathans honoring failed rebels against the state.

  I wasn’t alone in harboring such thoughts. We’d arrived in Richmond amidst a fierce debate about the first proposed addition to Monument Avenue in over sixty-five years. Arthur Ashe, the black tennis star and Richmond native, had recently died, and the city planned to honor him with a statue a few blocks from Lee and his fellow Confederates (in statue-studded Richmond, only one monument currently honored a black—Bojangles).

  We learned all this from the local papers while sipping iced tea at a sidewalk cafe. “Thought I felt a tick digging into me,” Rob said, groping in his trousers. With his other hand he slapped the back of his neck. “These flies seem to like me now. I must be pretty ripe.” Two women at the next table got up and moved inside.

  As Rob hunted parasites, I read that plans to place Ashe’s statue on Monument Avenue had aroused so much opposition from both blacks and whites that city officials had backed off. They now favored several alternatives, such as putting the statue in a black neighborhood, or near a park where the young Ashe had watched whites play tennis on courts from which he was excluded. A public hearing on the issue was scheduled for later in the day.

  I glanced at Rob, who was now gouging behind his ears. “Would it be correct, Gasm-wise I mean, to go to the meeting?” I asked.

  Rob stroked his beard rabbinically. “I think it’s kosher,” he said. “As long as there’s some Confederate content.” The only question was what to do until the late-afternoon meeting. Rob studied our map of Richmond and circled several spots we hadn’t yet toured. “More dead rebs,” he said.