by Tony Horwitz
Captured by Union forces, then recaptured by the rebels, Little Sorrel spent his post-War years touring county fairs and Confederate fetes. Souvenir hunters clipped so many hairs from Little Sorrel’s mane and tail that the horse eventually required guards. Nor did the horse’s death at the age of thirty-six end the indignity. The horse’s hide went on display in a caged exhibit at VMI’s library, while his bones were used in biology class.
Now, finally, Little Sorrel had come to rest in the school’s museum, where he had only to endure gawking tourists and occasional visits by a Smithsonian taxidermist who patched tears in the horse’s flanks and cracks on his face. “If he’d got popped with Stonewall at Chancellorsville,” Rob said, gazing into Little Sorrel’s glass eye, “he never would have had to go through all this.”
From VMI we strolled to Washington and Lee University. Here it was Robert E. Lee who reigned supreme. Lee Chapel, where the general worshiped and worked as the school’s president, offered a startling illustration of Lee’s Christ-like stature in the post-War South. Filling the altar was a life-sized sculpture of Lee, crafted from measurements of his face and physique made by the sculptor just before the general’s death. Even the thickness of Lee’s lips and the width of his ears were made to measure. Lee lay on a field cot, in full uniform, as though cat-napping between battlefield maneuvers. His recumbent form reminded me of Norman knights lying atop their tombs in Westminster Abbey.
“Square-toed boots, just like the originals,” Rob said.
“Size seven,” the chapel’s guide added. “Just like Lee’s.”
Rob nodded. “Lee had small feet and was short in the legs but long in the torso, so he seemed bigger in the saddle than on the ground.”
“Did you know Lee liked to have his feet tickled?” the guide countered.
As she and Rob swapped anatomical trivia, I wandered outside to view the grave of Lee’s mount, Traveller, who died nine months after her master when she stepped on a rusty nail and contracted lockjaw. Traveller’s bones, like Little Sorrel’s, had endured endless shifting about. Buried beneath the same blanket that had covered her in the War, Traveller was soon disinterred, only to sit around a taxidermist’s shop for forty years. The skeleton was later displayed at the college, where students scribbled their initials on the horse’s bones. When the skeleton began to deteriorate, Traveller was reburied beside the Lee Chapel’s back door, beneath a simple granite slab. Visitors had left carrots there as a token of respect.
We completed our morbid tour at the cemetery where Stonewall lay buried—twice. There was a statue of Jackson clutching field glasses, and a nearby headstone that stated, “The remains of Stonewall Jackson have been removed from this spot and now repose under the monument.” Rob chuckled, recalling the bizarre, twice-dug grave of Stonewall’s amputated limb near Chancellorsville. “Smedley Butler must have got here, too,” he said.
We stood for a while in the rain by Stonewall’s graves, then climbed back in the car and drove through the Shenandoah Valley, which Stonewall and his men fought so hard to defend. Though traveling north, we were headed “down the Valley,” in local parlance, from the high ground around Lexington toward the valley’s floor near Winchester.
As we sped through the rain, Rob begged me to make a few last hits. “We could do Cross Keys and Port Republic at the same exit,” he said, gazing wistfully out the window as we approached the turnoff for two of Stonewall’s hard-fought battles.
But I kept my foot to the accelerator, eager now for a hot shower and a reunion with my wife. Rob, meanwhile, had a date with his hardcore mates at Gettysburg, where a string of reenactments would begin the following day. As we reached the beltway ringing Washington , Rob opened his notebook and recapped the day’s dozen or so hits. Then, gazing pensively out at the traffic, he scribbled a few concluding thoughts on our Gasm:
“Very productive. New dimensions. Holy. Spiritual. Humorous. Educational. Maximizing time. Intense. Peaked many times!”
FIVE DAYS LATER, Rob called collect from a phone booth in Gettysburg. The reenactments were done, but he’d stuck around with a few fellow hardcores. Now, he’d decided to end his long Civil War sojourn with a flourish. “Tomorrow’s the anniversary of Pickett’s Charge,” he said. “We’re gonna do it at the exact time and on the exact ground that Pickett’s men did. Wanna come?”
My chigger bites and poison-ivy rash were just starting to subside. But I was curious to see how Rob’s time-travel fantasy played out. So donning my wire-rims and the filthy brogans I’d left airing on the porch, I drove to our rendezvous point by General Pickett’s Buffet, part of the modern sprawl of fast-food joints, wax museums and cheap motels that encroached on the Gettysburg battlefield.
Rob wasn’t there, but his three companions were easy to spot. They looked like Rob clones: lean men with chin beards, tattered butternut uniforms, sunburned faces and the thousand-yard stare bred of too many nights spooning by campfires. I was a little jarred, though, when all three introduced themselves with Northern accents. Don and Johann came from New York, Bob from Ohio. They’d first met Rob while filming a movie on Andersonville, in which all four played half-starved Union prisoners. “We saw this ad in the Civil War News,” explained Johann, a tall handsome man of Scandinavian descent who looked like a young Max von Sydow. “It said a film company was looking for ‘thin males aged eighteen to thirty-five.’ Guess we fit the bill.”
Rob appeared, clutching a spare rebel uniform for me and a book he called “the bible”—the Army War College’s minutely detailed guide to Gettysburg. “We’re going to follow the exact path of the 24th Virginia,” he announced, brandishing a map of the unit’s route during Pickett’s Charge.
It was high season at Gettysburg and tourists swarmed across the battlefield. But we managed to find a quiet spot in the woods bordering Seminary Ridge and huddled in the shade, as Confederates had done during the long wait for the assault to begin. “After a noonday lull,” Rob said, consulting the bible, “the Confederates opened up for over an hour with 140 cannon, the largest concentration of artillery in American history to that point.” The cannons’ blast carried to Pennsylvania towns 150 miles away.
Rob had brought along several other books and we took turns reading aloud, waiting for the midafternoon moment when the Confederates “stepped off” from the woods and into the open ground lying between the rebels and the Union line on Cemetery Ridge. “There were fifty thousand horses at the battle,” Rob said, gnawing on a piece of hardtack. “Can you imagine the manure?” We also learned that the temperature reached 87 degrees on the day of the Charge; that Pickett graduated last in his class at West Point; that the general oiled his long ringlets with scented balm; and that Rob wrote his senior paper in high school on Pickett’s Charge and got a C-minus.
Probably no half-hour in American history had been more closely scrutinized than Pickett’s Charge. Yet hard facts about the assault remained remarkably scarce. No one knew for sure how many men participated, which units breached the stone wall marking the main Union line, or what time the charge began and ended. The assault was also fogged by more myth and misconception than just about any episode of the War. Even the name was a misnomer; Pickett’s men formed only a third of the Southern force and James Longstreet, not Pickett, commanded the assault. Nor could anyone say for certain what Pickett did during the charge. Some sources even placed him near the rear, gulping “Confederate chloroform”—a.k.a. whiskey—certainly not in the lead with saber raised, as I’d shown him in my childhood mural.
Gazing out at the open valley the Confederates crossed, we tried to imagine what the rebels must have felt as they waited for the order to advance. This gave me an excuse to read my favorite passage on the Civil War, from Faulkner’s novel Intruder in the Dust. In one impossibly long sentence, Faulkner captured both the drama of the stepping-off and the nostalgic might-have-been that had lingered in Southern imagination ever since.
For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not
once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are loaded and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances…. yet it’s going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago; or to anyone who ever sailed even a skiff under a quilt sail, the moment in 1492 when somebody thought This is it: the absolute edge of no return, to turn back now and make home or sail irrevocably on and either find land or plunge over the world’s roaring rim.
When I finished the passage—which required several gulps of air to read aloud—Johann shook his head. “Guy could fuckin’ write,” he said. One of the other men checked his pocket watch and nodded at Rob: the moment of no return had arrived. Rob stood up and pointed at the copse of trees on Cemetery Ridge, which the Army of Northern Virginia had used as its guidon. “Men,” he said, mimicking Pickett’s speech in the movie version of Gettysburg, “today you fight for old Virginia!”
We took swigs from a pocket flask and solemnly shook hands, saying, “See you at the top.” Then Rob led us out of the woods. “Dress ranks,” he shouted. “Shoulder to shoulder. Forward, march!”
As we left the shaded woods, the midafternoon sun felt blindingly hot and bright. Cemetery Ridge shimmered in the distance, about a mile away across an undulating field that tilted gently upward. As we marched silently through the tall grass, I could feel the ground crunching beneath my cracked boots. The haversack rubbed uncomfortably through the wool shoulder of my butternut jacket. I felt a band of sweat forming beneath my slouch hat. My heart began thudding, more from excitement than exertion. I felt suddenly lightheaded. This is it Plunging over the world’s roaring rim. Were these the first stirrings of a “period rush”?
My reverie was broken by something bright in the grass. I reached down to find a gaudy plastic sword some child must have lost. Then I heard whirrs and clicks just off to our left. A skirmish line of tourists had formed about fifty yards off, aiming cameras and binoculars at us. Several others approached from our right flank.
“Let’s pick it up, boys,” Rob said, stepping faster. But there was no escape. Within minutes we’d been swamped by people in shorts and T-shirts who bombarded us with questions and camera flashes.
“Are you guys reactors?”
“Which one of you’s Pickett?”
“You gonna win it for us this time?”
We ignored them as best we could and marched quickly on, eyes trained to the ground. But a few followers still clung to either side of our line. A lobster-red woman in a halter top matched Rob stride for stride, carefully studying his uniform.
“What are you guys?” she asked.
“Confederates,” Rob mumbled.
“Ferrets?”
“Confederates,” Rob repeated.
“Oh,” the woman said, looking underwhelmed.
When we’d finally sloughed off our entourage, Rob paused to consult his battlefield guide and angled us slightly to the left, toward the inaptly named Bliss Farm. Suddenly, drums began banging to our rear. I turned and saw about a hundred tourists marching behind us, evidently inspired by our example. Most of the men in the front rank wore duckbill caps advertising ball teams and cattle-feed brands. One carried a drum, another played “Dixie” on a fife, a third waved a rebel battle flag.
“Sir,” Johann said to Rob, “the Tourists of Northern Virginia are close on our rear.”
Rob glanced over his shoulder. A man waved his fist and shouted, “Give ’em hell, boys!”
Rob ordered, “Route step, 110 paces a minute!” and we quickened our march until we’d left the shadow army behind. We entered a field covered with chest-high corn. Cemetery Ridge loomed just above the stalks. “Dress ranks,” Rob shouted, and we moved closer together, our shoulders almost touching, as the Confederates had done each time an artillery shell tore a hole in the their line.
We reached the Emmitsburg Road, which ran roughly parallel to Cemetery Ridge and marked the starting point of the rebels’ final dash for the Union line. It was here that Union guns opened in earnest with close-range canister and rifle shot, ripping into the rebels as they swarmed over a plank fence bordering the road. One board of the fence was later found shredded with 836 bullet holes.
We faced no such firestorm, only a heavy line of skirmishers: campers, RVs, pickups. As we clambered over the fence, cameras and videos poked out windows and sunroofs, aimed at us like roadside deer. “Could you guys do that again?” a man called out, reloading his camera.
We snaked between the vehicles and rushed onto the gentle slope on the far side of the road. Rob shouted, “Double quick!” and we formed a flying wedge, as the Confederates had done, sprinting across the last hundred yards of open ground. One rebel later described this stretch as “covered with clover as soft as a Turkish carpet.” Whether the clover was still there I couldn’t tell; the ground was too thickly strewn with bodies, kneeling or lying prone, their cameras poking through the grass for a dramatic action snapshot. The crowd was so dense that I had to shoulder aside several people as I loped behind Rob toward the stone wall at the top of the slope.
“Home, boys, home!” Rob shouted, waving his slouch hat. “Home is over beyond those hills!”
We reached the stone wall amidst a final hail of snapping shutters, then slumped on the ground, hot and exhausted. The charge had taken us twenty-five minutes, about the same as the original. We’d lost only one man, left behind at the Emmitsburg Road nursing his blisters. This was a far better ratio than the actual Confederates, almost two-thirds of whom were killed, wounded or captured in the assault. One Mississippi company lost every man. All told, the Confederacy took 28,000 casualties at Gettysburg, including thirty-one of the thirty-two senior officers who led Pickett’s division during the charge.
“What were you guys trying to prove?” asked a man in a Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt. “The rebels I mean.”
“You boys prisoners now?”
“Did it really happen like in the movie?”
After catching his breath, Rob began patiently answering each question in turn, as I’d seen him do at Manassas. Watching the rapt crowd, I began to feel less resentful of the gawkers we’d attracted all along the charge. From their questions, it was clear that Rob’s interrogators felt deeply drawn to Gettysburg. But visiting the place, on a July day thick with gnats and tour buses, they seemed vaguely disappointed and didn’t know quite what to do with the empty fields, the silent cannons, the mute blocks of marble. By charging across the landscape in our rebel uniforms, we’d given a flesh-and-blood boost to their imagination, a way into the battle that the modern landscape didn’t easily provide. For one of the few times during my brief reenacting career, I felt I’d done something worthwhile by putting on a uniform.
Still, it was hard to avoid feeling like a creature at the zoo. When I wandered inside to use the visitors’ center bathroom, the man at the next urinal looked at me and said, “Do they let you guys piss inside?” Buttoning up my fly, I heard a familiar click behind me and turned to find a boy smiling over his camera. “Gotcha,” he said.
Returning outside, I found Rob and his friends hoisting their gear. They had a date with a photographer who wanted to duplicate the most famous picture of the entire War: three lean Confederate prisoners standing proudly bes
ide a snake-rail fence at Gettysburg. The photographer was also putting together a Civil War calendar and planned to use a portrait of Rob as the accompaniment for one of the months. “Poster boy for the Confederacy,” Rob said with a grin. “Next thing you know I’ll be doing centerfolds.”
Still, Rob confessed to feeling a bit depressed. Tomorrow, his extended escape from the twentieth century would end, and he’d go back to waiting on tables to pay the rent.
“I’ve had this uniform on for ten days straight,” he said, wistfully fingering a sleeve starched with grime. “It’ll feel like farbing out when I finally get in the shower.”
11
Georgia
GONE WITH THE WINDOW
You drive through Atlanta … and take a look around, and up, and you wonder, what is this place? Is this a place?
—WALKER PERCY, Going Back to Georgia, 1978
Retreating south to Virginia, like the ferrets after Pickett’s Charge, I plotted my campaign through the crucial stretch of Civil War real estate I’d so far skirted. In the year following Gettysburg, while Lee locked the Federals in a bloody stalemate in Virginia, the Union army out “West” battled its way into the Confederate heartland of Georgia and Alabama. “I begin to regard the death and mangling of a couple of thousand men as a small affair, a kind of morning dash,” William Tecumseh Sherman wrote to his wife in July 1864, after a bloody repulse in north Georgia. Five weeks later, Sherman tersely telegraphed his superiors, “Atlanta is ours, and fairly won”—a victory that saved Lincoln from defeat in the fall elections and helped seal the doom of the Southern Confederacy.
Reaching Atlanta was far easier now than in Sherman’s day. Fueled by Georgia’s 97-cents-a-gallon gas and unenforced speed limits, I bombed down an interstate that spilled straight into Peachtree Street, the city’s main drag. Unlike Sherman, I approached Atlanta with trepidation. Though I’d never visited the city proper, it was impossible to travel the South without getting trapped in Atlanta’s tentacled airport, or being blitzed by TV images of the city’s bland skyline, its relentless boosterism, its bloodlessly efficient baseball team. Atlanta loomed in my imagination like a blimp-sized smile button.
