Confederates in the Attic
Read Confederates in the Attic Online
Authors: Tony Horwitz
TONY HORWITZ’s
Confederates in the Attic
“The freshest book about divisiveness in America that I have read in some time.”
—
The New York Times
“Horwitz’s economical style and understated humor make his writing a joy to read. He is the kind of writer who could make a book on elevators interesting.”
—
The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Part travelogue, part social study, part ’90s war epic,
Confederates in the Attic
is a personal, penetrating glimpse at a slice of America many of us didn’t know existed or would rather believe did not.”
—The Boston Globe
“The South rises again in this remarkable study.”
—
People
“Essential reading for anyone who really cares about America’s political and social conflicts.… You will find Tony Horwitz’s captivating narrative irresistible.”
—
Louisville Courier-Journal
“One of the most important studies of the American South in recent memory.”
—
The Oregonian
(Portland)
“A deadpan guide to Dixie kinks and a dead-on analysis of the shifting ideological landscape…. Riding shotgun with him is a treat.”
—Newsday
“A remarkably balanced, bittersweet, eye-opening tour through a part of America most Northerners are utterly unaware of.”
—Chicago Sun-Times
“A work of American history like no other.… A profound investigation not just of the American past but also of the American present.”
—
Preservation Magazine
“Outstanding journalism, artfully constructed and unfailingly vivid, as good a rendering as I’ve seen of the mysterious pull at the heart of the American identity.”
—
Slate
“Hilarious and engaging, troubling and insightful, entertaining and eminently readable.”
—
Charleston Post-Dispatch
“Jampacked with wonderful stuff.”
—
Chicago Tribune
“The mystique of Southern attitudes about the War of Northern Aggression is explored in a way never done before. Horwitz’s book is simply excellent…. Put this one high on your nonfiction list.”
—Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
“It’s like having your brightest, most observant friend around, the one whose descriptive powers always crack you up.”
—The Hartford Courant
“Excellent and amazing.… Horwitz managed to get inside the South’s impossibly thick skull and have a long, unsettling look around.”
—
Mobile Register
“Horwitz is a terrific storyteller, a writer with a wonderful ear for language and a sharp eye for nuance. Reading him is a delight.”
—LA Weekly
“Truly delightful.… His narrative is personal and searching, tender and funny.”
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The Orlando Sentinel
“Humorous, tragic, thoughtful, frightening, but always entertaining.”
—
The Seattle Times
“This Southern-fried odyssey has enough oddball and occasionally dangerous characters to fill a Flannery O’Connor novel.”
—The San Diego Union-Tribune
To my father
who gave me the passion,
and to my mother
who gave me the paint
Southerners are very strange about that war.
—SHELBY FOOTE
2
North Carolina:
Cats of the Confederacy
3
South Carolina:
In the Better Half of the World
4
South Carolina:
Shades of Gray
7
Tennessee:
At the Foote of the Master
8
Tennessee:
The Ghost Marks of Shiloh
9
Mississippi:
The Minié Ball Pregnancy
10
Virginia and Beyond:
The Civil Wargasm
11
Georgia:
Gone With the Window
12
Georgia:
Still Prisoners of the War
13
Alabama:
Only Living Confederate Widow Tells Some
There never will be anything more interesting in America than that Civil War never
.
GERTRUDE STEIN
I
n 1965, a century after Appomattox, the Civil War began for me at a musty apartment in New Haven, Connecticut. My great-grandfather held a magnifying glass to his spectacles and studied an enormous book spread open on the rug. Peering over his shoulder, I saw pen-and-ink soldiers hurtling up at me with bayonets.
I was six, Poppa Isaac 101. Egg-bald, barely five feet tall, Poppa Isaac lived so frugally that he sliced cigarettes in half before smoking them. An elderly relative later told me that Poppa Isaac bought the book of Civil War sketches soon after emigrating to America in 1882. He often shared it with his children and grandchildren before I came along.
Years later, I realized what was odd about this one vivid memory of my great-grandfather. Isaac Moses Perski fled Czarist Russia as a teenaged draft dodger—in Yiddish, a
shirker
—and arrived in Manhattan without money or English or family. He worked at a Lower East Side sweatshop and lived literally on peanuts, which were cheap, filling and nutritious. Why, I wondered, had this thrifty refugee chosen
as one of his first purchases in America a book written in a language he could barely understand, about a war in a land he barely knew, a book that he kept poring over until his death at 102?
By the time Poppa Isaac died, my father had begun reading aloud to me each night from a ten-volume collection called
The Photographic History of the Civil War
. Published in 1911, the volumes’ ripe prose sounded as foreign to me as the captions of my great-grandfather’s book must have seemed to him. So, like Poppa Isaac, I lost myself in the pictures: sepia men leading sepia horses across cornfields and creeks; jaunty volunteers, their faces framed by squished caps and fire-hazard beards; barefoot Confederates sprawled in trench mud, eyes open, limbs twisted like licorice. For me, the fantastical creatures of Maurice Sendak held little magic compared to the man-boys of Mathew Brady who stared back across the century separating their lives from mine.
Before long, I began to read aloud with my father, chanting the strange and wondrous rivers—Shenandoah, Rappahannock, Chickahominy—and wrapping my tongue around the risible names of rebel generals: Braxton Bragg, Jubal Early, John Sappington Marmaduke, William “Extra Billy” Smith, Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard. I learned about palindromes from the Southern sea captain Raphael Semmes. And I began to match Brady’s still-deaths with the curt stutter of farm roads and rocks that formed the photographer’s backdrop: Mule Shoe, Slaughter Pen, Bloody Lane, Devil’s Den.
In third grade, I penciled a highly derivative Civil War history of my own—“The war was started when after all the states had sececed,” it began—and embarked on an ambitious art project, painting the walls of our attic with a lurid narrative of the conflict. Preferring underdogs, I posted a life-sized Johnny Reb by the bathroom door. A pharaonic frieze of rebel soldiers at Antietam stretched from the stairs to the attic window. Albert Sidney Johnston’s death at Shiloh splashed across an entire wall. General Pickett and his men charged bravely into the eaves.
I’d reached the summer of 1863 and run out of wall. But standing in the middle of the attic, I could whirl and whirl and make myself dizzy with my own cyclorama. The attic became my bedroom and the murals inhabited my boyhood dreaming. And each morning I
woke to a comforting sound: my father bounding up the attic steps, blowing a mock bugle call through his fingers and shouting, “General, the troops await your command!”
T
WENTY-FIVE YEARS LATER
, the murals were still there and so was my boyhood obsession. I’d just returned to America after nine years abroad and moved to an old house in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. My Australian wife chose the spot; the fields and cows and crooked fences fit Geraldine’s image of outback America. For me, the place stirred something else. I stared at a brick church still bullet-scarred from a Civil War skirmish. In the lumpy village graveyard, I found Confederates and Yankees buried side by side, some of them kin to each other. Within an hour of our new home lay several of the battlegrounds I’d painted as a child, and to which I now dragged Geraldine on weekend drives.