CONFEDERATES IN THE ATTIC:
Dispatches From the Unfinished Civil War
By Tony Horwitz
Pantheon, 406 pages, $27.50
A Pulitzer Prize winner for national reporting, a senior writer for The Wall Street Journal and a former foreign correspondent, Tony Horwitz has clearly evolved into a first-rate travel writer. His books “Baghdad Without a Map” and “One for the Road” dealt with foreign locales. Now, having settled with his wife and son in Virginia, he’s headed down South to see for himself how the War Between the States still echoes in that region.
This is a journey not just through geography, but through time. Horwitz displays a sure eye for the telling description of a scene and an ear for the illustrative anecdote. And he has a prodigious talent for coming up with razor-sharp quotes. Indeed, the temptation here is to string together enough of them to fill out the rest of this review.
Let’s start with one from Shelby Foote, a Southerner whose novels are as brilliant as his beautifully written three-volume history of the Civil War. “Southerners,” Foote says mildly enough, “are very strange about that war.”
Strange, indeed, as Maryland-raised Horwitz discovers while scouting up a representative passel of today’s Civil War re-enactors. This often-fanatical (they would say “dedicated”) breed ranges from the purist “hardcores” to the more flexible “farbs” (short for “far-be-it-from-authentic”). The hardcores court weight loss so as to achieve the gaunt look of Confederate soldiers in photographs. During re-enactments, they eschew wearing wristwatches, smoking today’s cigarettes or using sunblock or insect repellent. They provision themselves with beef jerky and puff corncob pipes or chew their tobacco. They drink beer from antique jugs (though it’s not explained how they square filling them with Miller Lite). Refighting famous battles wearing authentic tattered and unwashed uniforms, they camp out (sometimes in mud) with one thin blanket apiece, heat coming from adopting the spoon position with another man and his equally thin blanket. One of them told Horwitz, ” `I’d take the chance of being killed just to see what it was really like to be under fire in the War.’ ” No doubt this would earn him his comrades’ highest compliment: ” `Super hardcore!’ “
Why? Because–as Edmund Hillary once similarly said about climbing Mt. Everest–the Civil War is there–still. As one hardcore explained: ” `The present–I live it, it holds no mystery. . . . The past does.’ ” Or perhaps there is an upwelling of today’s militia mentality: ” `Our ancestors were a little off with their timing, but their rebellion against (the) federal government is finally seeing fruition.’ “
As Horwitz explains: “Reenacting evolved from the reunions, called `encampments,’ held by Civil War veterans themselves. Veterans bivouacked at actual battlegrounds, donned their old uniforms, and occasionally performed mock versions of the heroic deeds of their youth.”
Horwitz took part in one battle re-enactment and was instructed as follows: ” `If one of our men should fall, pick up his musket and fight on. . . . If no one goes down, run around awhile and then take a hit. We can always use casualties.’ ” Afterward, Horwitz writes, “I resolved that next time I’d be true to my views and wear blue.”
Horwitz interviewed Foote at his home near Memphis, and Foote explained the re-enactors’ mental set and his own retroactive allegiance to the Confederacy: “It’s what kept them going through Appomattox, that attitude of `I won’t give up, I will not be insulted.’ “
Foote also asserted that no Southern male would pay a substitute to go to war for him. This is an odd slip for the novelist-historian. Albert B. Moore’s classic study “Conscription and Conflict in the Confederacy” (1996) is abundantly clear on the prevalence of shirking in Dixie. Indeed, Jeff Davis and his government in Richmond had so much trouble inducing Southerners to volunteer after the first flush of patriotism had worn off that the South instituted its draft in 1862, a full year before Lincoln’s Union was forced to take the same step, for similar reasons.
There is a wealth of color and not a little wisdom in “Confederates in the Attic.” (The title refers to the fact that Horwitz had grown fascinated by the Civil War at an early age because his draft-dodging great-grandfather, on his arrival from czarist Russia, had unaccountably bought a huge picture book about the Civil War.) One quibble: There is far too much familiar material on race relations, such as they are, below the Mason-Dixon Line today. I suppose this is unavoidable, and it is certainly consonant with the South’s lingering preoccupation with the Lost Cause, but I confess this is where I skipped. Otherwise, “Confederates in the Attic” is jampacked with wonderful stuff.
