Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

Summary (from the publisher): When prize-winning war correspondent Tony Horwitz leaves the battlefields of Bosnia and the Middle East for a peaceful corner of the Blue Ridge Mountains, he thinks he's put war zones behind him. But awakened one morning by the crackle of musket fire, Horwitz starts filing front-line dispatches again this time from a war close to home, and to his own heart.

Propelled by his boyhood passion for the Civil War, Horwitz embarks on a search for places and people still held in thrall by America's greatest conflict. The result is an adventure into the soul of the unvanquished South, where the ghosts of the Lost Cause are resurrected through ritual and remembrance.

In Virginia, Horwitz joins a band of 'hardcore' reenactors who crash-diet to achieve the hollow-eyed look of starved Confederates; in Kentucky, he witnesses Klan rallies and calls for race war sparked by the killing of a white man who brandishes a rebel flag; at Andersonville, he finds that the prison's commander, executed as a war criminal, is now exalted as a martyr and hero; and in the book's climax, Horwitz takes a marathon trek from Antietam to Gettysburg to Appomattox in the company of Robert Lee Hodge, an eccentric pilgrim who dubs their odyssey the 'Civil Wargasm.'

Written with Horwitz's signature blend of humor, history, and hard-nosed journalism, Confederates in the Attic brings alive old battlefields and new ones 'classrooms, courts, country bars' where the past and the present collide, often in explosive ways. Poignant and picaresque, haunting and hilarious, it speaks to anyone who has ever felt drawn to the mythic South and to the dark romance of the Civil War.

Review: "The old South was plowed under. But the ashes are still warm." - Henry Miller (190).

Rather than a history of the Civl War, Horwitz's account is of the legacy of the Civil War across the south. From re-enactors, war memorials, the rebel flag, battle fields, and more, Horwitz traveled throughout the southern states most affected the war to search out "the places and people who kept memory of the conflict alive in the present day" (18).

Shelby Foote perhaps sums it up best with his succinct "Southerners are very strange about that war." High emotions are encountered throughout Horwitz' travels - even sometimes by people who are grossly inaccurate in their accounts of the history of the war. "For the past several weeks people had been talking to me about 'heritage.' But, like the flag, this obviously meant very different things to different people. For the Sons of the Confederate Veterans I'd met in North Carolina, it meant the heritage of their ancestors' valor and sacrifice. For Bud Sharpe, it was the heritage of segregation and its dismantling over the past forty years" (80). Remembrance of the Civil War is highly personal and varies considerably from community to community.

I learned a lot of interesting facts about both the Civil War and the legacy of the Civil War today. "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. In 1913, hundreds of geriatric rebels rushed as best they could across the field they'd crossed during Pickett's Charge" (136). I was fascinated by random anecdotes, such as the "single oak tree, almost two feet in diameter, felled in the hail of small-arms fire" in the battle near Spotsylvania (236). Or the last surviving Confederate widow, who married the veteran as a 20 year old woman when he was in his 80s and after his death promptly married his grandson. Similarly, I had no idea that the Civil War lives on not just for Americans but is well known to other countries and is of particular interest to the Japanese.

Horwitz's book is an interesting mix of travel narrative and an informal history of a cultural phenomenon. Considering the strong presence of the Civil War that lasts in some way in nearly every state affected by the war, its little wonder that this book was a best seller. On the other hand, I wish that he had mixed his informal research on the ground level with individuals with over-arching information about the Civil War legacy today. This book felt more anecdotal than true overview, although on the other hand, the author clearly emphasizes the range of emotions and beliefs concerning the still highly controversial war.

Stars: 4