Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

[Stauffenberg]

I'm reading a marvelous book that seeks out the plangent echoes of the ACW in the South today:

Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War by Tony Horwitz (Vintage Departures, NYC: 1998)

In one chapter, the descriptions of reenactors who are purists in authentic outfits ("scratchy wool trousers, a filthy shirt, hobnailed boots, a jacket tailored for a Confederate midget") food ("cornbread, unshelled peanuts, slabs of cooked bacon"), marching all day and drilling, having to engage in 'spooning' to keep warm at night--all to qualify for the epithet "super hardcore" and to experience the ultimate "period rush," is quite unforgettable.

From the author's web page:

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.

Reviews

"Splendid. The freshest book about divisiveness in America that I have read in some time. This rattling good read is an eyes-open, humorously no-nonsense survey of complicated Americans."

—Roy Blount Jr., New York Times Book Review

“Good natured and generously funny: moving, chilling, and beautiful.”

—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"In this sparkling book, Horwitz explores some of our culture's myths with the irreverent glee of a small boy hurling snowballs at a beaver hat. An important contribution to understanding how echoes of the Civil War have never stopped."

—USA Today

“The best book that has been written on the Civil War in modern culture.”

—Richmond Times-Dispatch

Horwitz's chronicle of his odyssey through the nether and ethereal worlds of Confederatemania is by turns amusing, chilling, poignant, and always fascinating. He has found the Lost Cause and lived to tell the tale a wonderfully piquant tale of hard-core reenactors, Scarlett O'Hara look-alikes, and people who reshape Civil War history to suit the way they wish it had come out. If you want to know why the war isn't over yet in the South, read Confederates in the Attic to find out.

—James McPherson, author of Battle Cry of Freedom

http://tonyhorwitz.com/books/confederates-in-the-attic.php

[anjou]

James McPherson scared me off

[Pemberton1]

This was a wonderful book. The author is a sincere man who blends in with various groups in order to illustrate how modern Americans understand the War. He sleeps in the mud and eats salt pork with the hardcores, he interviews an afro-centric radical, he attends Lee-Jackson Day parties and Martin Luther King Parties, and he sneaks into battlefields after hours to discover groups of similar devotees musing there at dawn. His interviews are excellent, and he seeks an elusive balance between a stark political correctness that rashly consigns the old South to eternal infamy and an equally-blind, in his view, worship of Southern ideals without consideration of the evils of slavery. I recommend this book. It is a good meditation of contemporary discussion on the War.

[TheDoctorKing]

Yes, and it is highly readable. I have used this with students and they all loved it. Humorous, thought-provoking, it is a lot more about 21st-century America than it is about the 19th C., though. The theme is "the continuing Civil War" or "the Civil War and modern memory" to lift a title from another wonderful book.

[Le Ricain]

I enjoyed reading " Confederates in the Attic" many years ago. I especially remember the story of Alberta Martin, who was the last Civil War widow. She died in 2004, aged 97 years.