Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

In Confederates in the Attic, journalist Tony Horwitz tours many historic southern Civil War battle sites and towns, struck by how alive and important the Civil War remains for so many Southerners. I can't believe it took this long for me to read this one; I loved his Blue Latitudes, about the voyages of Captain Cook, and I'd thought about this one many times. It took my LT brother Mark singing its praises on the phone to get me in gear.

Among other things, Horwitz becomes involved in Civil War enactments, where "hardcore" participants will go to great lengths for authenticity:

“Look at these buttons,” one soldier said, fingering his gray wool jacket. “I soaked them overnight in a saucer filled with urine.” Chemicals in the urine show more oxidized the brass, giving it the patina of buttons from the 1860s. “My wife woke up this morning, sniffed the air and said, ‘Tim, you’ve been peeing on your buttons again.”

No surprise, issues of race remain important. "Vicksburg confirmed the dispiriting pattern I'd seen elsewhere in the South . . . Everywhere, it seemed, I had to explore two pasts and two presents, one white, one black, separate and unreconcilable. The past had poisoned the present and the present, in turn, now poisoned remembrance of things past." Horwitz's sense of humor helps make the sometimes difficult journey companionable, and there are insights galore:

“You asked how I'd define prejudice. That's it. Making assumptions about people you've never met.” (I love this one!)

“The way I see it," King said, "your great-grandfather fought and died because he believed my great-grandfather should stay a slave. I'm supposed to feel all warm inside about that?”

“For Robert Lee Hodge, {participating in Civil War reenactments} was also a way of life. As the Marlon Brando of battlefield bloating, he was often hired for Civil War movies.” (This specialist in battlefield bloating becomes an important traveling companion; I think that's a photo of him on the cover).

Anyway, I can't think of a reason not to give this five stars. It was written in 1998, but feels like he wrote it yesterday. It gave me more insights into how Trump supporters view the world than any other book I've read, including Hillbilly Elegy. A favored few can create page-turning nonfiction, and this guy is one of them. I want to read more of his; probably his A Voyage Long and Strange next. show less

Horwitz embarked on an odyssey soon after returning to his native U.S. after many years as a foreign correspondent, often in war zones. A chance encounter with Civil War reenactors outside the rural home he shared with his Australian bride rekindles a childhood obsession. It is not his alone, of course. No other event in our history exercises such an emotional hold on our imagination. In this book, he reports on his investigation of this hold.
In the course of his fifteen-month journey, he takes to the field with these reenactors at Shiloh and Gettysburg, as well as exploring sites on his own, both well-known and obscure. His curiosity leads to encounters with a memorable assortment of people, keepers of the flame.
Along the way, he makes show more the disturbing discovery that in recent years (he wrote in the nineties, the trend he detected has grown in the intervening decades) that the wounds have become more raw.
Horwitz laments the lack of common ground, of a way for Americans to discuss a shared history. His reporting suggests one reason for this. Many of those he met were hazy on the facts. They knew little of what actually happened, and much of what they thought they knew was false. It seems as if this invocation of the war has less to do with what transpired than with the alienation of millions left behind in the rapid transformations in society in our time. The war has become an emblem, a shorthand for grievance.
Like the author, I went through a Civil War obsession that coincided with the sesquicentennial of the war. Unlike him, many of my ancestors fought in it, and joined the Klan after they lost. The name I use for the conflict is the one I learned attending school in the north. It’s symptomatic that it bears another name in the south, where my mother was born. Our biannual visits to her home exposed me to the enduring memory of roadside markers commemorating the smallest of skirmishes and the monumental statue of a Confederate soldier in front of the county courthouse. Fittingly for the dirt-poor area, it was not a steed-mounted general with drawn sword, but common soldier, a “poor man fighting a rich man’s war,” as some of Horwitz’s contacts, less-enamored with Lost Cause propaganda, put it.
Those visits were long ago, before the hardening of attitudes reported by Horwitz. For me, attending school in one region and having close family ties in the other was an early education in knowing that there is more than one side to any issue, and that it helps to look at both dispassionately. That seems to be a trait that ever fewer Americans cherish. Reading this book in the early months of election year 2016 was a sad experience, but I highly recommend it. show less

This book is amazing and hilarious and terrifying. Given how much hatred and bigotry Horwitz encounters, it's astonishing that he makes this a fun read.

Subtitled "Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War". I picked this up thinking it was just about Civil War reenactors and tourists, but its so much more. Horwitz goes on a tour of the Southern states to see how the Civil War and its aftermath are still affecting people. A lot of it exposes deep seated resentments and institutional racism. It also shows that we are still having the same battles today that we were having 20 years ago when it was written; should the Confederate flag still fly, should statues of Confederate heroes still be on display, what revisionist history is still being taught - do today's (then or now) truly know why the war was fought? Oh and he does go on a crash tour of the war's battle fields with a reenactor who show more takes reenacting to an extreme bordering on insane. Its well worth your time. I'll let these quotes speak for themselves...

We were raised Methodists, but we converted to the Confederacy. There wasn't time for both.

Mostly, though, the fort attracted ordinary tourists, many of whom possessed a muddled grasp of American history. Visitors often asked McGill why he didn't mention the "Star-Spangled Banner". He had to explain that the national anthem was composed during the shelling of a different fort in a different conflict. Others asked whether it was true that John Brown fired the first shot at the fort. "One guy even asked me why so many Civil War battles were fought on national parks." McGill said.

Guthrie exhaled the depleted air of a thousand other towns across the back-country South, bypassed by the interstate and drained of vitality by decades of migration to the city.

Everywhere, it seemed, I had to explore two pasts and two presents; one white, one black, separate and unreconcilable. The past had poisoned the present and the present, in turn, now poisoned remembrance of things past.

I was born in 1921 and was raised up with segregation and separate water fountains. It was stupid now that I think of it. All these signs saying 'white' and 'colored' when most people couldn't even read.

9/10

S: 4/18/19 - 5/8/19 (21 Days) show less

The Smithsonian has been referred to as “America’s attic”, but down in the Old South in the mid-1990’s, Tony Horwitz found some artifacts that
a lot of people might wish had not been hauled out into the light. Prowling around the sites of Civil War battles, consorting with "hard core living historians", and interviewing ordinary folks from many walks of life, Horwitz discovered that much of what he thought he knew about the Civil War was mythic, that in many small towns and rural communities a sense of separatism is still very strong, and that the "lost cause" maintains a grip on the hearts of many citizens of the former Confederacy. Despite his northern liberal upbringing, Horwitz was able to mingle gently with conservative show more southerners, some of whom were openly racist or anti-Semitic, and get them talking. I do wonder what might have changed in the last couple decades since the book was written, given that it predates 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the election of an African American President, and such. I would be glad of an update, but nevertheless I give this book an unequivocal thumbs up. show less

Published in 1998, this is Tony Horwitz's account of his travels through the southern US in an attempt to better understand the Civil War, his own childhood fascination with that conflict, and its impact on the modern South. In pursuit of which he visits battlefields and museums, takes up with a dauntingly hardcore Civil War reenactor, meets a Scarlett O'Hara look-alike, and accidentally stumbles into a community where a recent shooting by a black youth of a guy with a confederate flag on his truck has inflamed racial tensions in a truly depressing fashion.

It's an interesting book, and a thoughtful one. Horwitz makes a careful point of not oversimplifying anything and letting the various people he meets state their cases without judging show more anyone too harshly. I cannot say, even after reading this, that I remotely understand the attitude that many white southerners have towards the Civil War (or the War Between the States, or the War of Northern Aggression, or whatever they might like to call it). I can't imagine having the kind of strong ties to the past that some of these folks do, nor am I capable of making the kind of cognitive leap that leads to the conclusion that the war was not actually about slavery at all. But I do now feel like I have a better understanding of what it is I don't understand, if that makes any sense. And some of the divisions and discontents that he observed in the South in the 90s seem to be very much the same ones that are now surfacing all over the US, here in the 2010s, so perhaps any understanding at all is a useful thing. show less

Around 20 years ago, I read Confederates in the Attic and Tony Hortwitz immediately became my favorite history/travel writer. I had just moved back to New England after living seven years in Virginia, and I related to the experience of meeting people obsessed with the past of the lost Civil War. I laughed, of course, at the most eccentric characters, such as the woman who created a Cats of the Confederacy chapter or Robert Lee Hodge, the hardcore living history reenactor. Hodge, pictured on the cover, was the star of the book and so focused on authenticity that he eschewed Civil War battle reenactments for long marches and drilling in period attire.
Reading this book again in 2021, it feels less a reflection on a way of life that was show more slowly dying, and more of a warning to the future. Since this book was published the United States has seen an alarming reemergence of the undergirding ideology of the neo-confederate beliefs depicted in this book - white supremacy and Christian nationalism - and not just in the South. This has manifest itself in:

• the hyper-militarized response to the September 11th attacks, built on anti-Muslim discrimination, and the immediate questioning of the patriotism of anyone who challenged these notions.


• the perverse interpretation of the Second Amendment from an insurrectionist perspective that allowed access to firearms for countless mass murderers


• the increase in mass incarceration of Black and brown people, the militarization of police forces, and the ability of police and vigilantes to murder Black and brown people without consequences


• the rise of the Tea Party, numerous white supremacist gangs and organizations, and ultimately the Trump administration


• And, on the day I finished re-reading this book, all of these things coming together as armed insurrectionists of white supremacists and Christian nationalists invading the US Capitol, some bearing the Confederate battle flag.

Tony Horwitz is no longer with us to offer his perspective, but in retrospect, Confederates in the Attic is a chilling account of a menace within our midst. Horwitz's great talent was his ability to meet strangers, talk with them, and form a bond, even when he considered their ideologies loathsome. Through his interviews and experiences in this book he offers a keen insight into the popular memory of the Civil War and its aftermath.
A lot has changed since Horwitz's journey through the South in the 1990s, and despite my list above, some of it is for the better. It would've been hard to imagine the sculptures of Confederate generals would ultimately be removed from Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia at the time Horwitz wrote about the controversy about adding an Arthur Ashe statue. I was also fascinated that some of the people who he interviewed had more nuanced views on the Civil War than I recalled, some expressing anti-militant feelings. I also appreciate Horwitz debunking Civil War myths, such as the story of Wilmer McLean, who is said to have had the Civil War beginning and ending in house, but his true story is much more nuanced.
Confederates in the Attic remains one of my favorite books of all time and offers a lot of insight into America's past and present, and possibly our future.

MY ORIGINAL REVIEW FROM THE FIRST READING
Tony Horwitz travels through the South meeting with people who have a devotion to the Confederacy that borders on insanity at times ("Cats of the Confederacy" is the best). Yet, Horwitz patiently and sympathetically lets the people he meets speak their peace and really allows their humanity to shine through. This is a very insightful, funny, and sometimes frightening book about America today. show less