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Confederates in the Attic
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Confederates in the Attic (1998) (edit title/settings)

Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

by Tony Horwitz (Author) (edit contributors)

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Description edit see section history

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... read more

People edit see section history

  • Tony Horwitz: The author and the voice of his journey learning about the Civil War
  • Abe Stice: Director of the Salisbury (North Carolina) National Cemetery
  • Sue Curtis: Daughter of the Confederacy and founder of Cats in the Confederacy
  • Mike Hawkings: Sons of the Confederacy, color sergeant, Rowan rifles, Army of Northern Virginia
  • Doug Tarlton: Sons of the Confederacy, fighting leukemia, retired police detective, retired farmer, retired lay minister
  • Beth: President of her chapter of Children of the Confederacy
  • Joel Dorfman: A Jewish out of work truck-driver from Long Island.
  • Joe McGill: A young black National Park's Ranger at Ft. Sumter
  • Manning Williams: From Charleston, SC - first-class artist, college professor, reenactor
  • A.V. Huff: a historian of the South at Furman University in upland South Carolina
  • O'Neill: huge reenactor with long stringy hair that fought as a marine in Vietnam
  • Debbie: Wife of an reenactor and has it be a family event. she is a shipping director in Newport News.
  • Robert Lee Hodge: Hard core reenactor with the Southern Guard, he lends Horwitz a uniform
  • Karen Meinhold: A 34 year old single nurse from Tonawanda, New York, that plays a Union widow in reenactments.
  • Shelby Foote: Civil War author and featured in Ken Burns' Civil War documentary
  • Bill Mays: lawyer from Missouri, drives a convertible Mercedes, tracking the path of his forebear, a rebel private named Elijah at Shiloh
  • Stacy Allen: A Kansan that is Shiloh National Park's historian
  • Wolfgang Hochbruck: works for the University of Stuttgart in Germany and is fascinated with the Civil War. Has lived a parallel like with Tony Horwitz.
  • Sabine Hochbruck: Wolfgang's wife working on her Ph.D., but is focused on America in the 1960s.
  • Joe Gerache: Owns "Corner Drug Store" in Vicksburg, and is fascinated with the Civil War since childhood.
  • Albert D. J. Cashire: Civil War soldier that was equal to any in thei company, but discovered to be a woman in 1911.
  • Jennie Hodgers: Born in Ireland Jennie disguised herself as a man and fought as Albert Cashire. In 1911 due to a car accident it was discovered that Albert was really Jenny, and was later put in a mental institution and forced to live out her life as a woman.
  • Laura Jones: 80 yers old and served as the president of the (black) Legion's women's auxiliary in Vicksburg.
  • Jimmy Olgers: Larger than life at six feet six and 320 pounds owns Olgers Store which is now a Confederate museum and works at the local funeral parlor - preaches, composes poetry, writes a column for the Dinwiddie Monitor, and serves and unofficial mayor for Sutherland Station.
  • Patricia Shuppin: Park Ranger at the McLean Farm
  • Franklin Garrett: Atlanta's leading historian
  • Jimmy Olger: Runs the store which is more of a museum and works for the funeral parlor. He knows a lot about Civil War history.
  • Beth Davis: involved in the history of Fitzgerald, Georgia
  • Alberta Martin: only living Confederate widow
  • Will Hll Tankersley: a Montgomery investment banker and former chairman of the Chamber of Commerce
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Quotes edit see section history

  • “The answer is family. We grow up knowing who's once removed and sex times dow. Northerners say, 'Forget the War, it's over.' But they don't have the family Bibles we do, filled with all these kinfolk who went off to war and died. We've lost so much.”
    Sue Curtis
  • “When I'm reading, I feel like I'm there, not here. And when I finish I feel content, like I've been away for a while. Sometimes I get brain fry from all the reading.”
    Mike Hawkings
  • “I just feel like the South has been given a bum deal ever since that War.”
    Mike Hawkings
  • “The present - I live it, it holds no mystery. The past does. Plus the present to me is not all that attractive right now. When you're puking in the commode, the past looks a whole lot better.”
    Doug Tarlton
  • “You know what I hate? When people say that history repeats itself. That's the scariest thing I can think of.”
    Beth
  • “Dr. King said you must be willing to stand for something or you will be willing to fall for anything. Jesse Jackson said it doesn't matter what boat brought you to this country. We are all in the same boat here. So let's come together. Let's hold hands now and smile at each other.”
    visiting minister in Salsbury, North Carolina
  • “I don't know what I'd expected to find on the ferry to Ft. Sumter, but it certainly wasn't this: a shaved-headed Jewish truck-driver from Long Island, talking in Doors' lyrics”
    Tony Horwitz
  • “If we could travel back in time, wouldn't we hit the end of the War first?”
    Joel Dorfman
  • “One guy even asked me why so many Civil War battles were fought on national parks.”
    Jim McGill
  • “You know what Sherman said: 'War is cruelty and you cannot refine it.'”
    Abe Stice
  • “In school I remember learning that the Civil War ended a long time ago. Folks here don't always see it that way. They think it's still half-time.”
    Abe Stice
  • “We were raised Methodists. But we converted to the Confederacy. There wasn't time for both.”
    Sue Curtis
  • “Sourtherners are a military people. We were back then, still are today. Every man in here has carried a gun for his country and probably a few women too.”
    Doug Tarlton
  • “When I read about them <Lee and Jackson>, I feel like man's a noble creature, like maybe humanity's just going though a bad patch.”
    Doug Tarlton
  • “I poke holes in icons. I'm suspicious of all agendas, most of all my own.”
    Manning Williams
  • “The South - the white South - has always had this powerful sense of loss. First, it ws the loss of the War and the antebellum wealth. Later, as millions of Southerners migrated ot cities, it was the loss of a close-knit agrarian society. Now, with the region's new prosperity and clout, Southerners wondered if they were losing the dignity and distinctiveness they'd clung to through generations of poverty and isolation.”
    A.V. Huff
  • “You know, if I could trade places with my great-great-grandpappy, I'd do it in a second. Life was harder then but in a way it was simpler. he didn't have to pay phone bills, put gas in the car, worry about crime. And he knew what he was living for.”
    O'Neill
  • “It's high pressure, every minute of the day is scheduled. Then you get out here without TV or appliances and for two days you sit around a campfire talking to strangers and helping each other. We've lost the art of conversation, of just being neighbors. You climb in your car and head back home, and the twentieth century starts flooding in again. It's depressing.”
    Debbie
  • “After these battles, all the soldiers just get up and walk away. But in real life, it didn't happen that way. Glory had a cost. I'm here so people will remember that.”
    Karen Meinhold
  • “It was fought in our own backyard or front yard if you will, and your not apt to forget something that happened on your own property. I was raised up in a rough-and-tumble society. I was in a lot of fistfights, maybe fifty in my life. The ones I remember with startling clarity are the ones I lost.”
    Shelby Foote
  • “It gave us a sense of tragedy, which the rest of the nation lacks. In the moive Patton the general talks about how 'We Americans have never lost a war.' Well, Patton's own grandfather ws in Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. He damn well lost a war.”
    Shelby Foote
  • “I'd be with my people, right or wrong. if I was against slavery, I'd still be with the South. I'm a man, my society needs me, here I am. The difference between North and the South in the War is that there was no stigma attached to the Northern man who paid two hundred dollars not to go to war, or who hired a German replacement. In the South you could have done that, but no one would. You'd have been scorned.”
    Shelby Foote
  • “It is ridiculous now to talk about the right to secede; it was not ridiculous in 1861. Not one of those thirteen colonies would have joined the Union if they hadn't believed they coudl get out of it.”
    Shelby Foote
  • “Slavery was the first great sin of this nation. The second great sin was the emancipation, or rather the way it was done. Teh government told four million people, 'You are free. Hit the road.' Three-quarters of them couldn't read or write. the tiniest fractio of them had any profession that they could enter.”
    Shelby Foote
  • “The Klan that people remember today is the Klan of the 1920s - anti-Catholic, anit-Jewish, anti-Black. Forrest's Klan was anti-blck but not opposed to all black people. It was trying to keep illiterate blacks from occupying positions like sheriff and judge.”
    Shelby Foote
  • “It is the simplicity of the people that fascinates me. Their minds don't seem to have been cluttered like ours, they didn't have all the hesitations about things being right or wrong. They knew, and they acted.”
    Shelby Foote
  • “I'm here because the issues are still here. People still want to be independent of central authority. The evidence suggests that rebels like Elijah believed strongly in their individual right to determine what their government shoudl be. I'm a Republican. Tracking down Elijah gives me some perspective on what it is I believe in, and what commitment to your beliefs is all about.”
    Bill Mays
  • “Ultimately, I guess, i'm trying to figure out what my place in the big picture is. I am who I am, geographically and politically, because of what happened here.”
    Bill Mays
  • “Traditional historians tend to ignore the best primary source out there - the ground. If you read it right, you realize a lot of the written history is simply wrong.”
    Stacy Allen
  • “I think some of the Confederate reenactors in Germany are acting out Nazi fantasies of racial superiority. They are obsessed with your war because they cannot celebrate thier own vanquished racists. Most of these people are Bavarians, of course.”
    Wolfgang Hochbruck
  • “My thesis so far is that Civl War remembrance reflects a movement towards more civility and peace. In reenactments, North and South get along, they work together. And look at all the people who dress as civilians. Maybe if we played a war more instead of really using weapons, our world would be a better place. Of course, it is possible my thesis is nonsense.”
    Wolfgang Hochbruck
  • “Things havent't changed because deep down people's hearts haven't changed. No law, no government, no corporation is going to make you do the right thing. That comes from inside. The outside's changed, but the inside's the same.”
    Laura Jones
  • “A Southerner - a true Southerner, of which there aren't many left - is more related to the land, to the home place. Northerners just don't have that attachment to the home place. Northerners just don't have that depth. I feel sorry for the folks form the North, or anyone who hasn't had that bond with the land. You can't miss something you never had and if you never had it, you don't know what it's all about.”
    Jimmy Olgers
  • “The War did a lot to launch the women's rights movement. Before 1860, women in most parts of the country couldn't own or run businesses, unless they were widowed or let a man manage their property. But during the War you had women working as nurses and clerks and factory laborers, and running businesses and plantations. After the War they started to sue for the right to keep doing so. T”
    Patricia Schuppin
  • “Atlanta's always been on the go. never was a moonlight-and-magnolia city like Savannah or Charleston. It always had more of a Rhett Butler attitude than an Ashley Wilkes one.”
    Franklin Garrett
  • “You must understand the times. In the 1930s we saw American movies, then during the war we didn't. These movies came back after the war and Gone With the Wind was the most popular. I think it gave people home to see this woman fighting so hard to build her land back. Also, she stands by her family, which is something we admire. Scarlett's strength fascinates us. But inside we feel more like Melanie Wilkes, who is polite and kind.”
    Japanese Tourist
  • “The time is not come for impartial history. If the truth were told just now, it would not be credited.”
    Robert E. Lee
  • “History is lived forward but is written in retrospect. We know the end before we consider the beginning and we can never wholly recapture what it was to know the beginning only.”
    C.V. Wedgwood
  • “If veterans could come together so soon after the War and forgive and forget, then surely we can overcome our differences. Old wounds were healed here, old barriers overcome.”
    Beth Davis
  • “It's funny, isn't it, that people get more bent out of shape about a war they lost a hundred thirty years ago than about a struggle that occurred in their own lifetimes.”
    Will Hll Tankersley
  • “Jews don't like Farrakhan because he calls them bloodsuckers. If you're fighting racism, you shouldn't have a leader who says racist things.”
    Tony Horwitz
  • “Five years later, I sat on a friend's rooftop and watched Washington burn during the rioting sparked by King's murder. It was about this time that I began drifting away from the Civil War. Thinking back, I couldn't remember why. But perhaps it was my growing awareness of the race-charged city around me; at some point, cool-looking Confederates didn't seem so cool anymore. And Union soldiers, to me, had always seemed like a bore.”
    Tony Horwitz
  • “But the South had changed on me, or I'd changed on it. My passion for Civil War history and the kinship I felt for Southerners who shared it kept bumping into racism and right-wing politics.”
    Tony Horwitz
  • “People had to fight their own battles; outsiders tended to get in the way, particularly in the South. Still, it saddened me that I sometimes felt like an enemy on the premises, among both whites and blacks.”
    Tony Horwitz
  • “I think the racism is worse now than then. Back then, blacks and whites both farmed and often worked close by, even if they weren't equal. Today, we're so much more separate.”
    Female student in Montgomery, Alabama
  • “A high proportion of our population was not even in this country when the War was being fought. Not that this disqualifies the grandson from experiencing to the full the imaginative appeal of the Civil War. To experience this appeal may be, in fact, the very ritual of being American.”
    Robert Penn Warren
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Setting & Locations edit see section history

Mid-1990s American South
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Organizations edit see section history

First Sentence edit see section history

In 1965, a century after Appomattox, the Civil War began for me at a musty apartment in New Haven, Connecticut.

Table of Contents edit see section history

1. Confederates in the Attic
2. North Carolina: Cats of the Confederacy
3. South Carolina: In the Better Half of the World
4. South Carolina: Shades of Gray
5. Kentucky: Dying for Dixie
6. Virginia: A Farb of the Heart
7. Tennessee: At the Foote of the Master
8. Tennessee: The Ghost Marks of Shiloh
9. Mississippi: The Minie 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
14. Alabama: I Had a Dream
15. Strike the Tent

Acknowledgments

Index

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

  1. Tony Horwitz (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Original Language: English
Publisher: Pantheon
Country: United States
Publication Date: 1998
ISBN: Add the ISBN.
Page Count: 406

Classification edit see section history

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