Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horwitz
Most people I speak with about Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic describe it as a travelogue about Civil War reenactors, and while much of the book does document this unique past time, Horwitz’s road trip cum sociological survey of the South is so much more than that.
Fascinated with the Civil War since childhood, Horwitz ambles outside his home in Virginia’s piedmont one day to find a troop of Civil War reenactors camped on the road beside his house. Intrigued, he meets with them, discovering an intense sub-culture with its own strange customs and language.
Horwitz is particularly taken with a ‘hardcore’ reenactor named Rob, a man famous among their ranks for his ability to accurately ‘bloat’ - play dead and contort himself to resemble an era-accurate battle casualty. Rob disdains more casual Civil War buffs, writing them off as ‘Farbs’, looking down on their more casual approach to Civil War remembrance.
Rob is very much not a Farb, going so far as marching for miles barefoot, camping in frozen fields, sustaining himself solely on days-old salt pork and hardtack, donning era-specific clothing, and basically making his life as miserable as possible to better hit that ‘period rush’ that he’s forever in search of.
““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 oxidized the brass, giving it the patina of buttons from the 1860s.”
But though Horwitz does pal around with the reenactors, most memorably in the book’s most entertaining chapter, The Civil Wargasm, the majority of the book details the writer’s journeys through the Clinton-era South.
We tag along as Horwitz encounters the hard-drinking (“I drink beer so I can drink liquor.”) Jamie Westendorff in Charleston, a man who digs up century-old privies on the off chance that he’ll unearth 19th century treasures. We’re a fly on the wall as the author sits and talks with prolific Civil War historian Shelby Foote. And he visits the last Confederate widow and attends civic debates on Richmond’s Monument Avenue statues.
One of the book’s most absorbing chapters is Dying For Dixie, in which Horwitz travels to Guthrie, Kentucky to explore the shooting death of young Michael Westerman, a 19-year-old white man murdered by 18-year-old Freddie Morrow, a Black acquaintance, for flying a Confederate flag on his pickup truck.
The story details how a chance encounter, bored kids, and casual racism exploded into a completely preventable incident that ruined lives and turned Westerman into an unlikely martyr to a cause he didn’t understand or seemingly even subscribe to for more than aesthetic reasons. When Horwitz asks Westerman’s girlfriend why he flew the flag that day, she responds, “He’d do anything to make his truck look sharp. The truck’s red. The flag’s red. They match.”
Morrow, for his part, didn’t seem to have a deep understanding of the Confederate battle flag either.
“They was telling me about how they had a war for it back in the days and all this,” Freddie said. That was all he knew of the Civil War. To him, the banner was simply something whites knew that blacks hated. He suspected whites brandished the flag as a sort of schoolyard taunt, “just doing it out of spite, to see what we would do.”
As Horwitz further tours the South, he peels back more and more layers of a region that cannot seem to let go of the past. A past that to many represents not just a Lost Cause, but a forgotten golden era. As he attends school board meetings, society gatherings, and city council debates, we witness partisans engaging in discourse that appears to be pulled right out of today’s online flame-fests, like this exchange between two men in Richmond:
“A Confederate-American—then and now—is simply anyone who’s against big government,” he said. “We as Southern Americans just want to be left alone.” “Yeah, the South wanted to be left alone—to oppress people!” a long-haired man shouted. “It was not about slavery!” a man with a rebel-flag T-shirt barked back. “It was states’ rights!” “Exactly. The right to own slaves. Tear the statues and plantations down!” “Should we tear down the Pyramids because they were built by slaves? And what about Washington and Jefferson? They owned slaves. Should we tear down memorials to them?”
By the end of his journey, Horwitz seems to lose his early enthusiasm, especially as he encounters school classrooms where children appear hopelessly ignorant of the war and its causes, while teachers are hamstrung by curriculum that seeks to either sweep it under the rug or white wash it into something it wasn’t.
As Horwitz finally makes his way home, he sadly laments, “the whole notion of a common people united by common principles—even a common language—seemed more open to question than at any period in my lifetime.” It’s depressing to reflect on how much worse things have become since.
Confederates in the Attic is as vital and relevant today as it was upon its release and Horwitz’s book, to me, lived up to its status as a modern classic. It’s a funny, wildly entertaining, heartbreaking and deeply thoughtful read that deserves a place among any history lover’s bookshelf.