Confederates in the Attic - Tony Horwitz

   1998; 390 pages.  Full Title: Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War.  New Author? : No, but it’s been a while.  Genres : Travelogue; U.S. History; Civil War; Non-Fiction.  Overall Rating : 8½*/10.

 

    I’ve always enjoyed studying history.  History classes were my favorites in Junior High and High School, and helped prop up my GPA in college.  The best parts of History studies were the sections about wars.  All sorts of wars, including the American Civil War.

 

    I grew up in Pennsylvania, and the Gettysburg battlefield was about about an hour from our house.  One time I got a chance to walk through the national park there.  I stood behind the cannons of the Union defenses, mentally relived the bloody fighting on Little Round Top, and sensed the desperation that the Confederate soldiers felt as they were cut down during Pickett’s Charge.  I was an avid Civil War enthusiast.

 

    So was Tony Horwitz.  He spent the better part of three summers visiting all sorts of Civil War sites, then wrote a book about his experiences: Confederates in the Attic.  Compared to him, I was a Farb.

 

    I was a what??  Hey, be cool now.  Don’t have a Wargasm.

 

What’s To Like...

    There are fifteen chapters in Confederates in the Attic.  Tony Horwitz’s travels and conversations are presented in chronological order, and for the most part take place in the South, since that’s where almost all of the fighting was done.  My favorite chapters, and yours may vary, were:

    05. Dying for Dixie  (Kentucky)

    06. A Farb of the Heart  (Virginia)

    10. The Civil Wargasm  (Virginia and beyond)

    11. Gone With the Window  (Georgia)

    14. I Had a Dream  (Alabama)

 

    I liked the “balance” in the author’s telling of his interactions with folks in the Deep South.  Tony Horwits is a Yankee (he was born in Washington D.C.), and most of the locals he meets and interviews are staunch Dixie diehards.  Their outlooks on their present situation range from “can’t we all just get along?” to “the war ain’t over yet.”  The “truth” about the Andersonville prison seemed to be an especially contentious issue. 

 

    The author also gets introduced to, and quickly enlists in “Reenactment” squads, which I found fascinating.  I assumed participants in Reenactments were just wannabee actors playing their roles; it turns out that the “Hardliners” in that group go to great lengths to fully experience the miserable life of soldiers in the Civil War.

 

    I loved the attention Tony Horwitz gives to the “myth versus reality” aspect of Civil War history. An example of this is given in the first excerpt below.  There are dozens more.  The Battle of Shiloh seems to have been particularly fictionalized, and the “Minie Ball Pregnancy”, which I was taught as being factual, is apparently pure hokum.

 

    Confederates in the Attic is a trivia lover’s delight.  You’ll learn the etymology of the word “deadline”, and how The Citadel college got its name.  I was surprised to learn that one of my favorite writers, Ambrose Bierce, fought in the Battle of Shiloh, and that you can visit the grave of Stonewall Jackson’s arm.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.5/5 based on 2,043 ratings and 597 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.10/5 based on 25,050 ratings and 2,165 reviews.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Sybaritic (adj.) : fond of sensuous luxury or pleasure.

Others: Coffle (n.); Guidon (n.) .

 

Excerpts...

    Fort Sumter wasn’t yet finished when the Confederate commander in Charleston, Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, received orders to “proceed to reduce it.”  Beauregard carried out this dietlike instruction at dawn on April 12, 1861, when the rebels unleashed an artillery barrage from batteries ringing the harbor.

    The Union garrison inside Sumter fired back until the fort’s wood barracks caught fire, forcing the men to surrender.  Incredibly, the only fatality during the thirty-four-hour artillery duel was a Confederate horse.  But when Beauregard permitted his foes to fire a 100-gun salute before lowering the Stars and Stripes, one of the shots misfired and killed two Northern soldiers—the first of 620,000 men who would die in the struggle that followed.  (pg. 46)

 

    The next morning, I toured what little there was to see of Elba, a town of 4,000 perched beside the Pea River.  I asked a Chamber of Commerce official if Elba had any historic sites I might visit.  “There’s that bug statue over in Enterprise,” she said, handing me a pamphlet about the neighboring town.  In a bizarre act of homage, Enterprise had erected a monument to the crablike pest that ravaged Alabama cotton fields seventy years ago.  “In profound appreciation of the boll weevil and what it has done as the herald of prosperity,” the inscription read.  The weevil had forced cotton farmers to diversify, and Enterprise was now a leading peanut-growing center.  (pg. 344)

 

I was midway to Gettysburg with a live chicken slung over one shoulder when I realized my Civil War odyssey had come to an end.  (pg. 379)

    There’s only a small amount of profanity in Confederates in the Attic, 10 instances in the first 20% of the book.  Almost all of the cussing is in direct quotes of the folks that Tony Horwitz is interviewing.  Three of those first ten cusswords were f-bombs and one was a racial epithet.

 

    I only notice one typo in the whole book: hanger/hangar.  Kudos to the beta-readers and editors.

 

    The worst thing I can say about Confederates in the Attic is that after a while, the rationalizations used by diehard Dixie devotees to justify their antipathy for all damn-Yankees get repetitive and tedious.  That’s not Tony Horwitz’s fault; indeed, he mentions this a couple of times in the book.

 

    8½ Stars.  One last thing.  In addition to “farb” and “wargasm”, the other new bit of slang I encountered was “knob knowledge”.  Tony Horwitz cites it as a collegiate term used at The Citadel, but we had this at Penn State when I was there.  Pass your knob knowledge test and you can toss your beanie away!