Tony Horowitz's Confederates in the Attic

Horowitz, Tony. Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War. NY: Vintage, 1999.

Tony Horowitz’s Confederates in the Attic, part travelogue, part history, and part journalistic account, takes us on Horowitz’s journey through the South in search of answers to many questions. Horowitz’s desire to understand his Russian immigrant grandfather’s obsession with the Civil War (and his own) lies at the heart of this text. This personal narrative frames a larger question: why do people without personal ties to historical events become so wrapped up in them? In an interview with his publisher (available here), Horowitz elaborates on this question, stating, “There’s a lot of history in the book, but it’s mostly about how we remember the past and what that says about us in the present.”

Horowitz travels through the South for a year, trying to understand the ways in which and reasons for which Southerners remember and commemorate the Confederacy. Along the way, he discovers new issues that he wants to explore. He wants to understand the legacy of the Civil War and the way it shapes the attitudes of people who currently inhabit the South. He considers why people participate in reenactments, wondering if there can possibly be a politically correct way to commemorate the Confederacy, an institution tainted by slavery. Horowitz contemplates regional differences in the hope of understanding how people give meaning to historical events in different geographical contexts. Additionally, Horowitz looks for a sense of common American identity—between North and South, between black and white—though he concludes that there is some rigidity to these categories in Southern imagination. Unfortunately, most of these ideas remain unexamined in the book.

Organizing his chapters by state, Horowitz provides a frequently humorous narrative filled with kooky and quirky characters. He meets members of a group called the Sons of Confederate Veterans and a family with its own unofficial museum of Confederate kitsch. After attending a Lee-Jackson birthday party, Horowitz witnesses events held by the Children of the Confederacy, a heritage group for children who spend their Saturdays reading short profiles they have written about the Confederate dead, reciting sentimental poems about “sleeping Confederates,” and laying wreaths on Confederate graves. He encounters Manning Williams, an artist from South Carolina, whose Hieronymus Bosch-inspired works include Lincoln in Hell and Southerners in Hell. In Kentucky, Horowitz learns the story of Michael Westerman, a young man who was killed for flying a Confederate flag, an event that touched off strongly racialized sentiments in one Kentucky town and recalls the recent events in Jena, Louisiana. Horowitz visits Georgia to search for the “real” Tara and meets a Scarlett O’Hara impersonator who is really popular with the Japanese. Finally, during a trip through Alabama, he meets the oldest living Confederate widow.

The most well-developed characters in the book, however, are the Civil War reenactors, whom Horowitz had originally included for comic relief. Horowitz meets hardcore reenactor Robert Lee Hodge and is initiated into the life of a hardcore reenactor, though he reluctantly realizes he is “farb” to the core. Painting a rather generalized picture of these reenactors, Horowitz describes how they urinate on brass buttons to give them a special Civil War sheen, wear genuine uniforms that they never wash, starve themselves to look good for Gettysburg, learn how to bloat up like realistic war dead, and spoon in ditches at night for warmth. Hodge takes a shine to Horowitz, including him in a week-long roadtrip of Civil War sites known as the “Civil Wargasm.”

While Horowitz’s anecdotes about the Civil War reenactors are quite engaging, he fails to indicate that there are great variations in the attitudes of reenactors, particularly with respect to authenticity. He seems to imply that remembrance of the past—from Civil War reenactments to Confederate heritage groups—becomes a sort-of defense mechanism for the South. These therapeutic rituals guard against the uncertainties of a changing world. As the South begins to look more like the rest of America, white Southerners cling to romantic notions of their own past. As a result, quests for authenticity or historical accuracy seem pathologized in Horowitz’s account. They are the folly of pathetic individuals who do not believe that the Civil War ever really ended—or did not end satisfactorily.

Confederates in the Attic is a great read, but we must be careful to consider the role of Horowitz’s own agendas or biases. His white Southerners distrust African Americans and Northerners, while his African American Southerners remain categorically disgusted by white Southerners. In his own quest to construct a narrative about the South today, Horowitz has omitted any characters who challenge his structural understanding of culture and race. In practice, the relationships between white and black and North and South are dialectical at the very least. Surely the South is filled with individuals who complicate Horowitz’s schema further. Nonetheless, they remain peripheral to his tale.