Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

Propelled by his boyhood passion for the Civil War, Horwitz embarks on a search for places and people still held in thrall by America's greatest conflict. The result is an adventure into the soul of the unvanquished South, where the ghosts of the Lost Cause are resurrected through ritual and remembrance.

In Virginia, Horwitz joins a band of 'hardcore' reenactors who crash-diet to achieve the hollow-eyed look of starved Confederates; in Kentucky, he witnesses Klan rallies and calls for race war sparked by the killing of a white man who brandishes a rebel flag; at Andersonville, he finds that the prison's commander, executed as a war criminal, is now exalted as a martyr and hero; and in the book's climax, Horwitz takes a marathon trek from Antietam to Gettysburg to Appomattox in the company of Robert Lee Hodge, an eccentric pilgrim who dubs their odyssey the 'Civil Wargasm.'

Written with Horwitz's signature blend of humor, history, and hard-nosed journalism, Confederates in the Attic brings alive old battlefields and new ones 'classrooms, courts, country bars' where the past and the present collide, often in explosive ways. Poignant and picaresque, haunting and hilarious, it speaks to anyone who has ever felt drawn to the mythic South and to the dark romance of the Civil War.

A War reenactor friend recommended I read the book. We were talking about the modern-day states rights concerns and he said that the debate had its origins at Fort Sumter. So, I picked up the book thinking it would simply be a survey of what I now know is called neo-Confederate thought. But I was more than a little bit thrilled to find that it was not just a sociological study, but also a travelogue-probably my favorite kind of book.

After returning to the States from an extended time abroad, Horwitz's childhood interest in the Civil War-and especially Rebels-was rekindled after a band of hardcore reenactors showed up in his yard on their way to a battlefield. Soon he began to tour the South visiting relevant War sites and interviewing the Confederate descendants that kept that cause's heritage alive. Horwitz's has an amazing gift for storytelling and it shines through in this book. He has an uncanny ability to come across mundanely interesting characters in his travels and to write their stories with an original verve.

The book is also balanced. Although he is a Yankee, Horwitz's affinity for the Rebels is evident. But he checks that affinity with a good dose of history and reality. He conveys the notion that the South's resentment of the North is not wholly unjustified, but actually often well placed. At the same time, though, he illustrates the willful naivete that makes Gods of Confederate generals and that forgets the Old South's uglier sides. Horwitz manages to do all this while highlighting not just the tragic, but also the fun and curious stories of the Civil War and its remnants today.

Every American should strive to learn a bit more about the War, and this is a great place to start. It's a fun, touching read that demonstrates why that chapter in our history is still important-and indeed still with us-today.


On The (Confederate) Road   December 20, 2004
Tuan Robo
14 out of 14 found this review helpful

When this book first came out, I was concerned that it would, like so many books, paint those who still memorialize the Confederacy as either rabid racists or slack-jawed yokels. However, the photograph of Robert Lee Hodge on the cover kept calling me. Once I took the plunge, I couldn't pull myself out. He critically examines Southrons and our obsession for the War Between The States, yet he does so with pathos, respect, objectivity, and a sense of humor. I haven't enjoyed a vicarious road trip this much since reading Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson. The chronicle is worth reading, if for nothing else, the 'Gasm with Rob Hodge. He draws some interesting parallels between those re-enacting the 1860's and those attempting to re-enact the 1960's as well.


Horwitz is one of the best journalists in the country   May 1, 2000
48 out of 57 found this review helpful

let me begin this review by saying that I am somewhat of a Civil War aficionado. Having said that, no other book that I have read has bridged the ap between the Civil War and the present as well as Tony Horwitz's CONFEDERATES IN THE ATTIC.

Horwitz, whose national reporting and war correspondence I have admired in the Wall Street Journal and The New Yorker, is once again in top form. The urbanity and sophistication of those two periodicals contrasts nicely with the rural south he reports on in this book. After moving to Virginia and meeting local Civil War reenactors, be takes a two year-long Odyssey through fourteen southern states to explore the legacy of the Civil War. William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor combined could not have created such a menegerie of bizarre southern gothic characters.

On his voyage, he encounters Civil War reenactors so "hardcore" that their wives have left them. He encounters hate groups, explores the Confederate Flag controversey, investigates a racially motivated murder, ends up waist-deep in Confedeate kitch, and wanders into a meeting of the "children of the confederacy" eerily reminiscent of a Hitler-youth group.

This book appeals to both northerners and southerners, because it accomplishes te seemingly contradictory tasks of appreciating southern heritage while satirizing the southerners who have not yet forgiven the "Yankees" for destroying their newly formed Confederacy. The names of the chapters "At the Foote of the master," "The Civil Wargasm," and "Gone With the Window" show how the author keeps a satirical tone while appreciating the legacy of the Civil War. This book is an incredible piece of scholarship and journalism.


The Civil War Is Still Being Fought In 10,000 Places   March 1, 2007
Goodbye Cruel World (Under Your Skin)
13 out of 13 found this review helpful

Tony Horwitz, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, takes to the road yet again, traveling from state to state in the American south, delivering one of the best guides to contemporary American attitudes on a specialized subject that's ever been written. In large part the intelligently penned and entirely addictive Confederates in the Attic is a mythbusters for the Civil War crowd. I know Tony Horwitz, author of Baghdad Without A Map, didn't intend it that way, but how else can you see this enjoyable travelogue when every chapter dispels at least one nugget of falsely cherished American folklore?

Permit me to mention but a few:

General Robert E. Lee, that beloved "marble man" iconic hero of admirers the world over, someone oft-billed as a non-slave owning Virginian, actually owned slaves until the end of 1863.

The infamous Hornet's Nest at Shiloh was in reality not the centerpoint of the battle, and in fact was among the least hotly contested and bloody spots on the sprawling field.

The first shots of the war were, as everyone knows, fired in Charleston Harbor, but not at Fort Sumter in April 1861, rather in January of that year at a Northern steamer called Star of the West.

Henry Wirz, the infamous commandant of the Andersonville "concentration camp" in southern Georgia was executed as much for his refusal to implicate his superiors as for his supposed mismanagement of the Hell-ish camp.

Horwitz also refers to Traveller, Lee's most famous mount (more favored by the General than his secondary steed, Ajax) as a "she". Assuming this was not a typo, then how many knew General Lee rode through the war on a mare?

But this book is much more than a mere exercise in mythbusting. It stands as an exploration of how the Civil War still affects the culture in which we Americans live today. One thing Horowitz exposed was how ignorant of the conflict too many modern Americans are. In one of his final chapters he revealed that even in Alabama, heart of Dixie, only half of college-age individuals could name a single Civil War battle. Horwitz's meeting with an Georgia-based representative of a pro-Confederate heritage special interest lobby pointed out the thought-provoking fact that those who revile the supposed racism inherent in the flying of the Stars and Bars should bear in mind that our own national flag, Old Glory herself, flew over legalized slavery for nearly half its history as a symbol.

And those sorts of factoids are what makes Confederates in the Attic so compelling. It opens the mind even as it interests a reader on a more personal and broader level. It's a lot of fun to tag along through the pages of the longest chapter of the book, the winsomely named "Civil Wargasm" and be a party to stories of camping in the dead of night on Antietam's Bloody Lane or to pore over paragraphs concerning the final resting place of Thomas Jackson's amputated arm, but it's even more rewarding to wrestle with the philosophical challenges one encounters scores of times in Horwitz's four-hundred pages.

Something else I gleaned from the two days I spent reading this unique book. Those people most Americans would most readily accuse of racism---Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy, Confederate flag aficionados, Deep Southern figures with much regional pride---are often the most open-minded and least racist sorts out there. Consequently, as Horwitz's journey to a mostly black high school in southern Alabama demonstrates, racism and phobic misunderstanding of others' of divergent ethnicity is by no means confined to those of European heritage.

Confederates in the Attic might just be the best book I've read this year.


History is never dead, it isn't even past. --Wm.Faulkner   March 27, 1999
John Carter John1229@Mailcity.com (Plainfield, IN)
15 out of 16 found this review helpful

This is a book that students of the Civil War and especially history teachers should read. Tony Horwitz has done what just about every student of history would like to do: travel across the Old South, following the armies, visiting the battlefields, and even joining "re-enactors." But this is much more than a nostalgic visit. Horwitz asks questions of himself and those that were willing to talk with him and discovers many disturbing, even frightening things about our nation. History teachers will cringe, weep, laugh, (and perhaps change professions) as they read of his conversations with the myriad persona who talked with him during his sojourn. Perhaps, most disturbing is the concluding chapters where he discovers that not only has the war not solved any problems, it has left a legacy of a fractured nation based on race, section, ideology, and political lines. I recommend this book most highly. As a teacher -- who happens to be teaching the CW at present -- it is sobering and refreshing, a reminder that (as Faulkner said), the past is, indeed, never dead.