Rebels with Causes, Now and Then

“Southerners are very strange about that war,” Shelby Foote announces in the epigraph of Confederates in the Attic, evoking the Mississippi cadence that fans of Ken Burns’s wildly popular Civil War series will immediately recognize. Despite this familiar opening presence, Tony Horwitz’s “dispatches” offer a quite different set of characters than those sketched by Foote in the television appearances that made him famous. True, there are interesting bits of Confederate trivia to be had in these pages, as well as a quite interesting re-interpretation of the Battle of Shiloh, the bloodiest of all American conflicts west of the Appalachians. Yet the book’s main focus is not the 1860s but the 1990s, as it explores how the latest white defenders of the “Lost Cause” are nurturing an ever-more strange relationship to their region’s searing period of glory, defeat, and obsessive myth-making. Horwitz puts his knack for recognizing the ironic and the absurd to good use and also benefits from a set of diplomatic skills that he acquired while reporting from Bosnia, Iraq, and Northern Ireland. With such tools, he takes up “all sorts of unresolved strife” that has recently shaped the southern engagement with the American Civil War. Navigating his way through historical mine-fields, he shows how quickly such disputes have become proxies for disagreements about “race, sovereignty, the sanctity of historic landscapes, and who should interpret the past” (p. 6). By the end, Foote’s wry aside seems, if anything, packed with considerable understatement.

What has Horwitz found in his journeys to Confederate America? As befits any attic collection, his neo-Confederates form a mixed lot. Among the books’ most prominent figures are those “hard-core” recreators of 1860s military life. Horwitz reports how his own latent interest in the Civil War was re-awakened one morning by Robert Lee Hodge and other self-described “living historians” who have become at once a product of and a challenge to those more traditional “re-enactors” drawn towards one of the country’s fastest growing hobbies. Hard-core attitudes towards most of the approximately 40,000 re-enactors drip with scorn. Those who smoke cigarettes, fail to use “authentic” clothes down to the proper dye, or—worst of all—use fake blood after being “shot” are dismissed as “farbs” (the etymology of the word is unclear, but some speculate it either was a brief version of “far-be-it-from-authentic” or a jumbling of “barf”). To avoid the usual “farbishness,” on the other hand, involves attending to the minute details of period clothing, knowing the intricacies of both camp life and military decorum and—most of all— passing their time as “real” Civil War soldiers would have: not by firing fake guns, but standing sentry, marching for days on end, and generally being miserable.

Horwitz explores the world of hard-core re-enacting twice before detailing his experiences on the marathon “Civil Wargasm” that marks the climactic moment of his travels. Though a remarkably good sport while on the field, he expresses mixed feelings during moments of reflection. He recognizes that most Americans interested in the Civil War show far greater enthusiasm about the battles than about those incidents that transpired “behind the lines” during the country’s most sweeping period of social and political revolution. Horwitz appreciates the pull of the battlefield and understands how re-enacting can further that “ritual of being American” through imaginative engagement with the United States’ defining conflict. Yet he is less sanguine about the way that re-enactments have, since their inception with actual white Confederate and Union veterans, minimized, if not altogether ignored, the explosive issues of race and nation. An encounter with black shoppers at a...