Confederates In The Attic: Dispatches From The Unfinished Civil War

Following his whimsical Gone with the Wind tour, Horwitz continues on with his theme of trying to separate the realities of the war from the fictions that have sprung up since. In this particular situation, he focuses on two notorious aspects of the war from the Georgia campaign, Sherman’s “March to the Sea” (312) and the prisoner-of-war camp in Andersonville. Both of these strike Horwitz as ripe for exploration: “since my arrival in Georgia I’d been doing some reading. Once again, I learned that much of what I’d absorbed of the Civil War was more mythic than factual” (312). However, while attending a reading by an author named Mauriel Joslyn, Horwitz goes on to see that old images die hard, as the woman spends part of the evening playing a game where she reads passages about war crimes and has the audience guess whether they were perpetrated by Union soldiers or by the Serbs in Bosnia (313-14). Despite this rather polarizing aspect of Joslyn, Horwitz later visits her at home, where he finds that she has curated a large amount of letters from prisoners and women—correspondences which she finds quite insightful on the psychological and human aspects of the war (216).

Furthermore, Horwitz tours Andersonville, a place that has been shaped in his memory by “the victors…who wrote the history of Andersonville” (326). And though he tries to get to the heart of it, Andersonville highlights yet another problem with trying to get to the facts regarding the history of the Civil War, since “if the traditional, Northern-slanted history of Andersonville was filled with exaggerations and omissions, so too was the version offered by Southern apologists” (327). In particular, Horwitz speaks about the commandant of the camp, Henry Wirz, who was hanged after the war for war crimes resulting from the fact that 13,000 Union soldiers died in the camp (325).

Still, one of the most unique moments of the book comes when Horwitz discovers the city of Fitzgerald, “Georgia’s Yank-Reb City” (331), where former Confederate and Union soldiers formed a town and lived side-by-side after the War’s end, one of the few examples offered in the book of people truly coming together after the Civil War to create a new and better society, where “[b]lood that mingled in bitter conflict was here united in brotherhood” (334).

Chapter 13 finds Horwitz in the Alabama town of Elba, where he meets with the oldest living Confederate widow, a charismatic and feisty woman named Alberta Martin. Martin’s story is quaint, but also highlights the massive hardships present for those living in the South in the years following the Civil War, such that when she was proposed to by William Jasper Martin, a man sixty years older than her, she readily accepted, telling Horwitz, “Better to be an old man’s darlin’ than a young man’s slave” (341).

Apart from interviewing Alberta, Horwitz speaks to her younger sister, Lera, who also is of the opinion that she would “have married him [Jasper] too... fifty dollars a month was a lot of money in them days…a woman didn’t have no choices” (347). In speaking the of “fifty dollars,” Lera refers to the pension drawn by Jasper as a Confederate Veteran. Chapter 13 seems to have its own, strange mood and feeling; devoid of the romance or nostalgia that seems to inform much of Horwitz’s encounters, these moments are the some of the closest to actual history that he seems to come to.