A common refrain I have found when reading recent books on the Lost Cause, and in particular ones with a personal relationship to the subject, is the choice to highlight two events from the past decade as marking a key turning point in our relationship with the memory of the American Civil War. These are the murder of nine churchgoers in South Carolina at the hands of an avowed white supremacist and the murder of Heather Heyer and injury of many other people during the violence around the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. Sometimes the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police is also added into this mix as well.
These events collectively have brought new attention to symbols and memories that for a long time a section of society have tried (and often succeeded) at arguing were benign. The toppling of numerous Confederate monuments in the aftermath of these violent episodes is a clear testament to how America’s feelings about its Confederate past have shifted and how they will continue to shift under sustained anti-Confederate pressure.
I bring this up because within this modern context it is a fascinating and surreal experience to read Tony Horowitz’s Confederates in the Attic, a book that feels like (and practically was) written in a different age. In his book, Horowitz, a highly qualified journalist, toured the American south sampling various flavors of Civil War memory and, in particular, neo-Confederate obsessions with that memory. The book is wonderfully written and engaging, filled with curious characters and entertaining anecdotes. Horowitz shows his knack for conducting interviews and brings in a dose of personal reflection on his own obsessions with the Civil War. Together, this makes the whole book feel particularly human.
However, Confederates in the Attic is also very clearly of its time. This was an era when there was significant argument around the use of symbols like the Confederate battle flag, but a both-sides, “can’t we just move” on attitude was still prevalent and compromise was the order of the day. This is best summed up by t-shirts that were emblazoned with Malcolm X and the battle flag with the slogan “You have your X and I have mine.” This sentiment of compromise bleeds into the book as a whole. The notion that these neo-Confederates are just wacky weirdos, people with odd beliefs that we all know are wrong but isn’t it just wild that they have them, pervades large chunks of the book. This makes for very odd reading now, when recent events have reminded us all that these are white supremacists clinging to their own positions of power and largely supporting a return to an old racial order.
I do not come here to condemn Confederates in the Attic. It is a product of the time it was written and must be understood that way. Horowitz provides an extremely valuable portrait of the many varieties of neo-Confederate belief that dominated in the 1990s. It is a window back in time, and a thoroughly engaging one at that. But it is also a window with limitations. The first is the lens that it understands its key characters through. Horowitz is not entirely ignorant of the malignant beliefs of these people, but the idea that they are largely harmless and that their beliefs are as well is not something that recent experience would sustain. At the same time, while Horowitz is at his best interviewing people and encouraging them to share their thoughts, personal history, and beliefs, he is not a historian and on the history he can be quite weak. He knows his big picture history of the Civil War, but he’s as liable to quote Foote as McPherson and has no real concept of how historical consensus is reached or what implications that has. He also does not always know enough to push back on the lies spewed forth by certain erratic individuals he interviews, and thus runs the risk of printing their lie as they said it without any counterpoint to indicate that they were wrong.
These limitations are not so significant that I would discourage people from reading Confederates in the Attic. I really enjoyed my time with the book and I learned a lot from it. I was alive during the 1990s but I was young and not fully aware of all that was happening around me, and Confederates in the Attic provides a lot of very useful context for the time as well as for the decades that followed. At the same time, this cannot and should not be your only stop when reading about Lost Cause memory. A book like Ty Seidule’s Robert E. Lee and Me or Karen Cox’s Dixie’s Daughters would make a great pairing with it and fill in a lot of the context that Horowitz missed.
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