Confederates in the Attic (10 page)

Westendorff pointed at a sprawling mansion with a peeling front and rotted shutters. “That’s typical of old Charleston money,” he said. “Too poor to paint, too proud to whitewash.” He edged the truck forward and pointed to several homes in much better repair. “That’s new Charleston dough. Outside money. Nouveau riche.” One of the houses belonged to a Wall Street trader, another to the founder of Wendy’s, a third to a McDonald’s executive. Westendorff whistled. “Must be big bucks in burgers.”

Where others saw grandeur, though, Westendorff saw dung. Pointing through an iron gate at an elegant garden, he said, “I reckon the privy would have been just over there. Could be a real gold mine a few feet down.” But Westendorff suspected he’d never plumb its depths. As new owners bought up Charleston, privy treasure was becoming endangered feces. “Used to be, I’d finish a job in someone’s house and they’d let me poke around the yard. But the new money people aren’t so prone to have you dig up their camellias.”

A horse-drawn carriage clip-clopped past, piloted by a coachman in nineteenth-century livery. A leather diaper dangled beneath the horse’s hindquarters to keep the animal from soiling Charleston’s streets. This daintiness extended to the tour guides’ vocabulary:
slave quarters were called “dependencies” or “carriage houses,” and privies were airbrushed into “houses of necessity.” Westendorff watched a gaggle of tourists poke cameras out the carriage window. “I call them ‘people of necessity,’” he said. “Got to have ’em, just like you got to have craphouses. But they’re turning this town into a fake.”

Westendorff preferred the real thing, most of it tucked on back streets or torn down long ago. He turned down an alley and stopped at a slatternly wood building. “Last of the great hoe-hooses,” he said.

“Great what?”

“Hoe-hoose,” he repeated. “What are you, a goddamned Baptist?”

Hoe-hoose. Whorehouse. Westendorff was the first white person I’d met with a true Charleston accent. The dialect had high and low forms, with the latter known as Geech or Geechee. “It’s a lazy way of talking,” he said. “Slurs words, cuts corners.” He began counting: one, two, shree, fo. The area between Shultz Lane and Michelle Court became simply “Shellcourt.” Then there was Charleston slang. Near the hoe-hooses had once stood dozens of “peanut shops,” hole-in-the-wall joints that sold pint bottles of booze after hours—with peanuts, cigars and other wares serving as fig leaf for their illicit trade. Charleston also once harbored countless speakeasies, known as “blind tigers.” It was at one such dive that black jazz musicians were believed to have created the dance known ever since as “the Charleston.”

“As long as there’s been people in this town, there’s been parties,” Westendorff said. He did his best to uphold this tradition. Pulling over to the curb, he took me inside an unmarked brick building. Paintings of wigged colonials gazed down from the walls at a room filled with card and dice tables. This was the Fellowship Society, founded in 1762, one among scores of private clubs in Charleston. Westendorff had gambled there the night before. “I figured, why stay up all night? So I cut a card with a guy for five hundred bucks. He got a queen. I got a shree.” He shrugged. “Whatever you do, do it for the most.”

Church bells chimed outside. Westendorff fingered an ancient pair of black and white orbs, once used to vote on potential new members
and “black-ball” those who didn’t pass muster. “Growing up here, you can’t help being obsessed with the past,” he said. “Nothing ever dies in this town. It’s like a bottle of wine, just gets older and better.”

Westendorff had to pick up a few things at his house, so we drove over the Ashley River to what looked like an ordinary suburban ranch home. Except that a huge missile perched where a boxwood should have been. “Union shell, two-hundred-pounder, dug it out of a privy,” he said.

Outhouse treasure also filled the interior. Westendorff picked up a nineteenth-century bottle and showed me the words “to be returned” on the base. “People think recycling’s new, but back then people recycled everything. People didn’t throw shit away.” Except down privy holes, of course.

Westendorff unearthed a yellowed notebook filled with invoices and letters of lading. This was the log of a company that managed blockade runners. “No romance here—all of this is strictly business,” he said. He opened the log to early 1863 and read aloud: “‘News has just arrived of another terrible defeat to the Yankees. We have offered our client the goods or any portion he may select at 300% on cost.’” Westendorff whistled. “These guys sure as shit didn’t give anything away.”

He read on: “‘We think by the spring the Yankees will be tired of fighting. We have no more doubt of our ultimate success than we have in our own existence.’” Standard Confederate boosterism. Then business again: “‘We hope therefore to sell as many goods as possible before 1863 expires.’”

Westendorff chortled. “The romance is that a blockade runner was so rich he could throw stuff around, like Robin Hood. But look at this journal—the guy’s so tight he fills every inch of paper rather than waste any.” Sure enough, tiny scribbles filled the margins and back of every page. “You can bet that for every pistol they ran in, there was twice that amount of perfume and ale. Even if you did fifty dollars for the Cause, you’d get rich.”

Westendorff’s own blockade-running forebear hadn’t done so well. Captain of a ship named the
Bermuda
, he sailed to Liverpool soon after the War started and loaded up with cannons. But the
cargo made his ship too heavy to run the blockade. So he docked at a Caribbean island to refit and was seized by the Union navy. After his release from prison he was caught again. He never succeeded in running the blockade and died soon after the War, a destitute man whose four children ended up in an orphanage.

“That’s where the Cause got most people,” Westendorff said. “Prison. Downward mobility. An early grave.” Even so, Westendorff had named his own boat
Bermuda
in honor of his seafaring ancestor.

We climbed back into Westendorff’s truck and returned to town. I thanked him for the tour and asked directions to an old Jewish cemetery that Joel Dorfman had mentioned on the Sumter ferry. This gave Westendorff an excuse to tell me about his own tombstone. “I did a cook-out for a memorial company. The owner was broke so he cut me a stone instead.” The inscription read: “He loved life and tried everything. Take it back—two things he never tried. Sucking dick and suicide.” Westendorff laughed. “My mother about died when she saw that.”

I left him cooking his pigs and walked a half-mile to the iron fence enclosing the Jewish cemetery. Charleston was the cradle not only of secession but also of Reform Judaism in America. Jews began arriving in Charleston in 1695; until the early nineteenth century, the city had the largest Jewish population in the country, with a quarter of all American Jews living in South Carolina. The nation’s first Reform congregation was founded in a converted cotton gin in Charleston in 1824. Jewish names still dotted businesses and law offices across the city. They also filled the headstones before me, mingling Hebrew lettering and Jewish stars with insignias of the Confederacy.

One monument honored a twenty-two-year-old named Isaac and a seventeen-year-old named Mikell: “Victims in Their Early Youth to the Horrors of War, They Freely Gave Their Lives to Their Country’s Needs.” Other stones bore the names Moses, Hilzeim, Poznanski, and also told of early deaths on battlefields or in prison camps. One among the dead was the son of Charleston’s chief rabbi.

I knew that several thousand Jews had fought for the Confederacy and a number had become prominent in the government. David Yulee, an ardent Florida secessionist, was the first Jew elected to the
U.S. Senate. David De Leon served as the Confederacy’s surgeon general. And Judah Benjamin, a close confidant of Jeff Davis, became the Confederacy’s attorney general, secretary of state, and secretary of war.

Still, the image of Southern Jewish foot soldiers discomfited me. I thought of my draft-dodging great-grandfather and of the Passover service, with its leitmotif of liberation from slavery in Egypt. Yet here were young Jews—a rabbi’s son, even, who had perhaps recited the four questions at his family’s seder—going off to fight and die in defense of the South and its Pharaonic institution. I was much more comfortable with the image Emily Haynes sang about while weaving her sweetgrass baskets. Abraham Lincoln, King of the Jews, killed by “the gang” because he brought blacks out of bondage.

B
LACKS, OF COURSE
, had struggled hard to liberate themselves. A third of all Africans brought to this country as slaves first touched American soil in Charleston, and it was here that a free black named Denmark Vesey plotted one of the South’s most ambitious slave revolts. A carpenter and preacher who bought his freedom with winnings from a city lottery, Vesey planned to seize Charleston’s arsenal and arm slaves across the Lowcountry. Betrayed by one of his men, Vesey went to the gallows in 1822 with thirty-four co-conspirators.

A famous shrine to Denmark Vesey still stood, though few people recognized it as such. After the failed revolt, Charleston erected a well-fortified arsenal to guard against future insurrections. This bastion became the Southern military college known as the Citadel (or “the house that Denmark built,” as some blacks called it). The Citadel was now best known for guarding against women, who were struggling to gain admission to the school at the time of my visit.

The Citadel’s modern campus centered on a parade ground ringed by mock-Moorish fortresses that reminded me of sand castles I’d made from plastic molds as a child. At the school’s small museum, I found a room devoted to the Civil War.

“F
IRST SHOTS
,” announced a sign at the start of the exhibit. I’d
had my fill of Fort Sumter and was about to move to the next display when a line of text jerked me back: “On Jan. 9, 1861, cadets under command of Major P. F. Stevens opened fire.”

January 9?
Open any history book and you’ll learn that the War’s first shots were fired on April 12, 1861, when Beauregard attacked Sumter. But according to the Citadel, four of its cadets beat Beauregard to the punch—by three months.

“Cadet George E. Haynsworth,” I read on, “pulled the lanyard firing the first shot across the bow.”

Bow? Of a fort?

Outside, I found a small monument by the parade ground with a bronze bas-relief of four cadets firing a small cannon out to sea. “In the early dawn of Jan. 9, 1861, the first shot of the War between the States was fired from Morris Island by Citadel cadets,” the plaque read, “and the defense of the South became real.”

Had there been some sort of cover-up?

I headed for the library and was greeted by a massive mural, depicting the same scene. I asked the librarian for material on the incident. She handed me a folder labeled “Star of the West,” bulging with yellowed clips and faded monographs that told the hidden history of the War’s beginnings. After South Carolina seceded, federal troops in Charleston moved from a land fort to the safer redoubt at Fort Sumter. Charleston officials responded by posting militiamen to the beaches and islands ringing the harbor. Among them was a detachment of Citadel cadets.

A few weeks later, a Northern steamer called
Star of the West
left Brooklyn with supplies for the Sumter garrison. A Southern sympathizer in New York telegraphed Charleston. When the
Star of the West
tried to enter Charleston harbor at dawn on January 9, 1861, it was a Citadel cadet who sounded the alarm. He and three classmates then fired across the ship’s bow. Several other guns also opened fire. Three balls struck the ship’s side and the captain prudently steamed back to New York. That was it.

Curious to know more, I went to see Colonel Bill Gordon, the Citadel’s resident expert on the
Star of the West
. Colonel Gordon was a ramrod-straight marine with close-cropped hair and black shoes polished to a blinding sheen. He said he took students on field trips
to Morris Island, though the site of the famed cadet battery had eroded into the sea years ago.

“I look at it this way,” he said. “It was Christmas, 1860, just before exam period. And someone says to these cadets, ‘Would you rather take your exams in calculus and English composition or go out to Morris Island and shoot at Yanks?’ It’s a no-brainer. You go.”

The adventure quickly became a wretched camping trip. The cadets were housed in an abandoned hospital filled with coffins. It was buggy, cold, and most of all, dull. So one morning, when a Yankee ship appeared, the adolescent cadets fired their guns. “I don’t think these kids had a cotton-picking clue what they were getting into, unless they were lunatics,” Gordon said.

The War that followed hadn’t been kind to the cadets. Two died in battle and a third fought four long years until the South’s surrender. Nor did he or the other gun-battery survivor enjoy any fame for their actions. “The romance set in later, when their families took an interest,” Gordon said. “The guys themselves probably didn’t give a rat’s ass about the War.”

Gordon’s irreverence surprised me, and I told him so. He explained that he’d seen plenty of combat in Vietnam. “Nothing romantic, let me tell you,” he said. Also, like June Wells’s at the Confederate Museum, his study of the Civil War seemed to have bred a certain pacifism. “I guess it’s fair for the Citadel to claim the first shot of the War,” he said, “but given the slaughter that followed, I’m not sure that’s much to be proud of.”

Others at the Citadel evidently disagreed. The school even had a prize called the Star of the West Medal, awarded each year to the best-drilled cadet. The prize consisted of a gold medal bearing a wooden star carved from what Gordon called “the sacred wood”—an actual sliver from the hull of the ship. The
Star of the West
also formed part of “knob knowledge,” the rote that first-year cadets—called “knobs” because of their shaved heads—were required to memorize and “pop off” whenever upperclassmen demanded it.

Gordon walked me to the door. It was Friday, when cadets drilled in dress uniform across the parade ground. Clad in gray, they toted rifles and the same Palmetto flag displayed with such pride by South Carolinians during the War. With their close-cropped hair and crisp
uniforms, the cadets didn’t much resemble the raffish, bearded rebels of old. But the drill ended with an appropriate flourish. A crew of artillerymen wheeled a cannon in front of the
Star of the West
monument. One of the cadets yanked the lanyard, a blank fired loudly, and a cloud of acrid smoke billowed out across the parade ground. The cadets in the gun crew smiled.