Confederates in the Attic (33 page)

Modern Manassas, a fast-growing bedroom community for Washington, was so hideous that some locals called it “Manasshole.” The town had gained modern renown as the place where Lorena Bobbitt hacked off her husband’s penis and tossed it in the grass outside a 7-Eleven. The town’s historic railroad junction, which had caused North and South to clash here twice in the space of thirteen months, was now swaddled by miles of housing tracts, fast-food joints and car dealerships. Civil War entrenchments had been bulldozed to make way for bowling alleys, shops, offices and access roads, many of them named for the history they’d obliterated: Confederate Trail, Dixie Pawn, Battlefield Ford, Reb Yank Shopping Center.

We ran a four-mile gauntlet of neon before finally glimpsing a split-rail fence that enclosed a small sanctuary of trees and grass. This was the battlefield park, about the size of a suburban golf course. Parking at the visitors’ center, we were instantly mobbed by youngsters gawking at our uniforms. “Cool,” one boy exclaimed. “I didn’t know you guys knew how to drive.”

Rob fixed the boy with a stony rebel stare. “Didn’t we drive them blue-bellies off this field, boy?” he growled. “Not oncet but twice?” The boy squealed with delight, then turned to me. I shrugged, tongue-tied, realizing what a long week it would be playing Yankee Doodle to Rob’s fierce Dixie.

The boy and five others trailed us to the crest of a small knoll at the center of the park. It was here that the beleaguered Confederate, General Barnard Bee, famously declared to his broken troops, “Look men, there is Jackson standing like a stone wall!” Bee died of his wounds before anyone could ask if he meant this as praise or derision; after all, Bee’s troops were fighting hard while Thomas Jackson’s lay prone behind the hill’s crest, holding their fire. But Jackson’s men soon proved steadfast, the nickname stuck, and an equestrian statue of the famed Virginian now towered over Manassas.

“This is Arnold Schwarzenegger doing Stonewall,” Rob quipped to his youthful audience, pointing to the rippling musculature of both Jackson and his steed. In real life, Rob explained, Jackson was a college professor of average stature. His horse, Little Sorrel, was described by one of Jackson’s aides as “a plebeian-looking little beast” whose gait was “always the same, an amble.” Rob turned to me and whispered enigmatically: “We’ll see Little Sorrel later in the Gasm.”

From the statue we strolled to the farmhouse where a bedridden eighty-five-year-old widow, Judith Henry, became the first civilian casualty of the War when an artillery shell crashed through the roof. Beside the Henry house stood a small mound of bricks and artillery shells, dedicated in 1865, “In Memory of the Patriots who fell at Bull Run.” This was believed to be the nation’s first monument to Union soldiers.

First Manassas was littered with firsts, which explained why it was better known than Second Manassas, a far bloodier battle fought on roughly the same ground in 1862. First Manassas was, first of all,
the first major engagement of the War, which prompted one of the first great quotes of the conflict. When General Irvin McDowell warned Lincoln that his troops were raw and unready for battle, the president replied: “You are green, it is true. But they are green, also. You are all green alike.” Northern troops proved not only green but yellow, fleeing toward Washington in a panicked retreat that William Howard Russell dubbed “the Bull Run races.” To Southerners it became known as “The Great Skedaddle.”

First Manassas was also the first battle where North and South adopted the annoying habit of calling the same engagement by different names. Southerners tended to name battles after nearby towns—hence, Manassas—while Northerners chose geographic features, usually a body of water: hence Bull Run, the stream on whose banks the fight began. This rule also prevailed at Sharpsburg (known to Northerners as Antietam, after a creek near the town) and Murfreesboro (Stones River), though not at Shiloh, which the South named for a log church, while Northerners originally referred to the battle as Pittsburg Landing, after a nearby docking place. Go figure.

First Manassas also marked the first use of the railroad to deploy troops for battle. Confederate reinforcements arrived in “the cars,” as they were then called, just in time for the fight. And First Manassas was the first time the keening “rebel yell” was heard as Confederates burst from the woods. Rob walked our juvenile coterie to the spot where this occurred. “Since they didn’t have tape recorders back then,” he said, “no one knows for sure what the yell sounded like. There’s at least three different versions.”

“Let’s hear them all!” several boys shouted.

Rob perched one foot on a cannon wheel and cleared his throat. Then he let loose a blood-curdling, full-throated caterwaul. The boys giggled and hunched their shoulders, as if spooked by a Halloween ghost. “That’s one,” Rob said. The second was a quick succession of high-pitched yelps, like a foxhunter’s call. The third was a peculiar, apelike grunt that rose gradually into a piercing howl. “A mating call,” Rob joked.

By now our small audience had swelled to a crowd, with kids imitating Rob in an unruly chorus of grunts, yips and shrieks while
their parents lobbed questions about Civil War arcana. As Rob patiently answered each query and voice-coached the children, I could see in their rapt, youthful faces a platoon of future hardcore reenactors.

It took an hour for Rob to finally break free. So we made quick work of Second Manassas, sprinting along the unfinished railroad bed where Stonewall Jackson’s men threw rocks at oncoming Yankees when they ran out of bullets. We also visited a nearby field where musket fire had been so intense that lead residue still lingered in the soil. Second Manassas claimed 25,000 casualties, five times the toll at First Manassas. By the late summer of 1862, such slaughter had become almost routine.

There was a later battle of Manassas that I’d witnessed myself. A few months after my return to the United States, the Walt Disney Company unveiled plans for “Disney’s America,” an historic theme park within cannon-shot of the battlefield. Disney’s “imagineers” concocted a fantasy Civil War fort, complete with pyrotechnic displays, “Disney’s circle-vision technology,” and daily reruns of the
Monitor
dueling the
Merrimack
. “It is going to be fun with a capital F!” a company spokesman exulted.

Disney’s plans provoked immediate protest. Manassas lay along the
axis mundi
of Civil War remembrance, within an hour’s drive of sixteen battlefields. Critics warned that the theme park would ravage this “hallowed ground” and substitute McHistory for the brutal reality of the Civil War. In the end, the park’s foes prevailed in a rare triumph of high culture over low.

But as Rob and I sat in gridlocked traffic just outside the national park, the victory looked hollow; like the rebels at Manassas, preservationists had won the battle but seemed doomed to lose the war. Virtually every inch of the park we’d just visited lay within earshot of heavy traffic. At nearby Chantilly, scene of a bloody fight the day after Second Manassas, the battlefield had vanished beneath tract housing. A short way to the southwest, at Brandy Station, site of the largest cavalry battle in American history, developers planned to build a Formula One racetrack.

I felt relieved when we finally broke free from the sprawl around Manassas and drove west through Thoroughfare Gap, into the rolling
farmland of the Virginia Piedmont. As the azure Blue Ridge loomed before us, I dug into my pack for the second reading we’d chosen for our Gasm: Ambrose Bierce’s first impression of Virginia as a young Union private in 1861. “Nine in ten of us had never seen a mountain, nor a hill as high as a church spire,” Bierce wrote of his Midwestern regiment. “To a member of a plains-tribe, born and reared on the flats of Ohio or Indiana, a mountain region was a perpetual miracle. Space seemed to have taken on a new dimension; areas to have not only length and breadth, but thickness.”

Rob had been raised in Ohio and shared Bierce’s wonder at the scenery, though not Bierce’s vocabulary. “I’m peaking,” he said, gazing at the rolling hills and pastures verged by dry-stone walls. “It TKOs you, this one-two punch of history and landscape. You don’t get that in Ohio, or almost anyplace outside Virginia.”

For a while we drove in silence along the Snickersville Turnpike, a narrow road along which troops of both armies had marched. At one point I instinctively reached for the radio dial to hear the news; then, after a few headlines—Bosnia, the budget deficit, presidential politics—I turned it off. Our Gasm wasn’t yet a day old but already I resented the intrusion of current events.

The day so far had also made me curious about Rob. I’d been struck by his rapport with the kids at Manassas and wondered who or what had sparked his own Civil War obsession as a boy in Medina, Ohio, a day’s drive from anything connected to the conflict.

“Well, my name sort of marked me,” Rob said. His father came from Alabama and a vague allegiance to the Confederacy had migrated with him to Ohio. So when Rob was born on Stonewall Jackson’s birthday, an older brother suggested the name Robert Lee, apparently confusing the two commanders’ close-by birthdays.

Rob’s siblings also handed down their Sears Blue and Gray set, a collection of plastic soldiers. “They were about two inches tall,” Rob recalled, “but the clothing really got me, particularly the rebels with their slouch hats and bedrolls. I used to talk to them.” For his first-grade picture, Rob wore a Confederate kepi. “It was cheap,” Rob said. “I was a farb back then.”

Rob cut short his autobiography as we crossed the Shenandoah
River and rolled into Harpers Ferry, the scene of John Brown’s famous raid on a federal arsenal in 1859. Brown hoped to arm slaves with pikes and guns and ignite a black rebellion across the South. Instead, he managed only to spark a local firefight which claimed as its first casualty a free black baggage-master, shot dead by Brown’s men. Vengeful Virginians mutilated the corpses of insurrectionists killed in the raid, then tried and hanged Brown and six other survivors. It was on the gallows that Brown sealed his fame by handing a prophetic note to one of the guards: “I, John Brown, am now quite
certain
that the crimes of this
guilty
land will never be purged
away
but with Blood.”

Brown, with his shovel-shaped beard and blazing eyes, had always seemed a spooky figure, and Harpers Ferry struck me as a spooky town. The main street pitched down an impossibly steep hill, dead-ending at a peninsula shadowed by sheer bluffs. An ancient, whitewash advertisment for Mennen’s talcum blanched the rocky crags on one cliff, with only the gigantic word POWDER still legible.

The town’s cramped streets bore the seedy cast of an unprosperous tourist trap, which Harpers Ferry had in fact been for 135 years. Merchants began hawking relics within weeks of John Brown’s raid, even manufacturing pikes and selling bits of rope and pieces of wood allegedly taken from the gallows. Post-War speculators bought the engine house in which Brown and his men holed up during the raid, and carted it off to the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Later, the engine house returned to Harpers Ferry, eventually coming to rest near its original location by the river.

Rob and I stood for a few minutes gazing at the peripatetic structure, a small brick oblong with stable-style doors and an empty cupola (Union troops swiped the bell during the War). It was dusk and the engine house and other sites were closed. We walked along the vacant streets and pressed our faces to the window of the John Brown Wax Museum: “88 Life Size Figures & Scenes. Life Story of John Brown Youth to Gallows.” As we wandered back to the car, I felt oddly as though we’d broken into a museum after hours.

Driving up the hill to the modern part of town, Rob pulled over to pick up two hitchhikers with long hair, backpacks and walking
sticks. They’d just wandered off the Appalachian Trail, which snaked through the hills nearby, and were searching for a store to stock up on supplies. “It’s like the Dead Zone, eh?” one of them said. As he and his friend clambered into the backseat, which was cluttered with gear—Rob’s musket, sowbelly wrapped in a bandanna, a half-drained six-pack of beer—I noticed the two exchanging glances. Then one of them leaned forward and asked, “You guys part of the living history demonstrations here?”

“No,” Rob said, flashing the hitchhiker one of his patented thousand-yard stares. “We’re just living it.”

The hiker glanced at his buddy again. “That’s cool,” he said.

When we’d gone less than a mile, one of the hikers announced, “You know, it’s a nice evening. I think we’ll hop out at that stoplight and walk it from there.”

The two men dragged their backpacks from the car with a hurried “Thanks a lot, man,” and sprinted down an empty side street. I recognized their paranoia from my own summers hitching around America, climbing into strangers’ cars alert for any flicker of weirdness or trouble. Rob gave more than a flicker; he fairly broadcast wacko.

“What was wrong with those guys, anyway?” Rob asked, popping a beer and speeding out through the darkening town.

W
E CROSSED THE POTOMAC
into Maryland, as Lee’s army had done after routing the Federals at Second Manassas. By carrying the War north, Lee hoped to demoralize the Union and convince Britain and France to recognize the Confederacy. He also wanted to steer the fighting away from Virginia’s war-ravaged farms during harvest. But Lee’s detour from his Virginia supply base forced rebel soldiers to live off the land. The Confederates who straggled through Maryland in September 1862 were as ragged as the Southern army would ever be until the last, desperate days before Appomattox.

“When I say they were hungry, I convey no impression of the gaunt starvation that looked from their cavernous eyes,” Rob read from a Maryland woman’s diary, as we sat by the river. “All day they
crowded to the doors of our houses, with always the same drawling complaint: ‘I’ve been a-marchin’ and a-fightin’ for six weeks stiddy, and I ain’t had n-a-r-thin’ to eat ’cept green apples an’ green cawn.’”