Confederates in the Attic (35 page)

The military certainly understood this; after the Civil War, it censored photographs of American battle dead for almost eighty years. Not until the 1960s would the public routinely see vivid images of their own sons at war. In that sense, the TV-fueled opposition to Vietnam wound back to the pictures of the Antietam dead that Rob and I studied over coffee and eggs.

As we returned to the battlefield, I was also struck by how closely the landscape still resembled the one shown in the 1862 photographs. It was easy to align each grim portrait with the bucolic farmland across which the soldiers fell: flung promiscuously along a split-rail fence by the Hagerstown Turnpike, surrounding artillery
Caissons near the Dunker church, sprawled across a cornfield where advancing troops had been exposed by the glint of their bayonets above the man-high stalks. Over 130 years later, the corn was still there, tended by descendants of the German-American family that had sown the same field in 1862.

There was one photograph in particular Rob wanted to revisit. Enlarged to wall size and hanging inside the Antietam visitors’ center, it showed Confederates marching through the streets of Frederick on their way to the battle. The image was believed to be the only photograph from the entire war showing rebels on the move (rather than in camp, dead on the field, captured, or posing stiffly for a studio portrait). Though blurred and faded, the photograph—crowded with lean jaunty men in slouch hats—perfectly captured the ragged panache of the rebel army.

The photograph had inspired Rob and his fellow Southern Guardsmen to concoct a peculiar fantasy. They wanted to stage precisely the same scene, with hardcores filling the role of each Confederate pictured, right down to their equipment, expression and stance. Then, they’d position an old camera in a window and take the exact picture all over again. “That’s about as close as you could ever get to Being There,” Rob said.

Our own time-travel was drifting off course. We’d lingered around the battlefield for twelve hours, a veritable epoch by Gasm standards. And Antietam was what Rob called “early war;” we still had the rest of ’62 and the first half of ’63 to tour in what remained of the day. This meant speeding several hours south to central Virginia, where most of the action occurred in the eight months following Antietam.

As we drove back across the Potomac, Rob took out his notebook and updated the list of stops we’d made so far. “We’re up to ten, if we count First and Second Manassas as separate hits,” he said. “Not too bad for the first twenty-four hours.”

M
IDWAY THROUGH
the long morning drive, Rob twiddled the radio dial until he found a rock ’n’ roll station to keep us awake. Then, shouting over the music, he previewed the next phase of the
War, between Lee’s retreat from Maryland in September 1862, and his ruinous march to Gettysburg the following June.

“These were the South’s Glory Days,” he said, borrowing from Bruce Springsteen. At Fredericksburg in late 1862, Lee repelled a Union invasion in one of the most lopsided slaughters of the War. Then, the next May at Chancellorsville, Lee crushed “Fighting Joe” Hooker and his 134,000 Federals, the largest army ever assembled on American soil and a force twice the size of Lee’s.

Chancellorsville proved Lee’s greatest triumph and also sealed the sainthood of Stonewall Jackson, who was mortally wounded while flanking the Federals—the apogee of his brief military career and ultimately that of the Confederacy’s. “Stonewall was a lot like Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison,” Rob said. “They were all peaking when they died and didn’t stick around to become has-beens.”

The analogy wasn’t airtight. Morrison and Hendrix were sex-crazed hippies who OD’d on drugs; Stonewall was a Bible-thumping teetotaler who sucked on lemons and sipped warm water because he thought the human body should avoid extremes. But Rob was onto something. If Jackson had survived, and failed to change the course of the War, his luster might have been dulled by the South’s eventual defeat. “Better to burn out than to fade away,” Rob wailed, echoing Neil Young.

We were doing both by the time we reached the outskirts of Fredericksburg, which bore a depressing resemblance to Manassas. Developers had achieved what several Union generals never could, conquering Fredericksburg and littering the elegant colonial town with acres of modern crud. As we crawled along Jeff Davis Highway, past a shopping mall called Lee’s Plaza, Rob scanned the ranks of franchise restaurants. “Fast food’s one of the compromises you make on the Gasm, in the interest of speed,” he said. “When you power tour, sometimes you have to power lunch.” Rob ticked off our options, slotting in his own tags for all the familiar names. “Toxic Hell,” he said, pointing at a Taco Bell. Then came “Pizza Slut.” Arby’s, inevitably, became “Farby’s.” We settled for the drive-thru window at Hardee’s, which at least bore the name of a rebel general in the Army of Tennessee.

Lunch made us even drowsier, so we decided to do what Rob
called “a drive-by hit” on Fredericksburg (appropriately, an urban battle fought partly at night). Then we headed to Chancellorsville, ten miles west of town. In 1863, Chancellorsville wasn’t a ville at all, just an inn called the Chancellor House located at the intersection of the Orange Turnpike and a plank road (literally, wooden planks nailed to logs laid over the mud). The battle also formed the unnamed backdrop to
The Red Badge of Courage
, in which Stephen Crane described a landscape of “little fields girted and squeezed by a forest.”

Now, Chancellorsville was slowly being sucked into the maw of greater Fredericksburg, with subdivisions and faux plantation houses poking through the trees at every turn. The Park Service oversaw only a fraction of the vast battleground; earlier in the century, the government had been slow to acquire land near Chancellorsville, arousing suspicions that it wasn’t eager to commemorate the most resounding of Southern triumphs.

Now, every inch not formally protected by law appeared slated for ruin. The local paper reported that a company called Fas Mart planned to build a gas station and convenience store on the spot where Stonewall Jackson turned the Confederate army in the famous flanking maneuver that won the day for the South. The irony was unintended—a Fas Mart supplanting Jackson’s fast march—but the neglect of history was not. “It’s just a handful of people concerned about the battlefields,” the county supervisor told the newspaper, defending Fas Mart in the name of “property rights.”

Near the center of the sprawl-pocked battlefield, we turned in at the small visitors’ center. Rob told the ranger behind the desk, “We want to see everything relating to Stonewall Jackson’s getting popped.” The ranger interpreted Rob’s question in narrowly anatomical terms. “All we have here is Stonewall’s arm,” he said. “The rest of him’s in Lexington, along with his horse.”

I caught Rob’s eye.
Stonewall’s arm?
We knew, of course, that surgeons amputated Jackson’s shattered arm near Chancellorsville. But nowhere in the visitors’ guide was there any hint that the sacred limb still resided on the premises.

“We don’t really tell people about it,” the ranger explained, “unless
they specifically ask.” Then he pulled a map from beneath the desk and showed us how to reach the arm’s burial ground, on private property a short drive west. “You may find some lemons lying around,” the ranger added.

Just outside the visitors’ center stood a monument marking the site of Jackson’s wounding, at the climax of his triumph on May 2. After a day-long march around Hooker’s huge force, Jackson’s men crashed out of the woods shortly before sunset and demolished the Union flank. At nightfall, as the Union fell back in disarray, Jackson galloped ahead of his lines to reconnoiter the enemy and judge whether to press the attack by moonlight. He was riding back through the dark woods when North Carolina pickets mistook his entourage for Union cavalry. “Pour it to them, boys!” an officer shouted. The volley struck Jackson three times in the hand and arm and killed four of his fellow riders. Jackson, ever the dour drillmaster, allegedly declared to an aide, “Wild fire, that.”

A few yards from the monument lay a large quartz boulder dragged to the site by oxen soon after the War. The lump of stone, known simply as “the Jackson rock,” was somehow more eloquent than the fine Victorian statuary that usually adorned such spots. A teenager stood reverentially studying the stone. He had spiked hair, earrings in every orifice, black combat boots, cutoff camouflage shorts and a T-shirt that read: “Sex Pistols. Pretty Vacant.” He looked up and nodded at Rob, and said, Punk to Grunge: “Nice threads. Where can I get some of those?” Rob gave the teenager his address and promised to send a copy of the hardcore “vendors’ list” he’d mailed me when I first expressed interest in reenacting. As the teenager wandered off, Rob said he often recruited people this way. “The uniform’s like a worm, it’s bait on your hook. Once they nibble at it, all you’ve got to do is reel them in.”

From the site of Jackson’s wounding, we worked our way backwards in time to the pine grove where Jackson met Lee on the night before Stonewall’s final march. The two generals sat on hardtack boxes beside a campfire, plotting their bold scheme to split the Southern army and send Jackson around the Union flank. Their parting the next morning, known as the “Last Meeting,” was the
most sanctified of all the Lost Cause’s hallowed moments, reproduced in countless prints and paintings that once adorned the homes of many Southern whites.

“We’ll do all the art and mythology stuff tomorrow in Richmond,” Rob said. Today’s lesson was anatomy. So we drove on, stalking Stonewall’s arm. Probably no limb in history was so heavily signposted. We passed an historical marker by the road titled “Wounding of Jackson” and another labeled “Jackson’s Amputation.” After Jackson’s wounding, litter-bearers carried him off the field under heavy fire, twice spilling the general on the ground. Then came chloroform and the surgeon’s scalpel; a tiny stump was all that could be saved of Jackson’s left arm. Stonewall, characteristically, took the loss in stride. Awakening from his drugged sleep, he declared that the doctor’s bone-saw had sounded “the most delightful music.”

The next day, Jackson was loaded on an ambulance and taken to a farm well behind the lines. An aide, meanwhile, bundled up the severed arm and carried it to his own brother’s house for burial in the family graveyard. We parked on the quiet country lane leading to the spot. Rob dug two Ambulance Corps armbands from his haversack—“to get us in the right spirit”—and we slipped them on before walking solemnly toward the burial ground, which lay at the center of a just-tilled cornfield, ringed by a small iron fence and a perimeter of gopher holes.

The graveyard was unremarkable, except for one lumpy stone with an inscription that read: “Arm of Stonewall Jackson May
3
1863.” No birth or death dates, no list of accomplishments. Just date of severance. It got stranger than that. A nearby marker stated: “During a mock battle attended by President Warren Harding in 1921, Marine Corps General Smedley D. Butler exhumed the arm and reburied it in a metal box.” Butler, I later learned, had heard from a local man that Jackson’s arm lay buried there, and arrogantly declared, “Bosh! I will take a squad of marines and dig up that spot to prove you wrong!” He found the arm bone in a box several feet beneath the surface and repented by reburying it and erecting a bronze plaque, which had since disappeared.

It was midafternoon, we were dazed and spent, and the graveyard seemed as good a place as any to rest for a while. Rob lay with his
eyes closed while I read aloud from the books we’d picked up at the visitors’ center. Amidst hagiographic retellings of Stonewall’s triumphs I caught glimpses of Jackson’s famed idiosyncrasy. This was a man who was fearless in battle, but so hypochondriacal that he believed eating a single grain of black pepper was enough for him to “lose all strength in my right leg.” He was a stern Presbyterian who frowned on public dancing, yet loved doing the polka with his wife in their parlor. A Virginian who owned six slaves, he broke state law by teaching blacks at Sunday school. He was also a merciless taskmaster who pushed his men ceaselessly and shot deserters without remorse, yet succumbed himself to battle fatigue during the Seven Days campaign and napped catatonically through much of the fray.

“He wasn’t stable. That’s attractive to me,” Rob said. “Plus the fact that he always won. I may be a loser but at least I was born on the same day as a winner.”

The identification went deeper than that. Jackson and the “foot cavalry” he led were mostly men of humble background from the Shenandoah Valley. Jackson grew up in the hill country of what was now West Virginia and spent his youth Huck Finn-ishly; orphaned at seven, he later rode a raft down the Ohio to the Mississippi, selling firewood to passing steamers.

Rob’s own family came from the same sort of modest, upcountry Southern stock. His father was born in a log house in hardscrabble hill country near Rock Creek, Alabama. A mule-trader’s son, he quit school after the eighth grade and at sixteen caught a ride to Cleveland, where he arrived with $15 in his pocket. While boarding with a Southern family, he met Rob’s mother, whose clan came from Tennessee. Nine days after they married, Rob’s father shipped out to fight the Japanese and returned thirty months later, shell-shocked, one of only seven men in his unit of fifty-seven to survive.

Rob’s father had recently retired from selling used cars and moved with his wife to the log homestead in Alabama that his forebears had lived in for generations. “Even though I was raised in the North I feel strong ties to the South, or at least the poor part of it my family came from,” Rob said. He’d been gratified to discover at the Archives that his ancestors were common farmers who owned no slaves. Such yeoman often resented the plantation gentry, who could be exempted
from military service if they owned twenty or more slaves, a loophole that prompted the famous Southern gripe: “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.”

Rob clearly cast his lot with the latter. “I like to think of myself as the average grunt,” he said, peeling off his filthy socks and draping them over a gravestone to air.