Confederates in the Attic (58 page)

“His idea of fun on a midsummer afternoon was going to Bull Run,” she said. “It was hot as hell and I wasn’t a bit interested. I thought it was weird.”

A
FTER MARCHING THROUGH
the dark for several hours, Rob ordered us into an orchard to rest until dawn. The men stacked their muskets in a tepee-like cone and threw groundcloths onto the dewy grass. Several soldiers spooned in the predawn cool.

I tethered my chicken to a split-rail fence and volunteered for sentry duty with Rob. This meant standing by the road with a wicker jug of honey liqueur, a vile brew that Rob had picked up while provisioning his troops. Between gulps, Rob gazed proudly at his sleeping men. It was a long way from our four-man Pickett’s Charge the year before. Since then, Rob had become a one-man lollapalooza, creating impromptu events that attracted a growing crowd of followers.

At first light a rooster crowed on a nearby farm. Our bird was still sleeping. “Wake up, you farb rooster,” Rob yelled, nudging the fowl with his boot. The rooster managed a half-hearted squawk and the men sleepily mustered. Then Rob shouted “Mail call!” I opened the gunnysack and took out the dense wad of letters. Struggling to
decipher the smudged scribbles on the envelopes—reproductions of nineteenth-century ones, which Rob had dabbed with sealing wax—I called out each soldier’s name.

For a few minutes the men quietly read their mail. One soldier learned that Yankees had seized his farm; another that his father had died of typhoid. Rob pored over a small tintype of a severe-looking young woman that was enclosed with a missive he’d addressed to himself the night before. “She may not look like much,” he said in a choked voice, wiping away tears, “but she’s my sister.”

O
NE HOT AFTERNOON
, my father took me for a sentimental drive around Washington. At Rock Creek Park, he pointed out the remains of Union breastworks he’d scrambled over as a child, and from which the Federals repelled a daring raid by rebels under Jubal Early. We also paused on Pennsylvania Avenue, where my father had watched Civil War veterans pass during military parades in the 1930s. “I used to stand and stare at these old men with long beards going by in open cars,” he recalled.

We ended our tour at the National Museum of Health and Medicine, which I’d last visited thirty years earlier when my father and I plowed through the ten-volume
Photographic History of the Civil War
. The museum was established to collect surgical specimens from Civil War battlefields, and one artifact in particular had struck my morbid boyhood imagination. At Gettysburg, a cannonball shattered the leg of Union general Daniel Edgar Sickles. He survived amputation, donated the leg to the museum—accompanied by a note saying, “with the compliments of Major Gen. D.E.S.”—and went to visit his severed limb each year on the anniversary of his wounding.

Unfortunately, the leg had been temporarily removed for conservation. As I studied the limb’s ebony-wood coffin and a picture of the stump-legged Sickles—who lived to the ripe age of eighty-nine—my father drifted over to an exhibit on head wounds.

“See the brains extruding?” he said, pointing at one picture. “That’s a cerebral hernia.” Another photograph showed a soldier who died of a depressed skull fracture after being kicked by a horse.
“It was over a major vein, they should have left it alone,” he diagnosed. “The patient probably thrombosed.”

We moved to a display of a surgical kit from the War. “Bone saw, file, gouging chisel, trepan,” my father said, ticking off the contents. “I used something called a Hudson drill with a crank mechanism that wasn’t all that different from what these guys had.”

Somehow, as a child, it had never dawned on me that my father saw some link between his own work, digging bullets from the heads of young men shot on the streets of Washington, and the labors of Civil War surgeons who trepanned the skulls of wounded soldiers—often in hospitals a few blocks from the operating tables where my father spent most of his career. Thinking back, I realized we’d spent an inordinate amount of time studying volume seven of the
Photographic History
, the one devoted to wartime hospitals.

N
EARING THE
G
ETTYSBURG BATTLE
, Rob halted our troop by a red farmhouse and ordered one of the men to go ask for water. A white-haired woman came to the door. She seemed remarkably un-fazed by the forty fetid rebels gathered in her yard. “You’re not the first ones here, though it’s been awhile,” she said. “Jeb Stuart’s cavalry came by in 1863. They slept in the grist mill over there.”

The woman pointed us to a spigot and went inside, returning with homemade loaves of potato bread and jars of apple butter. We filled our canteens and flopped gratefully on the grass, munching the heavy food. For me, this was the principal joy of reenacting. It restored my appreciation of simple things: cold water, a crust of bread, a cool patch of shade.

One of the woman’s children came out with a camera. She scanned the crowd and decided to photograph a cluster that included me. I smudged some gunpowder on my face and struck a fierce pose. As the camera snapped, I thought back to the morning when Rob and his fellow hardcores had first appeared on the road by my house. I’d brought out refreshments and gawked at the men, just as these farmers were now doing.

Before we left the farm, Rob asked an adjutant to pen a note saying,
“Thank you most kindly for your generous hospitality.” Then he slipped the letter in a period envelope, adding a five-dollar Confederate note, and left it by the farmhouse door. “We make war only upon armed men,” Rob declared, echoing his namesake, who ordered rebel troops to pay for all provisions acquired from Northern farmers.

The last several miles of the march took us along an old railroad embankment covered in crushed stone. The rubble felt brutal against my tired, poorly shod feet. Bits of tar bubbled on the cross-ties and heat waves shimmered up ahead. The unshaded track seemed to go on forever.

Rob had planned it this way, of course. “It’s the scenic route, boys,” he called out to his groaning troops. As one man pulled off his boots to study his blisters, the chicken he’d been toting broke free and scampered off the embankment. “Shoot the deserter!” someone shouted. But no one had the energy to give chase and the bird escaped into the woods. Rob shook his head. “Hardcore chicken,” he said.

A
LL SUMMER LONG
, I’d culled the notes gathered during my long Civil War ramble. The journey had leached into a second year and eventually carried me to fifteen states. But somewhere along the line, I’d realized that it would take several lifetimes to fully explore the South’s obsession with the War. I’d managed only brief forays to the outriders of the old Confederacy—north Florida, Arkansas, Louisiana, east Texas—and failed to reach more far-flung outposts I’d dreamed of visiting, including Brazil, where a diehard band of rebels known as the “Irreconcilables” established a colony after the War. Their descendants still held an annual
confederado festa
to honor their rebel forebears.

In the end, my journey had centered on the core Confederate states. And from the Carolina Lowcountry to the Mississippi Delta to the Shenandoah Valley, I’d often heard the same sentiments expressed. Everywhere, people spoke of family and fortunes lost in the War; of their nostalgia for a time when the South seemed a cohesive region upholding Christian values and agrarian ways; and, most frequently, of their reverence for larger-than-life men like Stonewall
Jackson, Robert E. Lee and Nathan Bedford Forrest. “That was our Homeric period,” Robert Penn Warren wrote of the Civil War, “and the figures loom up only a little less than gods.”

In reality, they weren’t gods at all, which only made them more intriguing. The more I read, the more I realized that the marble men of Southern myth were often prideful and petty figures who hurt their own Cause by bickering, even challenging each other to duels. Northern generals were often worse, on and off the battlefield. A few years before Daniel Sickles lost his leg at Gettysburg (in a stupid tactical move of his own devising), he shot his wife’s lover dead on a Washington street. Sickles got off with the nation’s first successful plea of “temporary insanity.” Then he took his wife back. It was hard to imagine Sickles—or Grant (an alcoholic), or Sherman (suspected of insanity), or Stonewall (ditto)—rising to the top of today’s luster-less military.

The Civil War, as I’d seen on countless battlefields, also marked the transition from the chivalric combat of old to the anonymous and industrial slaughter of modern times. It was, Walker Percy wrote, “the last of the wars of individuals, when a single man’s ingenuity and pluck not only counted for something in itself but could conceivably affect the entire issue.” This was true not only of generals, but also of men like Jedediah Hotchkiss, a geologist and map-maker who scaled mountains to survey enemy positions before plotting several of the South’s most triumphant maneuvers. Today, the same task would be performed by spy satellites and drone aircraft.

The Civil War was human-scaled in another essential way. Most of the War was fought across a pastoral, preindustrial landscape. Entire campaigns hinged on how many miles soldiers could walk in a day, how much forage they could gather for their horses, how much heat or ice both man and animal could endure. Soldiers and leaders also framed their experience in vivid rural imagery. Jefferson Davis feared that lowering the draft age to seventeen would “grind the seed corn of the nation.” In 1864, Grant ordered Sheridan to so despoil the Shenandoah Valley’s farmland that “crows flying over it for the balance of this season will have to carry their own provender.”

And yet it was new technology that made the War’s romance and
rusticity so palpable. Without photographs, rebs and Yanks would seem as remote to modern Americans as Minutemen and Hessians. Surviving daguerrotypes from the 1840s and 1850s were mostly stiff studio portraits. So the Civil War was as far back as we could delve in our own history and bring back naturalistic images attuned to our modern way of seeing.

But time-travel and nostalgia, and what Robert Penn Warren called “armchair blood-lust,” explained only so much. For many Southerners I’d met, remembrance of the War had become a talisman against modernity, an emotional lever for their reactionary politics. Neo-Confederates had even taken their culture war to the Internet, on Web pages called DixieNet, CSAnet (“the E-Voice of the South”) and Prorebel (site of the “Cyber-Confederate Army”).

While I felt almost no ideological kinship with these unreconstructed rebels, I’d come to recognize that in one sense they were right. The issues at stake in the Civil War—race in particular—remained raw and unresolved, as did the broad question the conflict posed: Would America remain one nation? In 1861, this was a regional dilemma, which it wasn’t anymore. But socially and culturally, there were ample signs of separatism and disunion along class, race, ethnic and gender lines. The whole notion of a common people united by common principles—even a common language—seemed more open to question than at any period in my lifetime.

But while my travels had brought me to some understanding of others’ obsession, I still felt strangely unable to explain my own. A psychoanalyst would no doubt tell me that I associated the Civil War with boyhood evenings spent with my father, a workaholic professional who was otherwise often absent from my life. Somehow, though, this didn’t fully explain the deep, almost spiritual contentment that often washed over me during my travels: studying Confederate muster rolls in a Carolina library, running my hand along a snake-rail fence at Chickamauga, dipping my toes in the Rapidan. Occasionally, people had talked about their passion for the War in ways that illuminated some part of my own. I thought back to Mike Hawkins, the bookish textile worker in North Carolina, who felt as
though he’d “been away for a while” when he read his history books. Or June Wells, the Confederate museum curator in Charleston, who saw in a dead drummer boy’s sticks the whole unspeakable horror of war.

Then there was Jimmy Olgers, the Virginia storekeeper Rob and I met on the Gasm. “You can’t miss something you never had,” he’d said of his tie to the land. “And if you never had it, you don’t know what it’s all about.” That was the way I often felt about my attachment to the Civil War. It was just something I “had,” like myopia or male-pattern baldness, a congenital trait passed down from my father on one side and my maternal great-grandfather, Poppa Isaac, on the other. The pleasure the Civil War gave me was hard to put into words, at least words that made much sense to any one other than a fellow addict.

Y
OU’RE TALKING ABOUT
a period rush,” Rob said, when I tried to explain all this during the final mile of our Gettysburg march. “You’re having rushes all the time and you don’t even realize it.”

Maybe he was right. Then again, I’d rarely felt the sort of period rush that Rob and his friends described while spooning by campfires or shivering in a picket post by a frozen Virginia stream. In a way, I was jealous. As a child, the Civil War had formed a vivid fantasy world I could enter with the stroke of a paintbrush, or by clutching a stick and imagining it a musket. In part, my journey had been an attempt to rediscover that boyhood rapture. But childhood fantasy kept colliding with adult reality—the reality of my dulled adult imagination and of the discomfiting adult questions that remembrance kept raising.

Still, here I was, marching to Gettysburg with a live chicken slung over my shoulder. Rob, of course, had the fever much worse than I did. But when I asked about the source of his own obsession, he became uncharacteristically tongue-tied.

“I’m like you, I guess, I can’t really explain it,” he said, draining the wicker jug of honey liqueur. “I mean, I could care less what I wear in
the rest of my life, but out here I’m obsessed with my clothes. It’s like I’m searching for the Holy Grail, except it’s not a cup, it’s a bit of gray cloth with just the right amount of dye and the exact number of threads.”