Confederates In The Attic: Dispatches From The Unfinished Civil War

After having re-examined his approach for how he discusses the Civil War and how he goes about experiencing it, Horwitz undertakes his most radical and whimsical adventure yet, once again bringing along Robert Lee Hodge. Together the pair undertake a whirlwind tour of the South and its historical sites, which they call the “Civil Wargasm” (209). Rather than doing the Civil War in a “controlled way” (210), Hodge once devised a “[hardcore] spontaneous tour of the War’s eastern theater” (210). Described as a type of “Bohemian thing, like a Ken Kesey bus tour” (212) the “gasm” attempts to immerse one as deeply as possible in the mindset of the period while also recreating the psychological and physical exhaustion that a Civil War soldier would have experienced (212-13).

Beginning at Fairfax Courthouse in Northern Virginia, the trip runs the gamut between well-known Civil War battles, such as Fredericksburg and Manassas, to basically unknown skirmishes that might now be the location of a strip mall. Along the way, Horwitz describes Disney’s failed attempt to construct a Civil War theme park, “Disney’s America” (217) around the Manassas battlefield, as well as showing how in some places history has lost out to commerce (234).