Confederates In The Attic: Dispatches From The Unfinished Civil War

Chapter 3 finds Horwitz in South Carolina, and it opens as he tours Fort Sumter, the site of the first battle of the American Civil War. He encounters an out-of-work, Door’s quoting trucker from Long Island who is also attempting a similar journey, though the man states that Fort Sumter is his final stop because “if we could travel back in time, wouldn’t we hit the end of the war first?” (46). Horwitz is also surprised to find that Charleston does not offer memories of the Civil War “at every turn” (49); rather, “the Confederacy represented only a four-year blip in Charleston’s long history,” which dates back to its original charter as an English colony home to many second brothers of English aristocrats (49). Charleston is a very blue-blooded city, such that when citizens of the town say that their “ancestry went back to the ‘three ships,’ they were letting you know, in genteel code, that their blood was of the bluest Charleston pedigree” (49).

While in Charleston, Horwitz visits the local Confederate museum, which is housed in a kindergarten and run by June Wells, a member of the Daughters of the Confederacy (52-3). Wells is an articulate woman who offers Horwitz interesting insights not only into the memorabilia present within the museum’s tiny collection, but she also speaks to him about the psychological make-up of both the South and Southern women: “We’re a different sort of people in Charleston, then and now, and I’m sure that’s why we started it [the Civil War] all” (53).