Confederates In The Attic: Dispatches From The Unfinished Civil War

One of the major themes running through Confederates in the Attic is the idea of loss. Loss is an ever-present topic that appears in countless numbers of conversations had between Horwitz and his subjects:“The South—the white South—has always had this powerful sense of loss” (87), or “Northerners say, ‘Forget the war, it’s over.’ But they don’t have the family Bibles we do, filled with all these kinfolk who went off to war and died. We’ve lost so much’” (26). For many Southerners, this loss is palpable, and the war is something that is recent, rather than a mere historical event, and “the south is a good place to look at what America used to be” (86). Because of this, remembrance serves not only as a way to honor those who served and sacrificed during the conflict, it also is a way of carrying on and trying to recreate the images and ideals that were prevalent in the South at that time. For many Southerners, remembrance is an active way to keep the South alive: “It seemed a wistful logic; the Cause was lost but the Lost Cause shouldn’t be” (79).

Often, the nostalgia for the golden age of the antebellum South is used as a way to remove people from the struggles and aimlessness of their everyday lives:

If I could trade places with my great-great-grandpappy, I’d do it in a second. Life was harder then but in a way it was simpler. He didn’t have to pay phone bills, put gas in the car, worry about crime. And he knew what he was living for (133).

The idea of having a purpose dominates much of the Southern nostalgia regarding the Civil War. Having lost the war, Southerners and Southern states no longer retained the autonomy that they had prior to 1861, and thus often feel slightly lesser, compared to their Northern counterparts: “The war is emotionally still on. I call it the thousand-year war. It will go on for a thousand years, or until we get back into the Union on equal terms” (67).

Moreover, in an attempt to make sense of the war and its fallout, much myth-making has come to replace the factual histories that governed the time period. Films such as Gone with the Wind, which offer whimsical images of Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara, have embedded themselves in the popular consciousness of Southerner and Northerner alike, thereby coloring the way many modern-day Americans think of the war and the Southern way of life that was centered on family, agriculture, and a chivalric sense of honor. In many ways, Gone with the Wind and films like it have “done more to keep the Civil War alive, and to mold its memory, than any history book or event since Appomattox” (296). This has helped frame the Civil War less as a struggle over the institution of slavery and more a struggle over whether regional or central government should wield the most power in the United States of America, and has given rise to the myth that the South was a noble underdog fighting an aggressive North in order to maintain its simple and honorable way of life, as well as its local sovereignty. In doing so, the popular consciousness has turned many Southern figures into folk heroes: “That was our Homeric period and the figures loom up only a little less than gods” (385). Even those who attempt to re-create the battles of the war tend towards playing the Southern role because to be Northern feels like being an aggressor against a people who wanted nothing more than to go on enjoying a specific way of life (136).

However, this elegiac remembrance furthers the problem of discussing the true causes of the war and the fallout caused by it, and it leads to a black and white division between white Southerners and African-Americans who each have completely different recollections of what the antebellum South represented:

Viewed through this prism, the War of Northern Aggression had little to do with slavery. Rather it was a culture war in which Yankees imposed their imperialist and capitalistic will on the agrarian South…the North’s triumph, in turn, condemned the nation to centralized industrial society and all the ills that came with it (69).

While for many white Southerners the past is a golden age, to African-Americans glorification of the old South and its way of life is nothing more than a longing to bring back slavery and their status as second-class citizens, such that modern-day conversations about how one should “honor” the memory of the Confederacy often break down along racial lines.