I don't normally make forceful book recommendations publicly, but after Ta-Nehisi Coates' post today on his descent into Civil War Bore territory, I feel I have no choice. Tony Horwitz's Confederates in the Attic is, simply and undeniably, the best book about contemporary obsession with the Civil War in all its myriad forms. (The term "civil war bore" is actually a complaint issued by Horwitz's wife (though she's luckier than the German professor whose wife has to put up with his collection of bayonets and minie balls.) Horwitz inherited his Civil War obsession from his Jewish immigrant grandfather, and upon returning to the United States after years of living abroad, began hanging out with a group of hardcore reenactors, who became the catalyst for his exploration of how the Lost Cause is still lived--and resisted--across the American South. Horwitz occupies an interesting position: as a Jew, he's basically Union in his sympathies, but because he's white, he's able to talk pretty candidly to Klan members and pro-Confederacy political advocates, go to meetings of the Sons, Daughters, Children and Cats of the Confederacy, hang out with bitter factory workers who have never met Jews before, and make a minyan with a historically Southern Jewish congregation and cope with the fact that Jews were active participants in the Confederate Army. The book is often extremely funny when Horwitz is hanging out with the reenactors or a laid-off-Jewish truck driver visiting war sites in reverse chronological order while spouting Doors lyrics, very moving (especially a very early-morning visit to Shiloh), and tragic, as in his visit to a county where a black teenager killed a white one over display of the confederate flag.
But amid this flotsam and jetsam, Confederates in the Attic has a useful thesis for anyone who's into the civil war: don't trust everything you see or here. In a way, I think the most useful advice Horwitz gets is from a secessionist professor and painter in Charleston named Manning Williams, who tells him "I poke holes in icons. I'm suspicious of all agendas, most of all my own." That's useful for a couple of reasons. First, as Horwitz finds out, the history of the war is an unreliable thing. For example, the geography at the Hornet's Nest means that the battle that happened there during Shiloh almost certainly couldn't have gone down the way veterans and historians described it.
But second, our relationship to the war is encrusted in politics, sentiment, and art. We can't talk about black soldiers without talking about Glory. The image of women in the Civil War is hard to discuss without bringing in Gone With The Wind (Horwitz has an uproarious and melancholy chapter about the original site of Tara and Japanese obsession with Gone With The Wind). The aftermath of the war is at least as important to American identity as the events of the war itself: Horwitz writes of one group of neo-Confederates that the felt "the Cause was lost, but the Lost Cause shouldn't be." We will, invariably, find in the war what we're looking for. Confederates in the Attic is a good, lime-green reminder of that fact. And of the fact that if we are willing to look beyond our goal, we may find much more than we expected.