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). Horwitz continues, “To Wells, defeat and devastation were the true legacy of the War; they set the South apart from a nation accustomed to triumph” (56).

After visiting with Wells, Horwitz meets with Jamie Westendorff, “a bonafide eccentric” (58). A plumber, Westendorff has a hobby of trying to dig up old outhouses to see what types of treasures he can come across and likens himself to the glorious old blockade runners of the Civil War. (58) Following a colorful exchange with Westendorff, Horwitz recounts the tale of Denmark Vesey, a South Carolinian slave who “plotted one of the most ambitious slave revolts” (63).Horwitz tours the Citadel, which was constructed as a result of Vesey’s failed uprising and went on to become a renowned “Southern military college” (63).

Following his time at the Citadel, Horwitz concludes his visit to Charleston by meeting Manning Williams: “a first-class artist. Also a college professor. A reenactor. Charleston’s leading secessionist” (66). Williams helps round out the cast of characters Horwitz comes across in the city. Williams is an avid Southerner who believes the war is “emotionally still on” (67) and that it was less a war about slavery than it was a war about the direction that the country should go in, both politically and economically (69). “If you like the way America is today, it’s the fruit of the Northern victory” (69), Williams says, which strikes to the core of what many South Carolinians and Southerners feel about the Civil War’s fallout and its ultimate effect on the Southern way of life.