Confederates In The Attic: Dispatches From The Unfinished Civil War

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1998

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-2

Chapters 3-4

Chapter 5

Chapters 6-7

Chapters 8-9

Chapter 10

Chapters 11-13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

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Important Quotes

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Chapter 15Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 15 Summary: “Strike the Tent”

Chapter 15 opens with Horwitz on a reenactors hike. Having begun barely being able to keep up with the “hardcores,” he is now “midway to Gettysburg with a live chicken slung over one shoulder” (379). Chapter 15 serves a summation of all that Horwitz has experienced to this point. He can no longer “glance at the calendar…without attaching dates from the 1860s” (380).

As his father has recently retired, he, too, has returned to his Civil War curiosities. Horwitz discovers that once, his own father’s “idea of fun on a midsummer afternoon was going to Bull Run” (381). The two embark on a mini-tour, where Horwitz finally makes the sudden and logical connection that his father, too, allowed for the Civil War to intrude into his life in many subtle ways, even if they never overtly spoke about it (382-83). All in all, Chapter 15 serves as a reflection, not just for Horwitz but for the entirety of what he has experienced. Almost too much to fully distill, Horwitz posits a series of questions and offers a series of observations based upon his time spent discovering the South and its Civil War heritage. Ironically, he is now no closer to understanding the magnitude of the War and its legacy than he was when he began his journey. Still, he has a new perspective on the people, the places, and the mentality that dominates the Civil War, which seems to be central to the “very ritual of being American” (389).

Chapter 15 Analysis

In closing, Horwitz hopes to make sense of all that he has experienced, something that he finds is nearly impossible to do. A different man than at the start of the book, he possesses a new awareness about the South and its culture, but he is still unsure of how the Civil War should be remembered and honored in that “politically correct way” (246). What the trip has done, though, is given him a chance to connect with his own roots, and to attempt to understand both his own grandfather and father’s obsession with the Civil War as a tradition passed down within his own family. And while it may not come with the fanaticism of reenactment or Lee-Jackson birthday parties, it, too, is a tie that binds and gives a common ground to what it means to be part of his own clan.

Horwitz’s ultimate position seems one of hopeful pessimism. He is aware of the massive obstacles and difficulties that surround the discussion of the Civil War, and he is doubtful that these will ever fully subside; still, he is hopeful that the country, which has survived this one great trauma can manage to pull itself together not because of the war but in spite of it. He has understood much of its appeal in that it was “the last of the wars of individuals, when a single man’s ingenuity and pluck not only counted for something in itself but could conceivably affect the entire issue” (385). It was, in this sense, “the transition from the chivalric combat of old to the anonymous and industrial slaughter of modern times” (385), which is in keeping with much of the symbolism surrounding its memory in the Southern people with whom Horwitz spoke.

In the end, Horwitz seems content with what he has discovered and is ready to move on to new projects and endeavors. However, in the final paragraph, he alludes to the fact that the room he has set aside for his son “had old wooden beams and a sloping ceiling” (390), another attic, in which one family’s love of the Civil War might continue on for another generation to come.