Blog entry for March 11, 2013

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            For this week our reading assignment was to finish Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horwitz, and to post our stop for Harrington by Thursday.  This is the assignment I had written down in my notes from class, and the reading schedule was not updated for this week.  Please let me know if there was more to read.

            The second half of the book Confederates in the Attic consisted of the author finishing his journey around the Civil War battles that he had wanted to visit.  Along the way he was able to talk to a variety of people including Shelby Foote, a famous documentary writer.  He visited the site of the Battle of Shiloh, a famous battle in the western half of the Civil War battle sites.  He learned about what constituted a “good death” and he visited the Ruffin Flag Company, a confederate shop.  On his way home he visited Tara, the house made famous in the movie Gone With The Wind.  The book ends with the author returning home to his wife and his wish of imparting his love of the Civil War into his newborn son.

            The author met with Shelby Foote while the author was in Tennessee.  Mr. Foote had helped Ken Burns produce his documentary on the Civil War, and was made famous when the documentary was released to the public. (145)  The author asked Mr. Foote a serious of questions, including what his view of the confederate flag was.  “In his view, those who saw the banner as synonymous with slavery had their history wrong.  The battle flag was a combat standard, not a political symbol.  “It stood for law, honor, love of country,” Foote said, and the banner was revered as such by the veterans who had fought under it.” (153)  Instead of viewing the confederate flag as it is seen in modern times, as a racist and hate symbol, Mr. Foote views the confederate flag as a symbol of honor for those who had fought under it.

General Nathan Bedford Forrest, Image Courtesy of Google Images

            The interview concluded with Mr. Foote telling the author about Nathan Bedford Forrest, a cavalryman who fought in the Civil War for General Lee.  (On a personal note, the book did not give Forrest’s rank but I do believe that he was a general, or very close to it.  Please correct me if I am wrong.)  Mr. Foote felt that Forrest represented ““antique values,” such as cunning and initiative, which had been lost in our own century’s warfare.” (155)  Mr. Foote saw in Forrest someone who represented a part of war that no longer existed, at least for Mr. Foote.  He viewed modern fighters has not having the same amount of initiative that Forrest had, and that it was a shame that some values had been lost to time.

Battle of Shiloh, Courtesy of Google Images

Map of Army Movements Leading to Shiloh, Image Courtesy of Google Images

            The author went to visit Shiloh in Tennessee, where a very famous battle took place.  The battle took place between General Ulysses S. Grant of the Union Army and General Albert Sidney Johnston of the Confederacy. (158-159)  The battle was hard fought by both sides, and the tide of the battle shifted when General Johnson died.  General Grant won the battle for the Union.  (159)  The author had wanted to visit Shiloh, and he was struck by what he called a “contradiction.” (170)  “The whole notion of a “battlefield park” seemed a contradiction in terms.  Preserved here for eternity was peace, beauty and quite – the precise opposite of the events memorialized.” (170)  Battles were harsh, bloody, and anything of beauty (flowers, grass, birds, ect) were quickly killed or trampled into the mud and mingled with the blood of the wounded and dead.  Yet the park dedicated to Shiloh on the site of the battlefield showed none of that.  To the author it may have seen strange, but the park service knows that visitors want to see beauty, and imagine the carnage for themselves.  They do not need to see it in front of them.    

            The author left Shiloh and continued on his journey around the south.  He learned in Virginia the meaning of “making a good death.” (237)  A “good death” was

you assemble your family around you and sing hymns and you are brave and stalwart and tell the little woman that she has been good to you and not to cry.  And you tell the children to be good and mind their mother, Daddy’s fixing to go away. (237)

To have a good death, the man had to be brave in the face of his death and to be stalwart when confronted with his mortality.  This was a good death, and it was the most desirable death for a man during the war.

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            The author visited the Ruffin Flag Company in Georgia.  The Ruffin Flag Company produced products that support the Confederacy in modern times.  The owner, Soren Dresch, sold pro-confederate shirts and bumper stickers in college, which led to his business when he graduated.  He continues to sell bumper sticker, but has expanded his stock to include "hand-loomed Carlina cloth" and dog collars, among other items. (293)

            On the authors way home he found the site of Tara, the house Scarlett O’Hara lived in in the movie Gone With The Wind. (309)  After talking with the owner, Cooper, the author was allowed to explore the woods behind the house.  He found several gravestones from the Civil War, but no “O’Haras or Wilkneses or Tarletons.” (310)  The author could identify the headstones as confederate because they had the “slightly pointed top of Confederate headstones I recognized from a dozen battlefields.  (“They’re shaped that way to keep the damn Yankees from sitting on them,” a Sons of Confederate Veterans member had told me.)” (310)

            The book ends with the author returning home to his wife in Virginia. (389)  He had fulfilled a childhood dream of visiting the sites of the Civil War.  He had met some interesting people along the way, and had quite a few different stories to tell.  When his son was born, he was named Natty Bumppo.  While this was not a Civil War name, the author concluded his book by writing “The upstairs bedroom we’d set aside for our son had old wooden beams and a sloping ceiling.  The walls badly needed paint.  Perhaps when Natty got a little older he could decorate them himself.  I had a few old books on the shelf that might give him some ideas.” (390)  This was the same activity that the author did as a child.  The reader is left with the question of “like father, like son?”  While Natty become a historian like his father, or will he follow his mother on a different path?