Confederates in the Attic
Intro the book and author. Tony Horwitz’s, Confederates in the Attic: America’s Unfinished Civil War. The questions you need to ask as you progress through the paper are: What does Horwitz discover in his travels about the memory of the war in the South? How do these memories affect us today? What does Horwitz see as the underlying problem in the remembrance of the war and race in the United States and how can these issues be addressed? This paper is due April 20. Please footnote and cite all your sources! Students will be required to use the Chicago Manual of Style for their footnotes or endnotes. Other methods will not be accepted! Each of these papers will demonstrate your ability to take a position on a subject and present evidence to back up your argument. Clarity of thought in developing your argument is also essential, so think through your topics carefully. Also, punctuation and proper usage of language will be graded.

Answer
Confederates in the Attic, written by Tony Horwitz, uncovers by introducing his
grandfather who had immigrated to America and who had a passion for the history of the Civil
War. Tony was very close to his grandfather therefore he also became passionate about war,
specifically the Civil War. Years later, Tony and his Australian wife, Geraldine, return to Virginia.
One day, Tony and his wife experienced several Civil War reenactors filming battle scenes for a
movie right in front of their front yard. Out of curiosity, Tony spoke to them for a bit in which
they invited him to go along with them on a training operation. He discovered he had the same
interest as those men. Those men gave everything they had to reenact every aspect of what it was
like to be a soldier during the Civil War, including the unhealthy and harsh conditions that came
along with it. Tony takes the offer and joins Robert Hodge, an American reenactor, and becomes
a “Hardcore” reenactor of Civil War battles.

1. During his ten-state adventure, Tony explores the
“Old South” and expresses how the South rises in various ways through the time of the Civil
War. The purpose of his journey was to keep the Civil War’s memory alive in the eyes of the
people. In this paper, I will analyze two themes from Confederates in the Attic and support those
themes with evidence through the narrative and with the stories certain characters have to tell.
As Tony traveled, he made a stop in Mississippi where the battle of Vicksburg took place.
He noticed that even though people in the town were living together in peace there were still
issues not fully resolved. One of the main issues not resolved was race. The division between
black and white people still existed in Vicksburg. He states that “the old and the new were not
blending too well”

2 It all indicated that there was some racial tension alive in town in which the
black people and white people lived separate lives. He saw the race issue himself on Memorial
Day when the ceremony took place. At first Tony saw the ceremony as a regular Veteran’s
gathering until he noticed that “all but one of those participants was black”

3 Black and white
veterans honored Memorial Day individually. In Vicksburg, they were living in this world where
all events were held as either “all-white, the other all-black”.4
In other words, each group had an arrangement where they lived separate lives and separate holidays that the other group did not participate in. Tony spoke with a woman who taught at a school and she addressed the fact that even though blacks had gained freedom after the Civil War “the color line remained intact”5
in schools. Another woman named Laura Jones spoke with Tony about racial issues in Vicksburg.
She told him that people ignored the problem and proceeded in their own way instead of sorting
out differences and coming together as a whole. At that point, the government could not make
anyone do the right thing because ignorance was in the hearts of the people. As Tony’s
adventure in Vicksburg came to an end, he was surprised to learn that the “racial divide ran so
deep”.6
While there, he explored two sides of everything. “I had to explore two pasts and two
presents; one white, one black, separate and unreconcilable”