Confederates In The Attic: Dispatches From The Unfinished Civil War

While for much of Confederates in the Attic Horwitz has alluded to the mythology surrounding the Civil War, Chapter 11 immerses the reader into the murky waters that have since helped to blur the image of Civil War reality and Civil War fiction. Journeying to Atlanta, Horwitz discovers a city that seems at odds with many of its Southern neighbors such that it is described as “what a quarter million Confederate soldiers died to prevent” (283). Unlike other Southern cities that had begun as port cities, “Atlanta began only twenty-four years before the Civil War as a railroad point…” (284), and never truly had much of that “moonlight-and-magnolia city” (285) flare.

According to some, the root discontent with Atlanta is that it is a city that is too Northern in style and scope: “People here still have a rural mentality. They want space […] no matter how many Northerners flocked to Atlanta, an essential Southernness would endure” (290). However, in Atlanta, unlike many other Southern cities, “there was not much demand for traditional Confederate history” (296); therefore, many of those who do make their way into the area spend most of their time on the hunt for anything that could be remotely related to Margaret Mitchell’s Lost Cause