Confederates In The Attic: Dispatches From The Unfinished Civil War

Remaining in Tennessee, Horwitz visits the cite of the Civil War battle of Shiloh, where he encounters a series of other history enthusiasts and reenactors who each have their own specific reasons for exploring the battlefield. One, a Northerner named Bryson Powers, has come to locate the exact spot where his great-grandfather was wounded. A pair of Southerners, Mike Brantley and Steve Oxford, the former bringing his great-grandfather’s gun, have also come to the battlefield to experience the type of “time travel” (162) common to so many Civil War sites.

Apart from these men, Horwitz also encounters Scott Sams, who thinks of himself less as a reenactor and more of a pilgrim to the battlefield: “This is a religious thing for me…Christians have Easter Sunday and midnight mass. I’ve got Shiloh on the anniversary of the battle” (167). The final part of Horwitz’ Shiloh experience is with a park ranger named Paul Hawke, who takes Horwitz on a semi-official tour of the battlefield. Hawke explains how “wars leave ‘ghost marks’ on the landscape” (176), such that often much of what people think of a battlefield’s history from only studying it from “eye-level” (176) may be wrong. This notion is something that has been dogging Horwitz for a while now, and he admits “[Hawke) had made me wonder if everything I thought I knew about Shiloh—and about many other battles—was closer to fiction than fact” (176).