Confederates in the Attic

by Tony Horwitz

  We drove a mile or so to a fork in Tara Road. Bridges said, “Remember the first scene of the book, when the Tarleton twins leave Scarlett?”

  I opened my paperback: “When they had rounded the curve of the dusty road that hid them from Tara, Brent drew his horse to a stop under a clump of dogwood.” Bridges smiled. “This is the spot.”

  He’d based his calculation on the lay of the land and the site’s distance from real coordinates in the book, such as Jonesboro and the Flint River. “Just to make sure, I talked to some old people around here,” he said. “They all told me there was once a clump of dogwoods at exactly this spot.”

  The dogwoods had been supplanted by a copse of real estate signs—“FOR SALE TARA Realty Company”—and by a sign pointing to Tara Beach, a spit of sand beside a nearby artificial lake. Bridges continued slowly down Tara Road, referring me to the book’s next scene, in which Scarlett waits for her father to return along the road from the Wilkes estate: “In her thoughts she traced its course down the hill to the sluggish Flint River, through the tangled swampy bottoms and up the next hill to Twelve Oaks where Ashley lived. That was all the road meant now—a road to Ashley and the beautiful white-columned house that crowned the hill like a Greek Temple. ‘Oh Ashley! Ashley!’ she thought, and her heart beat faster.” The road reappeared a few chapters later, during the O’Haras’ carriage ride to the Twelve Oaks party: a dusty trace bordered by wild violets, Cherokee roses, “savage red gulches” and cotton plantations.

  Now, bulldozers pummeled the red land, sowing tract houses. But the topography matched the text, eerily so, with the road dipping down a gentle slope to the the sluggish brown Flint. It was easy to conjure the swamp bottom where the white-trash Slatterys clung to their three acres of land between the O’Haras’ and Wilkeses’ estates. On the opposite side of the river, the road rose toward a hill with a panoramic view of the surrounding landscape. “Twelve Oaks,” Bridges said, pointing to the top of the hill.

  There was no Greek Temple atop the rise, just woods and cows and undulating pasture. Bridges pointed at the dense woods skirting the meadow. “Mitchell writes about the ‘soughing pines seeming to wait with an age-old patience’ to reclaim the land,” he said. “Well look. They have.” I couldn’t help wondering, though, how long it would be before the woods were claimed by another swim/tennis community.

  We retraced our route, back across the Flint and up the hill on the other side. Bridges paused near the bygone dogwood clump. A long driveway wound up a small knoll. “Tara would be back there, no doubt in my mind,” he said. “This has to be it.”

  A handwritten sign at the base of the driveway said For Sale By Owner. But Bridges wasn’t keen to go any closer, and conceded he’d never done so. “You run into some ornery folk around here,” he said. I reckoned Bridges, a former mailman, knew what he was talking about.

  He dropped me back at my car, and I sat for a while flipping through the novel, rereading passages on Tara. “It was built by slave labor, a clumsy, sprawling building that crowned the rise of ground overlooking the green incline of pasture … ‘Land is the only thing in the world that amounts to anything,’ he shouted. ‘’Tis the only thing in the world that lasts, and don’t you be forgetting it!’…‘Yes, yes! To Tara! Oh, Rhett, we must hurry!’”

  I circled back along Tara Road and pulled up the driveway with the For Sale By Owner sign. The road ended at a low-slung weatherboard house with a cinder-block foundation and a washing machine on the porch. Two bearded men stood leaning against pickup trucks, spitting tobacco juice.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “Did you know that this is where Tara was. I mean, would have been if it were real.”

  “No it ain’t,” said one of the men, who introduced himself as Cooper. “Tara’s back down the road a mile. That’s where that crazy old lady found it. Now there’s a hundred fifty-five duplexes going in.”

  I realized he was talking about the old Fitzgerald house, and tried to explain what Herb Bridges had just told me. Cooper turned and glanced at his modest house. “Lived my whole damned life in Tara and never even knowed it.” He shrugged. “My wife’s crazy about all that Gone With the Wind stuff. But it just don’t flip my boat.” His eyes narrowed. “’Less there’s money in it.”

  “What’s it selling for?” I asked.

  He thought a moment and said, “Fifty something.” This was a ludicrous sum, given that modern split-levels with swimming and tennis privileges were selling down the road for seventy something. I confessed that I wasn’t looking for property, just information. Cooper looked disappointed, but told me about a few Civil War graves nestled in the woods behind his house. “There’s snakes back there as big as your arm, but you’re welcome to poke around if you want.”

  Bushwhacking through the dense brush, I found a few stones almost buried by vines and pine needles. I could just barely make out the inscriptions. One, undated, said simply: “John M. Turner. Papa.” But two others had the familiar, 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.) Brushing away vines, I found one marked “Elijah A. Mann Co. E 10th Ga. Inf. C.S.A.” and another that said, “Lieut. Sidney D. Mann Co. D. 44th Ga. Inf. C.S.A.” No O’Haras or Wilkeses or Tarletons. Still, I wondered if Margaret Mitchell might have tramped back here as a teenager and had her imagination stirred by these lonely Confederate graves.

  Hiking back through the woods and into the yard, with its rusted bikes and battered pickup trucks, I climbed in my car and navigated slowly out toward the interstate, past red earth gashed with still more real-estate signs (“Ashley Woods,” “Tara Pointe,” “Grand Oaks at Tara New Homes from the 80s”), and then past Jonesboro, Tara Shopping Center, Tara Alternator and Starter, Tara Transmission, O’Hara’s Food and Spirits. And I realized that it was probably a good thing that the Japanese never found Tara. It was gone. Gone With the Window.

  BACK IN ATLANTA, I called the historian I’d visited, Franklin Garrett, to corroborate what I’d seen and heard in Jonesboro. He laughed hoarsely, then told me that Margaret Mitchell had phoned him in the 1930s, before finishing her novel. She wanted to check if any of the names she planned to use corresponded with families in the 1860 city directory. “She didn’t want to embarrass anyone by using that name and attaching it, say, to the owner of a lewd house in her novel.”

  Later, after the movie’s release, Garrett helped the city plan a tourist route past the approximate locations of Miss Pittypat’s house and other spots in Atlanta mentioned in the book. He quickly received a long, angry letter from Mitchell. “Franklin,” she wrote of the sites, “they weren’t anywhere except in my mind.”

  “What about Tara and Twelve Oaks?” I asked.

  Garrett chuckled again and mentioned several letters that Mitchell penned when fans of Gone With the Wind began trekking to Georgia in search of the famed plantations. I found one of the letters quoted in an old newspaper story. Mitchell told how she’d scoured the backroads of Clayton County while researching her novel to make sure that the scenery she described was indeed fictional. She even jumbled the county’s geography and checked that there were no Tara-like homes with tree-lined avenues. She did this so that no one might think their own grandmother was the model for Scarlett O’Hara. Mitchell was miffed that people were nonetheless determined to pin her fictional creations to firm ground.

  “My trouble,” she concluded, “seems to have been all for nothing.”

  So, apparently, had mine.

  12

  Georgia

  STILL PRISONERS OF THE WAR

  The time is not come for impartial history. If the truth were told just now, it would not be credited.

  –ROBERT E. LEE, 1868

  Heading east from Atlanta, I shadowed Sherman’s route as he rampaged toward the sea: reducing homes to charred chimneys known as “Sherman’s sentinels,” twisting railroa
d tracks into “Sherman’s neckties,” and sending parties of foragers, called “bummers,” to pillage the countryside.

  Or so I’d always imagined. Since arriving in Georgia, I’d been doing some reading. Once again, I learned that much of what I’d absorbed of the Civil War was more mythic than factual. Sherman talked a good game, pledging to “make Georgia howl,” but the reality of his March rarely matched his words (at least in Georgia; he was harsher on the Carolinas). One Georgia geographer had painstakingly mapped the March route and found that many homes alleged to have been burned were still in fact standing. “The actual destruction of private dwellings,” he concluded, “was rare indeed.”

  Nor was Sherman’s March, which caused few civilian deaths, notably cruel by historic standards. As compared to the laying waste to Europe during the Thirty Years’ War, the routine massacres of Native Americans—or the murder and mayhem caused by Confederate guerrillas such as William Quantrill—Sherman’s treatment of Georgia civilians was almost genteel.

  His surrender terms certainly were. When Joseph Johnston yielded his forces soon after Appomattox, Sherman drafted an agreement so lenient that it provoked outrage in the North, compelling Sherman to match the terms Grant offered Lee. Sherman had lived in the South for twelve years before the War and shared many of its attitudes. All this helped to explain an odd circumstance; Sherman was much less reviled by Southerners a century ago than today. Georgians received Sherman courteously during a return visit to the state just fifteen years after his March. When he died in 1891 (having devoted his post-War years to Indian-fighting, memoir-writing and roller-skating), Sherman’s pallbearers included his wartime foe Joseph Johnston. Eighteen years later, a reporter for Harper’s magazine retraced Sherman’s March and noted “a surprising absence of bitterness” among inhabitants along the route.

  The same wasn’t true now, at least in the town of Conyers, where I stopped to attend a Sons of Confederate Veterans meeting at the Masonic Hall. The session began with an SCV commander hurling firebolts at enemies of the South, most of whom seemed to reside in nearby Atlanta—or “the occupied city,” as he called it. He griped about Atlanta’s liberal newspaper, “The Journal and Constipation,” and about Georgia’s governor, who once called for changing the state flag. “We are a unique people,” he concluded to loud applause, “and others are jealous because they don’t have the heritage we have.”

  The night’s main speaker, Mauriel Joslyn, was a Georgia author who had studied the wartime diaries and letters of Confederates captured in the War. A slim woman with a prim bun, octagonal glasses and a long dress topped by a frilly neckline, she looked rather like my image of Emily Dickinson. “I had twenty-five forebears who fought in the War,” Joslyn began, warming up her audience. “We always say we gave a regiment.” Then, as prelude to her talk, she performed a peculiar call-and-response. Mixing recent news stories about Bosnia with accounts of Sherman’s March, she asked the audience to guess each time if the perpetrators were Serbs or Yankees. “Her husband was a captain in the opposing army,” Joslyn read. “She was sick in bed when two soldiers entered her room. They raped her and she later died in a mental hospital.” Joslyn paused. “Yankees or Serbs?” (Yankees).

  “Drunkenness is rampant. Many soldiers are drawn by the promise of pillage and roaming at will, and are responsible for many of the atrocities committed against civilians.” Sherman’s bummers or Serbian gunners? (Serbs).

  This went on for fifteen minutes. Like most in the audience I guessed wrong half the time. “So you see,” Joslyn concluded, “there isn’t much difference between what Sarajevo and Georgia suffered.”

  The main subject of Joslyn’s talk was an oddly gentle contrast to the atrocities she’d just catalogued. While researching a group of captured rebels, she’d found that the prisoners kept up a lively correspondence with Northern women. Many of the men had been injured and captured at Gettysburg. Recuperating in Pennsylvania, often for months, they were nursed by young women from Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York who stayed in touch after the men were shipped to Northern prison camps.

  The correspondence became quite formalized. If a prisoner was released, he’d pass on the name of his pen pal to a fellow inmate. The women also swapped their correspondents’ names. One Northern woman, jealous of her letter-writing friends, went to visit Fort Delaware (viewing rebel prisoners was a curiosity excursion for civilians) and tossed a cored apple to one of the Confederates. Inside the fruit was a $10 bill and her address. “He was cute—I have his picture,” Joslyn said of the prisoner. The two corresponded for several years and married following the War.

  Intrigued by Joslyn and by her unusual research, I went to visit her home the next day in a town called Sparta. “Excuse the mess—it’s always 1860-something in this house,” she said, leading me into a kitchen cluttered with reenactors’ uniforms, Civil War calendars, and piles of books. Joslyn wrote for the local paper, and her husband worked as a soil scientist. But their true calling was the Civil War.

  “Either we’re reading something or we’re getting ready for a reenactment,” she said. “It’s almost like we’ve adopted a different code of behavior. To me, the modern South is like a curtain I’m always trying to see through to what was there before.”

  Joslyn unearthed a sheaf of Confederate prisoners’ letters to Northern women that she’d gathered at various archives. Many of the letters began “Dear Cousin” or “Dear Aunt”—a way to dodge prison-camp rules against writing to nonrelatives. The letters also steered clear of politics or details about the War. This, too, was a way to avoid censorship. But Joslyn suspected the correspondents also weren’t keen to dwell on their regional differences.

  “They had other things on their mind,” she said. “Literature, art, and flirting like crazy.” One suave Mississippian wrote wistfully to a Northern woman of missing “those endearing scenes, those enchanting beauties that give the youthful heart its buoyancy.” He begged his pen pal to send him “a copy of Shakespeare or Byron,” and enclosed locks of his golden hair. Joslyn sighed. “I’d like to have met him.”

  James Cobb, a dashing Texan, inherited a correspondent named Cora from a fellow prisoner. The two strangers exchanged photographs and quickly fell in love, writing at the same time each Sunday while gazing at each other’s picture. “I walked in the (prison) yard until long after nightfall, with no companion save the invisible one which I felt to be near,” Cobb wrote. “But oh, how unsatisfying is all this! There is still the restless longing for her actual presence.” By late 1864, Cobb was addressing his pen pal as “my dear Cora” and telling her, “Think of all you would have me to say, & imagine it said.”

  For a time, Cobb also wrote to a friend of Cora’s named Allison, a tease who enjoyed the tension her letters created on the homefront. When a suitor arrived as she was writing, Allison told the man to wait until she finished her letter—all of which she reported in delicious detail to Cobb. “If you were here and he could get hold of you, I would not answer for the consequences!” Allison’s beau became so jealous that Cobb ended their correspondence, gallantly writing, “I do not desire to be the cause of a quarrel between lovers.”

  Joslyn said these letters had punctured her stereotypes about relations between the sexes in the 1860s. “There’s a frankness and flirtatiousness that isn’t what we think of as Victorian,” she said. “And the men aren’t talking down to these women at all. They write as equals.” Perhaps, too, they felt liberated by their unusual circumstances. “They’re probably much more intimate in these letters than if they’d been courting with all the formality that surrounded it in those days,” Joslyn said.

  The men also were tender with each other. Letters told of prisoners who washed clothes for fellow inmates, or taught them ballroom dance. “They even had exercise classes, sort of Jack LaLanne at Point Lookout,” Joslyn said, referring to a Maryland prison. “And I’ve got letters the men later wrote to each other signed ‘best love.’ These guys obviously didn’
t have the stigma we have today about men showing affection for each other.”

  They’d also overcome the stigma of writing to civilians in enemy territory. If anything, the divide between North and South spiced the correspondence. “For the women, those ‘awful rebs’ were forbidden fruit,” Joslyn said. The same was true for the men; Northern women were often stereotyped in the South as trollops or Puritans—or both, in the manner of Hester Prynne. “So this was all very titillating for both sides,” Joslyn said.

  The letter writing was also sustained by deprivation on the one hand and compassion on the other. One rebel thanked his pen pal for sending peaches, then asked haltingly for money. “It is something I never had to do before,” he wrote, promising to repay the loan, “if I am permitted to live.” His correspondent feared the money would be confiscated, but answered, “I pity you, being a stranger in a strange land, though you are a rebel and fighting against us.”

  Even more poignant than the letters were autograph albums the women sent for prisoners to sign. Often, the men put the words “unmarried” or “nairy wife, nairy child” beside their names. “There are three things I desire with an exceeding longing,” one man wrote. “A Sword, a Wife and my Freedom.” A Virginian wrote, “I am 22 and still single, but live in hopes.” He died soon after from dysentery. Joslyn closed the album, teary-eyed. “My fellahs were always fishing,” she said.

  Few succeeded in catching anything. Those who didn’t perish in prison returned to poverty-stricken homes and long-lost families. One destitute rebel waited six years after the War, scraping together money to set up a household before proposing to his pen pal. She accepted.