Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War by Tony Horwitz

Author:Tony Horwitz [Horwitz, Tony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-76301-3
Publisher: Vintage Books
Published: 2011-10-12T07:00:00+00:00

I realized with a start that I’d heard a bowdlerized version of this tale on my elementary school playground. Was it possible that this proto-urban legend had some basis in fact?

I found the museum’s curator, Gordon Cotton, sifting papers in a backroom. Cotton was a striking Shelby Foote look-and-sound-alike, a kinship partly explained by the two men having grown up in the same part of the Mississippi Delta. “I heard someone laughing out loud and knew you must be reading about the Minié Ball Pregnancy,” he said.

I asked if he thought the story could possibly be true.

“The girl’s mother believed it, and nothing else matters,” he replied. “I guess you could say that baby was the original son-of-a-gun.”

Part of the story was indeed factual. Dr. Le Grand Capers was the real name of a Confederate surgeon who wrote about the minié ball pregnancy in the American Medical Weekly in 1874, under the headline: “Attention Gynaecologists! Notes from the Diary of a Field and Hospital Surgeon CSA.” However, Capers intended the article as a spoof of the wildly inflated stories of medical prowess reported by other doctors in the War. Not everyone got the joke and Capers’s medical reputation never recovered.

“I decided to just present the story as Capers did,” Cotton said with a shrug. “History shouldn’t be dull.” The same attitude extended to the other exhibits, which Cotton himself had arranged with what he freely admitted was a strong Southern bias. “This is Vicksburg’s attic,” he said. “Our story is the story of Vicksburg, not somewhere in Pennsylvania. People might say, ‘that’s a Southern view,’ but this is a Southern town.”

Most of the items came from local households. The Klan hood had literally come from an attic, stowed in a trunk by a relative of Cotton’s. The outfit originally belonged to Cotton’s great-grandfather, a Confederate private. “The Klan’s part of our history, good or bad,” he said. “People often ask me if my great-grandfather hated blacks. No, I tell them. He hated Yankees. Anyway, if it hadn’t been for the Yankee occupation, we wouldn’t have any good stories to tell.”

Cotton lived in the same 1840s farmhouse where he, his father, grandfather and great-grandfather had all been born. One of Cotton’s cousins still slept in a bed riddled by bullets when Yankees killed her great-great-grandmother during a plantation raid. “Her killers were tried upstairs in this courthouse,” Cotton said. “So you see, we’re never far from our history. I’m not going to go through this museum rewriting the past just to please someone in the present.”

Anyway, the present wasn’t very pleasing to Cotton, particularly the casinos. “I’m still of that old Protestant work ethic, you work for what you get. I don’t believe in ill-gotten gains and games of chance.” Not that he was a prude. “We had a wonderful whorehouse district,” he said. “It’s gone.” He acknowledged, too, that the casinos had created thousands of jobs and pumped millions of dollars in tax revenues into a state that had long been the poorest in the nation.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.