3
South Carolina is too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum.
—JAMES L. PETIGRU, describing his native state in 1860
The General Beauregard eased out from the pier and steamed slowly into Charleston harbor. Trapped mid-deck in a coffle of schoolkids, camera straps and windblown maps, I could barely see the fort or hear the ferry’s crackly soundtrack. “With the first shot on Fort Sumter, America’s greatest moment of conflict, the War Between the States, had begun.”
Wriggling free, I joined a few stoic passengers gazing into the wintery breeze from the Beauregard’s bow. Sumter lay three miles offshore. Other Civil War ramparts occupied fingers of land poking into the water. “The Forts, faintly blue on the twinkling sea, looked like vague marine flowers,” Henry James wrote of his visit to Charleston in 1905. From the bow of the Beauregard, Sumter looked more like a manhole cover bobbing atop Charleston harbor.
A man to my left stared at his tour book. “They fired three thousand rounds at that thing,” he said. His wife nodded with the trancelike glaze of a teenager in first-period history class. To my right stood a heavyset man about my own age. He had a shaved head, sunglasses and a camouflage jacket with safety pins where the buttons should have been.
“It’s heart-breaking, huh?” he said, staring out to sea. I wasn’t sure if he meant the Civil War or the scene on the Beauregard.
“Tony Horwitz,” I said, extending my hand.
“Joel Dorfman.” He paused. “Shalom.”
Dorfman was an unemployed truck driver from Long Island. I asked what brought him to Fort Sumter.
“This is the end,” he said.
“The end?”
“Yes, the end, my friend. I just got into town about an hour ago.”
“Me, too.”
“Took a look around to see which way the wind blows.”
I don’t know what I’d expected to find on the ferry to Fort Sumter, but it certainly wasn’t this: a shaved-headed Jewish truck-driver from Long Island, talking in Doors’ lyrics.
“I’ve been a rider on the storm for four months,” Dorfman went on. The journey began when he lost his trucking job. Ever since, Dorfman had traveled through the Civil War, as I now planned to do. Only Dorfman was doing it backwards: from Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, to Petersburg, to Gettysburg, Antietam, Manassas and now Fort Sumter. Later today, he’d begin the long retreat to New York.
“Why’d you do it in reverse?” I asked him.
Dorfman looked at me quizzically. “If we could travel back in time, wouldn’t we hit the end of the War first?”
THE Beauregard docked at Sumter. Up close, the “consecrated object,” as Henry James called it, looked even less impressive than it had from sea. The fort, a low pentagon of brick, squatted atop a bleak man-made atoll. Its walls were covered with an ugly, lavalike spill of black pitch. Seagulls screamed and shat around us as we clambered ashore for the hour until the boat returned.
A Park Service ranger stood atop a cannon barrel inside the fort’s walls. He explained that Fort Sumter wasn’t yet finished when the Confederate commander in Charleston, Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, received orders to “proceed to reduce it.” Beauregard carried out this dietlike instruction at dawn on April 12, 1861, when the rebels unleashed an artillery barrage from batteries ringing the harbor.
The Union garrison inside Sumter fired back until the fort’s wood barracks caught fire, forcing the men to surrender. Incredibly, the only fatality during the thirty-four-hour artillery duel was a Confederate horse. But when Beauregard permitted his foes to fire a 100-gun salute before lowering the Stars and Stripes, one of the shots misfired and killed two Northern soldiers—the first of 620,000 men who would die in the four-year struggle that followed.
“No climbing, no crossing barriers and please don’t take Fort Sumter home with you,” the ranger said, as his audience dispersed across the rubbled fort. The ranger, a young black man named Joe McGill, said his warning against carting off chunks of the fort was only partly in jest. Many Southerners regarded Sumter as a Confederate shrine; marines often came here to reenlist and couples to exchange marriage vows. “Every once in a while someone gets carried away and tries to pry loose a sacred brick,” McGill said.
Mostly, though, the fort attracted ordinary tourists, many of whom possessed a muddled grasp of American history. Visitors often asked McGill why he didn’t mention the “Star-Spangled Banner.” He had to explain that the national anthem was composed during the shelling of a different fort in a different conflict: Baltimore’s Fort McHenry in the War of 1812. Others asked whether it was true that John Brown fired the first shot at the fort. They were thinking of the abolitionist’s raid on Harpers Ferry, eighteen months before the attack on Sumter. “One guy even asked me why so many Civil War battles were fought on national parks,” McGill said.
I was curious if McGill felt any awkwardness guiding tourists through a shrine to the slaveholding Confederacy. “I would if that was the whole story here,” he said. He pointed to a spit of land a short way across the water. It was near there, he said, that black Union troops launched a suicidal attack on a Confederate redoubt called Battery Wagner. The assault, which formed the climax of the movie Glory, changed white attitudes both North and South about the fighting ability of black soldiers.
McGill also told me about Robert Smalls, a Charleston slave and harbor pilot who hijacked a Confederate ship called the Planter, slipped past the guns at Sumter, and turned the ship over to the Union navy. Smalls later became the ship’s commander, as well as a five-term U.S. congressman from South Carolina. McGill smiled. “I see my role here a little the same way,” he said. “Maybe I can slip in a few things that will change how folks think about the War.”
McGill excused himself and went over to tell a school group about the fort’s crumbled bulwarks. The mortar was made from oyster shells and lime, and the ugly black coating I’d noticed from sea was the legacy of the fort’s renovation following the Spanish-American War. The army converted Sumter into a gun battery and sealed it with reinforced concrete, painted black to deaden glare.
I wandered outside and found Joel Dorfman lurking in the mudflats by Sumter’s original gate. A few artillery shells were still embedded in the wall. “These are the original stones and the original cannonballs,” Dorfman said. He pressed his palms against the sun-warmed bricks and closed his eyes. “Break on through to the other side,” he intoned.
A ship’s horn tootled, recalling us to the General Beauregard. Steaming back to Charleston, we gazed at the palmetto-lined seawall where women and children gathered in 1861 to watch the bombardment of Sumter. “All the death,” Dorfman said. “It starts to get to you. Shiloh. I was there. Bloody Pond. It was horrible. The Wilderness. I was there. During the battle the woods caught fire and burned hundreds of wounded men.” He paused. “I’ve been to a lot of cemeteries. Did you know three thousand Jews fought for the South? There’s some buried here in Charleston.”
Suddenly a cry went up and the other passengers started pointing at the sea. “Fin!” someone shouted. A pair of dolphins had broken water. “Quick, get the camcorder!”
Dorfman shook his head. “I’ve been to a lot of these places,” he said. “I couldn’t get much higher. But ninety percent of these people don’t know why they’re here. They’ll be standing on top of ten thousand graves and it might as well be Disneyland.”
We docked in Charleston at sunset. I walked Dorfman to his car. The backseat of the battered Dodge was piled with crumpled clothes, a stained pillow, Civil War books, crushed boxes of Ritz crackers, and a Styrofoam tray holding a gravy-stained biscuit. “The end, my friend,” Dorfman said, climbing inside. He rolled down the window and shouted “Shalom” as he puttered off in a cloud of exhaust. I waved and smiled, wondering if I would reach the end of my own journey in similar shape: death-obsessed, bloated on biscuits and gravy, sleeping in a car littered with dirty laundry and Ritz crackers.
AS A CIVIL WAR BORE, I’d arrived in Charleston naively expecting to confront the 1860s at every turn. But climbing off the Beauregard, I quickly saw that the Confederacy represented only a four-year blip in Charleston’s long history. The first clue to the city’s other lineage was the regal procession of street names—King, Queen, John, Mary—so reminiscent of colonial Williamsburg. In fact, Charleston predated Virginia’s first capital and was named for a monarch who ruled England two thrones before William of Orange.
Charleston even had its own creation story, a Southern version of the Mayflower. Hardy colonists sailed from England in 1669 aboard three ships; hurricanes wrecked two, forcing settlers to crowd onto the Carolina before alighting in Charleston the next year. When modern-day Charlestonians intimated that their ancestry went back to the “three ships,” they were letting you know, in genteel code, that their blood was of the bluest Charleston pedigree.
In the eighteenth century, Charleston was the largest city south of Philadelphia and boasted the colonies’ best theaters, finest homes and first public library. Each summer, while slaves toiled in the rice and indigo fields, the gentry escaped the malarial torpor of their coastal plantations and took up residence in urban pleasure-domes that rivaled the Robber Baron “cottages” in Newport, Rhode Island. “The gentleman planters are absolutely above every occupation but eating, drinking, lolling, smoking and sleeping, which five modes of action constitute the essence of their life and existence,” a colonial doctor in Charleston observed.
This sybaritic splendor had helped ignite the Civil War and was, in turn, destroyed by the conflict. On the eve of the Civil War, white Charlestonians had the highest per capita income in America. In much of the Lowcountry, as the swampy coastal lands around Charleston were known, slaves outnumbered whites by nine to one. It was mostly wealthy planters who gathered at a Charleston hall one December night in 1860 to unanimously pass the South’s first ordinance of secession.
By War’s end, Charleston had been ravaged by fire and by an eighteen-month blitz by Union naval guns. While post-War Atlanta and other cities remade themselves in the image of the North, Charleston abided in a sultry drowse: a poor, proud ghost of the defeated South. But destitution proved a blessing of sorts, sparing Charleston the wrecking ball. By the time prosperity crept back during World War II—fueled, ironically by the same federal navy that pummeled the city eighty years before—Charleston’s grand homes had been recognized as historic and architectural gems worth preserving, and the city was reborn as a playground for tourists. Having vanquished the Old South, Northerners could now partake of its luxuries by staying at planters’ city homes, touring their plantations, riding carriages along cobbled streets, and dining elegantly on the Lowcountry’s colorfully named dishes: hoppin’ John, frogmore stew, wild-cat shrimp and she-crab soup.
I opted for the low-rent tour, staying at a B and B and lolling about the peninsula tip on which the heart of historic Charleston rested. This square mile or so was the most agreeable piece of urban real estate I’d yet visited in America. The low skyline, hurricane-swept flora and well-spaced buildings gave Charleston’s streets the sun-flooded brilliance of a Van Gogh landscape, with architectural coloring to match. I gazed at the lollipop-colored facades lining “Rainbow Row” and peered through wrought-iron gates at secret gardens and grand side porches called piazzas, a Caribbean import designed to catch sea breezes and offer shade against the summer sun. Even in winter, it was easy to conjure a pair of Charleston aristocrats perched in wicker settees on one of these piazzas, idling away the day over rum, tobacco and whist.
I finally found the Civil War again at the Market, a former fish and produce mart that was now a tourist bazaar, including a stall devoted to Confederate paraphernalia: rebel flags, Dixie shot glasses, bumper stickers proclaiming, “If at First You Don’t Secede, Try Try Again.” Just beside the stall, a black woman sat weaving coiled baskets from palmetto fronds, pine needles and sweetgrass. She perched in a fold-out chair with a blanket over her legs and cardboard scraps as shields against the breeze. “Can’t bear the cold,” Emily Haynes said of the sixty-degree day. Tucking a windblown wisp of gray hair under a bright green headwrap, she had the worn look of a woman who could be anywhere between forty-five and ninety.
Haynes was a sharecropper’s daughter and had spent much of her childhood in the fields, using the baskets she now wove for tourists. “You tossed the rice up and down and let the wind blow the chaff away,” she said. “Fan-’em baskets, what we called ’em.” She laughed, exposing a solitary molar. “Now white folks use ’em for fruit and flowers and such.”
It was in the rice fields that Haynes learned what little she knew about the Civil War. “I forgot the tune but the words went like this.” She cleared her throat and recited:
Abraham Lincoln, King of the Jews,
Pinchbeck britches and cowbelly shoes.
She resumed her weaving. “Pinchbeck meant funny pants, blown up like a balloon,” she said. “Don’t know about cowbelly shoes. Sounds poor. Abe was a hick, I guess.” I asked why he was known as King of the Jews. “Cause he led slaves to freedom, same as Moses,” she said. “That’s why the gang got him, same’s they got Martin Luther King. The gang didn’t want him to have their chair.”
The “gang” had also kept poor people down. Blacks once owned much of the farmland around Charleston but they’d been “fooled out of it,” Haynes said. “My daddy always said, ‘White people will out-figure you and take your money.’” This reminded her of another ditty, popular during the Depression:
A nickel’s worth of sugar, a dime’s worth of lard,
I would buy more, but times too hard.
Times were better now. Haynes sold her baskets for $30 each—more, she reckoned, than her father cleared in a year. I let her fool me out of $30 for one. As I got up to go, I asked how she felt about her neighbor selling rebel trinkets in an adjoining stall.
Haynes shrugged, gathering fronds in her lap for a fresh basket. “They can remember that war all they want,” she said. “So long’s they remember they lost.”
CHARLESTON—TOURIST INDUSTRY CHARLESTON—preferred to forget the War altogether. The city’s main museum displayed a few Confederate relics but made no mention of secession or Sumter. Across the street, at Charleston’s huge visitors’ center, the introductory slide show opted for a passive construction of events: “Shots were fired on Fort Sumter and Charleston was plunged into the dark days of the Civil War.” Then the show moved quickly to other calamities in the city’s history: fires, earthquakes, the hurricane Hugo. I asked a woman at the desk about Civil War sites I might visit. Apart from Sumter, she couldn’t name any. “There’s used to be an old museum in the Market, I think,” she said, loading me instead with brochures for carriage rides, garden shows, plantation visits.
Returning to the Market, I found an antebellum building modeled on the Temple of Nike in Greece. A sign above the portico said “Confederate Museum” but there were boards over the windows; the building had been closed since Hugo damaged it in 1989. It was only by chance, at a shop down the street, that I noticed a handwritten flyer saying that the museum had set up temporary digs on a back street and was open for a few hours each weekend.
The location turned out to be a kindergarten, and the museum’s curator a Daughter of the Confederacy who taught there during the week. “The kindergarten said it was okay if we put a few of our things here for the time being,” June Wells said, gesturing at a small, dimly lit room cluttered with dusty cases.
The “things” included the first rebel flag to fly over Fort Sumter and wooden wheels from the first Confederate-made cannon—crammed, for lack of space, in one of the kindergarten’s toddlersized toilet stalls. “We’re not politically correct, you see,” Wells said of the museum’s circumstances. “The city says it can’t fix our building downtown because of money. But they’ve built a new park, a new school, a new aquarium and have fixed all the other buildings damaged by the storm.”
Wells told me this without rancor. She was about seventy, with delicate features and an hourglass figure. I found myself wondering what she had looked like as a young woman. It wasn’t just her appearance. It was also her gentle laughter and direct, almost coquettish gaze. “You’re from Virginia? Oh, we’re deeply flattered,” she said as I signed the guest book. Mine was the first name on a blank page labeled January.
I told her about my travels so far, and the impressions I’d begun forming about Civil War remembrance. “What a wonderful project,” she said. “May I offer you a few of my own thoughts?”
“Of course, m’am. I’d be grateful to hear them.” The best thing about Southern manners was that they seemed to improve my own, at least temporarily.
“We’re a different sort of people in Charleston, then and now, and I’m sure that’s why we started it all,” she said of the War. “We were a well-educated city that cared about issues and had never been through the poverty stage of colonization.”
Wells’s own family arrived on the “first ship” and had stayed in the city ever since. She knew dozens of families with similar pedigrees. “We’re not a migrating people,” she said. “We live in our old houses and eat on our old dishes and use the old silverware every day. We’re close to the past and comfortable with it. We’ve surrounded our lives with the pictures of all these relatives hanging on the walls, and we grow up hearing stories about them. It gives these things a personality beyond just the material they’re made of.”
She stood up and smoothed her paisley dress. “May I show you what I mean?” She gently grasped my wrist and led me to a glass case with a punch bowl inside. The woman who donated it, she said, was the daughter of the chief Confederate engineer at Fort Sumter. At a Confederate reunion in the 1890s, the woman served punch from the bowl to hundreds of distinguished veterans.
“Although she was a young woman, she had false teeth,” Wells said. “As she leaned over to pour the punch, her teeth fell in the bowl. She looked at the line of people waiting to be served, and she looked at the punch. The dentures had sunk to the bottom. So she decided to go ahead serving until she could discreetly remove her teeth.” Wells laughed. “She told me that forty years ago, but I still can’t look at that punch bowl without thinking of those teeth.”
She moved on to another glass case and another strange story. “A woman I’d never heard of in my life calls the museum one day and says, ‘I’m going to die before tomorrow. I have a uniform. If you want it you have to come and get it.’” When Wells arrived, the woman served her sherry in a silver goblet and talked for two hours. “Then she said, ‘I’m dying now, so if you want my granddaddy’s uniform it’s upstairs in a closet.’”
Wells pointed at the uniform and said, “It’s very valuable because it has pants. Few pants survived because the soldiers just wore them till they gave out.” I asked what became of the old lady. “Oh, she still calls me from time to time, to check on grandpa.” Wells smiled. “She’s just as fine as she could be. But she doesn’t like her relatives. I think she gave me the uniform to spite them.”
Every item in the museum seemed to carry a similarly Gothic tale, told with the same blend of decorum and dirt that left me guessing whether Wells meant to praise or skewer her subjects. “Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard was a charming ladies’ man,” she said of the euphoniously named Creole. “This is one of his silver matchboxes, which shows his exquisite taste.” She paused, reaching for her pearl-handled stilletto again. “Did you know he brought a servant with him from Louisiana to wax his mustache every day? He also brought his own cow, by train from New Orleans. He had stomach troubles and claimed he couldn’t drink the milk of any other animal. Can you imagine?”
Wells’s own family wasn’t spared. Both her grandfather and great-grandfather had fought for the Confederacy. “Very esteemed men in Charleston,” she said. At least outside the house. The two men lived together and both survived to ninety-five. “So my grandmother had to take care of these two ancient men, her husband and father, arguing about the War until the end of time. You know that lady had her hands full.”
Wells had joined the Daughters of the Confederacy as a young woman. At that time, the group still included many true daughters of rebel soldiers and even a few widows. Wells often ferried them to meetings. “These were real Charleston ladies, in gloves, hats and heels. I’d do up their corsets. Eighty-five years old, sucking in their breath to show off their slender waists.”
It was these women who had presided over the UDC during its heyday at the turn of the century, when the organization boasted 100,000 members and erected monuments of rebel soldiers on courthouse lawns across the South. It seemed strange to me that women had been so much more active than veterans in hallowing battlefield glory. But Wells, who once served as the UDC’s historian, felt the women were honoring themselves as much as their menfolk.
“Before the War, Southern women—white Southern women of means—were basically protected people, they didn’t do much,” she said. “But then the men went off to war and the women were left to take care of the homes, the businesses, the farms. They suddenly had to be self-reliant, and they found that they could be.” By 1865, one of every three Confederate soldiers had died from battle wounds or disease. Those who straggled home, from Northern prisons or the killing fields of Virginia, were defeated, dispirited, often maimed. “But the women had found in a strange way that they were stronger than before,” Wells said. “They took care of the widows and orphans and wounded men. And they felt a solidarity and sentimentality about the South.”
They also cherished the War’s physical remains; it was the Daughters who had started the Confederate Museum in 1896. Many of the items still bore yellowed, handwritten labels scribbled by veterans themselves. A typical one read: “Button from the coat of C.P. Poppenheim, with stain of wound received at battle of Sharpsburg.” One veteran presented a glass box filled with pressed flowers from Manassas. Another hauled home the trunk of a bullet-riddled tree. Some even toted home rocks. “When they weren’t shooting Yanks they were hunting souvenirs,” Wells said.
Nor did relic hunting end with the War. Wells showed me a letter with a lock of gray hair sewn to it. “This is our most popular item,” she said. The letter was from Robert E. Lee’s barber and read: “The lock of hair I send you was cut by me from the head of the great Hero after his death.” Another case contained a lock of Jeff Davis’s hair and splinters of wood from the tree under which he was arrested by Union troops in 1865.
Hair. Bits of wood. Blood-stained clothing. The kindergarten was beginning to feel less like a museum than a saints’ reliquary. “Why do you work here?” I asked Wells.
“Volunteer,” she corrected me. Then, in answer to my question, she showed me a pair of drumsticks with a caption that said, “Found in the hands of a lad killed in battle.” There was also a little trunk in which the drummer boy had carried his childhood belongings off to war.
“I always show these to young people because I’m very anti-military,” Wells said. “That’s why I do this museum. Everything here is real. It isn’t television. I hope that people seeing these things will make them never want to fight again.”
To Wells, defeat and devastation were the true legacy of the War; they set the South apart from a nation accustomed to triumph. She liked to think this made Southerners a little wiser and perhaps a little more considerate of one other. “I always felt sorry for Northern people,” she said. “I have a Yankee relative in New York and when I go to visit her I’m uncomfortable, people are so suspicious and cold.” She shrugged. “I guess I still feel the South is the better half of the world somehow.”
There was a knock on the door and a weary-looking woman came in with a boy of about ten. Catching sight of the museum, the boy’s face brightened. “I’m so glad we finally found you,” his mother said. “He’s mad on the Civil War.”
The boy pressed his face to a glass case displaying a pile of Confederate money. “When we were girls,” Wells told him, “we’d play house with this money and use it to start fires with.” Wide-eyed, the boy began wandering toward the weapons and uniforms, dragging his mother along.
“We have some drumsticks used by a boy about your age,” Wells said. “Make sure I show them to you before you go.”
BY DAY, CHARLESTON in January seemed quiet and genteel. By night it went wild. One evening, I was almost run down by a brigade of drunk college students charging through the streets shrieking, “Can’t lick those Cocks!” The “Gamecocks” of the University of South Carolina had recently triumphed in a football bowl game, prompting a week-long bender in the bars lining the Market. Not that Charlestonians needed much of an excuse. South Carolina had just elected a Christian Right governor. During the same election, Charlestonians passed a referendum allowing Sunday drinking.
A few days after my arrival, I phoned a local woman whom a friend had recommended as a guide. She offered to take me on “the walk.”
“The walking tour of the Battery? I did that. It was lovely.”
She laughed and said she’d meet me at dark. “The Walk,” it turned out, was Charleston slang for a pub crawl that ended when its participants were too stupefied to stagger any farther.
It seemed only fitting, then, that a saloon called Moultrie’s Tavern became my base for Civil War operations in Charleston. Moultrie’s looked at first glance like a tourist trap. Billed as a tavern “set in 1862,” it offered period music, Civil War decor and glass cases filled with minié balls and buttons unearthed by the bar’s relic-hunting proprietor. But while tourists hoed into cutely named dishes like Blockade Salad and Ham and Shrimp Sumter, a curious mix of well-dressed professionals and roughneck laborers clung to the bar, endlessly debating the Civil War.
As I ate lunch one afternoon, I overheard a man bellowing to several other drinkers, “The whole Southern cause was manipulated by a bunch of Charleston fat cats and that’s what got us into the mess at Sumter. Don’t get me wrong. I’m real proud of states’ rights. Hell, I believe in city rights.”
He paused to drain his beer, leaving me to wonder what depredation of the state government he was about to decry.
“Columbia has no business running us,” he said of the state capital. “It’s in the goddamned Bible Belt. I grew up being told that Baptists don’t fuck standing up because people might think they were dancing. That’s how staunch they are.”
I moved my lunch to the bar and offered to buy the man a drink. He ordered four beers, shoving one to me. “I drink beer so I can drink liquor,” he said. “You’ve got to lay down a foundation in your stomach before you start in on the hard stuff.”
Idiosyncrasy was a point of pride in Charleston. Several people had already boasted to me about the city’s police chief, a Berkeley-educated black Jew and former rodeo cowboy named Reuben Greenberg who roller-bladed his beat and decorated his office with miniature rebel flags. But even by Charleston standards, Jamie Westendorff ranked as a bonafide eccentric. Broad-shouldered, with watery blue eyes and a coronel of brown curls, Westendorff was, among other things, an alligator wrestler, fifth-generation Charlestonian, and descendant of a Confederate blockade runner.
“Those captains did it for the Cause, and that cause was money,” he said. “Running the blockade back then wasn’t much different from running dope today. Except they were smarter than dope runners because they didn’t get into their own junk.”
Westendorff worked as a seaman, too, gathering shellfish for his catering business. He specialized in Lowcountry feasts—fried shrimp, softshell crabs, hogs cooked in vinegar and pepper—and he always cooked on a Rabelaisian scale. “I’m like those blockade runners. Whatever you can do, do it for the most. So if I can cook for a hundred, why not a thousand?”
Westendorff also worked as a plumber, which had led to his principal hobby: privy digging. Using nineteenth-century insurance maps of Charleston, he looked for small squares marked W.C. and tried to find their remains in present-day backyards. “Fortunes were thrown down those holes,” he said. Medicine bottles. Crockery. Kitchen utensils. And liquor jugs. “Guys who didn’t want anyone to know they drank used to do it in the outhouse. That’s where we get the phrase ‘shithouse drinker.’”
Westendorff drained the last of his beers. “Got a hog to cook,” he said.
“Mind if I tag along?” I asked.
He shrugged. “If you don’t mind riding in the stankiest truck in the South.”
Two reeking mutts, Rut and Rut-Lite, perched in the cab of his battered pickup. Plumbing snakes, peanut shells and Civil War shrapnel littered the dashboard and floor. Starting the engine with what looked like a paper clip, Westendorff asked what I’d seen of Charleston. I told him I’d visited Sumter, various museums, gone on a walking tour, poked my head in a few gardens and interiors.
“In other words, you seen nothing yet,” he said, offering to show me a few of his favorite sites in “peninsula city,” as he called downtown. We stopped first at a street of grand homes by the harbor. “I’ve worked inside—or at least under—most houses in the Battery,” he said. “What they don’t tell you on those tours is what these houses really are—the world’s biggest money pits.” Termites, humidity and sea air corroded facades and porches. Simply painting the larger houses, in some cases an annual job, cost $40,000.
Westendorff pointed at a sprawling mansion with a peeling front and rotted shutters. “That’s typical of old Charleston money,” he said. “Too poor to paint, too proud to whitewash.” He edged the truck forward and pointed to several homes in much better repair. “That’s new Charleston dough. Outside money. Nouveau riche.” One of the houses belonged to a Wall Street trader, another to the founder of Wendy’s, a third to a McDonald’s executive. Westendorff whistled. “Must be big bucks in burgers.”
Where others saw grandeur, though, Westendorff saw dung. Pointing through an iron gate at an elegant garden, he said, “I reckon the privy would have been just over there. Could be a real gold mine a few feet down.” But Westendorff suspected he’d never plumb its depths. As new owners bought up Charleston, privy treasure was becoming endangered feces. “Used to be, I’d finish a job in someone’s house and they’d let me poke around the yard. But the new money people aren’t so prone to have you dig up their camellias.”
A horse-drawn carriage clip-clopped past, piloted by a coachman in nineteenth-century livery. A leather diaper dangled beneath the horse’s hindquarters to keep the animal from soiling Charleston’s streets. This daintiness extended to the tour guides’ vocabulary: slave quarters were called “dependencies” or “carriage houses,” and privies were airbrushed into “houses of necessity.” Westendorff watched a gaggle of tourists poke cameras out the carriage window. “I call them ‘people of necessity,’” he said. “Got to have ’em, just like you got to have craphouses. But they’re turning this town into a fake.”
Westendorff preferred the real thing, most of it tucked on back streets or torn down long ago. He turned down an alley and stopped at a slatternly wood building. “Last of the great hoe-hooses,” he said.
“Great what?”
“Hoe-hoose,” he repeated. “What are you, a goddamned Baptist?”
Hoe-hoose. Whorehouse. Westendorff was the first white person I’d met with a true Charleston accent. The dialect had high and low forms, with the latter known as Geech or Geechee. “It’s a lazy way of talking,” he said. “Slurs words, cuts corners.” He began counting: one, two, shree, fo. The area between Shultz Lane and Michelle Court became simply “Shellcourt.” Then there was Charleston slang. Near the hoe-hooses had once stood dozens of “peanut shops,” hole-in-the-wall joints that sold pint bottles of booze after hours—with peanuts, cigars and other wares serving as fig leaf for their illicit trade. Charleston also once harbored countless speakeasies, known as “blind tigers.” It was at one such dive that black jazz musicians were believed to have created the dance known ever since as “the Charleston.”
“As long as there’s been people in this town, there’s been parties,” Westendorff said. He did his best to uphold this tradition. Pulling over to the curb, he took me inside an unmarked brick building. Paintings of wigged colonials gazed down from the walls at a room filled with card and dice tables. This was the Fellowship Society, founded in 1762, one among scores of private clubs in Charleston. Westendorff had gambled there the night before. “I figured, why stay up all night? So I cut a card with a guy for five hundred bucks. He got a queen. I got a shree.” He shrugged. “Whatever you do, do it for the most.”
Church bells chimed outside. Westendorff fingered an ancient pair of black and white orbs, once used to vote on potential new members and “black-ball” those who didn’t pass muster. “Growing up here, you can’t help being obsessed with the past,” he said. “Nothing ever dies in this town. It’s like a bottle of wine, just gets older and better.”
Westendorff had to pick up a few things at his house, so we drove over the Ashley River to what looked like an ordinary suburban ranch home. Except that a huge missile perched where a boxwood should have been. “Union shell, two-hundred-pounder, dug it out of a privy,” he said.
Outhouse treasure also filled the interior. Westendorff picked up a nineteenth-century bottle and showed me the words “to be returned” on the base. “People think recycling’s new, but back then people recycled everything. People didn’t throw shit away.” Except down privy holes, of course.
Westendorff unearthed a yellowed notebook filled with invoices and letters of lading. This was the log of a company that managed blockade runners. “No romance here—all of this is strictly business,” he said. He opened the log to early 1863 and read aloud: “‘News has just arrived of another terrible defeat to the Yankees. We have offered our client the goods or any portion he may select at 300% on cost.’” Westendorff whistled. “These guys sure as shit didn’t give anything away.”
He read on: “‘We think by the spring the Yankees will be tired of fighting. We have no more doubt of our ultimate success than we have in our own existence.’” Standard Confederate boosterism. Then business again: “‘We hope therefore to sell as many goods as possible before 1863 expires.’”
Westendorff chortled. “The romance is that a blockade runner was so rich he could throw stuff around, like Robin Hood. But look at this journal—the guy’s so tight he fills every inch of paper rather than waste any.” Sure enough, tiny scribbles filled the margins and back of every page. “You can bet that for every pistol they ran in, there was twice that amount of perfume and ale. Even if you did fifty dollars for the Cause, you’d get rich.”
Westendorff’s own blockade-running forebear hadn’t done so well. Captain of a ship named the Bermuda, he sailed to Liverpool soon after the War started and loaded up with cannons. But the cargo made his ship too heavy to run the blockade. So he docked at a Caribbean island to refit and was seized by the Union navy. After his release from prison he was caught again. He never succeeded in running the blockade and died soon after the War, a destitute man whose four children ended up in an orphanage.
“That’s where the Cause got most people,” Westendorff said. “Prison. Downward mobility. An early grave.” Even so, Westendorff had named his own boat Bermuda in honor of his seafaring ancestor.
We climbed back into Westendorff’s truck and returned to town. I thanked him for the tour and asked directions to an old Jewish cemetery that Joel Dorfman had mentioned on the Sumter ferry. This gave Westendorff an excuse to tell me about his own tombstone. “I did a cook-out for a memorial company. The owner was broke so he cut me a stone instead.” The inscription read: “He loved life and tried everything. Take it back—two things he never tried. Sucking dick and suicide.” Westendorff laughed. “My mother about died when she saw that.”
I left him cooking his pigs and walked a half-mile to the iron fence enclosing the Jewish cemetery. Charleston was the cradle not only of secession but also of Reform Judaism in America. Jews began arriving in Charleston in 1695; until the early nineteenth century, the city had the largest Jewish population in the country, with a quarter of all American Jews living in South Carolina. The nation’s first Reform congregation was founded in a converted cotton gin in Charleston in 1824. Jewish names still dotted businesses and law offices across the city. They also filled the headstones before me, mingling Hebrew lettering and Jewish stars with insignias of the Confederacy.
One monument honored a twenty-two-year-old named Isaac and a seventeen-year-old named Mikell: “Victims in Their Early Youth to the Horrors of War, They Freely Gave Their Lives to Their Country’s Needs.” Other stones bore the names Moses, Hilzeim, Poznanski, and also told of early deaths on battlefields or in prison camps. One among the dead was the son of Charleston’s chief rabbi.
I knew that several thousand Jews had fought for the Confederacy and a number had become prominent in the government. David Yulee, an ardent Florida secessionist, was the first Jew elected to the U.S. Senate. David De Leon served as the Confederacy’s surgeon general. And Judah Benjamin, a close confidant of Jeff Davis, became the Confederacy’s attorney general, secretary of state, and secretary of war.
Still, the image of Southern Jewish foot soldiers discomfited me. I thought of my draft-dodging great-grandfather and of the Passover service, with its leitmotif of liberation from slavery in Egypt. Yet here were young Jews—a rabbi’s son, even, who had perhaps recited the four questions at his family’s seder—going off to fight and die in defense of the South and its Pharaonic institution. I was much more comfortable with the image Emily Haynes sang about while weaving her sweetgrass baskets. Abraham Lincoln, King of the Jews, killed by “the gang” because he brought blacks out of bondage.
BLACKS, OF COURSE, had struggled hard to liberate themselves. A third of all Africans brought to this country as slaves first touched American soil in Charleston, and it was here that a free black named Denmark Vesey plotted one of the South’s most ambitious slave revolts. A carpenter and preacher who bought his freedom with winnings from a city lottery, Vesey planned to seize Charleston’s arsenal and arm slaves across the Lowcountry. Betrayed by one of his men, Vesey went to the gallows in 1822 with thirty-four co-conspirators.
A famous shrine to Denmark Vesey still stood, though few people recognized it as such. After the failed revolt, Charleston erected a well-fortified arsenal to guard against future insurrections. This bastion became the Southern military college known as the Citadel (or “the house that Denmark built,” as some blacks called it). The Citadel was now best known for guarding against women, who were struggling to gain admission to the school at the time of my visit.
The Citadel’s modern campus centered on a parade ground ringed by mock-Moorish fortresses that reminded me of sand castles I’d made from plastic molds as a child. At the school’s small museum, I found a room devoted to the Civil War.
“FIRST SHOTS,” announced a sign at the start of the exhibit. I’d had my fill of Fort Sumter and was about to move to the next display when a line of text jerked me back: “On Jan. 9, 1861, cadets under command of Major P. F. Stevens opened fire.”
January 9? Open any history book and you’ll learn that the War’s first shots were fired on April 12, 1861, when Beauregard attacked Sumter. But according to the Citadel, four of its cadets beat Beauregard to the punch—by three months.
“Cadet George E. Haynsworth,” I read on, “pulled the lanyard firing the first shot across the bow.”
Bow? Of a fort?
Outside, I found a small monument by the parade ground with a bronze bas-relief of four cadets firing a small cannon out to sea. “In the early dawn of Jan. 9, 1861, the first shot of the War between the States was fired from Morris Island by Citadel cadets,” the plaque read, “and the defense of the South became real.”
Had there been some sort of cover-up?
I headed for the library and was greeted by a massive mural, depicting the same scene. I asked the librarian for material on the incident. She handed me a folder labeled “Star of the West,” bulging with yellowed clips and faded monographs that told the hidden history of the War’s beginnings. After South Carolina seceded, federal troops in Charleston moved from a land fort to the safer redoubt at Fort Sumter. Charleston officials responded by posting militiamen to the beaches and islands ringing the harbor. Among them was a detachment of Citadel cadets.
A few weeks later, a Northern steamer called Star of the West left Brooklyn with supplies for the Sumter garrison. A Southern sympathizer in New York telegraphed Charleston. When the Star of the West tried to enter Charleston harbor at dawn on January 9, 1861, it was a Citadel cadet who sounded the alarm. He and three classmates then fired across the ship’s bow. Several other guns also opened fire. Three balls struck the ship’s side and the captain prudently steamed back to New York. That was it.
Curious to know more, I went to see Colonel Bill Gordon, the Citadel’s resident expert on the Star of the West. Colonel Gordon was a ramrod-straight marine with close-cropped hair and black shoes polished to a blinding sheen. He said he took students on field trips to Morris Island, though the site of the famed cadet battery had eroded into the sea years ago.
“I look at it this way,” he said. “It was Christmas, 1860, just before exam period. And someone says to these cadets, ‘Would you rather take your exams in calculus and English composition or go out to Morris Island and shoot at Yanks?’ It’s a no-brainer. You go.”
The adventure quickly became a wretched camping trip. The cadets were housed in an abandoned hospital filled with coffins. It was buggy, cold, and most of all, dull. So one morning, when a Yankee ship appeared, the adolescent cadets fired their guns. “I don’t think these kids had a cotton-picking clue what they were getting into, unless they were lunatics,” Gordon said.
The War that followed hadn’t been kind to the cadets. Two died in battle and a third fought four long years until the South’s surrender. Nor did he or the other gun-battery survivor enjoy any fame for their actions. “The romance set in later, when their families took an interest,” Gordon said. “The guys themselves probably didn’t give a rat’s ass about the War.”
Gordon’s irreverence surprised me, and I told him so. He explained that he’d seen plenty of combat in Vietnam. “Nothing romantic, let me tell you,” he said. Also, like June Wells’s at the Confederate Museum, his study of the Civil War seemed to have bred a certain pacifism. “I guess it’s fair for the Citadel to claim the first shot of the War,” he said, “but given the slaughter that followed, I’m not sure that’s much to be proud of.”
Others at the Citadel evidently disagreed. The school even had a prize called the Star of the West Medal, awarded each year to the best-drilled cadet. The prize consisted of a gold medal bearing a wooden star carved from what Gordon called “the sacred wood”—an actual sliver from the hull of the ship. The Star of the West also formed part of “knob knowledge,” the rote that first-year cadets—called “knobs” because of their shaved heads—were required to memorize and “pop off” whenever upperclassmen demanded it.
Gordon walked me to the door. It was Friday, when cadets drilled in dress uniform across the parade ground. Clad in gray, they toted rifles and the same Palmetto flag displayed with such pride by South Carolinians during the War. With their close-cropped hair and crisp uniforms, the cadets didn’t much resemble the raffish, bearded rebels of old. But the drill ended with an appropriate flourish. A crew of artillerymen wheeled a cannon in front of the Star of the West monument. One of the cadets yanked the lanyard, a blank fired loudly, and a cloud of acrid smoke billowed out across the parade ground. The cadets in the gun crew smiled.
After visiting the Citadel, I made a point of perusing the indexes of Civil War histories, searching for scraps on the Star of the West. I rarely found more than a footnote. In the view of historians who bothered mentioning the incident at all, the cadets’ action proved inconsequential, resulting in nothing more than the ship’s return to New York. So the Star of the West remained a lost shard of Civil War history, hermetically sealed inside the Citadel, as if in a pharaoh’s tomb. In a sense this seemed fitting. What better vault than the Citadel, arguably the most mummified institution in America?
Nonetheless, I felt a furtive pleasure at being in on the secret. I doubted even the trivia whizzes back in Salisbury, North Carolina, knew this one. So I stored it away, looking forward to the day when I could slap a dollar on the bar while drinking with a Civil War buff and unleash my hidden weapon from the Citadel’s silo. “Buck says you don’t know who fired the first shots of the Civil War.”
THE WAGER WOULD HAVE TO WAIT for some bar other than Moultrie’s Tavern, the one place I’d be sure to lose. Idling away another lunch hour there one afternoon, I noticed a vivid portrait behind the bar. Titled The Relic Hunter, it showed the bar’s proprietor scanning the beach with a metal detector. I was struck by how well the portrait captured its subject and asked the bartender about its creator.
“Manning Williams?” The bartender laughed. “Where to begin? As you can see, he’s a first-class artist. Also a college professor. A reenactor. Charleston’s leading secessionist. Among other things.”
In other words, another Charleston eccentric. I phoned Williams from the bar and was immediately invited to his house. Following his directions to a neighborhood north of town, I wondered if I’d become lost. The area was predominantly black. This shouldn’t have surprised me; statistically, Southern cities were far better integrated than Northern ones. The second surprise was the figure who greeted me at the door of his bland modern home. Williams was a wiry, muscular man of about fifty, with piercing blue eyes, paint-stained fingers and a pointed beard that reached almost to his breastbone. He looked like a roguish rebel officer—a resemblance that was entirely intentional.
“It seems peaceful out there,” he said, shutting the door behind me, “but don’t be fooled. The War is emotionally still on. I call it the thousand-year war. It’ll go on for a thousand years, or until we get back into the Union on equal terms.”
Williams led me into a studio littered with half-empty coffee mugs, half-finished beers, half-smoked cigars. Civil War tomes and copies of a super-hero comic book called “Captain Confederacy” lay propped atop chairs and easels. “This is the work I’m finishing now, though the subject’s something I’ll never be finished with,” he said, pausing beside a large canvas. “It’s called Lincoln in Hell.”
The oil painting brought to mind Hieronymus Bosch’s inferno in Garden of Earthly Delights. The sky was a florid orange and streaked with exploding shells. In the foreground, a gaunt figure in a black frock coat and stovepipe hat strode across a mound of skulls, cannonballs, and bits of blue and gray uniform. Behind him loomed other stacks of bones, with blurry figures perched atop each.
“That’s Napoleon,” Williams said, “and over there’s Genghis Khan.” Like Lincoln, these leaders were warmongering tyrants who had therefore earned a place in Williams’s underworld.
“I’ve done some studies for a painting called Southerners in Hell, too,” he added. “It shows a bunch of rebels sitting with their hands over their ears as Lincoln recites the Gettysburg Address for the rest of eternity.” Williams broke into a wide, tobacco-stained grin. “I poke holes in icons. I’m suspicious of all agendas, most of all my own.”
For the rest of the afternoon, Williams prowled restlessly around the studio, delivering a monologue that skipped from the Lost Cause to lost souls to Christian evangelists to calculating how long a pair of wool army socks would have lasted in 1863 (“until the stink became too much,” he hypothesized). Often, he spanned two or three topics in a single sentence. And every fifteen minutes or so, he’d lasso a runaway thought and rope it back toward his central theme: the ineradicable divide between North and South.
“Take driving habits,” he said, detouring from a discourse on regional voting patterns. “Down here, you stop in a line of traffic to wave someone in and a single car pulls in front of you. Up north, you pause five seconds and ten cars butt ahead.”
Williams hated cars, particularly car tires, and railed against Goodyear and Firestone ads. Again, it took me a moment to see where this was leading. “Car tires are the footprint of Northern industrial society,” Williams said. As a subtle protest, he stuck tires into his paintings—a stray radial, say, perched anachronistically in the foreground of an unflattering portrait of William Tecumseh Sherman.
We were back to the Civil War, though Williams didn’t call it that. “A civil war is an internal revolt. But this was a war between two independent nations, one of which was exercising its constitutional right to secede.” Like many Southerners, Williams preferred the phrase War Between the States, or the War of Southern Independence. “Of course, the War to Suppress Yankee Arrogance is also acceptable,” he said.
In a convoluted way, Williams was introducing me to a subject dear to the hearts of latter-day rebels: neo-Confederate thought. This loosely defined ideology drew together strains of Thomas Jefferson, John Calhoun, the Nashville Agrarians (who took the title of their manifesto “I’ll Take My Stand” from a verse of “Dixie”), and other thinkers who idealized Southern planters and yeoman farmers while demonizing the bankers and industrialists of the North. In the neo-Confederate view, North and South went to war because they represented two distinct and irreconcilable cultures, right down to their bloodlines. White Southerners descended from freedom-loving Celts in Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Northerners—New England abolitionists in particular—came from mercantile and expansionist English stock.
This ethnography even explained how the War was fought. Like their brave and heedless forebears, Southerners hurled themselves in frontal assaults on the enemy. The North, meanwhile, deployed its industrial might and numerical superiority to grind down the South with Cromwellian efficiency. A military historian and neo-Confederate guru named Grady McWhiney put it best: “Southerners lost the War because they were too Celtic and their opponents were too English.”
Viewed through this prism, the War of Northern Aggression had little to do with slavery. Rather, it was a culture war in which Yankees imposed their imperialist and capitalistic will on the agrarian South, just as the English had done to the Irish and Scots—and as America did to the Indians and the Mexicans in the name of Manifest Destiny. The North’s triumph, in turn, condemned the nation to centralized industrial society and all the ills that came with it. Including car tires.
“If you like the way America is today, it’s the fruit of Northern victory,” Williams said. Abandoning a lit cigar for a wad of chewing tobacco, he sent a stream of brown juice into his coffee mug. “The South is a good place to look at what America used to be, and might have become if the South had won. If something’s fucked up, the North did it, not us.”
But the fight was far from over; as Williams had said, this was a thousand-year war. As an artist, Williams chose to take his stand on cultural grounds. “If the South had won the War, we never would have had a movie like Pulp Fiction,” he said. I’d recently seen the Quentin Tarantino film and been put off by its gratuitous bloodshed. But what irked Williams was a detail I’d missed.
“Tarantino goes out of his way to turn every stereotype upside down—except one.” The boxer, played by Bruce Willis, was white. The drug dealers were yuppies. The hitman, John Travolta, made jokes in French and read novels on the toilet. “But when two good ol’ boys appear in the film, what do they do?” Williams asked. “They rape a black guy in front of the Confederate flag.” He paused, disgusted. “Rednecks are about the only group it’s still okay to kick around. Not counting Nazis, of course.”
It was sunset. We’d been talking for hours; or rather, Williams had been talking and I’d been trying to sift what sense I could from his torrent of art criticism, car criticism, profanity, political philosophy. Much of what Williams said seemed little more than a clever glide around race and slavery, rather like the slick-tongued defense of the Southern “way of life” made by antebellum orators, South Carolinians in particular.
But parts of his diatribe unsettled me. It was certainly true that Northern zeal for righting Southern wrongs had a way of evaporating when similar wrongs surfaced close to home. To a degree I’d succumbed to the same hypocrisy. Born and schooled in Washington, D.C., a city sharply divided along race and class lines, I’d gone to work after college as a union organizer in rural Mississippi, urging impoverished loggers, most of whom were black, to go on strike and confront their white bosses. I’d burned out after eighteen months, but clung nostalgically ever since to this one bright flare of youthful idealism. Williams, I felt sure, would put a different spin on my Mississippi sojourn. He’d say I behaved like sanctimonious abolitionists and 1960s Freedom Riders who swooped down on the South while neglecting injustice in their own backyards.
“Listen closely while you’re down here and take a hard look at your own prejudices,” Williams said, slapping me on the back as he saw me out. “We may just make an honorary cracker out of you yet.”