Confederates In The Attic: Dispatches From The Unfinished Civil War

One of the major themes running through Confederates in the Attic is the idea of loss. Loss is an ever-present topic that appears in countless numbers of conversations had between Horwitz and his subjects:“The South—the white South—has always had this powerful sense of loss” (87), or “Northerners say, ‘Forget the war, it’s over.’ But they don’t have the family Bibles we do, filled with all these kinfolk who went off to war and died. We’ve lost so much’” (26). For many Southerners, this loss is palpable, and the war is something that is recent, rather than a mere historical event, and “the south is a good place to look at what America used to be” (86). Because of this, remembrance serves not only as a way to honor those who served and sacrificed during the conflict, it also is a way of carrying on and trying to recreate the images and ideals that were prevalent in the South at that time. For many Southerners, remembrance is an active way to keep the South alive: “It seemed a wistful logic; the Cause was lost but the Lost Cause shouldn’t be” (79).