Free Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horwitz

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.
    A S A C IVIL W AR 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, whiteCharlestonians 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