Reading Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War, with its account of the vicissitudes of the battlefield reenactments and reenactors of the long-ago war, causes me to confront the fact of my own Confederate past. Although I never affected authentic battle garb, dine on rancid bacon and parched corn, or exchanged black-powder volleys with imitation Bluebellies, there was a time when I too fancied myself a latter-day Wearer of the Gray and viewed the Fall of Richmond as a replication of the Fall of Man. As my friend and long-ago teacher the late C. Vann Woodward remarked in later years, “You had a bad case of it.”