A Yankee with Southern charm

Spying on the South is vintage Tony Horwitz as the author journeys across the American South, following the 1852-1854 travels of writer/architect Frederick Law Olmstead.

Horwitz, who wrote the classic Confederates in the Attic, almost always went on a journey to relive history in his books. Spying is no exception as he winds his way through Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas using Olmstead's dispatches for the New-York Daily Times as a guide.

Highlights of his travels are descriptions of a barge ride down the Ohio River, a trip to monster truck Mudfest in Louisiana, and a stop at the Alamo.

Olmstead--who designed New York City's Central Park--envisioned a literary work that would help the North and South understand one another, perhaps avoiding the oncoming civil war. His dispatches did little to turn the tide, but they did leave us with a good idea of what the South was like in those days and why war was inevitable.

Sensing parallels between current times and the pre-Civil Days, Horwitz set off to find out what Southerners were thinking and feeling. He sticks close to Olmstead's tracks throughout the book, managing to travel by barge, steamboat, and mule, often with hilarious results.

Horwitz plunks himself squarely into the journey, extracting stories and feelings from people even though he is seen as a Northerner. This exchange with a West Virginia barmaid is typical: "Let me guess, she said in an exaggerated drawl. "Yankee boy, spyin' on us hillbillies?"

Despite that, Horwitz's interest in people often allows him to cross the North-South divide and get folks to open their thoughts.

A few examples:

"Burns my ass, people drawing welfare and doing drugs while I'm busting my butt and paying taxes."

"It (a monster truck) isn't made in China or on an assembly line--it's all my own work. People today don't have that experience of building something, of putting that puzzle together."

"My fathers worked in a laundry...making fifteen dollars a week. The attitude was, 'All you need is what you need, not what you want. Don't kill to make a buck.' Everyone was pretty much the same; we wore the same shoes and had the same gardens, and if we had too many carrots, we took them to the neighbors."

"He's a man of few words unless he's yelling at you."

Horwitz ends his book with a visit to Olmstead's Central Park, an artistic effort to achieve what his 1850s dispatches could not do--bring people together in a place of calm, beauty, and conversation.

Ultimately, that's what Horwitz's journey does. He brings people together for conversations that lay out differences and dreams but in a respectful manner. Americans are divided, but there's hope for understanding.

On a sad and final note, Tony Horwitz died in 2019 of a heart attack. Spying was his last book.

It's fitting that his obituary in the New York Times ended with these words:

He (Horwitz) expressed the hope that they would remember him not as "one of those 'coastal elites' dripping with contempt and condescension toward Middle America," he wrote, but "rather, as that guy from 'up north' who appeared on the next bar stool one Friday after work, asked about their job and life and hopes for the future, and thought what they said was important enough to write down."