"The author retraces Frederick Law Olmsted's journey across the American South in the 1850s, on the eve of the Civil War. Olmsted roamed eleven states and six thousand miles, and the New York Times published his dispatches about slavery and its defenders. More than 150 years later, Tony Horwitz followed Olmsted's route, and whenever possible his mode of transport--rail, riverboats, in the saddle--through Appalachia, down the Ohio and Mississippi, through Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, and across Texas to the Rio Grande, discovering and reporting on vestiges of what Olmsted called the Cotton Kingdom"--

Propelled by his boyhood passion for the Civil War, Horwitz embarks on a search for places and people still held in thrall by America's greatest conflict. The result is an adventure into the soul of the unvanquished South, where the ghosts of the Lost Cause are resurrected through ritual and remembrance. He joins "hardcore" reenactors; witnesses Klan rallies and calls for race war; finds that Andersonville Prison's commander, executed as a war criminal, is now exalted as a martyr and hero; and takes a marathon trek from Antietam to Gettysburg to Appomattox in the company of an eccentric pilgrim. Written with Horwitz's signature blend of humor, history, and hard-nosed journalism, this book brings alive old battlefields and new ones--classrooms, courts, country bars--where the past and the present collide, often in explosive ways.--From publisher description