6
Who knows but again the old flags, ragged and torn, snapping in the wind, may face each other and flutter, pursuing and pursued, while the cries of victory fill a summer day? And after the battle, then the slain and wounded will arise, and all will meet together under the two flags, all sound and well, and there will be talking and laughter and cheers, and all will say: Did it not seem real? Was it not as in the old days?
—BERRY BENSON, Confederate veteran
Ireturned home to Virginia badly in need of a furlough. My Southern journey had taken a long and dispiriting detour in Todd County. Apart from brief visits to Fort Sumter and a few other sites, I’d hardly set foot on the historic landscape of the Civil War I’d originally planned to explore.
Salvation arrived soon after my return in a telephone call from Robert Lee Hodge, the hardcore reenactor I’d met bloating on the road months before. He said the first major event of the campaign season was coming up: the Battle of the Wilderness. Eight thousand reenactors were expected to attend, plus twice that number of spectators. “It’ll be a total Farbfest,” Rob predicted.
Hardcores were ambivalent about battle reenactments. After all, it was hard to be truly “authentic” when the most authentic moment of any battle couldn’t be reproduced, though Rob did the best he could with his bloating. Hardcores also felt that crowds of spectators interfered with an authentic experience of combat. But Rob and several other Guardsmen planned to go anyway, to scout fresh talent and see what changes the long winter layoff had brought to the hobby.
I was curious to go, too. Since spooning with the Southern Guard, I’d been doing some research. Before, I’d assumed that reenacting was a marginal part of Civil War memory, a weekend hobby for gun-toting good ol’ boys—with the emphasis on boys. My reading suggested something altogether different. Reenacting had become the most popular vehicle of Civil War remembrance. There were now over 40,000 reenactors nationwide; one survey named reenacting the fastest-growing hobby in America.
Also, while battles remained the core event, reenacting now encompassed all the nonmilitary aspects of the Civil War, mirroring a similar trend in scholarship on the conflict. Soldiers were joined by growing ranks of “civilian” reenactors who played the part of nurses, surgeons, laundresses, preachers, journalists—even embalmers. A generation ago, a young person with a keen interest in the War would likely have joined a Civil War “roundtable,” one of the hundreds of scholarly clubs nationwide. In the 1990s, the same person was more likely to join a reenacting unit, perhaps with his wife and kids.
Not that women needed men to get involved. On the Internet, I found multiple chat groups for reenactors; on one, the topic of the day was “Top Ten Civil War Studs,” a discussion among women about “gents who would most belong on the cover of a romance novel.” The designated “Dishes” included P. G. T. Beauregard (“Continental charm in Creole packaging”) and Robert E. Lee (“a geron-tophile’s dream with sugar daddy possibilities”). The “Dud” list featured Braxton Bragg (“less style than a Nehru jacket”) and William Tecumseh Sherman (“sinister expression”).
Reenacting had also bred a vast cottage industry of tailors, weavers, and other “sutlers,” a Civil War term for merchants who provisioned the armies. For advice, reenactors could turn to a dozen publications, ranging from the oxymoronic Civil War News to the Camp Chase Gazette, a monthly crammed with how-to articles titled “Bundling Paper Cartridges for Field Use” and personal ads such as, “DWF ISO S/DWM between 45-55. Must be in good shape and ready for some hard campaigning. No TBGs need apply.” Translation: divorced white female in search of single or divorced white male in trim condition—not one of those tubby bearded guys (TBGs), or what Rob would call a “fat flaming farb.” There was even a Consumer Reports-style quarterly called The Watchdog, which rated the historic accuracy and quality of the various products on offer to the Civil War shopper.
Standards hadn’t always been so high. When reenacting first became popular during the Civil War centennial in the 1960s, many soldiers wore work shirts from Sears and fired BB guns. But in the three decades since, the hobby had matured and so had the quality of soldiers’ “impressions.” Even so, reenactors differed on just how far they should go in seeking “authenticity.” Hardcores were a small minority within the reenacting community and regarded by many as elitists. Mainstream reenactors also feared that the hardcore faith, taken to its fundamentalist extreme, would turn the hobby into a performance art that no one would want to watch—much less participate in.
“They’re pushing the envelope in terms of authenticity,” the Camp Chase Gazette editor, Bill Holschuh, told me when I phoned for his opinion. “About the only thing left is live ammunition and Civil War diseases. I hope it doesn’t come to that.”
THE DAY BEFORE THE Wilderness battle, Rob dropped by to lend me some gear: foul-smelling socks that might once have been white but were now splotched amber, a butternut “trans-Mississippi officer’s shell jacket,” gray “JT Moore” trousers, a “smooth-side 1858 model” canteen, and a “tarred Federal haversack.” None of this meant anything to me, but I was given to understand that I’d resemble a walking museum piece. “With this kit,” Rob said, “people will think you’re hardcore even if you act like a total farb.” Rob wasn’t sure about the Southern Guard’s plans, so we arranged a vague rendezvous at the reenactment, held on a private farm near the historic battle site.
The real battle of the Wilderness, as its name suggested, was a confused struggle fought in jungly Virginia woods in May 1864. Lee slammed into Grant’s advancing army, hoping that surprise and the tangled terrain would disorient his much more numerous foe. For two days whole units became lost in the scrub oak and slash pine. The woods caught fire, cremating hundreds of wounded. Grant lost 17,000 men, twice as many as Lee. But the North could bear such losses better than the South, and Grant pressed on, waging the grisly war of attrition leading to Lee’s surrender the next spring at Appomattox.
Today’s Civil War “battles” were scheduled months in advance and conveniently signposted. I drove across the Rappahannock and the Rapidan and turned at a roadside placard marked Battle of Wilderness. A bit farther on, another sign pointed to the C.S.A. Parking Area. A woman sat behind a bridge table, chatting on a cellular phone. “Are you preregistered?” she asked me. I mumbled something about the Southern Guard. “Well, just fall in,” she said, glancing at her watch. “Afternoon battle’s about to begin.”
Just beyond the parking lot and a long line of Porta-Johns, several thousand Confederates mustered as drums rolled and flags unfurled. I scanned the long lines of gray but couldn’t find any of the Southern Guard. A ragtag troop marched past, led by a lean, strikingly handsome figure. He wore wire-rimmed spectacles and a battered slouch hat, brown and curled, like a withered autumn leaf. Long blond locks brushed the shoulders of his butternut jacket. He looked like a cross between Jeb Stuart and Jim Morrison.
I saluted him and said, “Sir, I’ve lost my unit. May I fall in with yours?”
He peered through his spectacles at my uniform. “Certainly, private,” he drawled. “I regret to say that one of our men fell in this morning’s fight. You may take his place.”
He pointed me to the rear rank, between two middle-aged men. The one to my left, named Bishop, had graying hair and what looked like red finger paint smeared on his cheek. I asked about the soldier whose place I was taking. “His wife wanted him back for their kid’s birthday party tonight,” Bishop said. “So he took a hit early and drove home.”
Bishop had been wounded in the same clash. He pointed to his stained cheek. “Yankee bullet just bounced off me,” he said. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a tube labeled Fright Stuff: Fake Blood. “Got it at a gag shop,” he said. “It’s mostly corn syrup, with some dye and chemicals mixed in.”
The soldier to my right, a huge man with long stringy hair named O’Neill, said he’d fought as a marine in Vietnam. The experience had evidently left him embittered. When the rebel army halted, confused over where it was headed, O’Neill groused, “Just like the real military—a continual fucking screw-up.”
I’d joined Company H of the 32nd Virginia, from the Tidewater area in the state’s southeast. The handsome man in command was Captain Tommy Mullen, a carpenter by trade. O’Neill worked at a museum. Bishop was a cop. Many of the others worked in the shipyards around Newport News. “We’re a bunch of average Joes, pretty much like the Confederates of old,” Bishop said.
“Bullshit,” O’Neill interjected. “We’re a bunch of fat slobs who couldn’t hack it in the real Civil War for an hour.”
The 32nd wasn’t hacking the unreal war particularly well, either. Our line kept wavering, and every time the captain gave an order someone got it wrong. “Git back up in the ranks!” the captain shouted. “I said right face! Do you know right from left?”
We reached a line of trees. “Watch the poison ivy!” one of the lead men called out. Then, marching through a pasture littered with cowpies, someone yelled, “Watch the landmines!” A few yards farther on, he yelled again, “Watch the cable!” I looked down and saw an electrical cord snaking through the scrub. O’Neill explained that a film crew was recording the battle. “My brother’s on the other side, in the Sixty-ninth New York,” he said. “He lives in New Jersey. I’m hoping to get filmed capturing him.”
We stumbled through brambly woods until Captain Mullen ordered us to halt. Then he gave us a few stage directions for the upcoming fray. “The Yanks get hit big-time, forty-five percent casualties,” he said. “But those rebs to the right of us are going to get overrun so we’ve got to counterattack and chase the Yanks back.” He glanced at his watch. “Ten minutes to battle so take a piss and eat something if you need to.”
The men pulled out pieces of store-bought beef jerky, minus the plastic, and Marlboros repackaged in old cigar cases. As we ate and smoked and urinated, I asked my fellow soldiers what they thought of hardcore reenactors.
“We try to be authentic,” O’Neill said. “But no one wants to eat rancid bacon and lie in the mud all night. This is a hobby, not a religion.”
Bishop gestured at his motley garb: work boots he’d bought at a yard sale, a homemade canteen, a haversack he’d crafted from an army surplus bag. “The way I see it, soldiers back then threw together whatever they could lay their hands on, like me. Was it perfection? No way.” He also resented the snobbishness of hardcore units. “Back then, the army took all available men. So why turn away someone who wants to fight just because he’s fat or doesn’t look the part?”
He had a point. I also realized I felt far more at ease here, among fellow bumblers, than I had at the Southern Guard drill surrounded by perfectionists.
Artillery began pounding in the field just beyond the woods. Each time the cannons boomed, the ground shook and pine needles showered down around us. A foul gray smog seeped in among the trees. “Suck it in, boys,” Captain Mullen said, resuming his Civil War persona. Troops to the right of us hoisted their guns and flags and rushed from the woods, vanishing into the smoke and noise. There was a keening rebel yell and the crackle of small-arms fire. I started to feel butterflies. Crouching in the woods, peering into the smoke and listening to the percussion of guns and artillery, I sensed a little of what a soldier must have felt, with no clue who was winning the battle he was about to join, or what his part in it would be.
Then I realized I had no role myself. “Prime muskets!” the captain barked. All around me the men of the 32nd bit open paper cartridges and poured black powder down their rifle barrels. Since I’d failed to hook up with Rob, I was the only man without a gun. I asked the captain what part I might play in the upcoming combat.
“If one of our men should fall, pick up his musket and fight on,” he said. Then he added, sotto voce: “If no one goes down, run around awhile and then take a hit. We can always use casualties.”
Back in line, I shared my orders with Bishop. “Casualties are a problem,” he said. “Nobody wants to drive three hours to get here, then go down in the first five minutes and spend the day lying on cowpies.” Sometimes, he said, officers began the battle by asking everyone for their birth dates. “Then they’ll say, ‘all Januarys and Februarys die. March and April, serious injuries.’” Another trick was to hand out different-colored cartridges with a particular hue designated as “death rounds.”
“Usually, though, it’s an honor system-type situation,” Bishop said. “If someone takes a bead on you and fires, go down. Otherwise you wait until you’re tired or you’ve run out of ammo.”
O’Neill cut in with a safety tip about dying. “Check your ground before you go down,” he said. “I’ve gotten bruises from falling on my canteen. Also, don’t die on your back, unless you want sunburn.”
Shoulder to shoulder, we marched out of the woods and into the clouded field. We marched forward, then sideways, completely blinded by the smoke. Somewhere in the fog a fife tootled “Dixie.” Then we seemed to be marching away from the noise. There were no other Confederates in sight.
“Halt!” the captain shouted. He took out binoculars and peered through the gloom. Just ahead, we heard the murmur of voices and what sounded like triggers cocking.
“Form battle lines!” Mullen shouted. Ten men knelt, rifles at the ready, with the other ten standing right behind. Then the smoke cleared, revealing a crowd of spectators in lawn chairs, aiming cameras and videos back at us. “There they are!” one of the spectators shouted, and a hundred shutters clicked at once.
“Company, left!” Mullen yelled, wheeling us sharply around, back into the smoke. Suddenly, fifty or so Yankees appeared just in front of us, as startled and disorganized as we were. “Fire at will!” the captain shouted. Flames licked from the muskets and bits of white cartridge paper fluttered all around us. The blanks made a deafening roar. Like street mimes, the Yankees aped our motions precisely. Then both sides frantically loaded and fired again. “Pour it in, boys!” the captain shouted.
I put my fingers in my ears and crouched beside O’Neill. The Yankees were no more than twenty yards in front of us, firing round after round. But I waited in vain for one of our men to go down.
“Damn Yanks can’t shoot straight,” O’Neill said, lips black with powder. Apparently, the rebels couldn’t aim either. Despite the withering fire, only one Federal had gone down. “Yanks never take hits,” O’Neill griped. “Fuckin’ Kevlar army.”
Then, obeying the battle’s script, the Yankees suddenly turned and ran. “Look boys, they’re turning tail!” Mullen shouted, drawing his saber. “Drive em, boys! Drive ’em!”
“No-account Yankees!”
“Candy asses!”
“Take no prisoners! Kill ’em all!”
We reached a field littered with blue figures. Several of the dead lay propped on their elbows, pointing Instamatics at the oncoming rebs. Fifty yards farther on, we ran into a storm of Yankee fire and repeated our previous drill: battle lines, fire at will, reload, fire again. “Okay boys,” the captain said, after we’d poured imaginary lead at each other for fifteen minutes. “Time to take some hits.”
Bishop reached into his pocket for the Fright Stuff. Smearing the bright red goop on his temples, he asked me, “Want a squirt?” I shook my head, imagining what Rob Hodge would say if I returned his uniform with fake bloodstains. “Watch for landmines when you go down,” Bishop reminded me.
The Yankees unleashed another volley. I clutched my belly, groaned loudly and stumbled to the ground. O’Neill flopped on his side like a sick cow, bellowing, “I’m a goner, oh God, I’m a goner.” Then he spotted his brother from New Jersey, lying in the grass nearby. “Hey Steve, they got you, too! Just like the Civil War, brother against brother!”
Bishop sprawled with his eyes wide open, Fright Stuff dribbling down his chin. Another man lay on his stomach, convulsed with laughter. He was wearing foam earplugs, the type they give you on airplanes. I wondered how I’d report the scene to Rob Hodge. Died and gone to farb heaven.
As the battle raged on, I chatted with a young Virginian named Butch McLaren who had fallen beside me. I asked about his wound. “It was mortal,” he said. “A lot of internal bleeding. But I died for an honorable cause.”
McLaren rolled on his side and lit a posthumous cigarette. During the week, he said, he worked as a rigger at a Norfolk shipyard. He passed the long days dreaming about these weekends and thinking about his great-great-grandfather, Private R. J. Dew. “He was wounded three times at Chickamauga and once marched four days with no food,” McLaren said.
We sprawled flat again as rebel reserves rushed past us and poured another volley into the Union line. “You know,” McLaren said, face pressed to the grass, “if I could trade places with my great-great-grandpappy, I’d do it in a second. Life was harder then but in a way it was simpler. He didn’t have to pay phone bills, put gas in the car, worry about crime. And he knew what he was living for.”
We lay in the grass until a bugle sounded Taps, signaling the end of hostilities. Captain Mullen rose to his knees and gave a final order to his men: “Resurrect!” We stood up and shook hands with enemy corpses as the spectators gave a lusty round of applause.
COMBAT WASN’T SCHEDULED to resume until the next day, so the soldiers and spectators scattered: to the parking lots, to the Porta-Johns, to a huge tent encampment called the sutlers’ row, or “the Mall.” Here, brought to life, was the strange world of civilian reenacting I’d read about. North and South mingled peaceably along dirt streets lined with shops. The atmosphere was tongue-in-cheek quaint, with stores labeled The Carpetbagger or War Profiteer Serving Both North and South. A commissary sign said, “No Likker Sold to Soljers.” Shoppers could have their picture—or rather, ambro-type—taken in period dress by a man with a hooded camera, or buy “period” love poetry penned on handmade stationery.
I watched couples promenade in uniforms and hoop skirts, quaffing Doc McGillicuddy’s Sarsaparilla, then wandered over to explore the “civilian camps.” At a Confederate tent, I found a “Soldiers Aid Society” where women clad as Southern belles sat knitting socks. They sipped Confederate coffee (parched corn sweetened with dark molasses) and gossiped about their Northern counterparts. “Yankee women, of course, may not be of the highest moral order,” one woman drawled.
On the Union side, a tall man in a black frock coat and stovepipe hat held forth before a crowd of wide-eyed children. “As a nation, we are a great deal more similar than we are different,” he proclaimed. “Woe be it to any foreign power that incurs the wrath of the United States.”
In real life, the orator worked as a nurse practitioner in Virginia. He played a Confederate soldier during combat, but preferred Abe Lincoln for his civilian impression. “I look the part,” he said. Problem was, there were two other Lincolns at the Wilderness (and no less than three Robert E. Lees). “But I think I’m the only Lincoln with a Southern accent,” he said. Then, resuming character, he slapped me on the shoulder and asked, “Can I count on your vote in November?”
The scene deepened the impression I’d begun to form from my reading. Contrary to its martial stereotype, reenacting seemed a clean-cut family hobby, combining elements of a camping trip, a county fair and a weekend-long costume party. Between battles, the schedule included a square dance, a trivia quiz for kids, a women’s tea, a period fashion show, and an outdoor Sunday church service at which two reenactors would be married. “It’s an era lost that we’re trying to recapture,” a woman named Judy Harris told me as she washed clothes in a tub at the Union camp. “Men were men and women were women. It was less complicated.” A soldier walked past, tipped his hat at Harris and said “’Evening, m’am.” She smiled back, then said to me, “See what I mean? No one’s that polite in real life anymore.”
In real life, Harris worked as a data processor. “But here, no one asks what you do for a living. You could be a dentist or a ditchdigger. See that general over there? He’s probably pumping gas at Exxon during the week.”
Women weren’t quite as welcome on the battlefield. A female reenactor dressed as a male soldier had successfully sued the National Park Service following her expulsion from a 1989 battle (she was caught while coming out of the women’s bathroom). Ever since, a small number of women had dressed and fought as soldiers, despite frequent grumbling from male reenactors who regarded this as farbish.
However, a different sort of cross-dressing—Southerners clad as Northerners, and vice versa—was common, even encouraged. The reason became obvious as I toured the Union camp. Though blue outnumbered gray almost two to one at the real battle of the Wilderness, the opposite was true here. In fact, a shortage of Yankees was endemic to reenactments, particularly those staged below the Mason and Dixon line. So it helped to carry two outfits, in case the other side needed your services. Reenactors called this “galvanizing,” the Civil War term for soldiers who switched sides during the conflict.
“The rebs have to take turns shooting us because there’s always more of them,” a Union reenactor, John Daniel, told me. Though a schoolteacher from Virginia, Daniel preferred to wear blue. He disliked what he called the “Redneckus Americanus” element on the Southern side. “There’s a biker mentality. Long hair, squirrel gun, South will rise again.” Some unreconstructed Confederates even tried to rewrite history by turning reenactments of Southern losses into latter-day rebel victories.
Daniel also preferred Northern style. Historically, the Union tended toward spit-and-polish ranks of blue, while Southern uniforms were often homespun and differed from state to state. “If you want to portray a generic Yank, you can pretty much dress off the rack,” he said. “If I were dressing Confederate, I wouldn’t know where to begin. Do I wear gray today, or butternut? Slouch hat or kepi? Boots or barefoot?”
But it was precisely this stylistic latitude that appealed to many Confederate reenactors. As I’d learned from Rob Hodge, rebel fashion gave new meaning to the grunge look; it was acceptable—even commendable—for Confederates to wear patched, threadbare duds covered in mud, pan grease, coffee grounds and tobacco spittle. Bad hair days were obligatory (“Try to use the dullest scissors you can find,” a Camp Chase Gazette article on haircuts advised, “and comb your beard with your fingers”). The South’s raffish look also made Confederate garb, on average, a bit cheaper than Union.
Other, subtler differences underlay the preponderance of rebels. There was, first of all, Americans’ instinctive allegiance to underdogs, the same sentiment that had fueled my own preference for Confederates as a child. “When I play Northern, I feel like the Russians in Afghanistan,” one reb from New Jersey explained. “I’m the invader, the bully.” The South also won hands-down when it came to romance. Conformist ranks of blue couldn’t compete with Jeb Stuart, Ashley Wilkes and the doomed cavaliers of the Confederacy. This also helped explain why foreign reenactors, bred on Gone With the Wind, almost always donned gray, even though their forebears in 1860s Europe and Canada had typically supported the other side.
But then, ideology rarely intruded on the hobby. If reenactors had a mission beyond having fun, or raising money for battlefield preservation, it was educational and nonpartisan. “We’re not here to debate slavery or states’ rights. We’re here to preserve the experience of the common soldier, North and South,” said Ray Gill, a gray-clad Connecticut accountant. “I hate to call it a hobby, because it’s so much more than that. We’re here to find the real answers, to read between the lines in the history books, and then share our experience with spectators.”
Gill and other reenactors were indeed knowledgeable about the men they portrayed. Touring the camps, I was regaled with minutiae about the units represented: what they ate, where they served, their exact casualties at each battle. But this bookish devotion to the War rarely extended to the passions underlying the conflict. “Why did they fight? I guess it was like the Persian Gulf, you just signed up and went because it was the thing to do,” Ray Gill speculated. “I don’t think there was that much difference between North and South.”
There was historical precedence for this studied neutrality. Reenacting evolved from the reunions, called “encampments,” held by Civil War veterans themselves. Veterans bivouacked at actual battlegrounds, donned their old uniforms, and occasionally performed mock versions of the heroic deeds of their youth. In 1913, hundreds of geriatric rebels rushed as best they could across the field they’d crossed during Pickett’s Charge, toting canes instead of muskets and greeting their erstwhile foes with handshakes rather than bayonets. By then, bitterness over the War had mellowed and the two sides met in an atmosphere of reconciliation, to celebrate their common valor rather than their sectional differences.
Now, reenactors were doing much the same. Those who professed deep ties to North or South typically did so only because it was the side their forebears fought for. “I have eighteen Confederate ancestors—it just doesn’t feel right to wear blue,” one Virginian said. “My grandmother always talked about the ‘War of Northern Aggression’ and she had a Currier and Ives print of Lee hanging in the front parlor. When she heard I’d played a Union soldier at Gettysburg, she shook her head and said, ‘Your grandfather would have been disappointed in you.’”
Others gave their Southern leanings a 1990s spin. In the rebel camp I heard a Long Island twang and traced it to a railroad conductor who marched at the head of other Long Islanders: farmers, factory workers, even a few whalers. “We play Confederate because we don’t like one group of people trying to rule over another,” the conductor said. “It’s not the U.S. we’re rebelling against, it’s the black-hearted businessmen who want to lord it over the working man.” He gestured at his comrades, adding, “We’ve been squeezed, laid-off, down-sized, put down. We’re fighting for our freedom, on and off this battlefield.”
The freedom of slaves didn’t figure much in this picture. Although Glory inspired several units modeled on the black regiment depicted in the film, the Wilderness reenactment and a half-dozen other battles I later attended were blindingly white affairs. This, too, was an issue both blue and gray preferred to sidestep. When I asked a Southern Guardsmen about his unit’s views on race, he replied: “Damn right we’re prejudiced. Against farbs.”
I’d finally found several Southern Guardsmen at the rear of a sutler’s tent. The unit had chosen to skip combat at the Wilderness because of the “farb quotient” and were busy planning their next event, a skirmish restricted to hardcore units. “Let’s talk about how we’re going to bring out the dead,” one Guardsman said, drawing in the dirt. Evidently, the order to “resurrect” would never be heard at a hardcore event.
Abandoning this austere crew (Rob Hodge was mysteriously absent), I wandered back to the rebel camp and found my erstwhile comrades from the 32nd Virginia seated around a bonfire, draining a case of Busch beer. One man poked at a can of tuna with his Swiss Army knife. Another scooped his fork into a plastic sack that I recognized from my Gulf War reporting as an MRE, or meal-ready-to-eat. “Have some hardtack?” one man asked, proffering a paper plate piled with Ritz crackers.
As they ate and drank, the men digested the day’s battle. “If that were a real firestorm of lead like we saw today,” one man opined, “we would’a all been dead now.”
“No shit, Sherlock. I wouldn’t go back and fight in that war unless I could do it in an F-15.”
“And with a pocket full of penicillin. The only Scarlett they knew back then was fever, not O’Hara. We’re pussies compared to them.”
The conversation drifted from syphilis to semantics, and a cataloguing of words with alleged Civil War origins: hooker from Joe Hooker, the Union commander famed for his tolerance of female camp followers; sideburn from Ambrose Burnside, the Union general with bushy muttonchops; tampon from tompion, a wooden plug used to protect rifle barrels from dirt and rain; heavy metal from mid-nineteenth-century slang for large artillery pieces. Then, as the beer disappeared, the chat became increasingly right-wing and profane, wandering from gun control to Hillary Clinton to a recent news report about the health risks of movie popcorn. This was greeted as yet another example of left-wing bureaucrats trying to dictate behavior. “If I want to go in a movie theater and grease my popcorn with eighty million grams of cholesterol, that’s my right and kiss my ass,” one man drunkenly shouted.
Bishop, the Fright Stuff soldier I’d marched beside, invited me to join him at a civilian tent where several families were preparing dinner. Here, the scene was markedly more genteel. Hoop-skirted women cooked ham, cornbread and black-eyed peas over an open fire while their kids frolicked around the camp.
Peeling vegetables with a woman named Debbie, I asked what she did while her husband went off to battle. “Wash dishes, make the camp bed, wait for him to come back,” she said. Debbie sewed her own dresses from calico cloth and pinned her hair in a “snood,” or hairnet. For meals, she consulted period “receipts,” as nineteenth-century recipes were known. “I’m not a purist, though,” she said, opening a can of apple pie filler.
During the week, Debbie worked as the manager of a shipping department in Newport News. “It’s high pressure, every minute of the day is scheduled. Then you get out here without TV or appliances and for two days you sit around a campfire talking to strangers and helping each other. We’ve lost the art of conversation, of just being neighbors.” The only thing she disliked was the letdown she felt at the end of the weekend. “You climb in your car and head back home, and the twentieth century starts flooding in again. It’s depressing.”
After dinner, rain began pelting down and I headed back to the 32nd’s camp in hopes of finding a dry spot for the night. One soldier had retreated to his car, leaving his tent vacant. Crawling inside, I quickly saw why. The canvas was so leaky and crookedly pitched that it resembled one of the wretched lean-tos in photographs of Andersonville. I found a bit of straw to put down on the wet ground, but in minutes the hay was soaked through. Then a river of rainwater drained into the tent and over my legs.
Rob Hodge, at least, would approve. But as I lay there on the wet hay, in my wet uniform, with rain beating against wet canvas a few inches from my face, I couldn’t help wondering what actual Confederates would do if they could rise from the dead, as we had that afternoon. Offered the chance, wouldn’t any soldier worth his salt be sleeping in a car with the heater on instead of lying out here in the mud?
I AWOKE AT DAWN to a hissing sound deeply resonant of my suburban childhood. Pulling aside the tent flap, I saw one of the Virginians squirting lighter fluid on a pile of briquettes. Using his cigarette lighter as torch, he ignited the charcoals and perched a modern coffeepot on top. All around the camp, Confederates performed their morning ablutions. A man cleaned his teeth with a horsehair toothbrush and swigs from a Diet Pepsi bottle. Men wandered off to pee in the woods while women in hoop skirts lined up beside a row of Porta-Johns marked “Ladies Only.”
I headed off in search of Rob Hodge again and found the Guardsmen bedded down in a sutler’s tent. One of the men said Rob had left at midnight to camp in a nearby field. I found him there, wringing out his socks over a sodden fire. Rob said he’d lain awake in the sutler’s tent, listening to the torrential rain, and become disgusted with the softness of his quarters. “I wanted to see what it’s like to be soaked and cold on the night of battle,” he said. “Now I know. It sucks the big one.”
I sat with Rob while he cooked slab bacon in a half-canteen that served as his fry pan, poking the victuals with his bayonet. A stream of young Confederates stopped by to swap stories and also, I sensed, to pay their respects. Some had met Rob the day before, or at previous events; others had heard of him through the reenactors’ grapevine. Robert Lee Hodge, baddest reb in the whole damned camp, sleeping out in monsoon rain and cooking blackened pork with a bayonet.
“Rob,” one young disciple asked. “I got this shirt at one of the sutlers’ tents. What do you think?”
Rob eyed the garment. “Hmmm. It’s almost there. What you want to do is cut those farby wood buttons off. Then go to an antique store and get some mother-of-pearl.”
The youth sloped off and another approached, caked with mud. Rob rubbed grease from his fry pan into the man’s trousers. “Want some for your beard?” he asked.
The man dabbed a bit on his chin and said, “I hear you’re doing a fifteen-mile march next week.”
“That’s right. Wanna come?”
“Hell yeah. Let’s do the first ten miles barefoot!”
Rob smiled approvingly. “Super hardcore,” he said.
This was a side of Rob I hadn’t appreciated before. His reputation and odd magnetism made him a missionary or guru, drawing acolytes to the hardcore faith. “If you can turn just one guy, he can bring his whole unit around,” Rob explained.
Rob planned to spend the day searching for fresh talent to recruit. He slipped on a red armband marked “ambulance corps” and issued a spare one to me. As nineteenth-century medics, we could wander the battlefield without taking part in combat. Rob even had a flask of gin in case we needed to administer anesthesia to the wounded. “Gives you the best seat in the house,” Rob said, perching atop an embankment.
The second day’s script called for a reenactment of the Mule Shoe at Spotsylvania, a bloodbath soon after the Wilderness during which Union and Confederate troops fought hand-to-hand. As the Army of Northern Virginia took up positions in the trenchworks, Rob cast a discerning eye at each unit’s impression. He wasn’t impressed.
“Look at that guy with the derby hat. Ridiculous. It’s 1880s Butch Cassidy stuff.”
“See the big officer over there? Great uniform, but the weight’s way out of line. And who’s the guy behind him with the red pants? He looks like a circus clown.”
“Ouch, way too much red trim on those artillery uniforms. They look like Shriners.”
I spotted the 32nd Virginia and pointed the unit out to Rob. “Those were my guys yesterday. What do you think?”
Rob frowned. “Poor cut. Wrong trouser color. And way too much blubber. The whole unit needs liposuction.”
I pointed hopefully at Captain Mullen, the dashing officer who had struck me the day before as possessing that Confederate je ne sais quoi. Rob savait exactement quoi. “Très farb,” he said. “A real Confederate would eventually have cut that hair to keep the lice under control. And what’s with the hat? It’s all wrong—the Boer War maybe, not this one.”
Rob scouted for another hour, gradually sinking into despair. But as the battle got under way, he finally spotted a prospect. Pointing at a mud-caked rebel, he said, “Garment’s hung fine and the bedroll’s just right.” Then the youth took a hit and sprawled backwards, thrashing wildly and ripping his shirt open to get at the imaginary wound.
“Wow, you see him get popped? He’s a natural. C’mon.” We rushed over to the wounded youth. I checked his pulse while Rob cradled his head. “Great hit,” Rob said, sloshing gin down his throat. “I liked the bouncing around. Looked like a nerve wound. You ever heard of the Southern Guard?”
As Rob evangelized, there was a pause in the fighting. A Union officer sprinted into the rebel trench “Stop shooting,” he shouted. “This is unscripted! We’re supposed to do hand-to-hand.” He conferred with a rebel officer and retreated to his position. Then the Confederate officer climbed atop the breastwork and waved his saber. On cue, the Yankees poured across twenty yards of open ground and into the trench. The blue and gray tangled in a melee of swinging rifle butts and mock bayonet thrusts. Several men abandoned their weapons and began groping on the ground. I was reminded of fake wrestling matches I’d watched on TV as a child.
After half an hour, Taps played. The battle was over and so was the weekend’s reenactment. But as the dead resurrected and shook hands, I noticed a dozen men still sprawled on the ground. One clutched his arm, another writhed and moaned. Their impressions looked remarkably good and I searched for Rob to see if we should recruit them. Instead, an officer ran up and asked of my armband, “Are you doing nineteenth-century medical or twentieth?”
“Nineteenth.”
“Damn. Some guys got really carried away.”
A moment later, modern medics appeared in an ambulance. They bandaged a broken nose, toted off a man with broken ribs, and stuck an oxygen mask on an older man struggling for breath. I later learned that fifty-seven people were hurt in the weekend’s reenactment, and two required hospitalization. At some events, casualties were mortal: several men had expired from heart attacks and one froze to death during an unseasonably cold night in Tennessee.
Rob had vanished with his new recruit, so I wandered off the field alone as reenactors and spectators streamed toward the parking lots. One woman lingered on the grass long after the others had left. Slim and delicate-featured, she wore a black hooped skirt, a tight black bodice and held a black parasol over her lace-covered head. I bowed slightly and asked what had brought her to the Wilderness.
“A reb shot my husband at Gettysburg,” she said. “I came here to remember him.”
Playing along, I offered the view that the rebel who killed her husband was simply following orders. “But I’m very sorry just the same, m’am.”
“That’s very kind of you, soldier,” she said, wiping away what looked to be a real tear. I asked what she did on the home front now that her gallant husband was gone.
“Empty bedpans and take blood,” she said; “I’m a registered nurse in Tonawanda, New York.”
She smiled, signaling that we were now “out of character,” and reached out a black lace glove so I could pull her from the grass. “This getup weighs ten pounds,” she complained. “I can’t wear it two days in a row because it starts to smell.”
As we strolled toward the parking lot, Karen Meinhold told me how she’d become a Union widow. Six years before, while visiting the chocolate factory in Hershey, Pennsylvania, she’d stopped off at Gettysburg and been stunned by all the graves. Knowing little about the War, she began reading and gradually became obsessed. Now, she often drove twelve hours after work on Fridays to reach Virginia in time for the opening shots of reenactments.
But she didn’t want to play any of the usual female roles, least of all nurse. “After all, that’s what I do in real life,” she said. Thirty-four and single, she’d settled on widowhood, hand-sewing her seven-layer outfit: pantalets, chemise, corset, corset cover, hoop, petticoat and dress. “At Gettysburg last year it was 108 degrees. I almost fainted.”
Her distress must have been fetching; she’d fielded eleven proposals of marriage during the battle and suspected not all were in jest. But Karen brushed off the overtures, intent on remaining a widow. “It may sound silly,” she said, “but I really do mourn the Union dead.”
We’d reached the hot dog stand that divided our two nations; one sign pointed to a parking area marked “Union,” another to a pasture labeled “C.S.A.” A traffic jam had already formed, heading back to the twentieth century.
“After these battles, all the soldiers just get up and walk away,” Karen said, as though she wished the drama ended otherwise. “But in real life, it didn’t happen that way. Glory had a cost. I’m here so people will remember that.”
Footsore and dirt-encrusted, I climbed in my car and crawled toward the highway behind hundreds of other Confederates. I turned on the radio, then quickly turned it off. There was something to what the others had said. Despite the weekend’s discomforts and phony moments, it had provided a pleasant taste of the enforced leisure and sociability of nineteenth-century life: chatting with the women as we peeled carrots, lazing beside Rob as he slow-cooked his breakfast, ambling down the mile-long country lane between the Union and Confederate camps, a distance that a car would have covered in a minute. Modern life rarely allowed for these simple, unhurried pleasures.
Reaching the highway, I stopped for coffee at a 7-Eleven. The store was crowded with black shoppers. Several of them stared quizzically—and, I sensed, with some hostility—at my Confederate uniform. Clunking self-consciously to the counter in my hobnailed boots and gray trousers, I felt like blurting out, “I’m just playacting,” or “It’s only a game.”
Instead, I returned to my car feeling confused and ashamed. This, too, was an aspect of the twentieth century that reenactors were fleeing: a heterogeneous society still raw with historic wounds and racial sensitivities. In principle, remembrance of the War could be a way to probe these scars, many of which trailed back to the 1860s. But reenactments did precisely the opposite, blandly reconciling North and South in a grand spectacle that glorified battlefield valor and the stoicism of civilians.
Driving back north across the Rappahannock and the Rapidan, I felt like a farb of the heart. Flags and muskets and uniforms weren’t just toys for adult boys to play with, nor could their symbolism be shed like so much dirty clothing. When I arrived home, a grungy Confederate foot soldier, even the dog didn’t recognize me. Peeling off my socks and boots and gray wool trousers, I resolved that next time I’d be true to my views and wear blue.