Confederates in the Attic (21 page)

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.”