History Buffs Fight U.S. Civil War Over Again

It was mid-May in Mississippi. The day had dawned hot and sticky. Standing before me at a breakfast campfire was a young Confederate soldier with his heavy wool uniform buttoned all the way to his Adam’s apple.

“My gosh, son,” I said, feeling itchy all over just looking at him, “aren’t you burning up?”

“Naw suh,” he said with a smile. “When wool gets soaked clean through with sweat, it’s actually coolin’.”

“Well, maybe,” I said, laughing. “But unless you’re upwind, the Yankees will sure know you’re coming.”

“Naw suh,” he said, shrugging, “they be smellin’ theyselves. They wear wool jes like we do in the wah.”

The “soldier” was a Civil War re-enactor, one of an estimated 22,000 nationwide.

They call themselves history hobbyists, and proudly call what they do “living history,” re-creating what once was, with as much authenticity as possible.

The meaner the weather, the harder the hardships, the greater the historic foul-ups, the more they relish reviving and experiencing the war moments.

“That’s what re-enacting is all about,” said Dent Myers of Kennesaw, Ga. The real war lasted four years, and Myers has been reliving it for nearly 30, since the Civil War Centennial years of 1961-65.

Dent and his peers believe their hobby is light years ahead of all the others. “What other hobby is so chock full of learning experiences for everybody, not just the hobbyists?” he asked.

Latter-day warriors will be doing their uncompensated educating this year in dozens of re-enactments and other public commemorations of the Civil War.

There will be formal ceremonies, such as one at the grave of the Unknown Confederate Soldier in a “rebels only” cemetery behind Beauvoir, the last home of Jefferson Davis, only president of the vanquished Dixie republic, in Biloxi, Miss.

And there will be particularly large re-enactments from one end of the old Confederacy to the other as 125th anniversaries of the original battles that raged over land and sea are observed.

At any of these events there might be what Marty Brazil calls “magic moments.”

Brazil, a Gulf Coast re-enactor who plays everyone from privates to generals, had his most memorable moments during a storm-tossed re-enactment near the old Southern citadel of Vicksburg, Miss.

“I’m telling you that I’ve been grateful if I get 20 or 30 seconds of time travel at an event,” Brazil said. “At Champion Hill, for almost five full minutes, I was in 1863!”

There had been the initial cheers and jeers as the opposing Blue and Gray took the field and hardy onlookers took sides.

“When the battle reached its peak, those spectators were stunned. They stared in open-mouthed awe,” Brazil said. He doubts that he will ever see such a sight again. “I saw men fighting a war in the rain. Not playing war, not pretending war, not re-enacting war. It was real war, grim and deadly.”

In his role as Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, Brazil was in the rear of the Union forces and saw the entire conflict. “In the pouring rain,” he said, “I rode past the dead and wounded sprawled in the mud. I heard the scream of shells. It seemed that musket balls whizzed by my ears. The ground charges exploded so realistically that I began to duck the cannon fire.

“I saw the national colors waving in the heavy smoke above a long blue line of men feverishly loading and firing. I saw orange tongues of fire licking through the smoke, and barely seen figures in gray waving flags of the Southern cause. When it ended I felt somehow changed.”

For Kathy Curran, a math teacher from Galveston, Tex., re-enacting changed her family’s life. “We went as spectators, got hooked and became re-enactors for life,” she said. Curran and her children like to dress up in the role of refugees fleeing the ravages of war.

Another woman in hoops, Mary Coludrovich of New Orleans, said: “Sherman really never knew what hell was because he never had to wear one of these dresses in a Southern summer!”

Banjos and fiddles, songs and dancing around the campfire, fatback and johnnycakes in battered iron skillets . . . it’s all part of re-enactments. So are cotillions (dances), concerts, parades and even weddings.

Also, there is “first person,” so beloved of re-enactors and spectators alike. A first-person scenario: A spectator strolls through a Confederate encampment before a battle re-enactment. A soldier, stirring his meager Rebel rations in a black pot, looks up and nods a friendly “Howdy.” The visitor answers, “Hi, how are things going?”

The soldier shakes his head gravely and replies, “Not so good, sir. The invaders just keep comin’ at us. There’s no end to ‘em, an’ our ranks are gettin’ mighty thin. Now we’re hearin’ there’s even more Yanks to our front an’ to our rear. They (he sighs wearily) just keep a-comin’.”

The soldier was very much into the perilous days of 1864, speaking as he believed a Johnny Reb of the time would have spoken before a battle. The spectator was of the much more peaceful present, yet his scalp suddenly prickled.

He nervously glanced around him, half expecting to see blue-uniformed hordes descending upon them and the ragged Rebel camp with fixed bayonets.

“First person really brings it home,” said Charles Sullivan, a veteran re-enactor and college history professor from Perkinston, Miss. “When you’re having a ‘you are there’ type of experience, seeing and hearing the grim reality of war--and especially of a war between brothers, fathers and sons--it can really be brought home to you.”

It’s such a novel educational experience that Sullivan takes it into the classroom with him. When a course enters the Civil War segment he will stand before his students in the uniform of one of his re-enacting roles, a Confederate artilleryman, and do first-person presentations intermixed with slides and film taken at re-enactments and from the archives.

They blend right in with his photos from the elaborate filming of the television miniseries “North and South” in Natchez, Miss., where many of the war’s legendary battles were re-staged by Sullivan and fellow re-enactors.

Last year, at the antebellum mansion McRaven in Vicksburg, Sullivan and fellow hobbyist Jane Kelly had their ultimate re-enactment. They were married in a genuine Confederacy ceremony, replete with smartly uniformed honor guards and bridesmaids in those magnificent hooped gowns of the 1860s.

At about the same time, in Pleasant Hill, La., “Sergeant” Jim Walters of Natchitoches, La., was addressing his men, who were formed in battle lines at the beginning of a re-enactment firefight.

“Men,” he bellowed, “the Yankees on the other side of that field are coming to take your wives, your sweethearts. And that ain’t all. They’re gonna take yore hawgs! What do you say to that?”

A voice from the rear shouted back, “They ain’t gittin’ my hawgs!”