Why I Fight

It’s a summer night in Gettysburg, quite warm, and to the sound of drums and bugles we form up on the road. Not the paved, lit road made for cars—that’s some distance away—but a muddy, rocky path through the woods that will be nearly impossible to follow after nightfall. It’s an 1860s kind of road. We are camped along it, each company’s tents around a small fire. There has been both rain and smoke all day, and both linger in the trees. We are outside but inside. Tidy but dirty. Things do not have their normal boundaries.

We form up on the road, shoulder to shoulder. We’ve eaten jerky and apples and fistfuls of bread for dinner. We stand in our wool and leather, shouldering our rifled muskets. The men from one group of tents meet the men from the next until we’re a single mass of blue coats. We no longer think for ourselves. Orders are given, from men on horses to men with swords to men with stripes to men with nothing to do but listen and act. We stand until we’re told to turn. We march until we’re told to stop.

And when we reach a hillside and we’re ordered to quickly build a wall with whatever fallen timber and rocks we can find, we become a colony of ants, a hive of bees. Each man knows what to do; there is no negotiation or disagreement. Without conversation, as if our lives depend on it, we stack logs and stones between trees, breathing thick air made of three kinds of smoke (wood, pipe, meat) soon to be joined by a fourth.

The cannon fire first, and our fortifications, by necessity, are complete. These breastworks are more like shin works, but we’re happy to have them. We kneel and crouch in the loam. We load our muskets with black powder and caps and we hold fast. There are people watching, probably, somewhere, but we don’t see them or think about them. We stare down the hill into the bent trunks and shadows and we wait for the men in tan and gray to emerge. They speak the same language. They carry the same guns. They appear in the twilit woods in a sudden sloppy line, each man finding his footing until they’re ordered to halt. But when they come close enough, a terrible fight erupts. We’re told to ready, then aim. They’re told to ready.

Then, together as a company, we fire a mean torrent of downhill lead. Seconds later it comes back at us, their muzzles flashing in the woods. And then a constant barrage, each man loading and firing as fast as he can. It’s desperate and loud. Above a steady beat and chirp of drums and fifes, there is yelling at all times in all directions, but somehow you hear the yelling that’s meant for you.

The trees between our lines gradually lose their lower leaves. Black powder smoke is accumulating. Ears are ringing. The Rebels fall back, and then reform and push up the hill again toward us. Our first sergeant tumbles back screaming, shot in the gut, and men crouch over him. More men slump over the wall, but we stay in the pits, firing urgently, for what feels like an hour but also five minutes. Eventually, the Rebels recede and they don’t return. We cease fire when the bugles and yelling tell us to do so. A few seconds of silence, and then cheering along the lines. Culp’s Hill held.

•••

We knew Culp’s Hill would hold. The guys we’re dressed as settled that 150 years ago. We weren’t there for the suspense, but we felt suspense anyway—along with terror and wonder and excitement and pride. We all talked about it for days. We commented on Facebook, where one can always find pictures and video taken surreptitiously during reenactments. We talked about how it was one of the best scenarios in recent memory. As good as the cornfield at Antietam, where the thick corn was hacked down by our attacks, and replaced with thick smoke and terrible noise.

What we felt, fighting, wasn’t what the real participants felt 150 years before—not by a long shot. But it was something more than the people watching us felt. And the people watching us, I reckon, felt something more than people who visit the granite monuments and plaques on Culp’s Hill. And the people who visit Culp’s Hill feel more than the people who simply read about Culp’s Hill. And the people who read about Culp’s Hill feel more than the people who don’t even know what it is. We choose to learn and remember by doing, and it’s a hell of a time.

Reenacting, I’m now fond of saying, is a fun mix of boyhood pursuits—camping, American history, Halloween, and playing war. People get into the hobby for a lot of reasons. Some enjoy the weaponry. Some get deep into the uniforms and period details. Some sons join because their fathers do it. Some fathers join because their sons want to do it. Some Vietnam and Iraq veterans take to it because they’ve grown accustomed to army life, while others, like me, suit up in part because we have no personal frame of reference for war. But what I’ve learned in my two and a half years as a reenactor is that no matter what attracts people, the people who keep reenacting truly love the history, and they want to feel closer to it and to honor it by living it from time to time.

Wanting to be closer. That’s why I became a reenactor. I’d read books and seen movies about the Civil War, but there was always a thick pane of intellectual glass between me and the action. Studying the war can be like listening to a football game on the radio. You get the broad strokes, but when something big happens, you find yourself wishing you were there. You can memorize the chess moves of generals and armies. But then there is the smell of sweat and gunpowder. The weight of the gun, the ringing ears, the growling belly and the sore back, the sight of a line of men coming toward you, a cannon firing nearby.

The Civil War was still all books and monuments to me when I met the group I would eventually join, the Brooklyn 14th. Eleven years ago, a friend in Brooklyn, knowing me to be a sucker for local history and small-town civic observances, invited me to a ceremony rededicating a war monument in Green-Wood Cemetery. It was a Saturday, a day perhaps too nice to spend in a cemetery, but we went on our bicycles, and I was wise enough to carry a notepad.

We gathered on a high hill with a sweeping view of lower Manhattan and dotted with war memorials and important graves. Prime real estate for the dead. A crowd of a few dozen sat in folding chairs a stone’s throw from Leonard Bernstein’s final resting place, waiting for the Brooklyn borough president, Marty Markowitz, who arrived 30 minutes late, in an untucked peach polo shirt and no socks, to deliver a short address evoking our “deeper understanding of the sacrifices of patriotism.”

Moments later, on small portable speakers, they played “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey, as cemetery workers pulled cloth sheets from the restored monument’s four life-sized bronze figures—a Union cavalryman, infantryman, artilleryman, and engineer. A small squad of red-trousered reenactors gave a musket salute.

One of the reenactors—from the 14th Brooklyn regiment, Company E, it turned out—was standing in the color guard, twitching. It was all Anthony DellaRocca could do to maintain his composure. “I know I’m not supposed to turn my head, but when they were playing that Space Odyssey and pulling off the sheets—that shot the back of my hair up, I’ll tell ya right now.” DellaRocca, then 43 years old, had been spending a lot of his spare time wandering old cemeteries looking for forgotten graves of Brooklyn 14th veterans and cleaning off their headstones. He had recently purchased, for several thousand dollars (and to his wife’s chagrin), a handwritten officer’s log from the 14th’s three-year tour. He knew enough, had internalized enough, cared enough, to be viscerally excited by the sight of the monument—and viscerally upset by the next speaker.

A man impersonating Edwin Morgan, the governor of New York when the Civil War began, stood throughout the proceedings in character, with chest puffed and thumb in waistcoat, smoking a cigar in the hot sun even while other local dignitaries sat shaded by a green canopy. From under his top hat, he spoke emotionally of his two terms as governor, and recalled seeing the men line up to join the militia, and how he roused them. “Those were great days for speeches, I can tell you. Speeches back then were full of fire, and lightning, and thunder, quite unlike the oratory that is in favor today,” he said, stepping away from the microphone to let his unamplified voice bellow. “I can still recall saying things like, ‘To arms! A war cry has again sounded! Your country is heaving to and fro, amidst the surging, roaring waves of a desperate rebellion!’”

DellaRocca thought that was rich. “I’ll tell you what I wanted to do when Governor Morgan was speaking. I wanted to spit!” he told me later, in an excited Italian-Long Island accent. “Governor Morgan tried to screw the 14th to the sticking post.” It seems that in 1861, Morgan had indeed recruited men to join the militia, but then hoarded the troops. The Brooklyn men had to go over Morgan’s head, through an emissary, to get their battle orders from President Abraham Lincoln. “He was acting all happy there, talking like an angel, but the guys in the 14th despise Governor Morgan.”

Don’t get DellaRocca started. Reenactors often “adopt” real soldiers to portray, and Tony had adopted Charles Augustus Bartow as his second personality. He told me the stories of battles as if he’d been there, with dialogue, names, subtle moments, the fates of certain horses. Barlow’s descendants, DellaRocca told me, had adopted him right back, since he knows more about their great-great-grandfather than they do. “Once you get attached to a soldier, it really is like your long-lost brother. I’m attached to the hip to this guy.”

From reading letters, journals, records, and every edition of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle newspaper from 1861 to 1865, DellaRocca knew the intimate details of Barlow’s injuries. “Charles was wounded twice. At Second Bull Run, he got clipped in the chest. The ball went up and exited his breast and broke two ribs. He’s out six weeks,” he told me. “The second time he got whacked was at Gettysburg, the second day. We were holding the back line of the army. He got hit in the leg, broke his femur. The ball traveled up, clipped his right testicle, and stuck in his pelvis. But don’t worry. Everything was in working order. He had four kids after the war!” Perhaps with Bartow’s injury still in mind, DellaRocca confessed, “I would give my left nut to win the lottery, just so I could take care of my family and just talk about history every little day.”

DellaRocca has not won the lottery, and his obligations to his family and job eventually took him away from reenacting. But that afternoon at Green-Wood his passion for the Brooklyn 14th lodged like a minie ball in my pelvis. Nine years later, DellaRocca had hung up his red pants, but I owned a pair. On Memorial Day weekend in 2011, I wore my uniform and stood guard by that same monument in Green-Wood Cemetery, while a procession of Brooklynites filed past in observance of the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the war. Paper-bag luminaries marked the graves of soldiers, some of which DellaRocca had cataloged. Later that weekend I posed for pictures with Dennis Boyé and Deborah Trill, two descendants of John Boyce, the Brooklyn 14th soldier I had chosen to portray.

I chose John from a list of Company E privates—it would be hubris to portray an officer—and because I was a latecomer, all the “good” privates (those who survived the entire three-year enlistment) were taken. I had to choose between guys who’d left early or started late. I picked the latter, since I was a late joiner to the group. I also wanted someone who had seen a lot. John Boyce was a blue-eyed 18-year-old English immigrant when he joined his two brothers in Company E in August 1862, just before the Battle of Antietam. (I’m a man of many brothers myself, another affinity.) At the Battle of Chancellorsville in 1863, John was crossing the Rappahannock River when a shell struck the pontoon bridge on which he was marching and drove a large splinter into his right foot. He was taken to a Union hospital in Alexandria, Virginia—he was recuperating there in July 1863, when the regiment fought all three days at Gettysburg—and he returned to the army in August and fought another year. On May 14, 1864, less than two weeks before the Brooklyn 14th would finish its three-year tour and make its triumphant return home, Boyce was captured at the Battle of Spotsylvania. He spent the final year of the war in Andersonville Prison in Georgia, where he contracted the rheumatism that would affect him the rest of his life.

John came home to Brooklyn after Appomattox, married, and worked as a pipefitter. He had five children who survived, and three who did not. When his wife died and his ailments worsened, he moved in with his son and daughter-in-law on Vanderbilt Avenue, not far from my apartment. He would have seen the buildings I had seen, when they were new. He would have walked the streets I walked. In September 1923, just before his 79th birthday, John Boyce grabbed his cane, hobbled into Fort Greene Park (another local haunt of mine) and stood at attention. Boyce was one of the last 12 survivors of the Brooklyn 14th, and he had joined a crowd of 3,000 in the park for an annual Sabbath service in honor of his dead comrades. They stood at the foot of a statue of Edward B. Fowler, the colonel who led the 14th into all those bloody battles John had seen. How many times did he sit in front of that statue when the park was empty? Had he been to the park as a boy of 17, too young to enlist, to see his brother and his regiment camped there before marching off to war? Private Boyce died in May 1929, at the age of 84. He is buried in Green-Wood Cemetery.

•••

It’s not many wars that end with the winners and losers as countrymen. The veterans of the Civil War, Confederate and Union, spent their postwar days in a nation laboring awkwardly to hold together, a land littered with the fields and rivers for which they had killed one another’s neighbors and friends. Hallowed ground was purchased and preserved. States erected granite monuments. And on occasion the skinny, bearded vets would meet once more on the old battlefields and have a look around. In 1913, for instance, some 50,000 veterans from both sides of the Civil War came together at Gettysburg on the 50th anniversary of the battle. People in the hobby like to say that Civil War soldiers themselves were the first reenactors.

Photography having become commonplace by then, we know that many of the men were still rail thin. Many still wore beards. But instead of rifles, they carried canes and parasols. They stood for portraits, northerners and southerners together, and they didn’t have to stand as still as they had to half a century before. There are even candid pictures—clear, crisp crowd shots of former Rebels in white shirtsleeves and boater hats standing somberly by the wall at the Bloody Angle, the apex of Pickett’s Charge, looking up to the high ground at the Yankee veterans, who appear a little more animated, a little more relaxed. They were all Americans now. Again. Their feelings about that, about what had happened, were surely complicated. But they didn’t stay away. They didn’t pretend it had never happened.

A few years later these men’s grandkids would fight in World War I, and their great-grandkids would fight in World War II. Their great-great-grandkids would fight in Vietnam. And by the time their great-great-great-grandkids were adults, fighting in Iraq or probably not, many of those descendants wouldn’t even know that their forebears had been Civil War soldiers. Maybe the branch of the family that had passed down the uniform or the musket or the box of letters would know. But for many down the line, the years swallowed the stories.

It turns out I was one of those descendants ignorant of my family history—until reenacting prompted an urgent curiosity, which dovetailed conveniently with the proliferation of digitized records on genealogy websites. My father had a vague sense from his father that we’d had family on both sides of the conflict, but to know any more, my father at my age would have had to scour libraries and clerks’ offices. I sat in my boxer shorts and entered my credit card number on Ancestry.com. I knew that my father’s father’s family, the Dellingers, came to the U.S. long enough ago to have Civil War potential, so I started scrutinizing my male ancestors from that branch of my tree. My 19th-century predecessors were not from Indiana, as I was; nor from Ohio, as my father was; nor from Michigan, as my grandfather was. I was a Midwestern-born Brooklyn resident, a Union reenactor, but history didn’t care. About an hour after logging on, I had found my Civil War ancestors. They were from North Carolina, which as you may know is in the South. Dixie.

Not one but two of my great-great-great-grand-fathers took up arms in the war against northern aggression. Archibald C. Dellinger might have had to. He joined Company K of the 1st North Carolina Cavalry on Halloween in 1864, late in the war, when he was pushing 40, which smacks of desperation and/or conscription. From what little I can gather, Archibald (how terrific to have an ancestor named Archibald!) spent much of his seven-month enlistment in winter quarters before fighting the tail end of a brutal conflict that had devolved into trench warfare and attrition.

But then there was George Washington Yount. George enlisted with his older brother Miles (and a whole clan of Younts) in the 38th North Carolina Infantry in 1861, also on Halloween. George fought for almost two years and then deserted on June 18, 1863, for three months. Perhaps he went home to work the farm for the summer. One website has him getting married on July 5. What is not clear is whether he knew then that his brother Miles had died four days earlier, on the first day at Gettysburg. He surely knew by the time he returned to the regiment in September and was docked pay for time absent and the cost of one musket and accouterments. George continued to fight in Robert E. Lee’s army until May 1864, when he was taken prisoner at Hanover Court House, Virginia, right around the same time and place that my adopted Yankee alter ego, John Boyce, was captured. They traded places. The Federals held George at Point Lookout Prison in Maryland until the end of the war, when they made George take an oath of loyalty and then sent him home to start his family. My family.

In the pale computer light, I learned I am a son of Confederate veterans. I could read the handwritten pages, the notes from when George returned. “One musket and accouterments,” in fancy script. I thought of him standing there at roll call, his honeymoon and the harvest over, his brother dead and buried in Pennsylvania, and a sergeant dipping into ink to record that George owed the army for accouterments. I wouldn’t have seen that long-forgotten page, wouldn’t have cared to look, had I not become a reenactor. And there’s plenty I don’t know about George. But there I was, meeting him, while in a closet in the other room hung a replica of the uniforms George had seen down the barrel of his weapon. Because of the times I’d worn the uniform, these little atoms of information, the Confederate army’s bureaucratic detritus, became vivid images of dirty gray pants, worn shoes, long marches, humid afternoons in camp with Miles. Suddenly I was on both sides of a conflict from five generations before, and the whole war seemed to double in size.

That spring, last spring, I visited a friend near Asheville, and I snuck away one afternoon and drove a few hours to the small town of Conover, an hour west of Charlotte. In a cemetery there, I walked the rows reading hundreds of names until I found a stone marked “CSA” and “George Yount.” It was a bright, newer stone. Someone had remembered. Well before I did, someone had cared.

•••

One group that cares a whole lot is the national park service, the good people who oversee a plethora of military parks and cemeteries, and who forbid combat reenactments on battlefields, for ethical reasons. “It is fundamentally disrespectful to those who actually fought and died on a particular piece of ground,” the NPS says, “to pretend to be able to accurately portray their deaths, sacrifices, and suffering. Even the best-researched representations of combat cannot replicate the tragic horror, complexity, or scale of real warfare.”

Fair enough. And thank God! That would be no way to spend the weekend. The reenactors I fell in with try to be on the “best-researched,” serious half of the spectrum. But don’t think we don’t drink cans of beer after the public goes home. Don’t think we don’t enjoy plentiful drinking water from giant trucks stashed discreetly (or not so discreetly) in the woods. And don’t think I don’t personally take full advantage of sunscreen and the latest technological advances in sweat-wicking underwear.

Everyone loves taking pictures of reenactors looking at our iPhones. They love seeing us climbing out of cars or standing in line at the convenience store in uniform. They love catching us in the 21st century, which is only natural: Juxtapositions make good humor, as do moments where earnest facades are lowered or fail. It’s funny to us too, I assure you. We get it. And personally, I understand perfectly why the National Park Service doesn’t want us doing our thing on national battlefields or cemeteries. I don’t want that either.

At the same time, being close to the ground and close to the experience is important for us, and the people who observe us. The enjoyment of reenacting depends on a maximum level of suspended reality, an immersion in history. If my neighbor is not in character, he makes it harder for me to be in character. And being in character is what we do, or what we try to do. It is, after all, what we spent loads of money on. Seven hundred bucks for the musket alone, $120 for the hat. Then $100 plus for the pants, $80 or so for a good shirt, $20 for the suspenders, $300 for the coat if you’re portraying a unit with a non-standard uniform (such as our Brooklyn 14th), and then several hundred dollars more for brogans, leathers, a tent. You end up buying a period tooth-brush and period pencils and period shoelaces. You burn candles. And you burn rounds. Someone added up the cost of powder, cap, and paper cartridge and decided it costs 44 cents every time a reenactor fires his musket. Never mind the guys with horses—or cannon.

When you buy all of this stuff, learn how to use and wear it, break it in doing drill and camping, and the time comes for you to battle in the cornfield at Antietam, you don’t want to look over and see a digital watch on a guy’s arm or a Nike logo on his shoes. For the same reason you wouldn’t want to go to an expensive restaurant and sit next to someone with their feet on the table. It ruins the mood.

And yet there is a wide spectrum of seriousness within the hobby, reflected in both appearance and training. The guys who prize authenticity and grow period beards and pack only what they can carry and do bayonet drill even though they’ll never use it in the field do tend to shake their heads at the privates wearing black sneakers who pitch giant A-frame tents worthy of generals and stock them with cots and coolers and then don’t know basic drill. The design of events matters too, and long-brewing frustration between the sub-sub-cultures within reenacting, between “mainstream” reenactors and the more authenticity-minded “progressive” reenactors, prompted a number of duplicate events in this 150th anniversary cycle. There were two Shilohs, two Antietams, two Gettysburgs.

Their differences are not unlike those between a zoo and a safari. At a mainstream event, the reenactor is marched, often through a parking lot, onto a battlefield set up like a high school football stadium. Spectators generally sit in risers while an announcer gives a play by play over a speaker. At progressive events, the modern world is tamed. Spectators might have to stand or bring their own folding chairs, maybe even hike a piece, so that the battle can take place in a period setting and reenactors can march through woods into battle, ideally along a route not littered with port-a-potties and elephant-ear stands.

There are times when the quest for authenticity can start to feel like a fetish, like the ends and not the means. But we never lose touch for long with why we care about the details in the first place. Eventually something happens that humbles you. This April, for instance, at a fairly casual event in Pennsylvania, our first of the season, a friend from Brooklyn brought his parents and sister and girlfriend for the day. They visited me in camp, and I was self-effacing, talking them through my gear, but playing it a little cool. Later, when we marched past them on the gravel road to the battlefield, I saw them smiling and waving and taking pictures. The scenario was short, and it went OK. Nothing too mind-blowing for us reenactors. But when I talked to my friend again, at a bar back in Brooklyn, he told me that his girlfriend and mother had both been incredibly moved. They wept. It was the sight of our fighting and dying, my friend said, but it had a lot to do with the fact that they’d talked to a few of us beforehand, had seen us putting on our uniforms and leathers. It made the battle personal.

To be honest, I was surprised, and even a little jealous. I had never been that moved at a reenactment. Or I’d been moved in a different way, an intense inside-the-battle way. It was heartening to know that our performance could have this effect, but it made me wonder what I was missing.

At Gettysburg I found out. On the second day, the afternoon after the epic Culp’s Hill fight, we switched uniforms, into standard blues, and went out into the Wheatfield as the 52nd New York. Per true events, there was a whole string of battles taking place simultaneously—the Wheatfield, the Peach Orchard, Devil’s Den, Little Round Top—but as a foot soldier, I was aware of little more than my immediate surroundings and the orders I was given. We fought a tense battle, and after a half hour or so in the hot sun, we were pulled back into the woods. We stacked arms, drank water, and rested in the shade. Then a few people wandered to the tree line, came back, and reported that the scene was something we’d want to see. We stood and followed them back, just into the clearing, under a giant oak tree.

A few thousand reenactors, stretched across 180 degrees of gorgeous countryside, were deep in battle. It was majestic and brutal. We never get to watch like this, and at first I observed as a fellow performer. From inside, I know, it feels something like choreography, and I appreciated the well-acted scenario. The guys were being good sports and taking hits, instead of acting bulletproof. They were maneuvering realistically.

And then my mind slipped, and suddenly I was just watching a battle, from afar, with innocent eyes. It was beautiful. Horses and officers and flags caught my attention first, then I took in the long lines of infantrymen, moving as an organism. A man falls and he’s replaced seamlessly by the man who was behind him. I saw stoic bravery, and desperation too. An Irish regiment charged a Confederate line and got mowed down. Two survivors picked up the fallen flag. Everywhere I turned, regiments were struggling like this. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of the spectator area in the distance, where folks looked like ice cream sprinkles in their loud modern clothes. But I was absorbed in the armies of dark muted colors clashing in the smoke and tall grass, in the wheat, in the rocks. I was choked up, and walked a few more steps forward so I could tear up unnoticed.

Then suddenly we’re called back in. We rush back into line, take arms, and march out. It’s mean. We’re pushed back, off step, retreating across uneven rutted ground in tall grass. The Rebs haven’t even rested, but they seem to like the heat. Their fire is relentless, and I am shot in the shoulder. (I’m always asked how we know when to die. It’s like Quaker meeting—you just know. But for safety reasons, it’s never when you’re loaded.) Soon the Confederates pass over me. The boys in blue are pushed back into the trees, and it’s over.

We dead rise up and file back into ranks, and the Rebs and Yanks find themselves just a few feet apart, staring close into each other’s sunburnt faces. We’d just been shooting at each other and now we’re not. It’s a little awkward. The play animosity is replaced with something that’s not nothing. Mutual respect? Gratitude? Wistfulness? The front ranks are shaking hands as we line up to march out. Good game. Nice fighting, boys. The Union guys share some bottled water and ice we had stashed in the woods with the Confederates. The Union band leader calls for his boys to play Dixie, and the guys in gray sing along.

Tomorrow will be Pickett’s Charge, the high-water mark of the Confederacy, when we’ll devastate the Rebel advance with chants of “Fredericksburg!” But just now, out of view of the candy-colored spectators who are filing back to their cars, deeply moved or not, we soldiers have this little moment to ourselves. A little piece of history made that much more alive, despite our poor power to add or detract. ◊