The other evening I had a conversation with a relative of mine who’s a Civil War re-enactor. I only get to see him about once a year or so but I always look forward to talking with him, in part because he’s a serious devotee of history. His re-enacting unit is a South Carolina regiment and his knowledge of that group and the battles in which it took part–not to mention what he knows about everyday life in a Civil War army regiment–is tremendously impressive.
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Through the years I’ve known several re-enactors from one coast to another. Once upon a time, when my best friend lived in Springfield, Virginia, his roommate was a civil war re-enactor. (You can see him and his unit in the film that’s shown at the visitors center at the Antietam battleground.) As a professional historian and teacher at the university level I’m often asked what I think about re-enactors. I can’t quite tell how most people think I’ll respond but I usually sense that they’re expecting me to cluck my tongue and say something dismissive.
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What I say, however, is that nobody guards historical memory with more dedication and passion than re-enactors do. I’ve never known anyone more concerned with getting the details right. And nobody is more interested in sharing the story of history. I have a lot of respect for them. I’ve met very few historians who can make history come alive like a re-enactor can.
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Way back when, the professor who first made me want to be a historian would tell his classes that one of his old professors used to say you can’t teach military history unless you’ve killed a man with a bayonet. That may be taking things a bit too far, and I’m pretty glad my PhD comps didn’t involve something like that. But re-enactors know things that few academic historians do: what it’s like to sleep in the rain with your feet sticking out of a Civil War era two-man tent, for instance. The point here is that knowing history, and being able to teach it well, involves something other than a purely academic approach to the subject.
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The old phrase “a mile wide and an inch deep” is often used to describe someone who knows a very little bit about a lot of things: the sort of person Alexander Pope was thinking about when he noted that “a little learning is a dangerous thing.” We all see plenty of that. Re-enactors are a little bit the opposite; they have knowledge that’s a mile deep, and what they know, they know emotionally as well as intellectually.
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Reënactors make you feel history on an emotional level and therefore it becomes something you feel protective toward and want to pass along. That’s something that academic historians definitely need to work on if we really want to pass along a passion about history. And that’s the #1 thing that we should be doing, especially for our students who aren’t getting history degrees. I’ve known academic historians who act as though they only people they want to read their books are other academic historians, and if the average person doesn’t care, that’s ok. My thought is that it’s most assuredly not ok.
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It remains to be seen what effect the current controversy over the Confederate flag will have on re-enactors and what they do. It’s of course true that Union units don’t fly the Confederate battle flag, but even I’ve seen first-hand how many people use a pretty broad brush when then characterize people with whom they disagree. It’s easy to imagine it becoming harder to be a Confederate re-enactor.
