by Tony Horwitz
“You’ll be issued a bedroll and other kit as needed,” Young said. “Bring food, but nothing modern. Absolutely no plastic.” He suggested I arrive early so he could check out my gear.
I donned an old-fashioned pair of one-piece long johns known as a union suit (which sounded Civil War-ish), a pair of faded button-fly jeans, muddy work boots, and a rough cotton shirt a hippie girlfriend had given me years before. Ignorant of nineteenth-century food packaging, I tossed a hunk of cheese and a few apples into a leather shoulder bag, along with a rusty canteen and camping knife. Surely the others would share their grub. I imagined the Guardsmen gathered round a crackling bonfire, talking about the homefront while slicing potatoes into a bubbling Irish stew.
Two young Confederates stood guard at the entrance to the drill site, a 400-acre farm in the bucolic horse country of the Virginia Piedmont. One was my host, Robert Young. He welcomed me with a curt nod and a full-body frisk for twentieth-century contraband. The apples had to go; they were shiny Granny Smiths, nothing like the mottled fruit of the 1860s. The knife and canteen and shoulder bag also were deemed too pristine, as was my entire wardrobe. Even the union suit was wrong; long johns in the 1860s were two-piece, not one.
In exchange, Young tossed me scratchy wool trousers, a filthy shirt, hobnailed boots, a jacket tailored for a Confederate midget, and wool socks that smelled as though they hadn’t been washed since Second Manassas. Then he reached for my tortoiseshell glasses. “The frames are modern,” he explained, handing me a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles with tiny, weak lenses. Finally, he slung a thin blanket over my shoulder. “We’ll probably be spooning tonight,” he said.
Spooning? His manner didn’t invite questions. I was a soldier now; mine was not to question why. So half-blind and hobbled by the ill-fitting brogans—boots weren’t always molded to right and left in the Civil War—I trailed the two men to a cramped farm building behind the inviting antebellum mansion I’d seen from the road. We sat shivering inside, waiting for the others. Unsure about the ground rules for conversation, I asked my host, “How did you become a reenactor?”
He grimaced. I’d forgotten that the “R word” was distasteful to hardcores. “We’re living historians,” he said, “or historical interpreters if you like.” The Southern Guard had formed the year before as a schismatic faction, breaking off from a unit that had too many “farbs,” he said.
“Farb” was the worst insult in the hardcore vocabulary. It referred to reenactors who approached the past with a lack of verisimilitude. The word’s etymology was obscure; Young guessed that “farb” was short for “far-be-it-from-authentic,” or possibly a respelling of “barf.” Violations serious enough to earn the slur included wearing a wristwatch, smoking cigarettes, smearing oneself with sunblock or insect repellent—or, worst of all, fake blood. Farb was also a fungible word; it could become an adjective (farby), a verb (as in, “don’t farb out on me”), an adverb (farbily) and a heretical school of thought (Farbism or Farbiness).
The Southern Guard remained vigilant against even accidental Farbiness; it had formed an “authenticity committee” to research subjects such as underwear buttons and 1860s dye to make sure that Guardsmen attired themselves exactly as soldiers did. “Sometimes after weekends like this, it takes me three or four days to come back to so-called reality,” Young said. “That’s the ultimate.”
As we talked, other Guardsmen trickled in, announcing themselves with a clatter of hobnailed boots on the path outside. Rob Hodge arrived and greeted his comrades with a pained grin. A few days before, he’d been dragged by a horse while playing Nathan Bedford Forrest in a cable show about the rebel cavalryman. The accident had left Rob with three cracked ribs, a broken toe and a hematoma on his tibia. “I wanted to go on a march down in Louisiana,” Rob told his mates, “but the doctor said it would mess up my leg so bad that it might even have to be amputated.”
“Super hardcore!” the others shouted in unison. If farb was the worst insult a Guardsman could bestow, super hardcore was the highest plaudit, signifying an unusually bold stab at recapturing the Civil War.
Many of the Guardsmen lived outside Virginia and hadn’t seen their comrades since the previous year’s campaign. As the room filled with twenty or so men, greeting each other with hugs and shouts, it became obvious that there would be little attempt to maintain period dialogue. Instead, the gathering took on a peculiar cast: part frat party, part fashion show, part Weight Watchers’ meeting.
“Yo, look at Joel!” someone shouted as a tall, wasp-waisted Guardsman arrived. Joel Bohy twirled at the center of the room and slid off his gray jacket like a catwalk model. Then, reaching into his hip-hugging trousers, he raised his cotton shirt.
“Check out those abs!”
“Mmmm.”
“Awesome jacket. What’s the cut?”
“Type one, early to mid ’62, with piping,” Joel said. “Cotton and wool jean. Stitched it myself.”
“Way cool!”
Rob Hodge inspected the needlework, obviously impressed. He turned to me and said, “We’re all GQ fashion snobs when it comes to Civil War gear.”
“CQ,” Joel corrected. “Confederate Quarterly.” The two men embraced, and Rob said approvingly, “You’ve dropped some weight.” Joel smiled. “Fifteen pounds just in the last two months. I had a pizza yesterday but nothing at all today.”
Losing weight was a hardcore obsession, part of the never-ending quest for authenticity. “If you look at pension records, you realize that very few Civil War soldiers weighed more than a hundred thirty-five pounds,” Rob explained. Southern soldiers were especially lean. So it was every Guardsman’s dream to drop a few pants’ sizes and achieve the gaunt, hollow-eyed look of underfed Confederates.
Rob had lost thirty-five pounds over the past year, leaving little or no meat on his six-foot-two frame. Joel, a construction worker, had dropped eighty-five pounds, losing what he called his “keg legs” and slimming his beer-bellied waist from forty inches to thirty. “The Civil War’s over, but the Battle of the Bulge never ends,” he quipped, offering Rob a Pritikin recipe for skinless breast of chicken.
Unfortunately, there was no food—diet or otherwise—in sight. Instead, the Guardsmen puffed at corncob pipes or chewed tobacco, interspersed with swigs from antique jugs filled with Miller Lite and rimmed with bits of each other’s burley. Eavesdropping on the chat—about grooming, sewing, hip size, honed biceps—I couldn’t help wondering if I’d stumbled on a curious gay subculture in the Piedmont of Virginia.
“I’ve got a killer recipe for ratatouille. Hardly any oil. Got to drop another five pounds before posing for that painter again. He loves small waists on Confederates.”
“Do you think we should recruit that newbie who came to the picket post? He looks real good, tall and slim.”
“Ask him, ‘Have you got a Richmond depot jacket? Do you sew?’ A lot of guys look good at first but they don’t know a thing about jackets and shoes.”
The sleeping arrangements did little to allay my suspicions. As we hiked to our bivouac spot in a moonlit orchard, my breath clouded in the frigid night air. The thin wool blanket I’d been issued seemed woefully inadequate, and I wondered aloud how we’d avoid waking up resembling one of Rob Hodge’s impressions of the Confederate dead. “Spooning,” Joel said. “Same as they did in the War.”
The Guardsmen stacked their muskets and unfurled ground cloths. “Sardine time,” Joel said, flopping to the ground and pulling his blanket and coat over his chest. One by one the others lay down as well, packed close, as if on a slave ship. Feeling awkward, I shuffled to the end of the clump, lying a few feet from the nearest man.
“Spoon right!” someone shouted. Each man rolled onto his side and clutched the man beside him. Following suit, I snuggled my neighbor. A few bodies down, a man wedged between Joel and Rob began griping. “You guys are so skinny you don’t give off any heat. You’re just sucking it out of me!”
After fifteen minutes, someo
ne shouted “spoon left!” and the pack rolled over. Now my back was warm but my front was exposed to the chill air. I was in the “anchor” position, my neighbor explained, the coldest spot in a Civil War spoon.
Famished and half-frozen, I began fantasizing about the campfire stew I’d naively looked forward to. Somewhere in the distance a horse snorted. Then one of the soldiers let loose a titanic fart. “You farb,” his neighbor shouted. “Gas didn’t come in until World War One!”
This prompted a volley of off-color jokes, most of them aimed at girlfriends and spouses. “You married?” I asked my neighbor, a man about my own age.
“Uh huh. Two kids.” I asked how his family felt about his hobby. “If it wasn’t this, it’d be golf or something,” he said. He propped on one elbow and lit a cigar butt from an archaic box labeled Friction Matches. “At least there’s no room for jealousy with this hobby. You come home stinking of gunpowder and sweat and bad tobacco, so your wife knows you’ve just been out with the guys.”
From a few mummies down, Joel joined in the conversation. “I just broke up with my girlfriend,” he said. “It was a constant struggle between her and the Civil War. She got tired of competing with something that happened a hundred thirty years ago.”
Joel worried he might never find another girlfriend. Now, when he met a woman he liked, he coyly let on that he was “into history.” That way, he explained, “I don’t scare her off by letting the whole cat out of the bag.”
“What happens if you do tell her straight?” I asked him.
“She freaks.” The issue wasn’t just weekends spent away; it was also the money. Joel reckoned that a quarter of his income went to reenacting. “I try to put a positive spin on it,” he said. “I tell women, ‘I don’t do drugs, I do the Civil War.’” He laughed. “Problem is, the Civil War’s more addictive than crack, and almost as expensive.”
The chat gradually died down. Someone got up to pee and walked into a tree branch, cursing. One man kept waking with a hacking cough. And I realized I should have taken off my wet boots before lying down; now, they’d become blocks of ice. My arm was caught awkwardly beneath my side, but liberating it was impossible. I’d disturb the whole spoon, and also risk shifting the precarious arrangement of blanket and coat that was my only protection from frostbite.
My neighbor, Paul Carter, was still half-awake and I asked him what he did when he wasn’t freezing to death in the Virginia hills. “Finishing my Ph.D. thesis,” he muttered, “on Soviet history.”
I finally lulled myself to sleep with drowsy images of Stalingrad and awoke to find my body molded tightly around Paul’s, all awkwardness gone in the desperate search for warmth. He was doing the same to the man beside him. There must have been a “spoon right” in the night.
A moment later, someone banged on a pot and shouted reveille: “Wake the fuck up! It’s late!” The sky was still gray. It was not yet six o’clock.
The pot, at least, was an encouraging prop. I hadn’t eaten since lunch the day before, and then only lightly in anticipation of a hearty camp dinner. But no one gathered sticks or showed any signs of fixing breakfast. I saw one man furtively gnaw on a crust of bread, but that was all. Recalling the hunk of cheese I’d packed the day before—the only item of mine that had escaped confiscation—I frantically searched my jacket pocket. The cheese was still there, hairy with lint and nicely chilled.
The Guardsmen rolled up their bedrolls and formed tidy ranks, muskets perched on shoulders. As a first-timer I was told to watch rather than take part. One of the men, acting as drill sergeant, began barking orders. “Company right, wheel, march! Ranks thirteen inches apart!” The men wheeled and marched across the orchard, their cups and canteens clanking like cowbells. In the early morning light, their muskets and bayonets cast long, spirelike shadows across the frost-tinged grass. “Right oblique, march! Forward, march!”
The mood was sober and martial, nothing like the night before. Except for a hungover soldier who fell out of line and clutched a tree, vomiting.
“Super hardcore!” his comrades yelled.
I spent an hour watching the men march and wheel as the drill sergeant called out his monotonous orders. “Shoulder arms. Support arms. Carry arms.” The field was skirted by a split-rail fence. Just beyond stood the plantation house, a handsome brick edifice ringed by stately oaks; I’d been told the night before that the Confederate guerrilla John Mosby had once climbed out a window of the house and down a tree to escape capture by Federal cavalry. To the west loomed the Blue Ridge, gentle and azure in the morning sun. There wasn’t a single modern intrusion. Looking at the scene, I thought about Mathew Brady’s black-and-white photographs, and the false impression they conveyed. The War’s actual landscape was lush with color and beauty. The sky, always a featureless white in Brady’s photographs, was a brilliant, cloud-tufted blue.
The sergeant broke my reverie, handing me his musket and suggesting I practice the drill steps behind the other men. At first, the maneuvers reminded me of learning to square-dance, with the sergeant acting as caller and soldiers taking turns as the lead dancer. The main difference was that a misstep here could result in a rifle butt to the chin instead of a step on the toe. The moves were also crisp and angular, lacking the fluid motion of a reel or do-si-do. “On the right by files, into line, march!”
Finally, after several hours of nonstop drilling, the Guardsmen stacked their weapons and sprawled under a tree. Reaching into their haversacks, they began wolfing down cornbread, unshelled peanuts, slabs of cooked bacon. One of the Guardsmen, a new recruit named Chris Daley, offered me what looked like a year-old piece of beef jerky. I asked him why he’d joined up.
“I work as a paralegal on Long Island,” he said. “This is escapism. For forty-eight hours you eat and sleep and march when someone else tells you to. There’s no responsibility.”
Chris chomped into the jerky, adding, “I think there’s a lot of people like me who want to get back to a simpler time. Sandlot baseball, cowboys and Indians, the Civil War.”
Rob Hodge agreed. “When you get into the grim details of the War, you realize you’ve lived a soft life. I think we all have some guilt about that. Doing this is a way of making things a little hard for a change.”
This prompted debate about just how hard a hardcore’s life should be. Rob favored total immersion in soldierly misery: camping in the mud, marching barefoot on blisters, staying up all night on picket duty. If he caught ticks and lice, so be it. “If that happened, I’d feel like we’d elevated things to another level,” he said. “It would suck, but at least I’d know what it was like to scratch my head all day long.”
A Guardsman named Fred Rickard went Rob one better. “There’s something in me that wishes we could really go the whole way,” he said. “I’d take the chance of being killed just to see what it was really like to be under fire in the War.” He paused, munching on salt pork and biscuits. “At least then we’d know for sure if we’re doing it right.”
Fred leaned over to spit out a bit of gristle and noticed something in the grass. “Rob’s bloating,” he announced. Rob lay splayed on his back, cheeks puffed and belly distended, eyes staring glassily at the sky. Joel walked over and poked a boot in his ribs. “Suck in your gut a bit,” he said. “It looks like you sat on a bike pump.” Fred rearranged Rob’s hands. “They don’t look rigor mortal enough,” he said. Then the two men returned to their meal.
Rob sat up and wiggled his fingers. “Hands are a problem,” he said. “It’s hard to make them look bloated unless you’ve really been dead for a while.”
I stuck out the drill until late afternoon. The temperature was dropping fast and another night of spooning loomed ahead. Better to farb out, I decided, than to freeze or perish from hunger. Rob urged me to come out with the Guard again when the battle season got under way, and I said I would. But there was something else I wanted to do in the meantime. Lying awake in the night, pondering Civil War obsession, I’d plotted a hardcore ca
mpaign of my own. Super hardcore.
2
North Carolina
CATS OF THE CONFEDERACY
The South is a place. East, west, and north are nothing but directions.
—Letter to the editor, Richmond Times-Dispatch, 1995
Hstorians are fond of saying that the Civil War occurred in 10,000 places. Poke a pin in a map of the South and you’re likely to prod loose some battle or skirmish or other tuft of Civil War history. The first pin I pushed turned up the town of Salisbury, North Carolina.
The scheme I’d plotted while spooning in the night was to spend a year at war, searching out the places and people who kept memory of the conflict alive in the present day. As my territory I’d take the actual ground over which the Civil War raged. This dictated a Southern strategy; apart from Gettysburg and stray Confederate raids on towns like Corydon, Indiana, the War occurred below the Mason and Dixon line. Given my mission, a Southern tour made sense. “We have tried to forget the Civil War,” Edmund Wilson observed. “But we have had the defeated enemy on the premises, and he will not allow us to forget it.”
It also seemed fitting to start in Charleston, where the War began with the shelling of Fort Sumter. But speeding south from Virginia, I tired of the interstate and pulled off at Salisbury to pick up a small road to South Carolina. Searching for a nonfranchise snack, I noticed a sign marked “Historical Salisbury” and followed it to an old train depot. An elderly woman sat reading a paperback with lovers in antebellum dress embracing on the cover. I asked her if historical Salisbury included anything to do with the Civil War.
“Oh yes,” she said, riffling through a desk drawer. “The national cemetery.” She handed me a yellowed pamphlet and a self-guided driving tour. “The graveyard’s right next to the textile plant,” she said, returning to her romance.