Civil War

A Civil War reenactment is in part a memorial service. It is partly, too, a leisure activity. Furthermore, most reenactors assert an educational import to the performance, and to develop their roles many pursue archival research with a rare dedication. On the other hand, Civil War reenactments are increasingly commercial spectacles with as many as fifty thousand Americans routinely gathering at (or near) historical Civil War battlefields in order to stage performances that purport to recreate the conflict, while hundreds of thousands more spectate (Hadden 1996:5). I will show how theoretical issues of authenticity arise as practical problems in the Civil War reenactment community by presenting my own observations from the 2006 Gettysburg reenactment and by relying on a number of texts produced by participant-observers. In particular, I will refer to Robert Lee Hodge, who was made famous by Tony Horwitz's 1996 book, Confederates in the Attic, and who served as a kind of Virgil to the author on his journey through a Confederate Valhalla. From these sources, I will argue that 'Living History' performances require an interpretive apparatus that takes genuine history as its authority while remaining external to both participants and tourists, who may well be unaware of how closely their own involvement approximates genuine historical events.