"Even though we didn't fight here, we make it a family event," said Williams, sitting alongside his wife, Angela, who was wearing period dress. Colored Troops - the designation the Army gave to ranks of all-black regiments - tend to re-enact battles where black troops played key roles in the fighting, including the Battle of Fort Wagner in South Carolina, depicted in Glory.Īrmy commanders initially made black regiments perform menial labor and didn't regularly order them into combat until after Gettysburg. They were the only black unit there.īlack re-enactors form a small faction within the overall hobby. This year, about two dozen people in his unit made the trip. Williams first organized a re-enacting group about 20 years ago, recruiting relatives, friends, and members of his church. It opened up my eyes to a lot of things." "I had no idea we were in the Civil War," said Williams, as his horse grazed in a field behind his tent.
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Colored Cavalry, a Union regiment of free blacks and liberated slaves, until later in life. One cavalryman, Nathaniel Williams Sr., said he grew up riding in southern Virginia but didn't learn that his ancestors served in the 2nd U.S. It was just these poor guys who were underfed, undermanned, underequipped, fighting valiantly to the last man, until they couldn't stand anymore."īrad Keefer, a 61-year-old corporal in the Union re-enactor ranks and a professor of history at Kent State University, said, "Re-enactors look at the war as a four-year period between 18 in which you can cut out all the stuff leading up to the war and very much ignore everything that happened afterward."Īnother unit traveled from Germany, and hundreds of cavalry re-enactors showed up with their horses. "Nobody really thought a lot about the social reasons of why the South went to war.
"It wasn't 'I'm racist and I want to glorify slavery,'" he said. "We were paying tribute to the fighting man." "Up until the last five or 10 years, the social causes of the war did not come into what we do," he said. In the 1980s and '90s, "the whole tone of the country was different," said Thomas Downes, 68, a retired machinist from Cleveland, who has been re-enacting for the Union side for 38 years. A reproduction Civil War rifle alone can cost more than $1,000.īut many are more introspective about it. Video games are to blame, some grouse, while others attribute diminishing interest to the rising expense of gear. Longtime hobbyists are aging out and retiring - soldiers in their 50s and 60s filled much of the camp at Gettysburg - and younger people aren't marching onto mock battlefields in nearly the same numbers.Įnthusiasts cite a number of factors. But the heyday of re-enacting was the '90s, during another moment of national fascination with the Civil War.īut in the past decade or so, the crowds at large-scale re-enactments have dwindled. Many of today's re-enactors were born as the last Civil War veterans were dying, and grew up amid the celebrations and re-enactments of the centennial that lasted from 1961 to 1965.
In 1998, at the 135th anniversary of Gettysburg, there were an estimated 30,000 re-enactors and 50,000 spectators. Gettysburg is among the biggest re-enactments of the year, and it still draws thousands to the sweltering Pennsylvania countryside in the middle of summer.īut that's nothing compared with the re-enactments of the 1980s and '90s, when tens of thousands would turn out. It was also a snapshot of a hobby in decline. An Abraham Lincoln impersonator was on hand to pose for photos. Spectators paid $40 to watch nearly a dozen mock skirmishes over the course of four days, and there was an old-timey ball Saturday night. The 155th Gettysburg anniversary re-enactment, which was held over the second weekend in July, was a chance for dedicated hobbyists to blast away at one another with antique rifles and rekindle old friendships over campfire-cooked meals.
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