|
|||||||||||||
Printer-Friendly
Email this Story
Post a Comment (0)
Soldiers come from all over to re-fight First Manassas
On a hot July day in 1861, two armies prepared to clash outside Manassas in the first major battle of the American Civil War.Exactly 150 years later, 6,500 men, women and children donned heavy woolen uniforms in 104-degree heat as they prepared to re-enact the event.
Last Friday, the day before the actual battle, soldiers and vendors took refuge in the shade from the mid-morning sun.
Eleven-year-old Max Giesler and his father, Jerry, traveled from Ft. Wayne, Ind. to fight for the Union. Members of the 44th Indiana in their hometown, they were instead portraying soldiers in the New York 76th at the battle.
That's pretty common at events where the re-enactors who show up don't necessarily represent the units that had fought in the actual battle, said Max.
“They'll probably use me as runner, which is kind of like a messenger boy,” said the sixth-grader, who is too young to be allowed a gun in the battles.
His father was expecting to be assigned as an artilleryman.
Max explained that to make the cannon fire realistic, pyrotechnicians sometimes pack small amounts of TNT into the ground around the battlefield. After the cannon fires, the TNT is detonated off in the distance, simulating an exploding cannonball.
Despite his age, Max is actually the Civil War buff in the Giesler family.
“I got into this after I learned about some of my family history,” he said, noting that his ancestors had fought for the Confederacy in North Carolina and Virginia units.
One hundred fifty years later, decked out in Union gear, their descendents now travel the country during the summer to recreate their battles.
“We take one big trip a year,” said Jerry Giesler, noting that his wife, Max's mother, opted to stay home by the swimming pool rather than make the trip to Manassas in a heat wave.
“I started last year,” added Max. “He started this year cause I dragged him into it.”
A short ways away from the Giesler's Union encampment, the few soldiers out in the midmorning heat strolled along a row of tents where sutlers (period vendors) sold clothes, weapons and supplies to the re-enactors.
In Gardner's Dulcimer Shop, Don and Jackie Gardner showed off a collection of stringed instruments to a group of Union soldiers who wandered by.
“This is what banjos would have looked like,” said Ohio resident Don Gardner, pointing to a collection of 200-year-old instruments.
The banjos themselves were made of gourd, he said. The strings were made of gut; Not catgut though: “Cats were too small,” he said. Sheep or goats worked better.
A young soldier took up the proffered banjo and began to pick out a tune as his fellows watched.
It wasn't the only period music heard on site. Throughout both encampments, the sounds of fiddles, flutes and other instruments floated through the heavy air as re-enactors relaxed under shade tents and played soft tunes.
In the Confederate camp, three people lounged under a canvas awning, wearing not uniforms, but t-shirts bearing the stars and bars.
Walter Rohrbacher and Vickie and Christopher Wright traveled in from Clarksburg, W.Va., where they are members of the 2nd Virginia.
On the eve of the battle, they were still awaiting their instructions on when and where to be for the fight.
“We're part of the 11th Battalion of the Army of Northern Virginia but we just met them for the first time yesterday,” said Rohrbacher.
Re-enactors don't get paid to perform, explained Christopher Wright. Instead, they pay a fair bit themselves for the experience. In addition to the registration fee, they also provide their own costumes, equipment, food, travel expenses and weapons.
The weapons are real working muskets that fire blanks.
“When we say blanks, we're still using black powder. We're just not putting the bullets in,” Wright said.
Just in case, there are a lot of safety rules. For starters, the soldiers never point guns at each other, always firing over each others' heads and into the air. They also don't use swords or bayonets.
And they don't use ramrods – the sticks shoved down the barrel to pack the powder in old-style guns. That's because in the heat of battle, nervous soldiers sometimes forgot to pull them out and inadvertently fired them like spears when they pulled the trigger, said Rohrbacher.
They'd rather that mistake not happen in a re-enactment.
The missing bayonets, ramrods and sudden death aren't the only differences between a real battle and a re-enactment, of course. For one thing, there are a lot more women on the battlefield now.
One of them is Vickie Wright, who, like her husband, is a gun-toting soldier. That's far from rare. While re-enacting is still a man's sport, there are a large number of women who fight as well.
Women fought on both sides in the Civil War, but almost always disguised as men. In re-enactments, gender doesn't matter so the women don't have to portray male soldiers.
“It doesn't matter; I just fight,” Vickie Wright said. “They always need an extra pair of hands.”
Asked how one organizes thousands of strangers for a battle when the outcome has already been determined by history, Rohrbacher said it depends on the event.
The re-enactors are already members of particular units and before a battle, the leaders get together to decide how the fight will go. Sometimes, Rohrbacher said, organizers decide the North will win one day and the South the next. That way, everyone goes home happy, even though that outcome may not be historically accurate.
At Manassas, though, Rohrbacher said the plan was to refight some skirmishes but not all of them. Since the Union won some smaller fights and the Confederates others, picking and choosing would allow each side to claim some victories without being historically incorrect. (At the actual battle in 1861, the South eventually routed the North).
Commanders then follow the pre-determined plan. There's no easy way to decide who's been “killed” though. Sometimes, Rohrbacher said, your musket will malfunction repeatedly and you'll decide that in an actual battle, you'd be dead. That's when it's time to lay down.
Other times, a commander will tell his troops that “we need to start taking some hits” and the soldiers will volunteer for death.
That's the plan, at least. In re-enacting, as in war, plans sometimes go awry.
“The problem is, when you get about 8,000 guys together, things don't always go as planned,” Rohrbacher said.
But regardless, he and the Wrights agreed that the event as a whole was already proving to be well-done.
“Larger events are hard to organize,” Rohrbacher said.
Vickie Wright agreed but credited the county and tourism officials with putting together a well-planned experience, especially in dealing with the heat and crowds.
“I think they really have gone above and beyond, putting up cooling tents and the port-a-johns,” she said. “It's been very well done.”
You must be logged in to post a comment.