Rebel yell
‘You’ve never heard of Mosby?… “ Bob, they’ve never heard of Mosby?” Wynne Saffer’s voice rose an octave or two. He had to grip the corner of the pulpit to support himself. “So, you’ve never heard of Mosby?”
Incredibly, we had never heard of Colonel John Singleton Mosby, aka “the gray ghost”, the consummate Confederate guerrilla, the partisan’s partisan, the boldest of the bold, the man who once charged an enemy position single-handed and was only saved when the horse from which he fell bolted and scattered the Union forces. Saffer, an accountant by training and one of a vast army of American civil war buffs, was determined to rectify the omission and proceeded to detail the exploits of that remarkable cavalryman.
We were in Mount Zion church, near Aldie, at the start of a five-day tour of some of the principal civil war sites in Virginia and Washington. Mount Zion was built just before the civil war broke out in 1861, and was pressed into service as a field hospital following a series of engagements in and around Aldie. It ceased to be a place of worship 20 years ago, as the peeling plasterwork testifies, and the developers threatened the site. Now, a committee has been formed to restore the church, protect the land and build a visitors’ facility, which will no doubt become a shrine to Mosby.
It is difficult to understand the South without coming to terms with the civil war. While the North is happy to let sleeping dogs lie (always easier for the victors, of course), in the South a distant yapping can still be heard, sometimes even the odd bark.
The great Confederate general Robert E Lee adorns many a parlour wall; T-shirts are emblazoned with the Confederate flag and the legend “The South will rise again” (they are worn ironically – mostly), and a new Southern Party was formed recently to campaign for secession.
The war was, as those outside Dixie are not slow to point out, fought over slavery, which makes the argument a difficult one for southerners to sustain. But, the latter maintain, it was also fought over freedom – the freedom not to be bossed around by an overbearing North. That cause remains dear to southern hearts, and they reckon it was a point worth making, even if the four-year war did cost 620,000 lives, the greatest loss of life in a single conflict in American history.
That startling figure is the principal reason why the war remains embedded in the American psyche, why the struggle against developers who wish to build on the battlefields is fought with such conviction, and why the precise pinning down of what happened where means so much in the US. They may not have the length of history of the UK, but they are far less careless of what they have.
Re-enactments of famous battles are frequent. This weekend’s staging of the battle of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania, reckoned by many to have been the turning point in the war, will attract 15,000 re-enactors. We went to northern Virginia for the first ever re-enactment of the Fight for the Mule Shoe at Spotsylvania, fought in 1864 and one of a series of battles that led to the siege of Petersburg and the eventual fall of the Confederate capital, Richmond.
The re-enactment took place over three days and attracted 7,000 re-enactors (including some from the UK and Germany) and 20,000 spectators. We went on a warm and sunny Saturday morning, not quite making the 5am infantry battle – which, according to the hardy souls who were there, was fought in a swirl of mist and artillery smoke – but arriving in time to witness a blood-curdling cavalry battle. From the sidelines, it looked terrifying, but none of the several hundred cavalrymen (and women) fell off, no horses bolted, and there didn’t appear to be any casualties.
The re-enactments are only part of the weekend’s entertainment. Most of the re-enactors camp in adjoining fields, brew coffee and cook bacon on open fires, and transport themselves back to the early 1860s. They take the role-playing deadly seriously, often choosing specific figures from the war who are similar to them in age or background. They will be part of a particular company or regiment and always stick to that role: for these three days they are completely in character, although I did overhear one young Confederate infantryman reciting lines from the latest Austin Powers film, which seemed a mite incongruous.
A large market surrounds the site of the re-enactment, selling uniforms, guns, books, magazines, saddles, and all manner of provisions. I bought a Tennessee artillery man’s hat (it looked fine in Culpeper but I had begun to have doubts by the time we got back to Heathrow) and a book called Springing to the Call!: How to Get Started in Civil War Re-enacting, which warns: “A term you will no doubt encounter right away is ‘farb’. A farb is basically a non-authentic re-enactor who has no desire to change. It is often said that we were all farbs once, but most of us got over it.” With my sunglasses worn over my artilleryman’s hat, I didn’t dare look any of the grizzled re-enactors in the eye.
One intriguing sideshow was a question-and-answer session involving specialist re-enactors of the leading Confederate generals – Lee, James Longstreet, and “Stonewall” Jackson. They gave their answers in character (the laconic Lee contrasting with the ebullient Longstreet), and the suspension of disbelief extended to the audience, who would formally, and with no hint of a snigger, address them by their military titles and ask complicated questions about military tactics. It was crazy, yet oddly pleasing, this sustained act of collective theatre.
So, are the re-enactors mad? Well, perhaps the odd one is a button short of a shell jacket, expecially on the Confederate side, some of whom really do want to fight the whole thing all over again. But the impulse for most of these large men with beards is adventure, escape, male bonding, the chance to play at soldiers, an antiquarian interest in the past, and the re-creation of a time when Americans had a cause, albeit a bloody and perverse one.
The more vacuous and consumerist that US society becomes, the more popular are the re-enactments and the whole civil war heritage industry. A museum devoted to the war has just opened at Pamplin Park near Petersburg, and uses the latest interactive technology to give visitors a sense of what it was like to fight.
As you enter, you choose a soldier from one of the gallery on display and follow his fortunes through the conflict, hearing the words he wrote in letters or diaries. Mine, a 22-year-old lieutenant from North Carolina, died rather abruptly at Gettysburg, his last letter home asking his wife to use the money he had saved to send their children to school.
Pamplin is a huge site (360 acres plus) which has been privately financed: as well as visiting the museum, it is possible to walk across the battlefield itself, where many of the original trenches are still visible. This was the point at which General Grant’s Union forces broke through Lee’s lines, making inevitable the fall of Richmond and the capitulation of the Confederacy.
My most touching discovery was that soldiers from the Deep South were fascinated by snow, which they had never seen before, and in the long winter stretches when campaigning was suspended they used to entertain themselves by fighting vast snowball battles organised on regimental lines and employing sophisticated military manoeuvres. If only the whole war had been fought with snow.
We drove on to Virginia’s state capital, Richmond, which was the site of the southern White House during the civil war. The house, which was home to President Jefferson Davis and his large family, is beautifully preserved and meticulously curated. It was stripped of its contents when Richmond fell in 1865, but they were recorded at auction and the great majority have been brought back.
The civil war remains a hot political issue in Richmond: the city has a black majority and, not surprisingly, they object to the reverence in which Confederate heroes are held. The current topic of debate is whether to include Lee on a mural depicting the history of the city: a black representative on the city council objected to the general’s inclusion, and the mural project is now blocked.
Almost all those at the Confederate museum which stands next to the presidential house were white, and I asked the curator whether the stress put on the civil war in the South was not inevitably divisive. He recognised the problem but said that the conflict was a central part of American history, that it embraced both black and white (some blacks even fought for the southern cause and, in desperation, the Confederacy accepted emancipation as defeat loomed), and that he hoped blacks could be attracted to the museum.
We saw numerous cars sporting the sticker “Heritage not hate”, which sums up the way civil war buffs like to see their commitment to “living history”. They want to remember the war and take pride in the southern effort, but, with the exception of a few “lost causers”, they don’t want to reopen old wounds.
Back in Washington, where my Confederate hat was given scant respect, we visited Arlington Cemetery, which is situated on land that belonged to Lee until war broke out. Montgomery Meigs, the Union’s quartermaster-general and arch-enemy of Lee, made a point of requisitioning the house and burying the first dead soldiers in Lee’s rose garden. Now the cemetery houses 250,000 dead soldiers and two presidents, including John Kennedy. Lee’s house is open to visitors, and is kept as it was when he lived there before the war.
The other resonant civil war site is the Ford theatre in the centre of Washington, where President Lincoln was assassinated just three days after the South surrendered. He was killed by an actor, John Wilkes Booth, who shot him as he sat watching a raucous play, the sound of the attack drowned out by laughter, as Booth knew it would be. Booth leapt to the stage, shouted Sic Semper Tyrannis (Thus Always Unto Tyrants), the motto of the state of Virginia, and fled. He was tracked down a fortnight later and shot by an over-eager trooper. Booth had hoped to ferment a fresh revolt. He does not merit a memorial, even in the most recalcitrant parts of the south.
← Moore eclipsed
Kafka's bookseller →
