Catharsis, Revision, and Re‐enactment: Negotiating the Meaning of the American Civil War

One cannot begin to express adequately the impact of the American Civil War on our cultural consciousness. As others have pointed out, the manifestations of this impact can be seen in the many hobbyisms, clubs, roundtables, books, heritage preservation groups, and merchandising concerns that abound. The fact that every year thousands of men and women re-enact the encampments and battles of the War suggests that it is still a vital part of many Americans' identity as Americans. The War has "had consequences," according to George Fredrickson in The Inner Civil War, "for the history of ideas which were comparable to its well known political and economic effects" (Preface vii). Robert Penn Warren reminds us that our collective impressions of the War are a representation of life rather than being life itself: a "condensation of many meanings." "There is no single meaning appropriate to our occasion," adds Warren, "and that portentous richness is one of the things that make us stare at the towering event" (8081). He continues: We shall not be able to anatomize this portentous richness, but we feel that we must try. We must try because it is a way of understanding our own deeper selves, and that need to understand ourselves is what takes us, always, to the deeper contemplations of art, literature, religion, and history. (Warren 81) Interestingly enough, although Warren certainly did not have in mind battle re-enactments per se, he suggests that the same sort of community ownership of an historical event that re-enactments evoke is what makes the event ours: Relatively few Americans now alive once sat by the grandfather's knee to hear how the men of Pickett and Pettigrew held formation up the ridge at Gettysburg, or how dogwood bloomed white in the dark woods of Shiloh. It is not merely that few men alive can, chronologically, have known the grandfather who had been in the War; the grandfather, or great-grandfather, of a high proportion of our population was not even in this country when the War was being fought. Not that this disqualifies the grandson from experiencing to the full the imaginative appeal of the Civil War. To experience this appeal may be, in fact, the very ritual of being American. To be American is not...a matter of blood; it is a matter of an idea-and history is the image of that idea. (77-78) It is the yearning, perhaps, to understand our being American that compels many tens of thousands of Americans to be Civil War "buffs" (a term lamentably inadequate) and to try to understand a thing too profound and dire perhaps to be fully comprehended. This activity signifies much more than American hobbyism or even nostalgia for what is now gone with the wind; it may be a sign of our dissatisfaction with a culture increasingly at odds with its own sense of identity. For many, it is a search for a more meaningful paradigm of conviction and purpose in our time of fragmented self-absorption. There are Civil War "buffs" who love the subject with an obsession unlike that of other buffs of other events. There are wargamers, Civil War Round Tables in nearly every city, living history festivals, preservation societies, Southern cotillions, and associations. There is a significant publishing industry: books continue to sell well and widely, adding to the more than 50,000 titles already extant (McPherson, Battle-Cry ix). Although there has been much attention in recent years on some of this incredible activity especially books and movies such as Glory and Gettysburg, and television productions like North and South, Andersonville, Ken Burns' The Civil War: A Narrative, and Civil War Journal, hosted by Danny Glover-there has been little attention paid to the significant cultural phenomenon of Civil War re-enactors and their hobby. It is more than a hobby, for it assumes the identity of a culture itself with its own unique traditions, language, and rituals. By one count, there are a minimum of 30,000 re-enactors (Hall 7). …