The first cannon shot commemorating the opening salvo of the U.S. Civil War went off at dawn on Tuesday, two hours later than Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard’s men actually fired on Fort Sumter in 1861.
This is about the only historical deviation diehard military re-enactors, in Charleston to mark the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the bloodiest and most controversial conflict ever to take place on U.S. soil, have been willing to concede.
From the blue Union and grey Confederate uniforms, to the “hoe cakes” on which they feed – not to mention the 19th-century scent they emit from under their heavy garb – authenticity is a re-enactor’s pride and joy.
But not every historical artifact is as simple to reproduce as a musket. The reasons that led the Southern states to secede are as much in dispute today as when America marked the 50th or 100th anniversaries of its “War Between the States.” On this one crucial point, the “indivisible nation” is divided still.
On the ferry to Fort Sumter, the fateful Union garrison located on an island in Charleston Harbor, Toni Tolbert is living proof of that. She is the only black person among the 200 passengers on the boat.
“A lot of African-Americans may not really want to talk about it,” offers the Charleston native, now an emergency room doctor in Florence, S.C. “They think that if they come to a Civil War event in the South that things may be said that are disrespectful.”
The underlying tension is the product of a seemingly irreconcilable difference: For most blacks and Northerners, the war was fought over slavery, period. Southerners, citing the Constitution, are more likely to cite “states’ rights” as the primary reason the country fractured.
“Abraham Lincoln did not understand the Southern mentality,” insists Robert Sonntag, 51, an Orlando, Fla., medical consultant dressed in the Confederate felt coat of the 2nd Florida Volunteer Infantry.
Elected president in 1860, Lincoln did not initially seek to abolish slavery in the South, only to prohibit its extension to new U.S. territories in the West. But fears in the South that Northern abolitionists were fomenting a slave rebellion, like the one that dispossessed French plantation owners decades earlier in Haiti, set the country on an inexorable path to war.
What all Americans seem to agree on, however, is that the more than three million men who fought on both sides were fearless warriors who thought much less about the causes of the war than the consequences of defeat.
“A lot of fellows joined for the sheer adventure,” says Charles Engle, 74, a retired Pennsylvania native and member of the Sons of the Union Veterans of the Civil War. “It took a battle or two to get the romantic notion of war knocked out of their heads.”
Ms. Tolbert, too, concedes that “the reasons the South seceded and the reasons its soldiers fought are two different things. The soldiers thought their land was being invaded.”
The idea, then, that Confederate soldiers fought nobly for an ignoble cause is not entirely accurate. The first part is true; the second is subjective.
What is indisputable is that the cost was incalculable. About 620,000 soldiers, or 2 per cent of the U.S. population then, had been killed by the time the last shot was fired in June of 1865. Countless more were maimed beyond recognition in some of the most gruesome battles ever recorded.
The re-enactors seek to honour the soldiers from both sides by recreating, as faithfully as possible, the conditions they endured. Unfortunately, they seem to be having too much fun for some.
“Many times, these celebrations have been romanticizing the past, transforming the war from what it was to what they want it to be,” Nelson Rivers, a vice-president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, charged at news conference here on Monday.
