Anisa Khalifa: Cannons, muskets, marching orders
Unidentified reenactors: Route step. Route step!
Anisa Khalifa: This is what's bound to rattle your ears if you go to a reenactment of a Civil War battle.
Unidentified reenactors: Load! Load!
Anisa Khalifa: It's an incredible spectacle. But the most interesting part of it all might just be the people who put on the show.
Silas: I hope you're as mystified and enjoyed as much as I do.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: What do you think people get wrong most about reenactments? What's sort of like a common misconception鈥�
Silas: That people have a side and they're that thing
Melody: Probably that we're a bunch of racist idiots running around. I mean, that's hardly the case. We鈥檙e very passionate about American history and about portraying what actually happens.
Anisa Khalifa: I鈥檓 Anisa Khalifa. This is The Broadside where we tell stories from our home at the crossroads of the South. This week, producer Charlie Shelton, Ormond literally stumbles onto a battlefield and explores the fascinating culture of Civil War Reenactor.
Unidentified reenactor: Forward, march!
[BREAK]
Anisa Khalifa: All right. Hey, Charlie.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Hey. Good to see you.
Anisa Khalifa: Yeah, it's, it's been a minute since we've been across the table from each other in a studio.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Yes, yes. Excited to chat.
Anisa Khalifa: Yeah. So you recently went to a Civil War reenactment?
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: I did.
Anisa Khalifa: Tell me about this. Where was it? What did you do? What did you see?
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Yeah, absolutely. So I went to Bentonville, which is about an hour southeast of Raleigh in rural eastern North Carolina. That's where the Bentonville Battlefield is. So this is a state historic site. And it's where the largest and the last battle in North Carolina in the Civil War took place.
Anisa Khalifa: Okay
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: So I went to the 160th anniversary reenactment on a sunny Saturday afternoon in mid-March.
Anisa Khalifa: So why did you wanna go to this reenactment, especially like on a weekend, on your precious Saturday? Why did you wanna go to this Civil War reenactment?
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Well, I've lived in the South my entire life, but I have never been to a Civil War reenactment, so I wanted to see what the reenactment looks like in action. But more importantly, I wanted to hear from people why they come out to do this 160 years later after the Civil War and after this battle actually happened.
Anisa Khalifa: So you show up.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: I show up.
Anisa Khalifa: What do you find? Yeah, like what's the scene there?
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: What really blew me away as soon as I arrived was the sheer scope of this event.
[Shelton-Ormond]: Alright. I'm sitting in traffic right now. We got about a half a mile's worth of traffic. Meanwhile, on the side of the road, we've got some horses, a couple carriages going by.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: So I arrived at the site to a big field, and half the field was a parking lot that was quickly filling up with cars, and the other half was full of these big canvas tents and inside the tents where people mostly selling period specific clothes and even, you know, soldiers, uniforms, or other items that looked like they could have been from this time period.
Unidentified child: That was probably the coolest thing I've ever bought in my entire life.
Unidentified reenactor: Because likewise, it's not like these things are super crazy accurate鈥�.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: There were folks who were doing demonstrations of weapons from the Civil War.
Unidentified reenactor: A revolver is something that typically goes in the left hand鈥�
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: And bordering this field was some woods, and inside the woods is where the soldiers, the reenactors had set up their camps, where some of these reenactors had been staying for a couple days now leading up to this big event on the weekend.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: total they were 1500 reenactors. It was actually mostly split even between Confederate and Union and 1500 is a large number, but that's actually nothing compared to the actual battle. The actual battle of Bentonville had 80,000 soldiers in total.
Anisa Khalifa: Oh, wow. Okay so definitely not recreating the scale of the battle, even though there's a lot of people here.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Mm-hmm. That's right. Yeah. They are reenacting parts of the Battle of Bentonville here on a much smaller scale. In terms of the people attending the event that day, there was an estimated 30,000 people.
Anisa Khalifa: Wow.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Now, all of them didn't go to the battle reenactment later in the afternoon, but that just goes to show how big of an event this actually is.
[Shelton-Ormond]: What brought y'all out here today?
Unidentified spectator: It's his birthday. That's what he wanted to do.
Shelton-Ormond: Whoa. Happy birthday. Are you excited?
Unidentified child: Yeah.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: It felt like this mix of historical theater with the reenactment, people camping out and dressed up in periods, specific clothes mixed in with education, people going to these demonstrations and learning more about the time period. And then kind a sprinkling of something like a county fair in there too.
Unidentified spectator: Um, he was told that after the fight he could go shoot some of the guns.
[Shelton-Ormond]: Really? Yeah. Oh my gosh. Well, you got a toy gun ready to go? Yeah.
Anisa Khalifa: So did you talk to any of these reenactors?
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: I definitely did.
[Shelton-Ormond]: How are you sir? Good morning. I'm assuming you're a reenactor.
Lynn Bull: Yes. We're gonna get those waskity webbles.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: One of the first folks I talked to was Lynn Bull. So Lynn is from Goldsboro, which is pretty close to Bentonville. And Lynn was portraying a union soldier, and he said that he's been doing reenactments since 1969.
Anisa Khalifa: Dang.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: And he became interested in the Civil War well before that.
Lynn Bull: Yeah. My dad took me to Gettysburg when I was in third grade, and as he put it, everything went downhill from there.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Now, Lynn has been doing these reenactments for a while and he is a little bit older. I'd say he's in his early to mid seventies and he says that it's been hard to get young people out there to do these reenactments and kind of continue this tradition.
Lynn Bull: We're we're aging out unless they get some younger people in that are all gonna kind of die off.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: But I was actually surprised to see a lot of young folks out there at Bentonville participating in the reenactment. There were teenagers, folks in their twenties and thirties taking part in this event in all aspects.There were people dressed up as soldiers, and there were other folks dressed up as civilians. There were kids running around. There are age requirements for going on the actual battlefield and carrying a rifle, but there were people really of all ages participating in the event.
Moses: I've been doing this and like men into history since I was little, maybe like 10 years old.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: I talked with a young man named Moses who traveled up from Atlanta to be a part of this reenactment and he is 15 years old.
Moses: It鈥檚 something I have a passion for and I love, so yeah.
Shelton-Ormond: And you said you've been doing this for five years?
Moses: Yeah.
Shelton-Ormond: How many reenactments has that been?
Moses: A little over a dozen.
Charlie: Really? Have they all been civil war or they been different kinds?
Moses: They're all been civil war. Okay.
Anisa Khalifa: So was it mostly men who were doing the reenactment of the battle or were there women?
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: It was mostly men, but there were women dressed up in sort of Antebellum dresses, but they were also women dressed up as soldiers, planning to go out on the battlefield and fight.
McKenna: And I do both roles. So we do soldier and we get all dressed up some days. So I love it.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: McKenna is in college and she says that she actually chooses whether she wants to dress up as a soldier or in a dress according to the day.
McKenna: Yeah, based on the day and just how I'm feeling. So like I wanted to shoot a musket today. So tomorrow, like tonight I'll be a lady and then I'll do the same thing in the morning. So it just depends, especially with the weather. Yes. I like to base it off of weather. Yeah. Because some days it can be super hot and I kind of just wanna be in a dress and not out in the field.
Melody: Hydrate all the time. Yeah. Whether, even if it's cool out, you still hydrate. More spectators will drop than we will because we are, we're very disciplined about that. Yeah.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: McKenna was with Melody. And Melody is a little bit older, and she said that she's been doing this for 14 years.
Melody: My goal is actually to do a battle in every state that they actually fought in. So that's one of my little bucket lists.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: And Melody said that she always chooses to be on the Union side because she has ancestors on that side.
Melody: My ancestor fought for the 10th, Massachusetts and the 37th Massachusetts. So I would never put on gray.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: But someone's family roots are definitely not the only thing influencing which side people join.
Anisa Khalifa: Hmm. So what are some other ways that people decide?
Silas: A lot of people think that you are on a side even, and I'm like, no!
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: I spoke with a man who goes by Silas Tackett, that's kind of his reenactment moniker, and he came all the way from Seattle.
So all the way from the west coast. He was dressed as a Confederate soldier. And he said most of the time he chooses whether to be confederate or federal, depending on what's going on with that specific reenactment.
Silas: I'm going to an event, what's the cool thing I wanna do at this event? And that's the thing I'm gonna do. And it's also, well, where my friends also go. So I want to go with my friends.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Silas has been doing this for. 30 years and I asked him how he's seen it change and he said in recent years he's actually seen politics become less prevalent.
Silas: Mostly been since the 150th anniversaries that that's when I've noticed there's been more of an effort. It's like that needs to go and that needs to go, that needs to go.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: The 150th was 10 years ago in 2015. And that's a time when a lot of confederate iconography, like the presence of Confederate monuments in the South and the confederate flag was getting more critical attention writ large. And Silas says that seeped into the reenactment world as well.
Silas: And it's hard to let things go. We didn't wanna do that, but um, in the long term, yeah, it's the right thing.
Melody: You can't judge people who lived back then with the mindset from today, in my opinion, you have to take it all in stride and you know. All the good, the bad, and the ugly. It's just, it's what we did. It's who we are, and we've grown from that and it's a beautiful thing.
Anisa Khalifa: On that point, obviously there's a Confederate side to the battle, but did you feel that [00:11:00] there was a Confederate presence in the sense of like, were there people with confederate flags? Did you see any people who seemed to have this lost cause ideology?
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: So there were definitely confederate flags amongst the Confederate reenactors, right? That's just gonna be a part of the event. There were also people who were spectators who had clothes that had the Confederate flag on them, and right outside of the parking lot, there was a statue of a Confederate general that is there all the time, and there was a tent with a group of older white men who had a bunch of Confederate shirts, buttons, flags, et cetera, with language around Southern heritage. But there wasn't really a ton of people like that. I think it's worth noting that the Battle of Bentonville is one where the Confederates lost. It was the last battle in North Carolina before the Confederacy surrendered in the state. So the fact that this was a prominent loss for the Confederacy might influence the legacy of it amongst people who are really passionate about their Confederate roots and ancestry.
Anisa Khalifa: Yeah, I mean, I mean, the question of race can't really be ignored here, right? My assumption, I think a lot of people's assumption would be that most of the people who showed up to do this reenactment were white men. What was the racial demographic?
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Most of the reenactors were white men, definitely, but not exclusively white men. I saw men of many different racial backgrounds. I did not see anybody dressed as a confederate who is Black. Moses, the teenager from Atlanta, is Black, and he says that he always chooses the same side in any reenactment.
Moses: I'm always on union.
Shelton-Ormond: Yeah, so this is my first time, first reenactment. So I might, I might get the bug.We'll see.
Moses: Have fun. Fun. You'll like it.
Shelton-Ormond: Okay, thanks.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: So when I was talking with Moses, I realized that it was actually getting close to two o'clock, and that's when the battles were set to begin and people were starting to venture toward the battlefield. And there's the big field where the battle takes place, and there's a hill atop of the field where spectators gather to watch it all happen. And, you know, I thought like that's, that's not really the view that I want to get. So when I was talking with Moses, I saw a group of union soldiers on horses go by and then kind of disappear into the woods. So I decided to try and follow them all right, check into the woods.
Shelton-Ormond: Hopefully I'm going in the right direction now.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: I lost the soldiers on horseback. But that wasn't going to deter me. I was still committed to finding a group of soldiers.
Shelton-Ormond: Well, got a little horse poop on my shoe, cross that off the checklist for the day.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Trekking through the woods, and I realized, you know, I was going in the right direction because I kept on finding some horse poop on the ground.
Anisa Khalifa: Love this, he follows a trail of horse poop to the battlefield.
Charlie: Yeah, that's my trail. Yeah, I know I'm in the right direction. And then that was promising, but when I really knew I was getting close is when I started to hear the music.
Shelton-Ormond: All right to the woods. I've stumbled upon union soldiers.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: After venturing through the woods for about a half a mile, I finally found about 300 union soldiers waiting in the wings, waiting for their orders to march into the battlefield.
[fife and drum music plays]
Anisa Khalifa: Let's take a quick break and when we come back it's time for battle.
Shelton-Ormond: They're all lined up getting ready to flank the Confederates. We'll see. We'll find out.
[BREAK]
Anisa Khalifa: Okay, so you've trekked through the woods following a trail of horse droppings. And you found this group of soldiers. Who are they?
Charlie: Yeah, so these folks are all a part of these reenactment groups, really across the country that apply to be a part of reenactments like this one at Bentonville. This reenactment is put on by the state government, so it's very official and all these reenactment groups are approved.
Unidentified reenactor: I'm an entrepreneur, business. I live, breathe, and die on my phone, and I turn my phone off for three days. When I come to these things.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: They really come from all walks of life. They are lawyers, they're teachers. I talk with somebody who's a clothing designer, like they really come from all places.
Unidentified reenactor: And I still get the night before jitters, before I leave. It still makes me feel like an 8-year-old boy.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Many folks are ex-military who see these reenactments as an avenue to tap into some of that comradery that they experienced in the armed forces without, you know, the, the danger and the risk that comes with being in an actual battle.
Anisa Khalifa: Yeah. I would feel like this would be something that would feel very familiar to them, but also exciting.
Charlie: Yeah, absolutely.
Unidentified reenactor: Boys, get fired up. Get fired up!
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: So while the brigade was waiting for their marching orders to enter the battlefield, I talked with somebody about the rank of all the troops. You know, how do you decide who's a private and you know who's a colonel? And he said that one part of it is about experience. And then another part is people just ask.
Unidentified reenactor: Donovan over here is a captain. So he's running all these sergeants who are obviously three or four times his age and it's his first time, trying it out. And he'll either be good at it or he'll be bad at it, and he'll yeah. Turn around and say, I'll go back and do something else next time.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Which I thought was an interesting sort of democratic way of going about organizing your troops.
Anisa Khalifa: Yeah, definitely not like the real military.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: No, not quite
Charlie: So all the soldiers are waiting in line. And then they finally get their orders to March out there and join the battle, do some fake fighting.
Other union soldiers and Confederate soldiers are coming from other different parts of the field. I'm with this brigade over here in the corner. And I was like, okay, I can't follow them all the way into the battlefield, so let me hop into a bush and get out of danger's way and see how this all unfolds hiding out in a bush right now as they all line up.
Anisa Khalifa: So here you are in your bush. Is this battle scripted and choreographed, or is this more of like, they have a general idea of what they're gonna do, but they're kind of ad-libbing. How does this work?
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: It's mostly scripted and I think with some improvisation, right. So they were doing specific battle scenarios on this day. The actual Bentonville battle lasted over three days, and so they were doing specific parts of that three day battle.
[Shelton-Ormond]: Got a whole cloud of smoke coming off of the battlefield from all the musket fire.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: And so it's a scripted event in the sense that they have the general movements of the battle, you know? But then within that, I think you can do some improvisation. Folks can choose when they get shot, when they get injured. Could be they're just tired and they wanna take a break.
Anisa Khalifa: Yeah. I'm assuming all of the ammunition is firing planks.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: They're all firing blanks. I wanna make that very clear. There are no actual cannonballs being fired. There's no actual bullets being fired from these rifles. Safety is a big, big priority for them.
And then while the battle is happening, there's also this person who is talking over a loudspeaker, where the spectators are gathered, kind of narrating what's happening in the battle with this sort of flowery language, like a billow of gun smoke cascaded over the battlefield as the confederates reformed their line.
Anisa Khalifa: That is so cool actually. It's like a sportscaster almost for the battle, but using like period appropriate language.
Charlie: Yeah, absolutely. And just to zoom out for a second and talk about Bentonville as a space. Bentonville has been doing these large scale battle reenactments since 1990 and they've done this reenactment every five years since then, excluding 2020 because of the pandemic. They've been doing living history events at Bentonville since the 1960s. Now, in the early 1960s is actually when Civil War reenactments experienced this wave and popularity.
Anisa Khalifa: So what was the initial kind of idea behind these? Was it just like, let's bring history to life?
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: It was pretty directly caused by the centennial of the Civil War. I think it's interesting to note that at the same time, the United States was experiencing a lot of major social, cultural, and political shifts. Meanwhile, the Civil War reenactments are having this moment, these events that are really rooted in looking back to the past the country.
Peter: Actually Europe has a pretty big Civil War following, believe it or not, so they'll do stuff like this in Europe.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: While I was safely in my bush, I struck up a conversation with a man named Peter, who is actually from the Wilmington area. And he's a veteran. He served in Afghanistan and he talked about doing reenactments in the United States of other wars too.
Peter: I do a lot of World War II and Vietnam stuff as well.
[Shelton-Ormond]: And that happens in the States too?
Peter: Oh yeah. Yeah. They do that all across the country. A lot of actually, like Tennessee and Kentucky have a lot of like terrain that we try to get, especially in the summertime, gets nice and hot and humid and there's a lot of ravines and stuff, so.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: So with World War II and Vietnam War reenactments, it seems like it's this pursuit of finding things as close as possible in the United States, but with Civil War reenactments in Bentonville specifically, Bentonville is pretty much unchanged from when this battle actually took place in 1865. The topography is pretty much the same.
Unidentified reenactor: Reform the battalion!
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: So after about 30 minutes, this brigade that I've been tagging along with takes a break. They come off the battlefield to where they first entered to where my safety zone is.
[Shelton-Ormond]: How'd that go?
Unidentified reenactor: It went okay. This will definitely go a lot better.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: The Confederates have advanced, so this brigade needs to take a beat and regroup.
Unidentified reenactor: So we're planning to retake our position.
Charlie Shelton: And then after a couple minutes they all get ready again and march back out there .
Unidentified reenactor: Left face, forward march!
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: They kept firing away, and eventually the reenactment reached its grand finale.
[Shelton-Ormond]: All right. I'm right in the thick of it right now. I'm behind the union line. Rifles are going wild. There's a bunch of gun smoke, so the grand finale here, guns a blazing.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: The reenactors are falling to the ground. There's hooting and hollering, and then there's victory. The union side wins.
Loudspeaker voice: That was a fantastic battle, wasn鈥檛 it folks? [applause]
Unidentified reenactor: Yeah, after game report. You know, we just went out there. We did our best, you know, we really gave it to 'em. They pushed back and we just did what we had to do.
[Shelton-Ormond]: What are you feeling? I'm tired. I don't know鈥�
Unidentified reenactor: When you鈥檙e being shot at you don鈥檛 worry about being tired.
Unidentified reenactor: Alright boys, next order or business, nap time!
Anisa Khalifa: So Civil War reenactments are something that like everybody knows it's a thing. Many of us just have heard about it. We maybe sometimes make fun of it. I mean, but most of us probably haven't been to one. After spending this whole day with this group of people, what were your biggest takeaways?
Charlie: I was curious if people were doing more of, of an impression of this time period or if they were really trying to be as authentic as possible. And it's a mixture of both. So a good example of this is about 15 Confederate soldiers came off the battlefield at one point to where I was hiding out.
Unidentified reenactor: Right here, rally by platoon.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: So they got in this huddle formation and their commanding officer ordered them to hold that position very sternly, hold that position, and then after a couple seconds, took out his iPhone and took a picture. Took a picture of them in position. So, nothing seems too precious, right?
Anisa Khalifa: Mm-hmm.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Where they are leaning into this time period and what actually happened in this battle, but they'll very easily break through that line and whip out their iPhone and take a picture of what's happening.
Anisa Khalifa: Yeah. That's fascinating. So you're saying that it's become less political than they have been, at least from the perspective of the people who are doing them, but isn't the act of recreating a battle from the Civil War, isn't that inherently a political act? It's a really fun day. It's a way to interact with history that's super immersive, delightfully nerdy, but I wonder if it can also be a way to deal with this political weight that's more nuanced than say, like putting up Confederate statues in public spaces that a lot of people are uncomfortable with.
Charlie: Yeah. So. I spent one day out there with reenactors. But what struck me about this world is that it doesn't seem to be static. It's, you know, always overlaid with the time period, whether that's the 1960s or 2015 with the 150th or today. So it's kind of this living and breathing thing that can change.
But it's still very rooted in a specific place that is imbued with a specific history. It's also an event that has a lot of offerings. There were historical presentations about the time period, and then there's also folks who talked about, um, having ancestors who were enslaved on this land and what that family lineage means for them today.
So I would say that. Honor and education are the two primary things, motivating people to be reenactors or to engage with this event, but ultimately, how each person embodies that honor and education is going to be really unique to them. Right. So I think it's a question of what is being offered in a space like this, and then how you personally choose to engage with that.
Anisa Khalifa: Would you ever do this?
Charlie: I would go back to another reenactment, but I don't think I'm going to buy a uniform anytime soon and get out there.
Anisa Khalifa: You, you had enough of trekking through the woods?
Charlie: I had enough trekking through the woods, yeah. And I had enough of cleaning some horse poop off my shoes. I'm okay watching in my bush off to the side.
Anisa Khalifa: This is delightful. Thank you.
Charlie: Yeah, thanks for chatting about this.[00:27:00]
Anisa Khalifa: This episode of The Broadside was produced by Charlie Shelton-Ormond, whose shoes unfortunately did not survive the experience. It was edited by Jerad Walker. Our executive producer is Wilson Sayre. The Broadside is a production of 吉彩网网站 North Carolina Public Radio and is part of the NPR network. You can email us at broadside@wunc.org.
If you enjoyed the show, leave us a rating or review or share it with a friend. I'm Anissa Khalifa. Thanks for listening, y'all. We'll be back next week.