I believe I have always loved history.  When I was six years old, the country was celebrating the Centennial of the American Civil War, the War of the Rebellion, the Brother’s War, the War of Attempted Secession, the War of Northern Aggression or whatever name you wanted it to go by.  It was 1961, John F. Kennedy was President and the nation seemed to have a sense of pride and greatness.

Maybe it was that we had so much pride that we could look at such a dark time in our past without losing our soul.  At the time, many recalled the Civil War as the war which ended slavery, thus a great a noble war, unlike the war which would soon overtake us in Vietnam.

My view was that of a boy born in California to a family which had mostly “Union” sentiments.  True, my fraternal grandmother was a Southerner, but she had married a man from Illinois and I grew up in California where we had so few black citizens I rarely recall seeing blacks as a child.  Our “minorities” were the Mexican/Latinos I could see on my grandfather’s farm, or working in the sections of the town as well as a few Asians.

So I was a Yankee when we boys would play “Civil War” in the empty lots or wide open fields.  My mother indulged me by making me a dark blue shirt and sewing on yellow bars that made me a captain.

Of course, we didn’t have the right weapons.  Our toy guns were those of the 1880s, not the 1860s.  We used them anyway, with six-shooters and “Winchesters” taking the place of the Army Colt and Springfields or Sharp’s Carbines.  Our armies of ten to fifteen on each side would argue over who was – or wasn’t – shot.

Almost two decades would pass from the times I fought on the battlefields of my youth before I would find myself in a more realistic version of the affair.  In 1987 I became a Civil War “reactor.”  Gone was the homemade blue shirt, now I had a genuine looking wool jacket, leather boots and belt, a reproduction “Colt Army” revolver which fired black gunpowder (and could fire the .44 cal. lead balls as well), as well as the .54 cal. Sharps Breechloading Cavalry Carbine.

For years, I would look forward to times when, one weekend per month, we would take the field, some five hundred or so of us, to re-enact Civil War battles.  It was a far better version of the games played in my youth.  The sounds, the smells and the noise were real.  Better yet, we would do it for a weekend and the camaraderie felt between us was perhaps the best I could recall enjoying among friends.

A few times, I would venture all the way to the East and get the chance to do it all on the actual fields (or close enough) where those men of old fought as we did, only they risked life and limb.

Sometimes I still wonder if we could do it.  Could those of us in America today sign up to march such long miles on such poor rations, live for four months in the sweltering heat and bitter cold?  Certainly it was not a popular war, newspapers of the time made it out to be less popular than the War in Iraq and many of the political commentators of the era called Lincoln stupid, ignorant, a “baboon” and worse.  The parallels between the picture given by his contemporaries make Lincoln sound as dim as many make out George W. Bush to be today.  One can only hope (for his sake, if no other) that Bush fares as well with history as Lincoln did.

For over five years of my time as a re-enactor I was the Commander of the Union Army in Northern California.  I also handled PR and other things for the club I joined for this memorable hobby, but through all of it, I most enjoyed talking to people about the reality of the war.  Hollywood and revisionist historians seem bent on making the war simplistic.  No war is ever simple, though.

Now, years later and with a family, I still have many of the uniforms I used over the years, as well as the guns, sashes, accoutrements and such.  I have many antiques of the Civil War era as well, from a “potty” chair (a small cabinet with a top that lifts up to reveal the seat for a chamber pot below) to some surgical tools and more.  With these, my military items, tentage and more I now volunteer at several local middle schools during the spring.  I visit the school for a day with a small encampment, showing them the uniforms, arms and equipment of the Civil War.  I also talk about the hard life of a soldier of that time, sprinkling it all with anecdotes and gory items to keep their interest.

Yet I find many of them think how odd it would be to willingly leave home and family, work so hard and give so much for little more than an ideal – be it the unification of the country, the freedom of a people or the love of the nation.  Gone is the patriotic idealism I recall from those days I spent running about a field in a blue shirt with a cap pistol.  That is not to say it is altogether gone – it can still be found in many of each generation – but it feels far less vibrant.  Perhaps we take all of it too much for granted.

I feel lucky to have been able to try on the shoes of those soldiers, without having to wear them for real.  Their hardships were great and few if any really could imagine they were doing much more than fighting a war – they were changing the world.   Without those soldiers of old, the United States would not have come to be the place it is, our people would not be who we are.  Indeed, they changed the country from “these united States” to The United States” in more ways than we fully comprehend ourselves.