FARBY’S MANUAL Of CIVIL WAR REENACTING

ARTICLE FIRST: ENLISTMENT

LESSON I: In one sitting, learn VOCBULARY.

Reenactor Noun. A person who enacts a role in an event that occurred earlier, typically a specific war or time period. This person willingly sacrifices modern conveniences, such as air conditioning, refrigerators, and indoor plumbing, in order to create the illusion of temporarily inhabiting a time without said conveniences. The illusion often comes at great monetary and physical cost to the person, which might lead observers to question the reenactor’s sanity.

Example: That reenactor just paid fifty dollars for the privilege of camping in their own canvas tent and shitting in the woods for a weekend. Perhaps we should schedule a psychiatric evaluation.

Farb Noun. A historical reenactor, most typically a Civil War or World War II reenactor, who is perceived to exhibit indifference to historical authenticity; also the inauthentic materials used by those reenactors.

Example: Look at that farb wearing sneakers and jeans. He’s way too comfortable for the 1860’s. Let’s chastise him!

This word, with little to no variation, can assume almost any part of speech.

Example: Look at that farby farb farbing.

Clusterfuck Noun. A slang term, typically used in a military context, for a situation in which multiple things have gone wrong. This is usually the result of incompetence, communication failure, or environmental issues.

Example: Remember that time half the company accidentally fired at the other half?

What a goddamned clusterfuck! Captain doesn’t know his ass from his elbow!

Living History Noun. An education medium used to teach people about a particular period of history through the portrayal or embodiment of the clothing, food, language, and customs of that period. The people that portray or embody these historical elements are called living historians.

Also, Verb. The experience of a living historian engaged in this embodiment.

Not to be confused with rewriting history, historical apology, or the myth of the Lost Cause. Those terms should not be mentioned at a living history event, as living history is certainly not any of those things. So. Glad we cleared that up.

LESSON II: Without consideration, join COMPANY.

They will find you at a city park or shopping mall, set up with their white canvas tents and unlit campfires. You will not expect to see them there, lounging on wooden barrels and folding stools as you walk by with your cone of soft serve. Perhaps you are there with a friend or family member, in the midst of a conversation. This will not help you. A flash of eye contact is all they need. They’ll lure you in with their talk of battles past and still to come, of the poor quality of the food and how long it’s been since they got paid. They’ll joke good-naturedly about the farbiness of your outfit and offer to help you fix that without fully explaining what it means. One thing is abundantly clear: farbiness is bad, and you need to stop. By the time they slip an oversized woolen jacket over your shoulders and place their sweat-stained cap on your head it’s already too late. The smell of grease and black powder and campfire smoke embedded in the fabric clouds all logic. Before the day is through you’ll have exchanged information and signed on the dotted line. You’re now officially enlisted in an army that disbanded 150 years ago.

The training process that follows can only be described as hazing, and it will be better for all parties if you’re too young to recognize that. Like learning a language or converting to a new religion, the transition grows more difficult with age. This is especially true if you joined alone, without the benefit of family or friends to soften the blow. Perhaps you’re a relatively-sheltered twelve-year-old with a budding passion for history and parents that are occasionally willing to humor you. Perhaps these parents work with a lanky old man who owns a booming shotgun laugh and gray hair that, under certain light, seems tinted Statue of Liberty green. Let’s call this man Bill. And perhaps Bill just so happens to be a private in the very company that has set itself up in the middle of your neighborhood mall or park. If these chance circumstances all align, you might just find yourself signed up to be a Civil War reenactor.

ARTICLE SECOND: TRAINING

LESSON I: In two ranks, form ALLIANCE.

The next, crucial step is to find yourself an ally. Sure, Bill is right there with his greenish hair and wide eyes made wider by the thick, farby lenses in his thick, farby glasses. But he is, even your parents have to admit, something of a kook. He is also pushing 70. What you need is another kid of your approximate age and temperament. Preferably someone a bit more experienced than you, but still new enough at this whole reenacting thing to share in some of your mistakes. Let’s call this person Josh. Josh will be taller than you, with dark hair and wild eyes that never seem completely satisfied with the scenery. He will probably be the son of one of the officers or NCOs in the company, and like all officers and NCOs, his father will take himself very seriously.

The importance of finding an ally cannot be overstated. Josh will be the reason you make it through your first campaign season. He is your fellow explorer, giggling and weaving through the darkness with you amidst the ghostly triangles of canvas tents. He is your wingman as you both try to flirt with the girls in corsets and hoop skirts at the evening dances, and he’s the first to offer a joke when the two of you inevitably fail in this endeavor and trudge back to camp alone. He joins you in your skepticism of haunted battlefields and laughs with you under his breath at the idiots snapping pictures of nothing, hoping to find some hidden specter when the film is developed. And he is equally terrified by the discovery of what surely couldn’t possibly have actually been a ghost charging at you from across the moonlit field. He is your drinking partner, downing Dr. J. Fogsworth’s Sarsaparilla to the point of sugar high while the older soldiers sip mysterious concoctions with names like liquid thunder, tar water, and jungle juice. (And, years later, he’ll convince you to try some of those concoctions yourself, both laughing at the way the wet bottoms of your cups melt rings into the varnish of the table). He is your partner in crime, sharing the arbitrary punishments that anyone and everyone in a position of power seem to delight in inflicting upon the two of you. More on that later. Over the years you will surely coerce the odd friend or two from the real world to join you on the field of simulated battle, but when they get too busy or lazy or bored to come back, it will be Josh who rolls up to camp with a bonnet and leggings stretched over his uniform and talks you out of going AWOL.

LESSON II: By company, CLUSTER-FUCK.

Once you’ve enlisted and found yourself an ally, the next few months will be spent preparing for battle. Like the thousands of real and imaginary soldiers who have come before you, you will spend over ninety percent of your time in the army somewhere other than the battlefield. Now it is time for drills.

No, not the kind in your father’s tool chest. These drills are a lot louder and more frustrating than anything designed to bore holes in two-by-fours. And however protective your dad might be of his power tools, these drills take a lot longer to master.

One of the most important skills a Civil War soldier can possess – aside from the two aligned teeth necessary to bite through a paper cartridge – is the ability to walk. This is much more difficult than it seems. You probably have spent the majority of your walking life alone, moving solo from one location to another. But marching in a column – or, worse, a line – requires you to walk at an identical pace and trajectory of the men on either side of you. In a column, this is either two or four people in a row. The people directly in front and behind you are called ranks, and people to either side of you are called files. These ranks stack upon each other until the column is ten, fifty, a hundred soldiers long. The simple act of marching together is like learning to walk again. It is only a matter of time before you are using your next vocabulary word – clusterfuck.

Your commanders will not be satisfied with marching in a straight line. Eventually they’ll start adding in new commands, such as BY FILE RIGHT and RIGHT FACE. It is important, when issuing this command, to first order your troops to count off by twos, thereby designating each soldier as an even or odd numbered man. Failure to do so will only enhance the severity of the clusterfuck. By the time you’re finished you’ll be introduced to a whole slew of new words, many of which make “clusterfuck” sound like the name of a nursery rhyme character by comparison. Just keep your head down and your mouth shut through all of this, and you’ll be fine.

LESSON III: Fire at Will.

When not on the battlefield or the training field, the Civil War soldier both then and now spent a good deal of time sitting around a campfire shooting not muskets or cannon, but something equally dangerous – the shit. When shooting said shit, it is important to form your opinions in advance, secure them tightly, and offer them unsolicited at whatever volume and intensity the situation requires. Never, under any circumstances, should you loosen your grip on your opinion while the shit is being shot. Should someone else’s shit shooting in any way weaken or alter your own opinion, keep that fact to yourself until the battle is over and you have retreated to fight another day. Then and only then may you reconsider and alter your own opinion based on new information, and you must have these new opinions secured tightly well in advance of another shit-shooting engagement.

If you feel inadequately prepared to shoot any shit yourself, have no fear! The shit shooters are happy to shoot their shit in your general direction without needing a return of fire. Indeed, many Civil War soldiers prefer to shoot their shit at unarmed adversaries, as this tends to significantly increase the chances of victory. As a fresh-faced rookie considerably younger and less experienced in things like tactics, politics, history, inebriation, anatomy, your comrade’s personal habits, or life in general, you are actually expected to have the shit shot at you without returning fire. And, once again, before engaging in shit-shooting yourself, it is important to form and hold onto an opinion strong enough to withstand the onslaught of older, louder, and drunker shit being shot at it.

LESSON III, Addendum: Living History.

Whether shooting the shit, drilling, marching, or actually fighting on a battlefield, the modern Civil War soldier, like those that came before, represents something larger than himself. In the 19th century, these soldiers represented nations, ideologies, lifestyles, and beliefs beyond and often different from their own. The modern Civil War soldier is much the same. They represent those same nations, ideologies, lifestyles, and beliefs while simultaneously representing the soldiers who originally represented those beliefs. They are, in both a literal and figurative sense, living history.

There is a lot more packed into those two words than initially appears. The first word, living, is both an adjective and a verb. As a soldier in a 150-year-old army, you are both actively living history, and you are a part of the larger apparatus that keeps history alive. The implications are great and the responsibility greater. It is certainly more than your new comrades let on when lecturing, berating, or shooting the shit at you. They will use phrases like “heritage, not hate” to explain why this is not a hobby, but a calling; not something they want to do but something they are obligated to do, something that is bigger than all of you. Something that can not, in any way and under any circumstances, be construed as…racist. This presents a burden you will not realize you carry until years later, when you are old enough and your opinions strong enough to shoot the shit with a fury built over years of forced and feigned naiveté. This burden, this fury, is born not of the shit that was shot, but of all the layers and layers of shit that nobody bothered to mention.

Living history is a funny thing. At its most basic, it requires an acceptance that history can, should, and is being rewritten. This will never be stated outright, nor will you consider it directly yourself. Your comrades and confidants, through shit-shooting and lectures, sarcasm and sincerity, will convince you that you are preserving history by keeping it alive, and you will not be in a position to consider, much less point out, the contradiction in that logic. But the truth of it remains, unnamed and unseen, like some dark and sinister thing lurking just outside your periphery. How, you might have wondered, can you preserve a thing as you live it? How can you enjoy the re-embodiment and reenactment of a thing without glorifying it? How can there be heritage without hate when the heritage in question is built on hate?

You may wonder whether these friends of yours strove to accurately portray the people and events that changed our history or to play an active role in the continued change of that history today. Whether they were Civil War buffs seeking a link to the past or Civil War apologists seeking an escape from the present. You may wonder where you fit into all of that, and the extent to which the one type of reenactor allowed for and legitimized the other. You may reach a point where your fond coming-of-age memories of camping and laughing and besting adults with your knowledge of Second Manassas must all be qualified and reconsidered. Or, God help you, you might never reach that point at all.

But it will be years before any of these thoughts creep into your mind. For now, this is all a game, an adventure, and you’re having too much fun to investigate. After all, these are people you’ve come to know, to laugh with, to respect. They’re not the people who burn down churches and shout themselves hoarse waiting for America to be great again. They’re Josh with his amazingly bad ideas, and Bill with his greenish hair and shot-gun laugh. Surely these friends, these comrades in arms, these parental figures would not intentionally mislead you. Right? Right? RIGHT?

Right. Sure. And so you let them shoot their shit, and you smile. Because you’re young. You’re only having fun. And because, after all, you signed up for this.

LESSON IV: In glaring isolation, fire-RAMROD.

Re-equipped with your knowledge of weapon terminology and your ignorance of social and racial implications, you’re ready to learn how to load and fire a rifle. Since the entire company is fairly new, this might be the first time any of them have gotten together and learned how to perform this task. They will be every bit as lost as you, but that will not stop them from using you as a scapegoat. You are, after all, the newest and youngest member of the company.

The man in charge of this portion of the drill will be the company’s ordinance sergeant. Let’s call him Bob. On each arm of Bob’s jacket are stitched three light-blue Vs, with a star on top. Bob will be old and potentially senile, a World War II veteran who saw action at Market Garden or the Battle of the Bulge. His gray eyes will be slightly cloudy and frequently unfocused, but they will be latched firmly onto you when he calls you out of line and orders you to load your rifle. Everyone else will stop what they are doing to watch.

At this point, everyone has been miming the loading portion of the drill. You will attempt to do the same, but Bob is quick to stop you and point to the leather cartridge box attached to your belt. Inside are roughly sixty paper tubes, closed at one end. These tubes have been filled with sixty to eighty grains of black powder, then folded down upon themselves to keep the powder from spilling out. Thus secured, these powered-filled tubes are called cartridges. At Bob’s insistence, you’ll pull one out of the leather box and hold it out in front of you. Bob will smile a little and nod for you to continue.

“Go ahead.”

You study the cartridge in your hand for a moment before tentatively raising it to your mouth. Thanks to the past hour of miming, you know you’re supposed to bite off the end and dump the powder into the barrel of your rifle. You place the end of it in your mouth, close your teeth around it, and pull. A few grains of powder spill out on your tongue in the process. An odd taste fills your mouth, sweet and bitter and spicy at the same time. You spit them out with the paper and wipe your tongue on your sleeve, leaving a faint trail of black spit. A handful of people behind you laugh, and your face flushes. You look back up at Bob.

He nods again and motions toward the barrel of your gun. You study the black hole at the end of smooth, blue-black metal tube. The powder slides out of the cartridge and disappears into this hole. When no more comes out you throw the empty cartridge on the ground, then look back at Bob.

“Heh heh heh,” he’ll chuckle. “That’s how you load a rifle.”

There will be some more laughter from behind you, and you grin.

“Now do it again.”

You’ll begin to mime through the steps, but he’ll stop you and point to your cartridge box again. You might try to point out that there is already a full cartridge down your barrel, but he will only find this amusing.

“Heh heh heh,” he’ll chuckle. “Load it again.”

So you do. This time you manage to avoid getting powder in your mouth. You grin with pride, but he isn’t finished.

“Now, I want you to load that rifle six more times.”

You can stare at him in disbelief all you want, but he isn’t joking. Or maybe he is, as he’s chuckling louder than ever, but he’ll repeat his order and wait for you to follow it. What can you do? You load your gun six more times.

“Heh heh heh,” he’ll chuckle. “Now get back into line.”

The mimed drill will continue for another hour or so before Bob singles you out again.

“Come on out here, private,” he’ll say, and you’ll be forced to oblige. This time the rest of the company will be ordered to continue their drill.

“Now I want you to draw your ramrod and put it down the barrel.”

You’ll be certain he’s messing with you, and you’ll offer a smile. You’re not supposed to draw your ramrod when you’re gun’s loaded. Every day since you started drilling, one NCO or another has beaten that into your head. It was dangerous during the Civil War, and it’s even more dangerous now. If any gunpowder is involved, the ramrod isn’t. But once again, Bob means business. You glance toward the rest of the company for help, but everyone is preoccupied. When you turn back, Bob’s dumb smile will be waiting.

“Go on,” he’ll say. You’ll sigh, delay, and eventually do as he says. Thanks to the eight rounds already in there, the ramrod will jut two feet out of the end of the barrel.

“Heh heh heh. That’s why you never load eight rounds into your rifle.”

You’ll nod, because there’s really nothing else you can do in a situation like that.

“Get back into line,” Bob will say, and you’ll happily comply.

Some time later, when the drill has moved on to actually loading and firing the weapons, Bob will call you out of line again.

“Over here, private,” he’ll say with deranged glee. You’ll sigh and walk over to him.

“Now I want you to fire that rifle.”

This will seem like an excellent time to point out that there are, at present, eight rounds of powder jammed down the barrel of your musket. As logical as this excuse sounds coming out of your mouth, Bob will remain unphased.

“I know,” he’ll grin. “Go on.”

And there’s nothing you can do but cock back the hammer and stand with your feet in the shape of an L, as you’ve been taught. You take a tiny brass percussion cap out of its pouch on your belt and place it gently over the metal nipple of the gun. With a nod from Bob, you bring the gun up to the firing position, cock the hammer back to ready, and, at his order, pull the trigger. The force of it nearly knocks you on your ass.

Even though the rest of the company is in the midst of firing as well, the sound from your musket is loud enough to stop them. The air around you is choked with thick, white smoke that stings your eyes and reeks of rotten eggs. When your hearing returns, you can hear Bob chuckling from somewhere inside the cloud.

“Heh heh heh,” he chuckles. “Heh heh heh heh heh.”

When the smoke clears he has tears in his eyes.

“That,” he says between chuckles, “Is why you never load eight rounds into your rifle.”

He dissolves in laughter again, and you return to line without waiting for him to dismiss you.

Before breaking for lunch, you all are ordered to draw your ramrods and listen to the different sound they make when hitting the bottom of a dirty, fired barrel as opposed to the clean pings they made earlier. When it comes time for you to draw your own, you’ll discover that it’s missing.

“Where is your ramrod, private?” the sergeant will ask. Face flushed, you’ll confess that you don’t know. After a moment, Bob’s chuckles will cause everyone to turn and look his way.

“I guess,” he’ll manage, through tears and laughter, “I guess you fired it.”

Realization sinks in, and the whole company turns to look out across the corn field at the impossibility of ever recovering the ramrod again.

“Now that,” Bob says, “is why you never load eight rounds into your rifle.”