Finding the High Road To A Vexing Topic

Towards the end of Whittled Away, the main characters find themselves behind a line of earthworks under attack by a regiment of US Colored Troops – the USCT.

For the first two years of the Civil War, the US Army was extremely reluctant to put black soldiers into battle for political and racist reasons. Nonetheless, by 1864, when the casualty lists had reached unimaginable lengths, Grant and Lincoln allowed the men in black regiments to join the bleeding and dying.

The reaction of Confederate soldiers fighting black soldiers is usually portrayed as blatantly racist. I suspect that is accurate given the overt racism of the 1860’s, but I think that perspective is also superficial. I think by 1864, after three long years of combat, the worn-down Confederate veterans mainly just saw the dark faces as more damyankees, part of the endless blue waves that kept crashing down on them.

In that context, I’m reflecting on a personal reenacting experience I had last Saturday afternoon. I was part of a group of modern Texans who traveled to Richmond, Virginia to portray Confederate Texans who were manning earthworks protecting Richmond, the capital city of the Confederacy.

In mid-September,1864, Grant attacked and two regiments of US Colored Troops assaulted the section the trench line held by the Texans.

The hobby of Civil War reenacting does not attract a large number of African-American participants. That is especially the case in the southern states where most reenacting outfits primarily portray Confederate soldiers. Go figure.

The point is that in my seventeen years and nearly 100 reenactments, I’ve never seen even a twenty-man company of African-American reenactors together portraying US Colored Troops. I couldn’t even imagine several USCT reenactor companies forming a battalion.

That was part of the lure for us to travel 3,000 miles to Richmond and back. We wanted to take part in a reenactment where enough black reenactors were coming together to portray a small USCT regiment in combat. Coupled with the offer for our outfit to portray the real Confederate Texans who fought the USCT regiments on the earthworks, about 90 of us were easily persuaded to make the long trip.

There were four battles scenarios “fought” for the public during the weekend. The second one, done on Saturday afternoon before a large crowd of spectators was the one we came for.

In mid-afternoon, we knelt on the backside of a long pile of yellow dirt excavated with modern machinery from a ditch dug for the reenactment. Early Saturday morning we had “improved the works” by laying tree trunks all along the top of the dirt pile to make protective “head-logs.” Under the logs we had scooped out holes in the dirt to serve as “shooting ports.”

We first saw the Union reenactors marching towards us while they were still several hundred yards distant, way too far to see if the faces under the blue kepis were pale or dark. When they worked past our “abatis” (tree branches littered across their path to disrupt their formation and slow them down), the USCT battalion broke into a trot and then a run to reach the ditch and climb the eight-foot dirt wall.

I had volunteered to be captured (these things are somewhat scripted, you know).  Seeing that the main effort to scale the wall was twenty yards to my right, I moved that way until I was right over the edge of the area where dozens of Yankees with dark faces were climbing upward and crossing over the head-logs. I was too close to safely fire my musket downward towards the main cluster of Yanks, so I just held it up until a young slender African-American fellow swung my way and pointed his musket at me. I quickly surrendered to him.

The next half-hour was a highlight for me. I was pushed along to join another small group of captured Texas Rebs. We sat under guard while most of the USCT men formed a line to defend themselves from a counter-attack by the rest of our guys, whose role had been to run away and then try unsuccessful to regain the earthworks.

When that played out, and the scenario was officially declared a done-deal, we Reb prisoners stood up and began shaking hands with the USCT reenactors. Everyone was ebullient about the success of the scenario. I can’t really express the joy and pride I personally felt, and the joy and pride that was clearly seen on the faces of all the reenactors involved. I shook hand after hand with other smiling men, all of whom were gracious and obviously feeling we had just done something special, something not normally done in our hobby.

If this was not the largest sham-combat ever done by the USCT in a reenactment, it was close. I was told by one of the white officers (historically correct, remember) in the USCT regiment that sixty-six black enlisted men answered roll call that morning. That’s enough for three good-sized reenacting companies and was enough to form a battalion.

Face it, race is still a slippery slope in our culture in 2014, and the hobby of Civil War reenacting is centered around a terribly racist time in the American story.  So much so, in our reenactments we normally just ignore race and the roles of African-Americans in the war.

But not last Saturday afternoon. On that bright afternoon, over a hundred black and white reenactors acknowledged our uncomfortable past in a proper manner, while we embraced the difficult, but not-insignificant progress of the 150 years since 1864.  We found the common ground like reasonable men should.