(My Response)
08/15/2006 08:48 PM
Comparative Re-Enactments
I suggest that there are certain conditions to be met for military
reenactments to exist. One is that there has to be a
sense of technological progress. I believe (subject to correction)
that American Civil War re-enacting took off in the
age of the assault rifle. Re-enactment involves muzzle-loaders,
weapons of obviously obsolete type, and represents little if
any threat to public order. A martial display by private parties
with credibly modern weapons tends to be viewed as a species of
ultimatum. For example, when Hermann Presser marched 400 armed men
of his Lehr und Wehr Verein through the streets of Chicago
in 1871 (?), it was understood to be a demonstration in force, as
part of the Socialist Workers Party's ongoing conflict with the
Pinkertons.
I suppose the last gasp of the English Civil War would be
the 1745 Highland uprising. By the 1780's, it had become
sufficiently distant to be safely nostalgic. On January 12, 1785,
the London Times published a letter from one Patrick O'Shiel
(Compton Street, Soho, London), avowing himself to be a Jacobite
veteran of Culloden, and reproaching Lord George Gordon for
railing against the deceased Jacobite Cause. Ireland's
next rebellion would of course be Jacobin rather than Jacobite,
the "Year of the French," starring Wolfe Tone. The ban on
the kilt and the tartan had been lifted in 1782,
and that on the bagpipes was removed at about the same time.
In a parliamentary debate on August 2, 1784, the speaker [Dundas]
expressed concern about emigration from the Scottish
Highlands, and the need to restore forfeited estates in order to
restore the mechanisms of patronage, and re-incorporate the North
Scottish people within the political system (Parliamentary
History of England, v. 24).
The oldest class of re-enactments I know of would be the
Eglinton Tournament, in 1839, and similar events, perhaps
the ultimate ancestor of the Society for Creative Anachronism.
http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/british_galls/audio_tales/eglinton_tourn/
http://www.artoftheprint.com/artistpages/corbould_edward_henry_theballroomateglintoncastle.htm
http://ejmas.com/jmanly/articles/2001/jmanlyart_wolf2_0801.htm
These sort of tournaments were aristocratic. They involved few
men, and did not involve anything like organizing a credible army.
Nor could anyone seriously believe that the participants would
survive an encounter with the Royal Horse Artillery. The
knightly mode of war of the tournaments had been obsolete
since approximately the early sixteenth century. The weapons with
which the English Civil War was fought were substantially the same
weapons with which the American Revolution and the
Napoleonic wars were fought, and the weapons of the land
battles of the American Civil War were only incrementally
improved. Gettysburg was very much like Waterloo.
Lord George Gordon, incidentally, is also known as the inadvertent
organizer of the Gordon Riots, in 1780. An anti-Catholic
demonstration he organized got out of hand, and there were a
few days of looting and incendiarism. Here are two
other letters to Gordon in The Times
To the Right Hon, Lord George Gordon,
London
"Infernal
scoundrel!
" Your assurance to
traduce the Roman Catholics, in your
letter to Mr. Pitt, shall be punished by me as
soon as I arrive in London. I will know
where your house is. By the sacred God, if your
ever attempt a similar instance of bigotry, your head
shall be severed from your body.
I am, bloody
bigotted [sic] Gordon
(or will be) your destruction.
Ireland, Dublin, Parliament Street"
To Lord George Gordon, Welbeck Street,
London.
" My Lord
"You
are going on disturbing the
peace and tranquility of our gracious Sovereign, and
by God, the next attempt I will come Felton
over the Prince of Wales, you, and
Charles Fox; if I do not, I will be dammed. His
Majesty has poor but honest friends that will
see him righted, so take it right and be advised by,
His Majesties friend,
A damm'd determined Fellow
" If you are wise take
this caution from a poor but honest man;
if not, by God you will feel me soon,
stabbing your heart thro' and thro'."
The editor of the Times dismissed these as demented
bravado (18 may 1785, p2)
One of the obvious long-established reenactments of the
larger English Civil War that I can think of is the
Londonderry Apprentices March, the anniversary of the battle of
the Boyne in 1690, otherwise known as "kick the papishes day," and
by extension, the whole business of the Orange Order.
Commemoration was not a particularly safe business. It
shaded over into "incitement to riot."
I'm not altogether sure what to make of Lord George Gordon.
Apart from being generally reputed to be crazy, he seems to have
been at a dividing point, between roads which would have led, on
the one hand to John Frost, the Welsh Chartist revolutionary
leader, and on the other to Ian Paisley.
I would suggest that probably the major formative event of modern
England was the emigrations, or rather, the combination of
emigration and industrialization. At a guess, something like half
the population eventually emigrated, either to the United
States, or to one of the Dominions. For a couple of hundred years,
all kinds of malcontents, religious, political, economic, and
otherwise, systematically departed. There was an emigration
destination for just about every conceivable tendency. The English
are the people who did not emigrate, who stayed put, who did not
let their quarrels rise to epic dimensions. There is a sort of
recurrent trope in English literature and popular culture,
about agonizing over whether to emigrate. One example might
be Monty Python's "I'm a lumberjack and I'm OK" skit, but
there are others. At the other end of the social scale, John
Mortimer's fictional persona, Horace Rumpole (Rumpole of the
Bailey), has a son who has become part of the brain-drain.
-----------------------------------------
The American Civil War had a similar longevity. The
South did not go away in 1865. One can make a very good case that
the Civil War continued into the 1970's. Not the 1870's but the
1970's. There's a picture (I believe it was published in Life) of
a South Boston Irishman, circa 1975, using a flag and
flagpole to bayonet an African-American lawyer. So in a very real
sense, the Civil War is still within living memory. One could do a
paper analyzing, say, Michael Sharra's Joshua Chamberlain,
working out how much of him is the historical Chamberlain, and how
much is a generalized 1960's freedom rider.
There are other possibilities. For example, Richard Maxwell Brown
has analyzed western gunslingers in Federal/Confederate terms.
Presumably, it would be possible to do a similar analysis of Civil
War reenactors, dealing with the whole range of class, ethnicity,
and regional origin.
The beginning of commemoration of the Civil War took the
form of the two great veterans' organizations. The Grand
Army of the Republic held annual encampments, preferably in
conjunction with some kind of militia unit.
http://www.archives.nysed.gov/a/researchroom/rr_mi_GAR_guide.shtml
http://suvcw.org/gar.htm
http://www.suvcw.org/
Given its membership requirements, the GAR eventually died out,
but its place was assumed by a quasi-descendent's organization,
the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War, , which seems to
be small, and primarily interested in tracing descent. It is
not, however, quite so formally exclusive as, say, the Daughters
of the American Revolution.
The corresponding confederate organization, The United Confederate
Veterans, was organized two decades later, in 1889, when the
participants were obviously too old for renewed war service.
http://www.civilwarhome.com/confederateveterans.htm
This, too, has a successor organization, the Sons of Confederate
Veterans,
http://www.scv.org/
and this organization _is_ socially exclusive. You probably can't
join if your name is Kowalski, or Chung, or the like. The
veterans seem to have had no great interest in re-enactment.
They had "been there, done that." This carries over to the
successor organizations. The Sons of Union Veterans seems to be
more interested in listing the number of its members presently
serving in the Middle East, rather than talking about reenactors.
The one big difference between the English pattern of memory and
the American pattern was that the weapons which had been current
from the sixteenth century to 1865, with only minor
modifications, suddenly became obsolete after 1865. The Wagon Box
fight and the Hayfield Fight in Wyoming and Montana in 1866
are of the same essential pattern as the Boer War and the
Battle of the Frontiers in 1914-- the pattern of the
repeating rifle.
Civil War re-enactment seems to have started about 1960, give or
take ten years, and to have really taken off, circa 1980.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War_reenactment
http://www.nsalliance.org/
http://wesclark.com/jw/
http://wesclark.com/jw/forigin.html
http://wesclark.com/jw/talk_of_the_nation.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Civil_War_reenactment
Reenactment took off at a time when the American Civil War was
still within popular remembrance, but no longer had real stakes.
The weapons needed to reenact the civil war would have been
ludicrously unsuitable for assassinating Martin Luther King or
Medgar Evers. The Confederate reenactors were not putting
themselves at risk of being mistaken for Klansmen.
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HNN post, Diane Purkiss, Why the British Don't Remember Their
Civil War and Americans Do Remember Theirs