After lunch, the spectators left camp: It was time for war. The Confederate Army marched in uneven files down a wide, paved road. After a quarter mile, the companies turned left onto a grassy path by the creek. The men waited under the trees until the Federals could get in position. General Shelton lay down on the side of the path to rest his feet and smoke a Camel.
Nervous before combat, the infantry got chatty and revealed deep knowledge of Civil War history. “Of course the war was about slavery,” Confederate Sergeant Matthew Connor said. “Read any state secession document. You’ll see in the first line it was about slavery.” A man in his company complained around his chaw that the war had been government as usual: poor men dying for the 1 percent. Not one man denied that the war was about slavery or voiced any of the other Lost Cause lies.
But what I was not prepared for were the end-times fear and pessimism that pervaded the ranks. The soldiers were in complete agreement that war was coming. Not in a few minutes, in reenactment, but in real life, in America, and in my lifetime. What the men could not agree on was the cause. One feared an A.I.-driven war, another the consequences of draining the aquifer in the Southwest. Another soldier fixated on how much land had been given over to growing animal feed—and feared what Americans would do to stay fed when the soil was depleted. Climate change wars loomed particularly large in their imaginations.
