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  • Lost CausesConfederate reenactors take pride in their Southern heritage, but struggle with the centrality of slavery and racism to the Confederacy
  • Jesse Dukes (bio) and Jonno Rattman (bio)

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Confederate reenactor with straps. Gettysburg, PA, 2011.

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The Union soldiers fall back into the treeline and after a short respite, the command echoes down the long gray line: “Brigade . . . battalion . . . company . . . advance!” In the dying light, hundreds of gray-clad soldiers march across a short patch of grass to the trees. I’m in front with the Color Guard, and the Confederate battle flag marks our company’s place in the line. Slowly, we permeate the woods of Culp’s Hill. The light is dim, and blue-white gun-smoke tendrils drift in the air. There’s no sign of the Yankees. Roots and rocks threaten to trip us. A few rebel yells echo from our left, ghostly in the shady woods. After a couple minutes of slow progress uphill, we can see the Union soldiers, aiming down at us from a stone wall. Then the flashes, the smoke, the echoing cracks of the rifle, and we form a line and prepare to return fire. Our sergeant shouts encouragement. “Come on, Fifth Virginia. Do it for Jackson, boys.”

I’m not here as a tourist. Or spy. I’m not a Confederate reenactor. I’m not even sure I’m a real Southerner. I was born in Virginia, a bastion of the Old South and Confederacy, but now considered suspect by many in the Deep South. I’m from just outside a college town, [End Page 89] Charlottesville, which even many people in the surrounding counties don’t consider Southern. Go back more than two generations and all of my ancestors are from above the Mason-Dixon line or immigrated to the South directly from Europe. So even though I’m geographically from the South, I’ve always felt disconnected from Southern culture.

But a pop-culture controversy in 2013 got me thinking more about white Southern identity: the flap over Brad Paisley’s collaboration with LL Cool J on the song “Accidental Racist.” The song depicts a white Southerner attempting to explain to an African-American barista at Starbucks that the Confederate battle flag on his shirt is meant to be an expression of Southern pride, not an expression of racism. Some critics saw Paisley and LL Cool J as well intentioned but hopelessly naïve in their attempt to reduce hundreds of years of racial history to a few platitudes about getting along. And they were right. But despite the song’s false equivalencies and muddled message, the central image—a white man considering his decision to wear a Confederate flag on his shirt—felt powerful and familiar.

When I was growing up in Virginia, I didn’t think the Confederate flag was about race. Every week I saw the Confederate flag on television in The Dukes of Hazzard, a show that glorified hot rods, moonshine culture, and neighborly values. It was set in a mythical South in which bad guys come in twos, bullets never hit anything, and the issue of race rarely comes into play. I saw the same flag on album covers and T-shirts from bands like Lynyrd Skynyrd and Alabama. I learned to associate it with pride in rural identity: bumper stickers on the backs of pickups and rusty Trans-Ams. Later, in school, I learned about the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement and saw images of segregationists waving the battle flag, but even with that exposure to the intersection of the Confederate flag and racism, it was only in my college years that I realized how uncomfortable, unwelcome, and angry the flag made other people feel. That changed how I felt about it.

So after the controversy surrounding “Accidental Racist” spread, I remembered a group of Confederate reenactors I had met, back in 2011 while on assignment in Waynesboro, Virginia, for a radio program. At the time, they suggested I come with them to the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, coming up in July of 2013, but...

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