The Civil War in Popular Culture: Memory and Meaning

11. “Oh, I’m a Good Ol’ Rebel”: Reenactment, Racism, and the Lost Cause

191 11 “Oh, I’m a Good Ol’ Rebel” Reenactment, Racism, and the Lost Cause Christopher Bates Captain Vern Padgett is a Confederate Civil War reenactor—a member of the Richmond Howitzers. Though a California native, he is one of the more diehard Confederate reenactors—not in terms of his devotion to an accurate impression but in his commitment to what he perceives as the southern cause. His e-mail messages often have titles like this: “Rebuttal to ravings of misinformed Yankee propagandists.” He thinks nothing of lecturing his fellow reenactors on the “facts the historians leave out,” with the goal of correcting what he calls “Northern platitudes.”1 Padgett is best known—both inside and outside reenactment circles—for his advocacy of the notion that the Confederate army included significant numbers of African American soldiers.2 The fact that academic historians categorically reject—and even deride—this idea only encourages Padgett. He has a lengthy and highly polished lecture on the subject that he has delivered at dozens of Civil War roundtables and other Civil War–related gatherings. His presentation makes use of all the hard evidence he has been able to gather—a few photographs, a handful of quotations and diary excerpts, and several other odds and ends. The centerpiece of his argument, however, is creative mathematics. Working backward from a single piece of information— that a dozen African Americans qualified for veterans’ pensions in Tennessee in 1905—he “calculates” how many black soldiers actually served in the Confederate army. By his figuring, Tennessee had about 10 percent of the South’s population in 1905, so those 12 pensioners actually represent 120 soldiers if 192 Christopher Bates extrapolated across the entire South. Next, he calculates that because only 20 percent of Civil War soldiers lived until 1905, those 120 survivors represent 600 soldiers. Padgett continues through several more iterations using this mathematical sleight of hand and ultimately concludes that the Confederate army had as many as 200,000 black soldiers. This is a staggering number, given that, at its height, the entire Confederate army numbered perhaps 1 million soldiers. When pressed to explain why a group that—in his analysis— constituted as much as 15 or 20 percent of the Confederate army has left so little evidence of its existence behind, Padgett falls back on the other main theme of his lecture: that professional historians can’t be trusted and are inclined to hide information that doesn’t fit their preconceived notions.3 Don Worth is also a Confederate reenactor—primarily as a member of the Third Georgia. “I am an absolute nut about the Civil War,” he explains. “I have no idea why.”4 Worth, a retired computer systems administrator, has been reenacting for nearly two decades. His interest in the Civil War dates back much further, however, to when he was a youngster during the Civil War centennial of 1961 to 1965. He explains how he was first drawn to the Civil War: My grandfather gave me the Life magazines in the early 1960s and the American Heritage Book of the Civil War. I had to do a Civil War project for school—sixth grade?—and I remember cutting out pictures from the magazines for the report and looking up what I then considered obscure generals in the encyclopedia. At the same time, because of the centennial there were lots of other Civil War–related things around. For example, I had the Marx Blue and Gray plastic soldiers play set. . . . The Gray Ghost was on TV and I had seen the movie Friendly Persuasion and loved it. One of my friends had the Avalon Hill Game Gettysburg and I had to get that too. I ended up buying their Chancellorsville game too. And I had stacks and stacks of the Whitman Confederate play money. When I visited Knott’s Berry Farm, I bought replicas of Harper’s Weekly from the Civil War era too.5 Worth believes that in the 1950s and 1960s, children’s exposure to the past was more extensive than it is today. Toy stores, for example, were filled “Oh, I’m a Good Ol’ Rebel” 193 with items inspired by historical events and individuals. Besides its Blue and Gray line, Marx sold toy soldiers from the Mexican-American War, the War of 1812, the Revolutionary War, and the Indian Wars. There were Red Ryder BB Guns, Lincoln Logs, Davy Crockett...