Playing Rebels: Reenactment as Nostalgia and Defense of the Confederacy in the Battle of Aiken

In the late 1990s, when journalist Tony Horwitz traveled the South in his quest to understand the tenacious hold the Civil War still has on many in the region, he found that in South Carolina "hardly a day . . . passed without some snippet about the Civil War appearing in the newspaper: a school debate on whether to play 'Dixie' at ball games; an upcoming Civil War reenactment; a [newspaper] readers' forum about the rebel flag."¹ He wasn't exaggerating. Had he stayed longer he would have seen no lessening of the scenes he observed during his brief visit. The South has witnessed in recent years a virtual avalanche of events reminiscent of "The War," and the Palmetto State has contributed its share.

Since the publication of Horwitz's book Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War in 1998, perhaps the most intriguing artifact of the war, the CSS H. L. Hunley, the first submarine to sink an enemy ship, was found off the coast near Charleston and raised amidst a flotilla of private crafts displaying Confederate flags in salute to the vessel and its crew, who lost their lives as it destroyed the USS Housatonic on February 17, 1864. A museum is planned to house and interpret what may become the Charleston area's biggest attraction. Meanwhile, the remains of its eight-man crew were buried with military honors in Charleston's Magnolia Cemetery in April 2004, as thousands, led by Confederate reenactors, paid their respects. In 2000 the state legislature mandated May 10 as an official holiday in honor of the Confederacy; this decision came right after a lengthily debated vote to honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with a state holiday and was an apparent attempt at balancing two equally determined factions. In another gesture of memorialization, an impressive, bronze bas-relief monument, the nation's first such edifice on the grounds of a state capitol honoring the evocative history of African Americans, was unveiled in March 2001.² But the biggest ongoing story in South Carolina's recent "culture wars" is The Flag.

Indeed the 1990s could well be labeled the decade of The Flag in South Carolina, for the rectangular banner generally, if incorrectly, called "the Confederate flag," then flying under the United States and South Carolina flags on a pole atop the State House dome in Columbia, became the focus of a new "civil war" of passionate words within the Palmetto State. Symbols of the Confederacy elsewhere may have been falling, but the flag, in its position of honor, if not sovereignty, proclaimed that the state whose leaders began both the secession process and the war that followed still defended the values and honored the bravery of those who marched beneath some version of that banner so long ago.