Relevance, Resonance, and Historiography: Interpreting the Lives and Experiences of Civil War Soldiers

In the summer of 1985, as a nineteen-year-old undergraduate history major from Indiana, I headed to Appomattox Court House National Historical Park, where I assumed the identity of Cpl. Robert Fields, a corporal in the 188th Pennsylvania Infantry. Years of reenacting and living history did not prepare me for the imaginative world of first-person interpretation. As soon as I entered the village as Corporal Fields, I stepped back into the summer of 1865, greeting visitors as if they were weary time travelers eager to see where Robert E. Lee had surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant. At times I felt as if I were on the set of a hokey Twilight Zone episode. But in most instances, visitors played along, staying in period, hoping to hear an “authentic” voice from the past. A few took their roles a little too seriously, and a day did not pass that I was not called “damn Yankee.” One of my colleagues, who portrayed the civilian Mr. Peers, had grown period muttonchops so that he might better look the part—they were bushy and thick and proved to be irresistible to one visitor who pulled on Mr. Peers’s facial hair to see if it was real. Another visitor told me that I would burn in hell for my role in turning the South into a wasteland. Even though the comments were ridiculously absurd, it did not take long before the charade of first-person interpretation began to feel a little too personal. An alarming number of visitors thought they could find historical redemption for the white South by publicly humiliating Corporal Fields. I was getting weary, and it did not help that every day, as sweat streamed down my face, I was asked if I was hot in a wool uniform. A continuous barrage of Lost Cause–inspired insults made it increasingly difficult to repress thoughts of turning Virginia’s Southside Railroad into Sherman neckties.

Peter S Carmichael as Corporal Bobby Fields

(Courtesy of Carmichael)

With just a few weeks left in the summer, first-person interpretation seemed nothing more than cheap theater. Was I not trivializing the Appomattox story by encouraging visitors to dream their way into the past? At the time, I thought I had little choice but to sacrifice comprehensiveness, depth, and originality for superficial stories exulting the former Rebels for putting down their guns and becoming my countrymen again. My message was historically flawed, and I nearly let my frustrations blind me to ways historical imagination primes people to explore the past. Visitors want to reach back in time to feel, hear, smell, touch, and taste what it was like to be in the ranks of Civil War armies. What did it mean to experience the war at a deeply visceral level is a question that cannot be easily dismissed, even if it seems ahistorical.

I left Appomattox in 1985 with a question that has followed me throughout my career as a seasonal historian, a graduate student, and as a college professor: how can I make the history of Civil War soldiers resonate with my diverse audiences while also keeping it relevant to their daily lives? Scholarly studies in soldier ideology—beginning in the 1980s along with the rise of sensory history and the emergence of the new-revisionism in the late 1990s—have satisfied my inquiry. No longer do we search for a single common soldier. He does not exist. In books and at national parks we showcase the lives of many soldiers, and their stories reveal that northerners and southerners were deeply ideological, but they were also confined by physical coercion, by cultural and organizational forces, both perceptible and imperceptible, all of which shaped their choices in a relentless struggle to survive.

When I was portraying Bobby Fields in 1985 there was virtually nothing instructive on Civil War material culture, except for the pathbreaking work of Bell I. Wiley.¹ I consequently just showed audiences the accouterments of war and explained how they functioned. General...