AS THE REBEL TWIG IS BENT
“The Only Good Yankee is a…”
Being An Eyewitness Account of a Civil War Reenactment.
By Will Bevis
It was a Sunday, and I felt that if I did not drag myself out of bed and do something I would spend my whole day there. So I decided to go to the small time reenactment a librarian had told me about. My daughter wanted to go with me and I was happy to have her.
The place was only about thirty miles away, a little town called Ohatchee, South of where we live in Gadsden, and West of a town named Jacksonville. I hadn’t been there in years.
We got there about thirty minutes before the “battle” was to begin and just stood around looking at the men and women in their Civil War clothes. I told my daughter this would not be a good place to mention to anyone that I am a Union man. She laughed.
Yellow police tape marked the area for the spectators, in front of the meadow where the battle would take place. There was a line of woods in the background. And some Union troops were playing baseball around two cannons near us, catching the ball in their hats. To the far left of them was another artillery battery and way beyond them up on a hill, was a Confederate battery. In the tree line could be seen rebel soldiers milling around. Talking. Waiting for their part in the big show.
This was the first reenactment I had been to since a beautiful one at Shiloh, some twenty-five years ago. Back then I was still a rebel. How things can change in that length of time.
Oh there was one other I went to later at Shiloh, but it was plagued with torrential rain and everyone was walking around in near knee deep mud. It got cancelled right before it began. But the other one had been a beauty and I have to admit I have seen nothing as beautiful as the seeming thousands of rebels come out of the wood line back then, that flag – those many flags fluttering as they came across open ground to meet just as many Union men. It was huge. And impressive.
I was younger then, and I climbed high in a tree to see over the other thousands of spectators’ heads, just as I later learned people really did at Bull Run... the first battle of the war – the one that proved the war was not going to be an overnight thing.
I wasn’t expecting much from this tiny gathering.
Finally a Confederate General got up on the back of flatbed trailer/platform, stepped up to the microphone, welcomed everybody, told a few jokes that fell flat, then told us that “Our reenactment today will take some liberties today with what actually happened here.” He said that yesterday, Saturday, the rebels had won, and that in the interest of fairness, the Yankees would be allowed to win today.
There was some laughter at that. .”
(In the interest of facts, the Union had won the real skirmish here).
Then he said “Let’s all sing Dixie,” and I didn’t. We were all pretty much standing anyway, so he didn’t say “Let’s all rise and sing Dixie,” or I may have been singled out by being the only man sitting. I was already the only man I saw in the crowd wearing a blue shirt.
Then he said “Let the battle begin!” and there was immediate rebel yells and gunfire.
I was watching the big picture, not focusing on any one part of the large golf course like area in front of me, when one of the Union batteries fired right in front of me and scared the bejesus out of me. I had forgotten how loud they were and not only that – the vibration it sends through you.
And I can’t imagine and don’t want to ever experience what the hundreds of cannons going off at the same time at Gettysburg must have felt like. The smoke from the cannon drifted quickly behind the cannon itself and the photographer still in me recognized a beautiful picture when my soul saw it. But I was too late. Other cannons fired and I got some pictures, but never caught the beauty of the one shot that escaped me.
There was skirmishing way to the left, and the Federals captured some prisoners and were bringing two close to where we were standing, when one Reb tried to run and escape and was shot and fell, falling into a Federal coming at him, tripping him, and causing him to fall over him with his bayonette on his rifle. The prisoner still tried to fight and escape and the Federal stood up and jammed down with the bayonet into the dirt beside the man, and it was the most realistic thing I saw all afternoon.
And when I saw that I thought to myself something I can not write, and I was not proud of what I thought. I felt very bad about it. But immediately as I thought that - something else very coincidental happened – or maybe it was preordained.
A tall thin older man came up and stood close beside me, and beside him was a three or four year old boy, maybe his grandson, or maybe his son. And while I had only thought a bad thing, this man began talking bad things, and the boy was listening to every word.
And I thought to myself, “As the twig is bent, so grows the tree.
I immediately handed the camera to my daughter, as I knew as well as anything I have ever known, that that man and his little boy were why I came to this place today. To hear, and to tell you some of what they said.
I took out paper and a pen. And as the “battle” went back and forth, I tried to jot down as much of what I heard as I could.
A Yankee got “killed” and I swear the man told his son or grandson, “That’s good! The only good Yankee is a dead Yankee!”
Then when the Union drove off an attack the man told him, “They’re trying, aren’t they! We’re not skeered! We’re outgunned and we’re outnumbered. Rebels don’t even have a cannon. (He was wrong about that Evidently he was very nearsighted).
“We’re getting beat down today, Buddy!” he told his son sadly.
A Union cannon went off and rebel soldiers fell and the man said “Look! It mowed them all down. That cannon mowed them all down! It’s a sad, sad day for us.”
The little boy asked him why they weren’t getting back up, and the man said, “Cause they’re dead. The ones that are dead, there ain’t nothing you can do for them. Forever.”
Then another cannon exploded and the man said about the Reb who fell, “Ohhh, tore him up.” He said that twice. But the little boy didn’t buy it and said, “That guy’s not a good actor,” and the man answered, “Nah, he’s not fooling no body there.”
Then the little boy said to him, “What if you took a real gun and killed one of them?”
The man replied, “Well, you’d go to jail today. They’re just actors. They got rights..”
There was a cannon barrage, and the man said, “I love it. It’s cool. It’s cool cause you know you are alive when that goes off – cause you jump!”
Then there was hand to hand fighting and the little boy noticed two who weren’t doing a good job and said, “Why are those two guys not punching over there.”
“Cause you can’t do that,” the man said.
I looked up to the far left and that beautiful Union flag was going up the hill on the right flank, and the Rebels were skeedadling back into the woods.
The man said, “They’re running our guys off. And people are dying in the woods. They are bleeding to death as we speak.”
Over in one place a Yankee pushed a rebel down. And the man did not try to get up. The man beside me said, “Well, they’ve given up. That wasn’t cool. Here comes more of them Yankees.”
And the Union was overwhelming the Southerners – just like what happened in the real war.
Finally the man here said, “I think we have had it. They’ve given up.”
It was just about over. Rebel prisoners were being rounded up. The Yankees had won this one. This Sunday reenactment in the year 2011.
The man said, “Well we held them for a while, didn’t we?” the boy agreed.
“Man, we lost a lot of men, didn’t we?” he added.
The boy agreed again. Then the little one asked the question. The big question. He said to the old man, “Why did we lose?” And though he may not have meant it, being only four, I think he meant, why did his dad’s side lose the war – not just this battle.
The dad said, “They were fighting on the wrong side.” Then he quickly caught himself and changed it to this: “No, they were fighting on the right side, but they got captured.” Then he added, “Now they’re gonna get sent to a concentration camp.”
He did not say prison camp. He said concentration camp. And he made no mention of the Rebel’s own infamous “concentration” camp, Andersonville.
And as one rebel prisoner being escorted carried his rifle over his head the man added, “If I was him I’d turn around and hit that Yankee with that gun over my head.”
If I was him.
That’s what this all boiled down to. What all reenactments boil down to no matter what the size of them:
If I was him.
But it isn’t us.
We aren’t them.
We never will be.
We are who we are.
Living in 2011.
Our job is to go on living in the time we are living.
And to try to bend the twigs that are children in a good way.
But a lot of us can’t do that.
The war is 150 years over, but the twigs are still being bent backwards.
The fake general was back on the microphone and said “That concludes today’s reenactment. As soon as the re-enactors have a miraculous recovery we’ll have a drawing for this afternoon’s prizes.”
I told my daughter let’s go, hoping we could get to the shuttle bus and beat the traffic, after a quick stop at the small museum.
We went into it and on the way out they made sure we signed the guest book. Something about funding. They wanted as many signatures as possible. There was one last spot on the bottom of the left side of the page. I signed my name to it. Then added beside it: “The Union Forever!”
Then we went outside into the bright light.
This afternoon, after one of the cannons had fired and there was a huge cloud of white smoke covering the area between the gun and the soldiers and those of us standing along the line as spectators…
A bright yellow butterfly came from the right and flitted up and down across the white cloud toward the left, completely unimpressed and unaffected by what had just happened here today...
Same as I am sure they eventually returned to Gettysburg after that battle.
Nature always wins.
I have to accept that what I write will have even less effect on the world
Than one cannon firing loudly.
But I have to keep trying – even if all I actually do is just - in a small way - counter balance
The bending of a few trees in the wrong direction.
As the rebel twig is bent so goes the Southern man.
And there are still a lot of saplings being bent toward hatred and violence.
As my daughter and I waited for the shuttle bus to take us to our truck,
I saw the second one like that today…
A little boy – his red hair cut in a marine buzz cut…
Playing in the grass beside me.
He played shooting, and getting shot, and falling down dead.
And he was wearing a shirt that said
“Never Give Up.”
Will Bevis
April, 2011.
WillBevis.com