Americans Are Talking About Civil War — The People Who Reenact It Know What It Looks Like

text by Marshall Wilson
pictures by Preston Merchant

SNELLING (Merced County) — On a sunny morning in California’s Sierra foothills, cannons blast and smoke sweeps the field. Soldiers in blue shoulder muzzle-loaders. A captain in gray directs return fire with a raised sword.

It is 1863 – playing out to the sound of car alarms screeching from a nearby parking lot and 15 minutes from a minimart.

A photographer and I recently came to this dusty lot unsure what we would find beyond spectacle – Civil War reenactors spending a weekend inside someone else’s century. What we encountered instead were conversations about division, faction, us and them – from people who live a history that shows how a country can fracture.

Watching the battles unfold, it was hard not to think about how casually the language of civil war now circulates today — online, in protests, in jokes meant to provoke rather than persuade. 

Away from the cannons, the reenactors were not talking about winning or losing. They were talking about something much deeper  — about fracture, consequence and what is won and what is lost, not on a battlefield but in society that comes apart.

And 160 years after the last shots were fired, the question of what we’ve learned still hangs in the air like blast smoke.

After Saturday’s battle, Nancy Idlet-Whittle sang next to the field — not really a performance but a way to draw observers in once the shooting stopped.

Idlet-Whittle has been reenacting for 37 years. She portrays Harriet Tubman. Enslavement is not distant history in her family; it reaches back only a few generations. Now retired, she spent her career as a medical social worker at a trauma hospital.

Under a canvas awning, she answered questions about slavery, escape and California’s place in the Civil War — a state that never saw a battle but supplied gold and soldiers to both sides — and about why the past still feels unsettled.

“I think this is what reenactments are,” she said. “They’re teaching you about your past so you can move on.”

But when it came to progress, she paused. “Someone asked me today, who actually won?” she said.

“We’ve come a long way,” she added. “But maybe not far enough.”

In some ways, she said, the present feels uncomfortably familiar. “We’re still back at almost like a Civil War kind of level,” she said. 

“So what have we actually won?”

For two days, participants enjoyed the nostalgia, the uniforms, the camaraderie. But what also held the camps together — Union blue, Confederate gray — was a shared unease with how easily a country can talk itself into catastrophe. 

Take William Harrod, in blue, commander of Union troops.

By day, he works as a project controller in renewable energy. A few weekends a year, he leads volunteers across fields like this one, opening their camps to school groups and curious visitors.

“It’s living history,” Harrod said. “It’s important for kids to see what it was really like — and not repeat it.”

Harrod spoke to the sound of bacon frying on open fires and volunteers sorting gear under A-frame tents as they prepared for the day’s battle.

“You hear people online yelling, ‘We need another Civil War!’ I don’t think they have any idea what they’re talking about,” he said. “With modern weapons and technology, it would be devastating in every way.

“If something like that ever happened again, this — cooking over a fire, sleeping in the dirt, your whole world shrinking down to what you can carry — this is what life would be like, if you’re lucky.”

On the other side of the field, Richard Lawrence, 76, stood near an artillery piece he built himself, cutting oak from his ranch in Northern California, milling and seasoning the wood before shaping the cannon carriage by hand. His family fought for the Confederacy. 

“My great-great-great-grandfather was shot in the guts at the Battle of Port Republic and died three days later,” Lawrence said. “His son fought all the way through the war and was wounded in the head. They said he was never the same.”

Lawrence bristled at the idea that reenacting was nostalgia.

“I don’t fight the Civil War,” he said. “That was terrible. I hope we never have to do that again. But if you stop history, you stop learning. And if you stop learning, you repeat it. And the way things are going now — they’re really pushing it.”

Writing about the years before the Civil War broke out in 1861, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Bruce Catton argued that most people wanted peace but drifted into war, failing to understand what war would actually bring.

Slavery lay at the center of the conflict that tore the country apart in 1861. Yet Americans at the time described the war in different ways: many in the North said they fought to preserve the union, while many in the south framed their cause in terms of states’ rights and self-government. 

But Catton’s warning was about something else: how a nation that claimed to want peace allowed every mechanism meant to prevent catastrophe to fail.

By Sunday afternoon, the smoke cleared after the last battle of the weekend. Tents came down, campfires doused, muskets wiped clean. Uniforms were folded and packed into cars, trucks and SUVs for the drive back to the 21^st century and its debates about division, faction, us and them.

The camps cleared. The car alarms stopped. 

Idlet-Whittle’s questions linger.