~ AN ACCOUNT OF ~
Four Days in Wool
The 135th Anniversary Reenactment of the Battle of Gettysburg
July 2 – 5, 1998
by James Pereyra, Private, Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry, with photographs by Mrs. Frances Pereyra

My name is James Pereyra. On weekdays I carry the mail in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. On a good many weekends since 1988 I have carried a musket instead, as a private in a company that portrays one of the Pennsylvania volunteer infantry regiments of the Civil War. My wife Frances has come along since 1990. She portrays a civilian lady of the period, which in July means a cotton dress over a hoop, and she will tell you it is every bit as hot as wool.

Last summer, for the 135th anniversary of the battle, we spent four days at the big reenactment on farmland outside Gettysburg. I have been to a lot of events. I have never seen anything like this one. There were more reenactors than any of us had ever seen in one place, North and South, foot, horse and guns, thousands upon thousands, and crowds of spectators along the rope lines every day. It was also brutally hot. Here is how it went.

A word about the pictures: all of them are Frances's, except the one of her. Cameras stay in the tents when the ranks take the field (a camera on a private in 1863 would look a little odd), so she took the battle pictures from the spectator line, with everybody else. She did a fine job.

Thursday, July 2 · Into Camp
We drove down from Harrisburg after my route, with the car packed to the roof. Registration took an hour in the sun. The Union camp was laid out in long straight company streets of white canvas tents, row after row as far as you could see, the way the Army laid them out in 1863. Our company had its street near a woodline, which turned out to be the best luck we had all weekend. I pitched my tent with my messmates; the married ladies camp in the civilian area, so Frances went off to set up with the other civilians, and I visited her for supper like a soldier on a pass.

Friday, July 3 · Drill
Reveille at 5:30. The camp at dawn, with the cook-fire smoke lying low over the rows of tents, is the most beautiful thing at any event, and I'm sorry to say neither of us got a decent picture of it. After coffee and hardtack the company fell in for drill. Our first sergeant, Vern Crosby, has a voice that could carry across two counties, and he put us through the manual of arms and company movements for an hour and a half until we moved like one man. Mostly.

The company at shoulder arms, with First Sergeant Crosby facing us. I'm the bearded fellow at the near end of the front rank.

In the afternoon we fought the first battle scenario. When the ranks take the field, all you see is the man next to you and the smoke in front, and all you hear is the officers and the guns. You fire blank charges, black powder and no ball, and nobody ever forgets that the musket is real. You march, you load, you fire, you wheel, and when the captain says it's time, some of you take a hit and fall down in the grass, which on a 95-degree afternoon is not the worst thing that can happen to a man.

That night we sat around our mess fire, the four of us who share a cook pot and a coffee pot all season.

Our mess, left to right: me, Vern Crosby, John Trantham and Brandon Ressler.

John is sixty, our company cook, and he can make a meal out of salt pork, potatoes and an onion that you'd pay for in town. He smokes a clay pipe and tells the same three stories every event, and we'd be disappointed if he didn't. Brandon is twenty-nine and the youngest in our mess, and he does most of the hauling of water, which is the privilege of youth. Vern you've met. The coffee is boiled in the pot with the grounds in it, and it is terrible, and I look forward to it all year.

Saturday, July 4 · The Guns and the Heat
Saturday was the hottest day. By ten in the morning the thermometer hanging on a sutler's tent pole said 91, and in the afternoon Frances saw it at 96. The artillery opened before the infantry went in, and Frances was at the rope line for it.

A battery firing, from the spectator line. You feel these in your chest at two hundred yards.

We lost men to the heat that afternoon, in our company and every other. A man in wool, carrying nine pounds of musket, marching and running in the sun, can go from fine to flat on his back in five minutes. Four of ours went down before the battle was half over. The medics (real ones, with real ice and real water, waiting in the shade of the woods) took good care of them, and all four were back at the fire by supper, pale and embarrassed. The water details ran all day, buckets and canteens, and I drank a gallon of water that day and the next, and still came home five pounds lighter. If you ever go to a summer event, drink before you're thirsty, and wet your hat.

Between battles I went over to the civilian side to see my wife, and found her on sutlers' row. The sutlers are the merchants who follow the army, then and now, selling everything from tin cups to shoes to candy, out of big canvas tents. It is very dangerous for a man's wallet.

Mrs. Pereyra on sutlers' row. The one picture in the album I took.

Frances made that dress herself, from a pattern of the period, in a small brown print that's correct for 1863. The hoop underneath is steel. She bought a new fan that afternoon and a tin cup for me. I bought nothing, which she says is a first.

Sunday, July 5 · Service, and the Last Battle
Sunday morning there was a church service in camp, under the trees, with a chaplain in a frock coat and several hundred men in uniform singing the old hymns. Whatever you believe, it is something to hear. In the afternoon came the last and largest battle, across a big hayfield, and Frances was on the rope line at the edge of it.

The Union line advancing across the hayfield. Our company is in there somewhere.

From inside the line you don't see it like this. You see the back of the man in front of you and the colors moving over your head, and you hear the drums. When Frances showed me this picture I looked at it for a long time. That is what it must have looked like. That's the whole reason we do it.

We struck our tents at five and were home in Harrisburg by nine. I slept eleven hours, and went back on my route on Monday with a farmer's tan that stopped exactly where my collar did.

What a Private's Kit Weighs and Costs
People at the rope line ask me this more than anything. Prices are what I'd expect to pay today, new, from a good sutler; you can do it for less used, and many units have loaner gear for new men.

As for weight: the musket runs about nine pounds. With the full kit on, blanket roll, canteen full, haversack and cartridge box, I weighed myself on the bathroom scale once, and it came to thirty-four pounds over what I weigh in my postal uniform, before the wool gets wet with sweat. The real soldiers carried more, and marched farther, and slept on the ground with no air mattress waiting in the trunk of the car. We never forget that.

The Real Battle, July 1–3, 1863
For three days in July 1863, the Union Army of the Potomac under General George G. Meade, who had been in command for only a few days, met General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia at Gettysburg. On the first day the fighting started north and west of town, and the Union men were pushed back through the streets to the high ground south of it, on Cemetery Hill. On the second day Lee attacked both ends of the Union line, and men fought over places whose names every reenactor knows: Little Round Top, the Wheatfield, the Peach Orchard. On the third day came Pickett's Charge across the open fields against the center of the Union line on Cemetery Ridge, and it failed. Lee's army began its retreat on July 4. Some 51,000 men were killed, wounded, captured or missing in those three days, North and South together. That November, President Lincoln came to dedicate the national cemetery there and gave his address. If you've never been to the battlefield itself, go. Walk it. It's an hour from my front door, and I still go back every year.

How to Join a Unit

• Go to an event and walk the camps. Talk to the men. Most units are glad to talk to anyone who's interested, and you'll find out quickly which ones feel like home.
• Look in the reenacting papers. The Camp Chase Gazette and The Civil War News list units and events all over the country.
• Don't buy anything yet. A good unit will lend you gear for your first events and tell you what's correct before you spend money on what isn't.
• Buy good shoes first. You can borrow a coat. You can't borrow feet.
• Learn the safety rules and follow every one. Black powder is no joke, and neither is a musket.
• Bring your family. There's a place in the hobby for wives, husbands and children, as civilians, musicians and more. Frances would say the civilian side has better food. She is right.

Visitors to this page since March 1999:

Questions about reenacting, or about the battle? Write to me.
[email protected]

Last updated Monday, September 6, 1999