No one experiences a museum like a reenactor or a veteran.

 

As a former Civil War reenactor, I think visiting a museum in Gettysburg is a surreal experience. I've seen these things out on the field in real life and there they are in a museum, behind glass.

We go to these places and feel a physical connection across time to these very old objects.

 

It's different when you know firsthand how rough the wool clothes are, how hard it is to sleep on the ground in those tiny canvas tents, to have sore feet from the hard leather shoes. When you know just how heavy that rifle is and what the gunpowder smells like (and tastes like). When you've felt the shock of the blast hit your chest the moment a cannon fires, when you know the stinging smell of smoke, when you've heard the beating drums vibrate you to the core, when you've heard the harsh bugles and fifes assaulting your ears above the clattering chaos. When you know the gut wrenching feel of marching steadily toward the sound of gunfire, when you've felt invincible, a cog in a vast machine of war and yet vulnerable at the same time knowing there's a good chance you'd be dead if it were real. 

 

We stare at the grim faces in those tintypes and they seem to stare back at us. If we listen closely, maybe they can tell us part of their story. 

 

We have an organic connection to those men we know the public will never be able to grasp. The dry numbers and percentages in textbooks will never make a visitor feel a connection to the past like being able to see it, hear it, feel it, taste it and smell it like we do.

 

You feel a strange sort of camaraderie, like that long dead soldier in the photograph could be a friend, a cousin or even a brother to you. You want to reach across time and speak to them, listen to them. Hard to describe beyond that but it is unbelievably real to me.

Bruce Catton said it best:

We are the people to whom the past is forever speaking.

We listen to it because we cannot help ourselves, for the past speaks to us with many voices.

Far out of that dark nowhere which is the time before we were born, men who were flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone went through fire and storm to break a path to the future.

We are part of that future they died for.

What they did--the lives they lived, the sacrifices they made, the stories they told and the songs they sang and, finally, the deaths they died--make up a part of our own experience.

We cannot cut ourselves off from it.

It is as real as something that happened last week.

It is a basic part of our heritage as Americans.

 

 The Civil War living history days are far behind me now, almost ten years ago as I write this. But some of those experiences will stay with me forever.