In the coming months thousands of reenactors dressed in 18th-century garb will try mightily to experience, if only for a fleeting moment, some of the sensations and perceptions of the men who fought in the U.S. Revolutionary War.
Getting the feel of life as an 18th-century soldier isn't easy when there's an airplane flying overhead or a siren wailing in the distance. But sometimes it happens, and that can be thrilling, says Patrick O'Kelley, a reenactor who lives near Lillington, North Carolina.
Such time travel can be "reenacting nirvana," said O'Kelley, the author of Nothing but Blood and Slaughter: The Revolutionary War in the Carolinas. "If you can actually feel you're there, you've reached nirvana."
Walter McIntyre, a Revolutionary War reenactor from Albemarle, North Carolina, said he experienced such a moment in 1994 at Leesburg, Virginia. A thick cloud of gun smoke hid spectators from two armies of reenactors.
"The cavalry rode out of the gun smoke and then back into it," he recalls. "You didn't see anything of the 20th century. All you saw was the 18th. It was the sight and the sound and the smell, all together."
People become involved with period reenactments because they aren't satisfied with learning only what they read in history books, McIntyre says.
"The reenactors want to experience, as closely as possible, the feeling that those people [in the 18th century] had," he said. "Of course, we'll never experience it totally. We're not fighting a real war, and we want everybody on both sides to go home safely."
There will be lots of opportunities for reenactors to relive moments of Revolutionary War in the coming months. This week reenactors will commemorate the 225th anniversary of the surrender of Charleston, South Carolina, to British forces. Other reenactments are planned this year at many Revolutionary War sites in the western Carolinas:
• The Waxhaws in South Carolina, where British forces defeated a patriot army in late May 1780
• The Battle of Camden in South Carolina, where British forces again defeated the patriots in August 1780
• The Battle of King's Mountain, where British Maj. Patrick Ferguson met his end in October 1780 and the momentum of the Revolutionary War shifted to the patriots
• The Battle of Cowpens in the South Carolina foothills, where patriot forces dealt another decisive defeat to the British in January 1781
