REENACTMENTS, REIMAGINED: The state's most important Civil War battlefield shifts with the times.

• Author: MacMillan, Mike

Colby Stevens, the 37-year-old site manager of the Bentonville Battlefield in eastern North Carolina, sits in his office on a hot May afternoon. A pair of Civil War rifles hangs on the wall, an 1858 Enfield, carried by the Confederates, and an 1861 Springfield, used by Union troops. A Confederate battle flag flies just outside the east end of the park. Its presence seems to annoy Stevens.

The site is seven years removed from the 150th anniversary of the battle, the last major action between North and South in the Civil War. Since 1990, Bentonville has marked the engagement with a quinquennial reenactment, the largest such event in the state and a significant source of tourism dollars for Johnston County. In 2015, it generated $4-7 million in visitor spending and a total economic impact of over $8 million, according to the Johnston County Visitors Bureau. There were 53,000 daily visitors, with about 14% of pre-ticket sales from out of state. Hotels up and down Interstate 95 were booked, representing 3,472 room nights across a four-county area.

By all accounts it is highly entertaining--two days of living history, marching troops, cannon fire and campfire talks. But these reenactments are not what they used to be, and nearly everyone agrees that if they are to survive, they have to change. The Old South symbolism fluttering in the breeze doesn't help.

Not just playing army

Perhaps the best-known recounting of the reenactment world is Tony Horwitz's 1998 book Confederates in the Attic, which served more broadly as a meditation on race relations in America, past and present. Horwitz follows a hardcore reenactor to a series of battlefields in Virginia, eating hardtack, sleeping on the ground, and bearing witness to "bloating" (the grisly practice of pretending to be a battlefield corpse). This did not have the most salubrious effect on the reenactment industry. As Stevens puts it, people were "worried we're going to give them dysentery or that they would have to be in first person all weekend."

But, he hastens to add, that's not the case. The Bentonville action is, as Stevens describes it, closely curated, an invitation-only event that involves "people we know and trust. Just because you have a cannon, you can't just come down and shoot it," he adds. The emphasis is on storytelling and, more and more, on including perspectives from all sides, both good and bad.

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