Ghosts of Battles Past

Once upon a time, Camp Moore was the largest Confederate training camp in Louisiana. More than 30,000 troops passed through here on their way to places like Shiloh, Manassas, and Gettysburg. When the Confederate General John Breckinridge (a former vice president of the United States) launched his attempt to retake Baton Rouge in August of 1862, Camp Moore was his staging area. It remained the center of resistance to Federal efforts to conquer Louisiana until the fall of 1864, when the site was finally overrun.

Virtually nothing is left today--just a cemetery, a small but excellent museum, and a lot of ghosts. But once a year it's the site of a Civil War reenactment, and this past weekend Steve and I finally made it up there to watch.

I know people who place reenactments--especially Civil War reenactments--somewhere on a sliding scale between weird and disturbing. But I find them an odd mixture of fun and profoundly thought provoking. For a writer of historical fiction, they can be fascinating. Did you know that artillery changed very little from the time of Sebastian St. Cyr to the Civil war? If you want to write about about canon fire and musket volleys, nothing beats actually hearing them.

Over 800 men are buried in the cemetery there, most of them laid low not by Yankees but by measles, pneumonia, and dysentery. Many of their names are known, but the locations of the actual graves were lost when the victorious Federals pulled up the wooden grave markers and burned them. How nasty is that?

And for the record, the only Civil War veterans I've found on my family tree were all Yankees!

The Battle of Jackson Crossroads

Civil War reenactments are popular around here. They offer adults a chance to be kids again--playing dress-ups and good-guys-and-bad-guys--besides spending the weekend camping out in the woods with friends. What more could you ask?


When it comes to the Battle of Jackson Crossroads, there’s no doubt who the bad guys are. In the original battle (actually, there were two), marauding Union soldiers from the nearby siege on Port Hudson descended on Jackson looking for supplies. The local militia rode out and whipped their thievin’ Yankee asses (twice). Since our lake house lies between Jackson and Clinton not too far from the battle site, I felt like I should be out there givin' a rebel yell with the best of them.

In the reenactment, of course, both sides are, by necessity, played by good Southern boys from Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas. Down here, if reenactment groups didn’t crossdress, they’d never have anyone to fight.


This was my first Civil War reenactment (as a spectator only; I used to go to medieval ones in England), but we had so much fun we’re already planning to go to the Battle of Port Hudson reenactment next year.


As for my own Civil War antecedents, my Tennessee great-grandmother’s four half-brothers all fought in the War Between the States, but they, ahem, fought for the Yanks. Just don’t tell anyone.


And I promise my next post will be on adapting screenplay structure to novels.