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!

Sigh...

The timing of this one is particularly lousy, since it's expected to make landfall on the seventh anniversary of a certain, memorable event. I tried a couple of days ago to compose my annual Katrina post. In preparation, I reread my past years' musings and was rather stunned to find myself sitting at my computer and sobbing. Obviously, I'm not as "over" it all as I thought I was.

Fortunately, Isaac is only expected to come ashore here as a Cat 2, although a rather wide, nasty one. And it's so disorganized and unpredictable that it may well go in someplace else. But, just in case, we spent the day closing our fancy new hurricane shutters (for some reason they've swelled since we had them installed last year, which explains why, ahem, they tell you to test your shutters at the beginning of hurricane season), cleaning out gutters, stockpiling water, and making sure anything that might blow around is tucked in tight. We're not evacuating, thank God. (I am sooo not in the mood for that.) But the city-wide buzz of anxiety makes it hard to settle down and do anything like, well, write.

At any rate, I've stockpiled everything I need to make it through the next few days...

SOLA's 2012 Writers' Retreat

This past weekend our local RWA chapter, SOLA, held its annual writers' retreat at a wonderful old plantation house down in Plaquemines Parish. Steve and I volunteered to give a workshop we entitled "Secrets from the Bestseller List," which was basically an examination of certain characteristics all bestselling books (even the most godawfully written ones) have in common, and what writers can learn from them.



This was SOLA's first time at Woodland, built in the 1830s and the only plantation house south of New Orleans still standing on the west bank of the Mississippi. The hotel is advertised as "rustic," which makes it sound considerably rougher than it is. The old house has been plumbed and wired with electricity (it wasn't when the present owners bought it back in 1997!), and while I wouldn't call the accommodation slick, it's more than comfortable. And in terms of ambiance, it is simply unbeatable. The sense of staying in an old home, as opposed to a hotel, is very real. Guests have the run of the entire plantation house, which consists of the central hall...



a large conference room....



and nine original bedrooms.



The house is considerably larger than it looks from the outside, probably because the 14 foot ceilings fool the eye and distort the perspective. The office, kitchen and restaurant are in what was once an old nineteenth century church...



And I am not exaggerating when I say the chef is world class. Steve and I stayed an extra night by ourselves and enjoyed a six course meal so exquisite we've decided it would be worth making the drive down to Woodland some evening simply for the restaurant.

If you think the plantation looks vaguely familiar, that's because a print for the old house is on the label of Southern Comfort bottles. Sunday morning, before we left, Steve and I went for a walk toward the nearby river, and came upon this sign...

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.