ABSTRACT
When I was handed the greyish jacket, I sensed right away that it constituted far more than a mere piece of worn cloth. I was in Chestertown on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, USA, to take part in the local Memorial Day parade and witness the annual re-enactment of the Chestertown tea party.1 Even though the town’s Tea Party Festival, an event marketed as ‘celebrating colonial resistance to British rule’,2
was mainly centred on the 1770s and the period of the American Revolution, I was here as a Civil War private from the 1860s. The company of re-enactors I had joined had strong ties to this particular place, and we were set to march in the afternoon parade, unconcerned about potential anachronism. In fact, my biggest concern on that late May day in 2010 was the soaring heat building up, threatening to destabilise a native Scandinavian like myself who had recently acquired an expensive and well-crafted, but also thick and woollen, reproduction of a Confederate army coat. This is when I was handed that other jacket. It was much thinner than my fancy woollen one, but more importantly, it carried so much more power. We may perhaps with Benjamin (1969) speak of ‘aura’, but this was not an original historical piece from the actual Civil War. It did however possess a history and an authority that I could tap into, closely tied to its owner, a local hero and old-time re-enactor, now in
*Email: mads.daugbjerg@hum.au.dk
Aarhus U iversity
his 60s, who had ‘been there and done that’ when the re-enactment hobby was finding its feet in the 1960s and 1970s. On that day in Chestertown, ‘Warren’, as we may call the old-timer,3 had been inspecting my amateurish attempts at getting dressed for the parade, and was evidently not happy with my appearance, or, more precisely, with my ‘impression’ – the re-enactment term for the total look and feel of the part you bring to the show. Grudgingly, he went to his pickup, took out his well-worn Confederate jean jacket, and said ‘put this on instead’. From the faces of my company comrades I could tell immediately that this was not simply an order not to be disputed; more than that, it constituted a generous offer from a local legend who did not have the energy (or indeed the need) to be in the frontline himself anymore, but whose powerful apparel I was now invited to don, give life to and carry on for a little while. As I marched the hot roads of Chestertown that day, I was thus not only re-enacting the 1860s but also in a sense celebrating and reconsolidating the potency of Warren’s early ventures in the hobby. The dirty jacket, holding so much accumulated experience and grit, was much cooler – in both senses of that term.
