What it takes to be a revolutionary war enactor

https://archive.is/avbMB

From the article:

A man named Sean, who works as a military contractor—one of several Green Mountain Boys who normally “do British” but were slumming it as rebels for the weekend—told me that he likes to portray a British officer because of how hard it is. British Army reenactors, he said, possess “a desire to do things to a level of research perfection.” Unlike the tailors, sailors, and shopkeepers who took up arms against them, the British forces were professional soldiers. “We can’t look like a quote-unquote ragtag band of militia,” Sean said. “We have to look like people who, this is their job.” Emily, a college student studying music—one of three women dressed up as a Green Mountain Boy—told me she delights in “the degree of organization” and “very standardized drilling” inherent in redcoat portrayals.

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If you want to be a reenactor but are laid-back, messy, or broke, you might be better suited to portraying an American. Or rather, a “Patriot”; technically, there were no “Americans” at Fort Ticonderoga or Lexington and Concord. The American Revolution began as a British civil war; before the Declaration of Independence in the summer of 1776, indignant colonial citizens considered themselves as “British” as the crimson-coated soldiers sent to patrol them.

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Reenactors can be roughly divided into two sects: “progressive,” whose members’ fervid commitment to historical accuracy typically leads to them hand-sewing every layer of their 18th-century ensembles; and “mainstream,” whose practitioners are fine buying machine-stitched garments off the rack. I met more progressives than mainstreamers but, regardless of faction, age, or gender, participants’ politics skewed markedly left. Revolutionary War reenactors, an anthropologist noted in a 1999 report for the National Park Service, tend to be politically more liberal than their Civil War peers. (This is perhaps because a person is most likely to reenact a conflict that occurred within driving distance of his or her home, and deep-blue New England was not a combat zone in the Civil War.)

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One trait common to every reenactor with whom I spoke was a scorching, irrepressible desire to share factual information with strangers. Among the things I learned: It was fashionably expensive for a man to order his coat, waistcoat, and breeches “ditto”—meaning made of the same fabric and color—in which case the resulting suit of clothes would be referred to as “a ditto suit.” An herbal analogue to aspirin can be made from decocting the bark of a willow tree into tea. Many redcoats’ coats were, in fact, slightly orange (enlisted men’s coats were colored with inexpensive dye made from the root of the madder plant; the darker carmine dye of crushed cochineal bugs was reserved for the coats of officers). The amount of forest covering Massachusetts has increased more than 100 percent since the 1830s. No one who wore one called it a “tricorner hat.” Muskets with an external safety catch, called “doglocks,” were considered obsolete by the 1770s—

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For me to portray an armed man with an established unit, a reenactor named Dakota warned me in a phone call, would likely entail completing a “labor intensive” six-month training process that included memorizing the exercises of a 1764 drill manual until I could perform them perfectly while maneuvering a 12-pound musket (which itself would run me more than $1,000). I had stumbled into the only cranny of American culture in which firearms are tightly controlled.