The battle began shortly after 3pm on a lazy Sunday afternoon.
The Confederate and Union soldiers faced off against each other not
in the American South of the early 1860s, but in our own South
Valley just last weekend.
The battle began shortly after 3pm on a lazy Sunday afternoon. The Confederate and Union soldiers faced off against each other not in the American South of the early 1860s, but in our own South Valley just last weekend.
With a chest-pounding boom, a cannon filled the air with grey smoke. The great gun’s ear-shattering explosion reverberated through the peacefully secluded valley. Following this, the pop of musket rifles staccatoed as men on both sides of the conflict paced cautiously across the lawn and toward each other in a spirit of mutual annihilation. This Civil War fight proceeded at a leisurely pace. Occasionally, a “Yankee” would fall. Occasionally, a “Reb” would fall.
Along with other spectators, I stood on the side of the field to witness this skirmish taking place out at the San Benito County Historical Park south of Tres Pinos. The three-day Civil War Days event was co-hosted by the San Benito County Historical Society and the National Civil War Association.
All this weekend-warrior violence was a re-enactment performed for our entertainment and education by hard-core history buffs. But it did make my mind ponder on the hellish activity called war.
The real Civil War, of course, was never a weekend hobby. The numbers of those slaughtered stagger our modern imagination. On the Union side, about 360,000 men were killed. Among the Confederate soldiers, the dead numbered about 260,000.
For that period of history, the war’s dead equaled almost 2 percent of America’s population. For a 21st-century comparison, it would be as if nearly 6 million men died in a confrontation that four years.
Add to that another 50,000 or so civilians who died – mostly in the South – and that devastation increases. As I watched the re-enactors charge each other in the mock battle on Sunday, I mentally computed the cost of the Civil War not just in terms dollars and deaths, but also in the price of broken hopes and promises.
Many of America’s brightest minds – young, well-educated men on both sides – were exterminated in that carnage. During any battle in any war, how can any mortal ever measure what future potential bleeds into the soil? The intelligence, the inventions, the great art and literature, and achievements of science – all those human possibilities become forever lost as the bullets cut down each life.
And the price of war isn’t only the dead. After the 11am battle earlier that day, I and the other time-travel tourists roamed around a make-shift hospital inside the history park’s barn-like hall as military “surgeons” mock amputated wounded arms and legs. Men carried in on stretchers wailed in torment.
It felt unreal to witness the overlay of two historical periods – modern tourists snapping digital pictures of the aftermath of battle where 19th-century men are carved up like so much raw meat. In the real thing, in all wars, men often carry physical and mental scars for the rest of their lives.
Like all America back in those long-ago days of the early 1860s, California was deeply impacted by the Civil War. The state officially sided with the Union, and many towns and cities organized military companies to support the North. Locally, mercury processed from South Valley’s New Almaden and New Idria quicksilver mines were used to extract California and Nevada’s gold and silver that paid for the war effort.
But within its lines, California’s residents took opposing sides over the highly volatile questions of slavery and state secession. South Valley’s own San Juan Bautista was sympathetic to the Confederates. Many settlers from Texas and southern states had moved to the Spanish mission village dubbed a “Copperhead town.” Throughout the war, Southern-supporting Democrats stayed in the majority in San Juan Bautista, and overall, Republicans and Democrats lived together peacefully. But there were occasional outbursts of emotions, especially when the federal government in 1864 leased the vacant National Hotel as a barracks, calling it Camp Lowe after Frederick Lowe, California’s governor at that time.
It consisted of two infantry companies and one cavalry company commanded by Major J.C. Cremony. You can imagine how exciting it must have been for the residents of the sleepy village to watch Union Army soldiers parade about the plaza and perform military drills.
Three San Juan Bautista residents made some remarks one day that caused them to be seized and imprisoned in an old adobe guard-house, but they soon escaped into the hills when their jailers fell asleep. The Southern sympathizers were never caught.
Watching the battle last Sunday afternoon, I wondered who in the world ever came up with the term “Civil War.” The expression gets it totally wrong. There’s nothing very civil about any war. Perhaps General William Tecumseh Sherman of the Union Army described it better. “War is hell,” he once stated in his bluntly honest style.
Or take the words of someone who fought for a couple of weeks on the side of the Confederates. “There never was a just war, never an honorable one,” said Mark Twain.
The famous author also made this astute observation of the people who participate in every war throughout history: “All war must be just the killing of strangers against whom you feel no personal animosity; strangers whom, in other circumstances, you would help if you found them in trouble, and who would help you if you needed it.”
After the 3pm battle ended, the fallen Yankee and Rebel soldiers all stood up and the men marched off the field with each other in a spirit of friendly comraderie.
We human beings are a strange species in the animal kingdom. Unlike other creatures, we’re very clever in finding new and creative ways to kill each. But will we ever be clever enough to one day create a world where the only battles fought are by re-enactors at historical parks on lazy Sunday afternoons?
