As stated on the title page, we are a group of living historians. We research our impressions and do our best to live for a short time as soldiers in a rifle company during the War Between the States. We strive to accomplish this by making all effort to wear the correct type of uniform assembled properly from the right materials, carrying the proper weapons and developing a proficiency in their correct use, learning and practicing period close-order drill and manual of arms and various other 'material' efforts.
But it is more than this that makes us living historians and makes what we do so enjoyable to someone with an avid interest in the history of our chosen period. It is not just the clothing or the musket. It is the bacon you manage to char horribly and the coffee that would float a horseshoe. It is the grit of dust between your teeth on a long march in July. It is shivering and staring gritty-eyed into the darkness with your hands around a cold musket barrel on night picket while your bedroll beckons with the voice of a Siren. That hot, sharp, brimstone whiff of Hades when a thick bank of powder smoke from a volley drifts back over your line. The way rusty, tepid canteen water can taste like iced lemonade when you're dry enough to spit cotton and how just the right patch of ground and a scratchy wool blanket can feel like clean cotton sheets on a feather bed. And there is the smell of that bacon and that coffee mingling with the tang of woodsmoke on the dewy morning air. The man who shares the vulcanized bacon and the tar-like coffee with you because that is all you have and laughs with you at how awful they are, who eats the same dust you do, who hands you his tepid canteen when yours is empty. The knowledge that, just as the song says, 'we are a band of brothers'.
What makes us what we are and is at the core of what we do is the desire to experience, as nearly as is safely possible, what the men and boys of a divided land went through just because they believed it was the right thing to do. We know that we can never truly 'honor' them--they brought honor upon themselves, merely by being where they were and willingly doing what they did, '...far beyond our poor power to add or detract'. But it is important to us that although we can bring them no greater honor than they earned on their own, we can remember them and what they did, and do our best to remind those who might forget that these 'common soldiers' were actually the most uncommon of men.
