Whether a Maine Civil War reenactor wears the blue or the gray, they are still yankees that stubbornly maintain thefeatures invented by puritans. 99% of the Confederate reenactors (has the lowest number of Confederate reenactors in all the states except Hawaii)Maine have contradicted the honor, faith, and compassion represented in those uniforms of gray.  Those coats reflect the gentle chivilary of Lee's Army in Pennsyvania on one hand and the deadly willingness of General Forrest's cavalry to fight for home referenced echoed throughout the four years of conflict.  Yet, for those that wear it for parades and picnics here in Maine, the uniforms are little else than the common fashion of their paciliar past time.

For most of them wearing the gray uniform and flying the Confederate flag is a mid-life hobby for outcasts and drunks. Most (usually spotted by the stars or bars on their collars) are failures in real life and will scratch, claw, and deceive their way up in rank.  What a sad sight; their desperation and obession for a rank that is nothing more than that of the private's: it is a role.  It is a portrayal. And they wield that exagerated power arrogantly and pathetically though most of them have no real experience or knowledge of the rank and post they are portraying.

Yet, the most common image of Confederate reenacting in Maine is the combination of chaotic politics, rank being the true goal and cause of participating, personality considered before principal, and a list of personal dishonors to the soldiers they are portraying. A couple of examples in that list include a pick up bed full of farby or non-period gear and uniform parts found in each group. And then there is the completely stupid fact that the Confederate troops in Maine do not like to drill and perfect their image and over all presentation for public events. Most of the Confederate officers in Maine can not lead their units through more than ten different marching orders.

There have included a train robbery by a group of infantrymen. They don't consider the fact that there never was one incident during the whole civil war involving infantry soldiers capturing a train.

Mosby's Rangers and JEB Stuart's cavalry rode on horses. They were the ones that captured the trains.

These gavalnized yankees do these silly events because it gets the public off and playing train robber banditos is a lot more fun than doing a graveside ceremony at one of Maine's five Confederate graves. Marching across level open fields for a hundred yards before dying is usually the style for both the Union and Confederate units here in Maine. Considering that the average weight of these so called soldier reenactors is 290 lbs (wives: 300 lbs) and are usually no younger than thirty-five and as old as the sixties, there hasn't been a tactical reenactment in Maine in many years.  The last I heard, one "Confederate" reenacting group in Maine has a first sergeant in his sixties that cannot spend more than an hour in the direct sunlight and had dropped out of reenacting for three years following a battle that caused his feet to get wet. 

I've visited and experienced a number of Confederate units from others states and I am usually impressed by them, especially those from the South. Many of them have a well-balanced presentation of not being too serious yet serious enough to give an appropriate portrayal of the Southern soldier.   The very serious guys are the coolest, to me, at least.

Confederate reenacting is too sloppy in Maine. The whole thing has turned a hive of units, each with no more than fifteen reenactors that actually form for a parade or drill. The spare no efforts to compete with each other.  The competitions between Maine Confederate units would shame even the most dramatic battles between the blue and gray.

I've had very few experiences while Confederate reenacting in Maine when topics such as battlefield and monument preservation were brought up by any one other than my family and I. Other topics and subjects like planning events to honor two of Maine's Confederate generals or the Confederate raid into Calais or even large scale encampments in the state.

They never discuss or attempt to try group effort school presentations, making a booth at community events, or doing an event in public to celebrate a Civil War anniversary date or Confederate Memorial Day.

In fact, in the dozens of schools that I gave countless classroom presentations of the Confederate soldier, there was only one or two times where maybe one or two other members of my unit participated in.

Again, Confederate reenacting has turned into a pack of little people motivated by big egos.

If these were the kind of "men" that were charged with defending the South during the Civil War, the war would have been lost long before Fort Sumter!