With the tremendous growth of re-enacting has come an explosion of purveyors of replica items. One is easily overwhelmed by the sheer number of people offering items for sale on “sutler’s row”. Oddly enough, despite the increase in dealers, the overall effect has been a drop in the quality of replica items being offered for sale. The words “museum quality” have been so loosely applied and used in selling items, the it has become meaningless. More often that not, when one compares these items to originals, they would be more accurately sold as having “amusing quality”. Many people may base their purchases on the fact that you may see people at the event wearing these items, or a lower price. What I have found is that a lot of people rely on what their friends or their unit “expert” tell them. This of course has nothing to do with historical accuracy. If this “unit expert” has looked at and handled a lot of original artifacts, and knows what to look for in a replica, the person he is advising will be lead down the right path and consequently spend his money wisely. More often than not, people base their “expertise” in years of reenacting, rather than looking at original artifacts. This is the point at which the sky darkens and the clouds roll in.
There was a guy back in 1974 who got into reenacting and competition shooting in the N-SSA. His first unit outfitted themselves by taking men’s blazers, turning back the lapel and adding trim to “convert” them to artillery. Of course he wanted to fit in, so he copied this approach. When he later put together an infantry impression, he blindly bought the same stuff that every one in his unit was wearing. Over the years, this guy wasted a lot of money on replicas his friends told him to buy, before he ultimately began to research the items for himself, and judge for himself what was the best on the market. That “guy” was me.
Our product line is the result of almost 20 years of research and in-depth thought of what existed in the garment industry of the nineteenth century. This catalogue not only presents the items, which I am offering for sale, but also present the background information around them. Whenever possible, I not only try to describe the replica, but also the corresponding original. The goal is to help the customer make a more informed purchase. Of course, the best of all resources are the original items themselves.
The scope of this product line is not limited to the traditional approach of making high quality reproductions, which required fastidious copies of individual artifacts from museums and private collections. Although it is essential to examine the original items before making a reproduction, I believe that microscopic notes and details of only one item is far too limiting. At the very least, the individual item may reflect a production flaw or anomaly, or details, which may have been altered after issue. One truly needs a larger sample group. Moreover, common sense would dictate that an item made one at a time would look completely different from one of a batch of 10,000.
Many reenactors take their cue from the military collectors. I have found that military collectors want to over categorize the original items, whether they are cap boxes or frock coats, into Type I or II or, the “regulation pattern”. This thinking has spilled over into the living history field, which has resulted in a very dogmatic definition of what an authentic replica should look like. This approach overlooks the fact that the original items were made by human hands. Despite the wide range of variation present on originals, features such as fabric color, workmanship or garment pattern design are given as absolutes. For fabric color, one needs only to examine the “Wood hull report”, published in 1868 by the Office of the Surgeon General, to discover the federal government’s dissatisfaction with the inconsistencies of indigo dyeing. Indigo dyed fabric comes out of the dye bath in a wet, natural/white state. The fabric only takes color as it dries and oxidizes. One does not know what the result will be until the fabric dries. Sky blue kersey which came out too dark after dyeing was slated to be used for overcoats. Moreover, a juxtaposition of the two enlisted frock coats in the collection of the Chester County Historical Society shows the tremendous contrast in color of Federal issue garments
. The wide range of production variations is well documented, both in physical artifact and written work. Oddly enough, there is a desire for a tighter definition of what is correct than could be achieved during the Civil War.
It has long been established that there were variations between contractors, which is to say, that the trousers made by J.T. Martin look slightly different than that of Harkness or Dearing. What I have found is that there are inconsistencies within items produced by the same maker. For example, there are three original C.S. Storms cap boxes in the Wisconsin Veteran’s Museum collection. I also possess an original produced by C.S. Storms. While there are similarities, no two are identical in detail. Moreover, there are two original shirts in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution that are of similar fabric and pattern. The contractor and inspector’s markings were smeared and illegible, but their size, color and placement were almost identical. It is my belief that they came from the same manufacturer. Nonetheless, one of the shirts has a big box pleat in the back neck area and the other is plain. This would lead one to believe that different workers in the same factory made these cap boxes and shirts.
The futility of categorizing authentic reproductions by small details of original artifacts consistently overlooks one major fact. All of the items had to pass Federal inspection; at which time their slight differences of color pattern and workmanship would come into play. The logical conclusion is that the inspectors were not basing acceptability on the same details that many living historians are. Authentic reenactors have to adopt the same mind set as the original inspectors, and become sensitive to the range of industrial quality available in the 1860’s before making judgments. Therein lies the major difference between a reproduction and original item. NONE of the reproductions have to pass Federal inspection. Without the professional, industrial input available during the Civil War, authenticity of reproductions is limited to a word of mouth endorsement. Given the hundreds of manufacturers that received contracts during the Civil War and add the number of variations possible for each individual contractor, it is absurd to be dogmatic. This does not in any way excuse the bad reproductions being sold, as many of which bear no resemblance to their original counterparts. What can be said, is that there are features that, for instance, every original sack coat had, that got them the contract and subsequent payment. The problem is that most bad reproductions get bogged down in the “right color blue” or requiring the use of logwood dyed linen thread.
