ORDINARY MEN AND WOMEN:
You Have No Idea How Hard It Is to Be a Reenactor: Benedict Arnold’s boot wouldn’t come off, and other hardships from my weekend in the Revolutionary War. (Caity Weaver, November 2025, The Atlantic)
The reenactor community generally discourages members from claiming to be dressed as specific historical figures—though a few key roles may be assigned in highly choreographed public-facing reenactments. A reenactment of Washington crossing the Delaware, for instance, needs to have a Washington. With the exception of Arnold and a pugnacious Ethan Allen (the leader of the Green Mountain Boys, famous for yelling, as interpreted that weekend by a man named Tommy Tringale), plus a coterie of commanders at a reenactment of the attack on Bunker Hill, few reenactors I met purported to be dead people. They portrayed, instead, historically plausible types (a scraggly farmer; a wealthy townsman), which reenactors call “impressions.”
Who would you be if you traveled to America’s colonial past in 2025? If you have a large disposable income, an obsessive personality, an idolatrous affection for protocol, or ideally all three, then you possess the trappings for a fine portrayal of a member of the King’s army. Top-notch redcoat impressions are renowned among “RevWar” reenactors for requiring an exceptional degree of precision, and also for their eye-bursting expense. The stiff bands of contrasting fabric, or “lace,” sewn around each button on the front of a British regimental coat can cost several hundred dollars. Again, just the part around the buttons. An entire “kit”—reenactors’ term for all the clothing, weapons, and associated paraphernalia—can easily cost thousands. (Reenactors reject the assumption that they wear “costumes,” which they do not consider functional clothing.)
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.
(Note: People who spend thousands of dollars outfitting themselves as 18th-century British soldiers reacted so strongly when I asked if they considered themselves Anglophiles—they do not—that I felt embarrassed to have even suggested they might.)
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.