Photographs by Scott RossiEditor’s Note: This article is part of “The Unfinished Revolution,” a project exploring 250 years of the American experiment. Benedict Arnold had been growing hunkier all afternoon.Incarnated, at the moment, by Cameron Green, the director of interpretation at historic Fort Ticonderoga, Arnold had spent much of this May Friday on horseback. Sixty rain-numbed Revolutionary War reenactors had sloshed in his wake, marching up forest trails and past a Texaco station, in period-correct leather buckle shoes (not engineered to withstand repeated impact with modern Vermont’s asphalt highways) and period-correct wool coats (now ponderously wet, stinking of sheep). “Give ’em hell, boys!” a local resident had hollered from his farmhouse.Saturday morning would mark the 250th anniversary of the fort’s seizure in 1775 by the Green Mountain Boys—a rumbustious militia of proto-Vermonters who spent years violently defending their bite-size territory—but so far the rain was at best blighting and at worst obliterating every enriching activity the Fort Ticonderoga staff had dreamed up. A plan for the reenactors to sleep under starlight when we’d arrived on Thursday had been downgraded to a plan to shiver in a barn all night. A plan to shoot muskets had been canceled. A plan to teach elementary-age children how to cook a meal over an open fire in a town green had devolved into a horde of famished, filthy adults flooding into a schoolroom; propping their dripping muskets against shelves of picture books; and scavenging pencil-shaped cookies leftover from Teacher Appreciation Week. Everything was going less smoothly than it had in 1775. If the partially defrosted reenactors under Cam Green’s supervision—individuals who had come from as far away as North Carolina; who had had to submit color photos of themselves in 1770s-era clothing and proof of insurance to be granted the privilege of portraying 18th-century guerrillas—camped out again tonight, there was likely to be a mass hypothermia event.And so the majority of the group—approximately 40 men in 18th-century clothes, one 16-year-old boy in 18th-century clothes, and one reporter who had been explicitly forbidden from attempting to wear 18th-century clothes (because, a senior member of Fort Ticonderoga’s staff had insisted, she did not possess the fortitude to dress in leather breeches and buckle shoes for the first time while hiking 18 miles while conducting interviews, and he was right, he was right; thank God she had dressed in tactical hiking togs woven of such state-of-the-art ultralight moisture-wicking plastic that she herself could be said to be reenacting the life of a Poland Spring bottle)—had crammed into a one-bathroom family lake house for the night.Its living room rapidly reached the swelter and volume of a blacksmith’s forge operating as a front for an unlicensed tavern. Upon entry, about half of the company sloughed off their soaking breeches to stand around in voluminous shirts, pantsless, like giant toddlers; within minutes the place reeked of sodden natural fibers, sweaty armpits, and, intermittently, a tropical kiss of summer, owing to a decision by some of the men to repurpose some scrounged-up kids’ sunblock as cologne. “Okay, so this is not—this is not coke,” a man told me as he sprinkled a pinch of the brown powder he had just snorted off a sword onto the web of skin between my thumb and forefinger. (It wasn’t coke! It was snuff—“battle crank,” they called it—dispensed from a porcelain canister with HONOUR TO THE KING hand-painted in spidery letters on its lid.)Yet as the tide of fiascoes rose around him, Benedict Arnold (still, in 1775, a charismatic Patriot; it would take five years of grievances to whet him into the traitor of 1780) was becoming—I will say this as clinically and dispassionately as possible—ravishing.Cam had appeared in the barn that morning looking neat as a nutcracker. His regimental coat was festooned with epaulets (fringed) and silver buttons (dazzling). His Tresemmé waves were bound tidily back. His calves were encased in trim black riding boots with cognac cuffs.Scott Rossi for The AtlanticBenedict Arnold on the shore of Lake ChamplainBut as the day sploshed on, Cam came to resemble more and more a windswept pirate on the cover of a romance novel. By dusk, the men in the lake house—men with wives and girlfriends wisely absent—were cracking jokes about his comely dishevelment. One observed that Cam, a 34-year-old father in buff breeches and a billowing white shirt, had metamorphosed into the group’s “zaddy.” Cam’s hair escaped its binding. He shed his scarlet coat. His swaggering boots remained powerfully on.His swaggering boots would not come off, actually. Cam couldn’t get—huff—he couldn’t—gasp—he couldn’t get the—goddamn—boots off.Now Cam was levitating horizontally. Men dressed as sailors and farmers and fopdoodles were yanking his arms and left leg toward opposite ends of the lake house, as if attempting to pull apart a stupidly huge party cracker. Cam had to be wrenched free because the alternative—having one’s feet totally and permanently encased in period-correct leather riding boots—would be a suffocating fate, and also because he ran a real risk of developing trench foot if he slept in the boots.“How you doing over there, Cam?”In reply, a voice, muffle-crushed beneath three men who were using their body weight to pin Cam to the floor while other men pulled on his right boot, or on the shoulders of the men in front of them who were pulling on his right boot, or on the shoulders of the men in front of them who were pulling on the shoulders of the men in front of them, etc.—in a chain that extended out the door to the stairs—a voice so tiny, it sounded like it was coming from the bottom of a well: “I’m good!”Baby powder was sifted into Cam’s boot. PAM cooking spray was chhhh’ed around the cuff’s rim. Half a bottle of olive oil was glugged down into it. Cam lay on the floor with his eyes shut in concentration as a man wearing a floral neckerchief tied around his forehead, Rambo-style, attempted to rip Cam’s foot off his body.“I’ve seen this happen before,” said a lanky apprentice leather-breeches maker from Colonial Williamsburg. “The long heel measurement wasn’t taken correctly!” Fresh hands kept appearing—at one point I counted 20 people in the bedroom—eager for a chance to pull the sword from the stone. Cam’s leg, by the way, was now fantastically slippery, because it was drenched in olive oil. A man in a red knit cap yanked as hard as he could. “That’s just—my ankle—breaking!” Cam yelped.No one suggested slicing the boots open with kitchen shears. Custom leather footwear cannot be destroyed lightly—especially if you have to wear it tomorrow because you are starring in a 250th-anniversary commemorative reenactment of the capture of Fort Ticonderoga.Scott Rossi for The AtlanticThe Green Mountain Boys cross the lake in a hand-built boat.Americans have been reenacting the Revolution since before the war was even over: In 1778, a lieutenant colonel in the Continental Army wrote in his journal that his men had marked the anniversary of a “Glorious victory Obtaind over the british” at Saratoga with “a Grand sham fight.” Flurries of Revolutionary War battle reenactments were also recorded around the centennial, in 1876; participants then included many Civil War veterans, separated from real battlefield carnage by only a few summers.Reenactors have no official governing body, though many belong to associations that coordinate events among local groups, whose members share tips and gear. Estimating how many Americans participate in reenactments is a bit like trying to figure out how many people carve jack-o’-lanterns. Counting buckle-shoe sales won’t help you any more than counting harvested pumpkins would; some reenactors make their own shoes. But I can tell you that, as the United States barrels toward the commemoration of the 250th anniversary of its proclaimed independence, they are legion.[Beverly Gage: America is suffering an identity crisis]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.)Scott Rossi for The AtlanticThe Green Mountain Boys on their way to Fort TiconderogaA 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.Scott Rossi for The AtlanticBritish soldiers and residents of Fort TiconderogaIf you have a contrarian streak, you could portray a Loyalist—a colonial civilian who supported the British Army. This is a less popular impression. On Friday morning at the Green Mountain Boys’ first campsite, standing over the simmering pot containing “breakfast” (rice mush and meat hunks, with sprinklings of rainwater), I asked Brian, a public-school teacher from Connecticut, why he’d chosen this role.“Because we’re the good guys,” he told me, with the grin of a man who has tricked his fourth-period social-studies class into engaging with today’s lesson. Loyalists “were law-abiding citizens who didn’t want a war,” Brian said. “They’re not for rebellion. They’re not for insurrection.” In lieu of breeches—too tight, he said—Brian’s kit included goldenrod-yellow plaid trousers and a coat of pine-needle green. “I’m a dirt farmer,” he replied, when I asked what sort of person might have worn such attire.“The American war for independence was started by the 1 percent, and the 99 percent fought it,” Brian told me. “It wasn’t a change for the better. Slavery increased. We were in debt.” The new government even broke its promise to pay the soldiers who had fought to create it. “Hence Shays’s Rebellion in 1786,” he said. “Hey, man, I fought for this country and I can’t afford my farm now. It’s very sad.”(If you enjoy having sex with multiple partners, that could make you a British soldier, too—allegedly. At an event weeks later, one bubbly young reenactor portraying a Patriot civilian murmured to me out of the corner of her mouth that “a lot of the Brits are swingers.” The Americans, she said, tend to keep things more family-oriented. I was unable to confirm any of this.)Who exactly does this kind of thing? (Revolutionary War reenacting, I mean!) I met a former punk rocker who now works in marketing, a Delta pilot, a nurse, a priest, an attorney, every kind of teacher, an admin guy from MIT, a park ranger, someone who works on historical sailing vessels, a woman who retired from a software company, a guy who had a gun pulled on him during sex by his then-girlfriend, and a man who’d driven from Arizona with his wife. Many of the reenactors I met were from Massachusetts, with accents so vehement, they can be transcribed only with symbols that evolved in the lacunae of standard English orthography (“Bunkà Hill”).Men far outnumbered women, and a bright ribbon of divorce wove through the older males, girding some and racing toward others. Most were white; the current crop of Revolutionary War reenactors might be whiter than the original Continental Army, of which Black and Native American soldiers are believed to have constituted as much as 15 percent by 1780. Many of the reenactors were far younger than I’d expected, in their 20s and 30s, though a significant portion were considerably older; nearly everyone was older than the average Continental soldier, who was 22.Reenactors can be roughly divided into two sects: “progressive,” whose members’ fervid commitment to historical accuracy typically leads to them hand-sewing every layer of their 18th-century ensembles; and “mainstream,” whose practitioners are fine buying machine-stitched garments off the rack. I met more progressives than mainstreamers but, regardless of faction, age, or gender, participants’ politics skewed markedly left. Revolutionary War reenactors, an anthropologist noted in a 1999 report for the National Park Service, tend to be politically more liberal than their Civil War peers. (This is perhaps because a person is most likely to reenact a conflict that occurred within driving distance of his or her home, and deep-blue New England was not a combat zone in the Civil War.)Three different white men emphasized to me the necessity of incorporating the perspectives of “those who only appear in legal documents, but were real human beings,” as one put it. Patriot reenactors insisted that their aim is not to lionize the Americans. “It’s not ‘The British were bad and the Americans were good,’ ” one told me. American colonists indiscriminately killed the men, women, and children they encountered already living on the continent, and imported new ones solely to enslave them. “Like, we are not this noble country here.”Multiple reenactors mentioned that they found the fiddly work of sewing historical garments relaxing. Others cited the pleasure of socializing without cellphones. A nurse named Alicia, wearing a beautifully hand-stitched gown the color of dark sea glass splattered with blood-red flowers, told me she doesn’t like the 18th-century aesthetic “at all” but enjoys reenacting this era, because many of its associated activities (solving problems without modern implements, cooking over open fires) are physically grueling and require getting dirty.One trait common to every reenactor with whom I spoke was a scorching, irrepressible desire to share factual information with strangers. Among the things I learned: It was fashionably expensive for a man to order his coat, waistcoat, and breeches “ditto”—meaning made of the same fabric and color—in which case the resulting suit of clothes would be referred to as “a ditto suit.” An herbal analogue to aspirin can be made from decocting the bark of a willow tree into tea. Many redcoats’ coats were, in fact, slightly orange (enlisted men’s coats were colored with inexpensive dye made from the root of the madder plant; the darker carmine dye of crushed cochineal bugs was reserved for the coats of officers). The amount of forest covering Massachusetts has increased more than 100 percent since the 1830s. No one who wore one called it a “tricorner hat.” Muskets with an external safety catch, called “doglocks,” were considered obsolete by the 1770s—“Sorry,” said the 19-year-old who had just spent four minutes describing certain particulars of 18th-century French firearm mechanisms to me. “That was a lot of autism.”My foremost anxieties about pretending to live in the 18th century:1. I would have to camp, which I hate.2. I wouldn’t be able to wear my glasses, which I need (because, although one Pilgrim came over with a pair of spectacles in 1620, eyeglasses were still relatively uncommon in colonial America).3. I would have to be a woman.This last one stings to admit. Because—actually—I am a girl’s girl! You can ask any girl (from a list of girls I have preapproved for questioning). My initial research into the roles of women during the Revolutionary War produced a list of horrible jobs. I could:1. Do laundry.2. Have sex in exchange for rice.3. Get murdered, my death inspiring troops to battlefield glory.This last item was the job(?) of Hannah Caldwell, a mother of nine from New Jersey who was shot in 1780 while looking out her bedroom window, apparently by a British soldier. Fury over Caldwell’s killing is often credited with reinvigorating American troops; as such, she is frequently included in lists of women important to the war effort. (North Caldwell, New Jersey, Tony Soprano’s hometown, is named for her … husband.)My list was not exhaustive, of course. I could also be a nurse or cook food—okay, now it’s exhaustive. Historians estimate that some 2,000 female “camp followers” marched with American troops. Many of them were the wives of enlisted men; some were widows, runaway servants, or otherwise impoverished; some brought children. These women performed vital tasks in exchange for food, and George Washington complained about them repeatedly. He issued orders that “expressly forbid” the women “to ride in the waggons”—for any reason “at all.” “A clog upon every movement,” he called them. (It was as if he knew me personally.)I do not intend to denigrate the contributions of, for instance, Continental Army laundresses, who stripped the skin from their hands boiling, wringing, and scrubbing a modicum of sanitation into Washington’s fetid forces, far more of whom died of disease than in combat. This labor was strenuous, challenging, and shamefully undervalued—and that is why it was impossible to feel excited about the prospect of performing or even pretending to perform it. I wanted to shoot a gun.Scott Rossi for The AtlanticWomen at Bunker Hill, played here by Gloucester, MassachusettsIrritatingly, it seemed that reenactors’ fetishistic commitment to gun safety meant that I would be stuck (with the peerless honor of) being a woman. The only thing the average reenactor loves more than accurately portraying life in the 18th century is: safety precautions. “Safety—No. 1,” I overheard one Revolutionary War veteran remind a newcomer. “Authenticity—No. 2. Have fun—No. 3.”For me to portray an armed man with an established unit, a reenactor named Dakota warned me in a phone call, would likely entail completing a “labor intensive” six-month training process that included memorizing the exercises of a 1764 drill manual until I could perform them perfectly while maneuvering a 12-pound musket (which itself would run me more than $1,000). I had stumbled into the only cranny of American culture in which firearms are tightly controlled.At times, reenactors’ twin fascinations—authenticity and preventive safety measures—are irreconcilable. A stitch-perfect reproduction of a fisherman turned militiaman’s indigo-dyed knit Monmouth cap can lend only so much veritas to a deadly battle re-created with prescheduled water breaks.Did you know that it is against the rules of America’s national parks to pretend to die in them? If you are reenacting a real battle, that is. Reenactments that imitate exchanges of fire, hand-to-hand combat, “or any other form of simulated warfare” are prohibited in all 433 prelapsarian sites under the stewardship of the National Park Service. “Even the best-researched and most well-intentioned representation of combat cannot replicate the tragic complexity of real warfare,” the park-management guide beseeches. It is hard to argue with this, particularly if one has ever read, for instance, the memoir of Private Joseph Plumb Martin, who was 19 when he wintered in New Jersey under Washington’s command. “We were absolutely, literally starved,” he wrote. “I saw several of the men roast their old shoes and eat them, and I was afterwards informed by one of the officers’ waiters, that some of the officers killed and ate a favorite little dog.”And yet. If one’s goal is to captivate the public with wonders of the past, so much so that they might care about a former age enough to actually learn something, explosive combat reenactments are probably the most efficient way to accomplish this. Things that are shocking and terrible provoke our curiosity; if nothing ever went wrong, there would be no newspapers. Also: If you’ve spent six months learning how to properly fire a musket that set you back more than $1,000, you don’t want to just walk around holding it.It is fortunate, then, that some areas of this country (most of it, in fact) are considerably more lax about who is allowed to carry a weapon. While trying to find some work-around by which I would be able to fire an 18th-century musket without sacrificing months of my life learning how to do it safely, I heard of a ginormous reenactment of the Battle of Bunker Hill, the war’s first major contest, taking place in June. The original battle site is preserved today by the National Park Service as a darling little plot penned in on all sides by urban Boston. This precludes it from accommodating thousands of visitors eager to witness simulated slaughter. The reenactment, therefore, would be held 35 miles up the coast, in Gloucester, Massachusetts. “And because it’s not happening on National Park property,” my tipster informed me, “we have a little more flexibility.”Scott Rossi for The AtlanticAn American militiaman fires his musket—containing black powder but no projectiles—at the Battle of Bunker Hill.But first, I would have to be a woman.After several weeks harassing various kind reenactors by phone call and email, I was dumped into the aproned lap of Stacy Booth, a member of Colonel Bailey’s 2nd Massachusetts Regiment, which provides impressions of individuals who might have lived between 1770 and 1783. Stacy was coordinating civilian activities (that is: activities relating to 18th-century civilian reenactors) for the Bunker Hill event. She agreed to help me fulfill my dream of enacting reenacting, and we decided that I would spend one day as a civilian woman and one as an enlisted man.I do not know how to sew anything, including a suite of 18th-century clothing. I got my husband to help me take a dozen persnickety measurements of my physique so that I could order custom garments from some of the foremost retailers of 18th-century-clothing reproductions—companies whose product quality, frequently mocked by hard-core reenactors, is, at the same time, generally deemed passable. Stacy introduced me to Susan Stewart, another stalwart of the 2nd Massachusetts, who agreed to help me learn to dress myself, and to provide additional clothing for me to borrow, if I flew to Boston a couple of weeks before the event.This was fortunate, because neither my custom-made “Green Linen Gown” ($385 plus shipping) nor my “Linen Frock Coat—Short Collar” ($425 plus shipping) remotely fit. (How far off were my measurements? I am an adult woman of above-average height, and the nonreturnable gown, which I donated to the 2nd Massachusetts, is set to be repurposed for a 6-year-old girl.)Within an hour of meeting Susan, I was nearly naked in her home. She laced me into my stays, instructing me in how to “fluff” my breasts upward as part of the process, and kindly yet firmly correcting my assumption that I would not be allowed to wear underwear during the reenactment. (“They did not. We all do.”) The nearly $2,000 this magazine had splashed out for my clothing, much of which did not fit, appeared to cause her bodily pain. She seriously considered spending hours altering my child-size dress, but in the end settled for loaning me virtually everything I needed, and she also made me lunch. I remind the reader that this is merely Susan’s hobby—a hobby in which she pays to participate.I felt uglier as a middle-class woman in 1775 than I ever have in my life. From the inside out, I wore: low-rise hip-hugger underwear (not period-correct); white thigh-high cotton stockings fastened with cotton ribbon garters; a white linen shift with commodious sleeves; the buff-colored linen stays, which blockaded my torso yet neglected to bestow the fetching hourglass silhouette imposed by modern corsets; a green linen petticoat (essentially a skirt split into two panels of fabric hung on cotton string); mushroom-brown hanging linen pockets (tied around my waist); a brown linen petticoat; a green linen bedgown (functionally, the ensemble’s shirt); a linen apron of bitsy blue and white checks; an enormous neckerchief hand-dyed with soft-red and dark-pink flora on a field of olive brown, folded in half diagonally and stretched over the shoulders; leather mules; and a white ruffled cap fastened around my skull with a burgundy ribbon tied in a bow (and further secured via a hidden plastic comb—not period-correct).I had removed my makeup, nail polish, wedding ring, and earrings, and inserted contact lenses. When I studied myself in the mirror of the public restroom at the park where the Bunker Hill reenactment was taking place, what looked back at me was a shapeless mound of fabrics crowned by my plain stupid face—devoid of the natural glow I daily simulate with cosmetics—and the mortifying bonnet.I probed my reflection for some trace of my own Revolution-era ancestor, whose features are a mystery to me. Priscilla Timbers was 18 in 1775 and resided in Virginia, about 16 miles (via I-95) from the farm where George Washington spent his childhood. Like me, she was the daughter of a white woman and a Black man; her mother was most likely a free servant working in the same household as her father, an enslaved man. I tried to picture myself as I imagine Priscilla: a tastefully sexy teen. Would she have looked better than I did under so many yards of fabric? How big was the bow on her cap? Did she have any inkling, in March 1775, that, as her fellow Virginian Patrick Henry thundered in a speech in Richmond, “The war is inevitable, and let it come!” Might a second- or thirdhand account of Henry’s cataclysmic conclusion—“Give me liberty or give me death!”—have reached her by June? How, if at all, would such news make its way to a really quite striking teen?Meandering through these thoughts, I was assaulted by a traumatizing realization: I am 36. I therefore, in all likelihood, more closely resemble a faintly suntanned version of Priscilla’s white mother, who was about 40 years old in 1775. In fact, Sarah’s whiteness is the only reason I am aware that her daughter existed; it created a vine of legal paperwork that curlicued across generations, hundreds of years later spiraling through free online genealogy forums, where I tripped across it one day after Googling my grandfather’s name. Under Virginia law, Sarah’s free status, impoverished as it was, conferred upon her daughter, and her daughter’s sons and daughters, the same freedom.The traces of Priscilla in written records mostly take the form of attestations in which various Caucasians state under oath that they have long been acquainted with Priscilla’s family, and know her mother to have been a free white woman; or know that certain people are Priscilla’s children and grandchildren and, thus, descended from free, white Sarah. If Sarah had been enslaved, there would be no documents to give me even this brumous view into her and her daughter’s existences.I have no idea how these members of my family, only a few generations removed from me, experienced the Revolution. This is one of the reenactors’ central points: Sarah and Priscilla were part of the reality that formed my country and my self, and I don’t know anything about their lives.The Bunker Hill reenactment coincided with the first sunny Saturday to enlighten the Boston area in 15 weeks, which may explain why some 20,000 people turned out to Gloucester’s Stage Fort Park that weekend to witness it. The organizers were hell-bent on doing it right, which meant huge, which meant six British tall ships in the harbor, which meant they needed a harbor. They also needed sufficient space (and porta-johns) for 1,000 camping reenactors, a hill for soldiers to run up, and room for members of the public to watch it all unfold. The seaside site in Gloucester satisfied all these criteria. And because the interpretation would take place in a random municipal park, people were free to die there, as long as they were only pretending to.Scott Rossi for The AtlanticThe British arrive at Bunker Hill.I emerged from my tent that Saturday morning half dressed, in my bedgown and just one petticoat—Susan had promised to help lace me into my stays—and picked my way through alleys of spectral white tents to the 2nd Massachusetts’ commissary. For $20 and a volunteer shift, group members would receive five meals, plus snacks. A cast-iron pan the size of an extra-large pizza box sat atop flaming logs; inside it were more scrambled eggs than I’d ever seen in my life (“23 dozen”). Hot water for coffee dangled in a metal pail. By 7 o’clock, I was shoveling down expertly charred bacon like one who has overwintered with General Washington in New Jersey. Stacy’s husband, Mark, the captain of the 2nd Massachusetts, sipped a gleaming Capri Sun. Visible anachronisms were permitted until eight, when the event would officially open to the public.The June 17, 1775, Battle of Bunker Hill was fought between forces roughly quadruple the size of those in our reenactment. But, like the 2025 event, it did not occur on Bunker Hill. Patriot militia forces, encircling British-occupied Boston, had been instructed to work through the night to fortify a strategic position atop one of two hills—Bunker Hill—overlooking the city. When the sun rose on the 17th, it was revealed that the colonists—possibly out of a last-minute change of plans, possibly out of moonlit confusion—had built a rough defensive fort on the other hill, Breed’s Hill. That’s the one the British charged.Even at one-quarter scale, the re-created battle really was something. Weapons were loaded with black powder. Real cannons boomed every few seconds, and the rackety-crack of real muskets was constant. The smoke was thick enough to cast its own shadows upon the hill. The sulfurous scent of hell wafted on the sea breeze.The British reenactors could not help but lure the audience’s attention away from the Patriots. They moved, in their smart red coats, with ordinate intention, firing in sequence, attacking, falling back, and redoubling their fake efforts. The colonists, at first, simply picked off oncoming redcoats from behind the safety of their redoubt, until, excited and discombobulated by the macabre spectacle of the slope disappearing beneath the bodies of the enemy, they began firing randomly—all of this playing out as it had on the day, when the undisciplined Patriot forces quickly ran out of ammunition.Scott Rossi for The AtlanticShooting and restingFor someone like me, who has trouble picturing things that are not immediately in front of her, watching people run up the hill was illuminating. A historian with a mic provided play-by-play narration for the crowd, explaining actions that were inscrutable to the casual viewer. “You can see Americans are pounding stakes in the field in front of the redoubt,” he said. Why did the audience think they were doing that?“Trip wire,” a spectator in a beach chair in front of me confidently told a child.In fact, the stakes were distance markers. Smooth-bore muskets, the emcee explained, fire inaccurately beyond about 50 yards; markers like these helped the colonists hold their fire until it would be most deadly. (The possibly apocryphal imperative to delay shooting “ ’til you see the whites of their eyes” infiltrated the American lexicon from Bunker Hill.)The most difficult job any reenactor performed that day was not scattering white mice with painted red eyes around the food area (the task I was assigned at lunchtime). It was not shouting historically attested quotations during the simulated battle. It wasn’t even manning the smoldering cannons—a job that has, for centuries, put both soldiers and reenactors in a position to possibly have their arms blown off. (One cannoneer reenactor told me that her mom’s cousin “lost his hands” operating a cannon during the bicentennial.) It was being a British soldier who was killed in the redcoats’ first failed charge up the hill. These reenactors were forced to lie face down in the sun-scorched grass for nigh on an hour, baking in their red wool uniforms (and, in the cases of those outfitted as grenadiers, towering fur hats).Hours after the battle, when the spectators had gone home for the day and the undead soldiers had dusted themselves off, hundreds of reenactors, including several I had known back when they were Green Mountain Boys, gathered in the dark for a “jollification”—a chance to drink free cider, ale, lager, wine, and molasses rum that various participants had managed to procure in great quantities. An 18th-century-dressed stranger materialized out of the black night—there was no electricity at the jollification—and offered me psychedelic mushrooms. (I declined her offer.) The reenactors were still scream-singing 18th-century prison ballads when I descended the hill back to my tent, clawed myself out of my stays, and fell asleep on the ground.So many reenactors explained to me so many times the mechanics by which a marble-size lead musket ball is ejected through the (smooth, not rifled) barrel of a musket that I am tempted to recite them here, just to prove that I can. But I can’t spare 5,000 words. By the time I got to the Bunker Hill reenactment, I had heard enough musket horror stories—about a gun kicking back and breaking a man’s nose because he didn’t realize he had loaded it with three charges of gunpowder; about how, if a paper-wadded musket ball is not nestled in powder at the very bottom of your gun’s breech, “you have yourself a pipe bomb”—that I had grown afraid to shoot one. But I had begged to do it, and so I would have to.On Sunday morning, I dressed as a man in birch-colored linen breeches that fastened in front with two quarter-size buttons; a linen “work shirt” worn over a chest binder from Amazon (the latter neither period-correct nor—we’re all friends here; we can say it—greatly needed); a pale waistcoat with 12 silver buttons; a cumbersome brown frock coat; a black cocked hat; a raspberry kerchief knotted jauntily around my neck; the most discreet black sneakers I could find; and gigantic, flappy gaiters to hide them.Though the men’s kit was even more stifling, I was less bothered by my appearance in it, because I looked so completely foreign to myself. (Also, no member of the public reached out to rub the fabric of the men’s garments between their fingertips—“Nice linen!”—as one had when I was a woman in skirts.)Thus attired, I stood on the Atlantic shore, clutching the musket to what my instructor referred to as “the meaty part” of my shoulder. The gun was so heavy, I had to cantilever my upper body backward to keep it aloft. I pulled the trigger, producing a tiny fireball and a loud crack. “Baaaaaaaah! ” I said. To my relief and delight, the firearm had not exploded in my face, maiming me for life. I couldn’t wait to put it down.In the afternoon, the reenactors staged the Battle of Bunker Hill all over again, for the Sunday crowd. On both days, nuance was pulverized in the heat of war. “These are the good guys,” a father told his son, pointing at the Patriot forces. He probably did not know that, actually, many soldiers serving the Crown held ideas about liberty that were at least as, if not more, radical than those held by many Patriots, as had been explained to me at the lake house, right before our emergency pizzas (thank you, Cam) arrived.Scott Rossi for The AtlanticThe careful observer might spy signs of modernity.Watching a dozen redcoat reenactors face-plant in the grass probably did not help the assembled spectators better comprehend the horrors of war. But many did learn something. A significant portion of the crowd seemed surprised and disappointed to discover—as they watched the King’s soldiers surge over the redoubt on their third charge attempt, taunting retreating colonial militiamen—that the Americans lost the Battle of Bunker Hill.Back in Vermont, it took Cam’s men an hour to prize him out of his leather boots, which popped off in choking puffs of oiled baby powder. I was the only woman in the lake house of 41 people, and so was offered one of its three beds. (“A clog upon every movement!” Commander Washington snarled across the centuries.) The luckier Green Mountain Boys used couch parts for pillows; most lay on the bare floor. Ian, a 26-year-old preschool teacher, who had slept Thursday night on a pile of straw, spent Friday night in a closet, on a mattress of pizza boxes. When morning came, Cam was back in his wet boots.We resumed the march in winterish May drizzle and by mid-afternoon reached the spot whence, in 1775, the Green Mountain Boys launched their assault against the fort, silently sneaking across Lake Champlain. To ferry reenactors across, the astonishing Fort Ticonderoga staff had hand-built two flat-bottomed bateaux. The sun emerged while we rowed across the lake. On the New York shore, it shone through the fuzzy caterpillar heads of giant foxtail grass. The effect was enchanting, but not period-correct. Giant foxtail was introduced to North America by accident in the 1920s, mixed in with grain imported from Asia.Because I was not wearing period clothing, I could not participate in the climax of the reenactment, when the Green Mountain Boys, led by Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold, would rush in and seize the fort. I wished them luck with the mission, and split off to claim a bleacher seat. The original Green Mountain Boys had stormed the gates at 3:30 a.m. When the commemorative reenactment—“REAL TIME REVOLUTION™ 3-Day Reenactment: No Quarter!”—began 250 years later, the first evening stars were tiptoeing out. A fort historian set the scene: The British garrison was small, he explained, occupied by only 66 people—not just soldiers, but their families as well. In real life, the Green Mountain Boys had been guided the final stretch to the fort by a local lad who knew it better than any militiaman; he had spent all that day “playing with the boys” who lived there, he later recalled. He saw the soldiers’ sons “most every day.” They were his closest friends.Scott Rossi for The AtlanticThe careful observer might spy signs of modernity.A few minutes later, cries of “Halt!” and “Alarm! Alarm!” echoed off the fort’s stone entryway. Reenactors portraying British sentries were bum-rushed by a swarm of whooping Green Mountain Boys. At a word from Arnold—“Get them out of their beds!”—a horde rushed into the garrison, emerging seconds later, dragging and pushing bewildered men, women, and children dressed in flimsy nightclothes into the hollow heart of the fort. The night had grown cold, and the families were ordered to kneel on the packed dirt. Some were in bare feet. “Be careful!” a woman called out. “There’s an infant right here!” There was an infant right there—a two-month-old boy, swaddled in period-correct cloth against a reenactor’s chest.The Green Mountain Boys encircled the hostages, muskets aloft. Allen thundered a command for the British to hand over the fort. “If you do not comply, or a single gun from this fort is fired, neither man, woman, or child will be left alive!” he yelled. “What?” gasped a cowering woman. A few Green Mountain Boys flipped their muskets around and menaced the kneelers with the butt ends. “For the sake of your men and their families,” Arnold said to a British officer, “surrender this post.”All of this was surprisingly upsetting to witness. These were my sweet Green Mountain Boys? The ones who had spent two days drawing my attention to interesting birds’ nests we marched past, sharing with me the orange peels they had candied themselves, and teaching me about buttons? When I’d first been introduced to them, they had been interchangeable old-timey people. Now I could easily distinguish between the beech-nut and ash browns of their wool coats. I knew exactly how damp those coats were, how overpoweringly they reeked of wet sheep. That was Emily, the fifer, dragging a man out of bed. That was Wilson, the genial leather-breeches maker, shoving a soldier to his knees. These were my friends? Holding a baby hostage at gunpoint? When the fort commander surrendered his sword, shrieks of glee ripped from the throats of the Green Mountain Boys.I spent the night in a Super 8 and, when I returned to the fort the next morning, was jarred to realize that the reenactment had resumed. Oxen were taking part in it now; they were being used to tow the imprisoned soldiers’ belongings, as the British-garrison reenactors—now prisoners of war—were marched toward the parking lot. When, I wondered, would the past end? I spotted a Green Mountain Boy I knew, Avi, and confessed to him that I’d found the reenactment unsettling. “It was a big tragedy,” he said. “These people”—he cast his eyes over the parade ground—“were as American as us in a lot of ways.”This, perhaps, is the chief merit of reenacting: not that it glorifies past accomplishments or condemns past failures, but that it emphasizes how any action humans have ever performed, whether for good or for ill, has been carried out by ordinary women and men. The Green Mountain Boys were not hellhounds. They were farmers. Kind and generous fellows were no doubt among the British soldiers killed at Bunker Hill. George Washington turned out in clean military dress because women did his laundry.This is an emboldening and disquieting way to apprehend history: not as a logical march toward an inevitable destination, but as a free-for-all dash subjected to the whims of regular people. It could end up anywhere.And if people in the present fawn over history, it is no less true that many in the past were preoccupied with how the future would regard them. Take, for instance, these lines of poetry commemorating the 99th anniversary of American independence, in 1875:They pierced the veilOf distant years, lov’d us, although unborn,And purchased, with their arms, and purest blood,The bright inheritance we now enjoy.The sentiment strikes 21st-century ears as unremarkable; we are accustomed to adulating the revolutionaries. But, in fact, the words sweat on the page. The poem, titled “The Anticipation for the 99th Year of American Independence,” was published in 1780, in the middle of the war. Independence was a fantasy, not yet secured. The writer dreamed of someday being remembered kindly—hopefully by Americans.This article appears in the November 2025 print edition with the headline “Into the Breeches.”