Quote Originally Posted by CornBot View Post
My younger brother and his whole family are CW re-enactors... 2 of his sons are Union infantry and I wonder if they were among the soldiers today. Couple years ago, one of them had the opportunity to be in Gettysburg with friends, called his dad all excited, "Dad! I just fought in Pickett's Charge!" LOL

My bro, his wife, and their 2 younger kids all wear authentic period civilian clothes to these events. He swears re-enactors are cooler in their hats, waistcoats, floor-length dresses, and bonnets than is a visitor wearing a tank top and shorts whose skin is being directly baked by the sun. OK, so I agree with keep the sun off one's bare skin... but, thinking about this, my bro is a man, and men's clothing has not changed all that much since the 1860s: cotton shirt, trousers, jacket. He is as comfortable as any man in either era. I wonder if his wife, wearing petticoats and bloomers under her long-sleeved day dress, might have something different to say about the heat. I'm going to have to ask her one of these days.
While at the event, I ran across a gent wearing the standard Union issue clothing in one of the tents, he was sweating profusely. You can see that he wanted to take off that heavy wool jacket in the worst way. But doing that would violate the reenactor's code or something. I'd be willing to bet that the troops took off their jackets, when not fighting, or maybe even during. Covering up does help though. Probably kept their long sleeved shirts on.

The wife was commenting on the dresses the women were wearing. Besides noticing that they mostly didn't fit right, which stemmed from learned behavior from her mother who was an accomplished seamstress, she commented that the hooped skirts kept the women cooler due to the material being away from the body, allowing air in. Besides, the material used was light, thin cotton