Bringing Civil War battlefields to life
Tour group uses eyewitnesses' words to tell the in-depth story of major clashes

by Greg Edwards
for Virginia Business Options
December 2006

Tour guide Robert Freis commands a Civil War battlefield as skillfully as Ulysses S. Grant or Robert E. Lee. He marshals eyewitness accounts of 19th-century soldiers to instruct and entertain 21st-century visitors. The battlefield roars to life as he reads aloud the soldiers' words at places such as the Dunkard Church at Antietam, Marye's Heights at Fredericksburg and Grant's Cabin at City Point near Petersburg.

An example of Freis' approach is this account from the book "The Cannoneer" in which Pvt. August Buell describes a Union retreat on the first day of the battle of Gettysburg in July 1863. Feis reads passages from the book at Seminary Ridge in Gettysburg where Buell's unit, Battery B of the 4th U.S. Artillery, fought. "Every man's shirt soaked with sweat and many of them sopped with blood from wounds not severe enough to make such bulldogs let go - bareheaded, sleeves rolled up, faces blackened - oh, if such a picture could be spread on canvas ... Out in front of us on an undulating field, filled almost as far as the eye could reach [was] a long, low gray line creeping toward us, fairly fringed with flame."

Freis, a Roanoke resident, has made a business of revealing the in-depth story of these clashes. Civil War Weekend has offered 2½-day tours of major battlefields in and around Virginia for the past five years. The company is the brainchild of Freis and Elliston resident Michael Hemphill, who handles scheduling and the financial end of the business. "These old battlefields are themselves wonderful places, and they do reveal themselves quite well," Freis says.

One recent tour participant was George Whitt, a general contractor from Colorado, who followed Freis through the Gettysburg and Fredericksburg battlefields this summer. Freis brings a dimension to Civil War history that you can't find in books, says Whitt. "What he does is challenge you to think for yourself."

Freis hopes that participants in his tours come away with an understanding of the scope of a battle and the hardships that the soldiers endured. "[Participants] have cut out the middleman and become their own historians," he says.

One avid student of Civil War history is Lou Smith, an Alexandria resident who has toured nine battlefields with Freis. She traces her interest in the Civil War back just four years. By chance she came across a monument on the Chancellorsville battlefield where Confederate Gen. "Stonewall" Jackson was fatally shot by his own men. Wanting to learn more about the war, she joined a tour. "I'm certainly a fan of Robert's," Smith says of Freis. "He doesn't just talk about the battles."

In fact, Freis weaves in details about the weather, terrain, customs of the time and sometimes conflicting personalities of commanding officers in the same army. Jackson, for example, frequently feuded with his officers and had Gen. A.P. Hill arrested.

Freis finds most of his primary sources for tours in the stacks of rare and old books at Virginia Tech's Newman Library. If possible, he will tailor a tour to the special interests of tour participants. He occasionally uses the words of a participant's ancestors to describe a battle.

The tours don't glorify battle or war, Freis says. "That would be intellectually dishonest," Tour participants, though, often comment on the bravery and devotion of the soldiers involved in the battles, he says.

While participants can pick from a yearly schedule of tours, Civil War Weekend will also conduct special tours if a group desires. To avoid the sometimes oppressive mid-Atlantic heat, the tours are held in April, May, June, September and October.

The minimum number of participants for a tour is four. The maximum, Freis says, is the number that he can fit into a van along with the food, drinks and other supplies that he carries.

Tour rates haven't changed in two years. A standard 2½-day tour costs $595 per person for double occupancy. For that money, a participant gets three nights' lodging, transportation to and from battlefields, breakfasts, boxed picnic lunches and a banquet dinner. Freis also provides participants with a packet of information including battlefield maps and reproduced period photographs.

Civil War battles have much to say to the modern corporate world, Freis says. "The performance of high-ranking officers comes into focus on the battlefield. These men were, in effect, executives, making decisions under stress and with limited information. Sometimes they based those decisions on faulty criteria, not the least of which were ego or envy."

But such weighty issues aren't the sole reasons for battlefield tours, Freis says. "You get outside to visit these engaging places, to think about what happened, to hear the elegant words written by these articulate people, to feel as much in the moment as possible and without getting too carried away with any of it."