Brother vs. Brother, Reporter on Horseback   

Instead of using laptop computers and fax machines, reporters during the Civil War scrawled their stories in notebooks while riding horseback.

The Society of Civil War Correspondents is convinced that experience is worth revisiting. Since 1986, its members have retraced the paths of reporters from the North and South during battle reenactments.

"It's not so much what they wrote as the men's experiences," explains Gerald Regan, the founder and secretary of the informal group, which includes journalists, artists and a history professor.

Regan and his colleagues attend several battle portrayals each year, playing reporters alongside participants outfitted as Union and rebel soldiers. Recently, Regan wore civilian clothes from the period to become George Alfred Townsend, a one-time reporter for the New York Herald, at a reenactment of the Battle of Cedar Mountain in Virginia.

"It was a feat of endurance," recalls Regan, 40, a freelance writer and former USA Today copy editor. "Cannons were going off and I'm on a horse that's more headstrong than I am, trying to capture the scene."

Regan says he launched the society after covering a 1986 reenactment of the Battle of Bull Run while reporting for Gannett Suburban Newspapers in New York. Nobody was portraying journalists, so he volunteered. "It was a 'Eureka!' moment for me," he says. "I wrote about the reenactment as an insider."

Most Civil War reporters were highly educated and well-read, Regan says, and their coverage included vivid first-person accounts. "Then, the journalist was allowed to be part of history."

Although editors often embellished their reporters' work, Regan believes the style of the time sometimes made journalism more honest. "In the 19th century I could have had an adventure without having to pretend I wasn't there," he says. "There's no place for the heart to soar in modern journalism."