besides, the Union is very picky about the unifoms your wear,
AIn't that the truth... I was Union with a regiment out of Kittanning, PA up here... This hobby, like all others, is littered with ******** who will do their damndest to ruin your "good time" if they possibly can... Beware the maroons.
I got out of it because of that... I moved on to F&I War re-enacting, and while there's a lot of snoots in it too, there's a lot of positive people... Generally the Indians and Colonials/Militia. YOu get into the Brit regiments and French regiments though and they're a bunch of jags to you at events. Particularly the Brits, as I was in a Scottish Light Foot regiment, which basically were like Wild Scots with loose dresscodes... They adopted Indian atire readily and the Indians respected the Scottish Light Foot regiments a bit more and accepted them almost as another tribe.
It was cool because I had equipment that ranged from an Irish Hilted Broad Sword for an Officer's sword all the way to a Tomahawk as well as two muzzle loading weapons. When we'd show at the bigger reenactments though, we got lots of hell from the prim and proper British regiments in their fancy expensive uniforms... We'd have bone buttons on our red jackets, they'd have brass and polished, and they'd argue that we're not "proper" in our uniforms... Some would even refuse to deal with us actually... The French were usually a little better, but the guys in British uniforms almost always had a problem with us... Especially if they had Blackwatch with them. Ugh.
Still, I had fun with it, and it was a lot better experience for me than the Civil War re-enacting was... That got to be a chore, especially because I was really young at the time.