Civil War - U.S. -- fiction

The tenth book in Gilbert Morris's sweeping and personal history of the Civil War, "A Witness in Heaven" retells the classic Pygmalion tale--set against the gold fields in Colorado and the war-ravaged landscape around Richmond.

Part of his Appomattox Saga.

"These are the circumstances under which we meet sixteen-year-old Rhoda Strong, the daughter of a sweetly morose Scotsman and his formidable Lumbee wife. Rhoda is fiercely loyal to her family but is also fiercely in love with young Henry Berry Lowrie, who, although being hunted as an outlaw, is cut of heroic cloth and is, finally, a man whose moral fiber dictates his every move."

"At the heart of the story are spirited eighteen-year-old Constance Armstrong and her childhood friend, Frank Stringfellow. Constance, strong and intelligent, supports her family by running a bookstore. Two Rebels and a Yankee vie for her affection amidst the chaos of war. Frank, an irrepressible daredevil, becomes a scout and spy for J.E.B. Stuart and undertakes countless hair-raising adventures.

"On and off the battlefield, Marching Through Culpeper exposes the human side of such heroes as John Pelham, J.E.B. Stuart, A.P. Hill, and George Armstrong Custer. This rich tapestry of life in a war-torn community is a story of the human spirit and the power of love."

The Civil War threatens to destroy the romance between a Harvard-educated Cherokee Indian and the daughter of a Union officer, in a fast-paced novel... .
The sequel to The Proud and the Free.

It would be a challenge enough for perpetual list-maker Molly West, the director of a meal-delivery program in southern Ohio, to plan an ordinary wedding for her daughter. But this is no ordinary wedding. Molly's daughter wants the ceremony to be a costumed Civil War reenactment - and the date is only two months away. To complicate matters, Sheriff Matins warns Molly that an escaped convict is on his way to their Appalachian county, intent on disrupting more than just the wedding plans.

Then a bridesmaid finds a skeleton hidden in the caves beneath her historic home - caves once used by slaves fleeing the Confederacy. Is the skeleton the remains of a forgotten Union soldier, or a more recent victim of an unsolved murder? When the case brings local stories of Civil War-era struggles back to life, Molly and her friends realize that their tight-knit community hides more than one unpleasant secret.

"In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowa preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He 'preached men into the Civil War,' then, at age fifty, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle. Reverend Ames writes to his son about the tension between his father - an ardent pacifist--and his grandfather, whose pistol and bloody shirts, concealed in an army blanket, may be relics from the fight between the abolitionists and those settlers who wanted to vote Kansas into the union as a slave state. And he tells a story of the sacred bonds between fathers and sons, which are tested in his tender and strained relationship with his namesake, John Ames Boughton, his best friend's wayward son.

"This is also the tale of another remarkable vision--not a corporeal vision of God but the vision of life as a wondrously strange creation. It tells how wisdom was forged in Ames's soul during his solitary life, and how history lives through generations, pervasively present even when betrayed and forgotten."

"Before there were The Killer Angels and Gods and Generals there was Andersonville. MacKinlay Kantor won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1955 for this novel, an epic account of the notorious prison camp in Macon County, Georgia. Though many of his characters are fictional, many are based on historical figures. Even some of the minor characters who appear as suffering prisoners of war are historical. Writing in the early fifties it was perhaps inevitable that Kantor drew subtle echoes of the Nazi concentration camps as he told this grim story of the greatest of Confederate war crimes. Kantor spent most of his life studying and writing about the Civil War. His emphasis was always on the small-town, ordinary citizens confronted with the horrors of Civil War.'

When their two sons meet as West Point cadets, the southern, plantation-owning Main family and the industrialist Hazards of Pennsylvania find their lives interlocked, as the nation moves toward Civil War.
Continues with Love and War and Heaven and Hell.