Reviews
Michael deGruccio has written a haunting story of ambition, injury, jealousy, and violence in the crucible of the American Civil War. Here, with ingenious research and understated but powerful prose, is the 'real war' that Walt Whitman worried would 'never get into the books.'
In this riveting tale of ambition, treachery, and power, deGruccio has written a history as gripping as any novel and as profound as anything I've read on the US Civil War. Following one man's struggles, he narrates this conflict in all its complexities while showing how the questions it failed to resolve—about the meaning of freedom, equality, and the American dream—have become only more pressing over time.
Michael deGruccio has rewritten Civil War history as a murder mystery about the American dream, motivated by the successes and failures of killers and victims alike. His deeply researched odyssey of Colonel George Cole is not a biography or microhistory; it is a cultural history of America in transition and American families in pain: Black soldiers, white officers, their wives, their kin, their sins, their confessions.
This vivid account of a sordid murder explores the 'national creed of self-making' through the many failures—professional, domestic, military, moral—endured by the hapless murderer. The 'strange and tragic wounds' of George Washington Cole far exceeded those he received in battle and illuminate the perils of ambition in Civil War America.
Book Details
Prologue: Self-Made Tragedy
Part I: Bred in the Bone
1. America, a World without Grace
2. To See Ourselves as Others See Us
3. The False Dawn of Seneca Falls
Part II: Delusions of Manhood
4. Fog of War
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Prologue: Self-Made Tragedy
Part I: Bred in the Bone
1. America, a World without Grace
2. To See Ourselves as Others See Us
3. The False Dawn of Seneca Falls
Part II: Delusions of Manhood
4. Fog of War
5. George Washington, Town Destroyer
6. The Domesticated Man
7. Below the Beast
8. Tears for Uncle Tom
9. A Good Deal of Trouble
10. Point of No Return
11. The Resurrectionists
12. Mutiny
13. Family, the Inflammatory Stimulus
Part III: Odyssey after War
14. Killing for Union
15. Men Who Nearly Needed God
16. Confessions
17. Mary. Wife. Self.
18. Life Imitates Art
19. Some Magnetic Power
20. Heroic Wounds
21. Rings and Friends
22. Schemes and Smoke
23. Buried on the Brow of a Hill
Afterword