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The Strange and Tragic Wounds of George Cole's America

A Tale of Manhood, Sex, and Ambition in the Civil War Era

Michael deGruccio

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A gripping tale of determination, betrayal, and the struggle for dignity amid societal and personal chaos.

In The Strange and Tragic Wounds of George Cole's America, historian Michael deGruccio offers a gripping tale of ambition, self-making, and tragedy set against the backdrop of the American Civil War and its aftermath. George Cole was a once-hopeful Union soldier whose dreams of heroism and societal recognition unraveled in the chaos of war and personal betrayal at home. Haunted by the war's brutalities, Cole struggled to reclaim his dignity in a post-war nation that, in his mind, had...

A gripping tale of determination, betrayal, and the struggle for dignity amid societal and personal chaos.

In The Strange and Tragic Wounds of George Cole's America, historian Michael deGruccio offers a gripping tale of ambition, self-making, and tragedy set against the backdrop of the American Civil War and its aftermath. George Cole was a once-hopeful Union soldier whose dreams of heroism and societal recognition unraveled in the chaos of war and personal betrayal at home. Haunted by the war's brutalities, Cole struggled to reclaim his dignity in a post-war nation that, in his mind, had forsaken the most deserving.

When he returned home to upstate New York after the war, Cole discovered that his wife had been seduced—or had been raped—by their family attorney. At first glance, Cole's story is straightforward: he murders their attorney, is tried (twice), and is acquitted. But in deGruccio's telling, the murder, like a flash of lightning, illuminates a vast landscape in striking detail. By mining court transcripts, newspapers, private letters and wills, memoirs, and military records, deGruccio pieces together a noir tale of American life in the nineteenth century, one given to desperate self-improvement.
This meticulously researched microhistory of a pained veteran explores how increasing rights for women, the end of slavery, expanding access to market goods, burgeoning towns and cities, the madness of war, and the congealing corruption in government and business brought a new birth of fraught freedom.

Reviews

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.

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Book Details

Release Date
Publication Date
Status
Preorder
Trim Size
6
x
9
Pages
392
ISBN
9781421451541
Illustration Description
31 b&w illus.
Table of Contents

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

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

Author Bio