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Spring 2019 Update
Dear Readers,
A sequel to my Civil War novel, The Cost of Freedom, is now for sale. Titled 1898: Freedom’s Children, it follows the lives of the two main characters featured in The Cost of Freedom by focusing on the lives of their descendants. The Civil War’s violence unites Amanda and Armistead, who had once taken opposite sides. They leave their beloved Virginia to begin a new life together on a hardscrabble Texas ranch. Here they raise two children, whose divergent lives become this book’s central theme.
Morgan Carter goes to New York City to seek employment. She works for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World as that paper competes to become the voice for a new, mass audience composed of recently arrived immigrants. Confronting the era’s blatant sexism, Morgan struggles to escape the journalistic confines of the Lady’s Page. She begins to make a name for herself because of her ability to see and describe the city as it is, whether the world of the rich or the lives of the immigrants packed into their East Side tenements. When war breaks out in 1898, she finds her voice and becomes closely connected to the Anti-Imperialist League. In this capacity, Morgan mingles with the League’s leaders who include Robber Barons, famous authors, and celebrated social activists. Having learned from her parents the terrible costs of war, Morgan becomes an ardent opponent of the American war in the Philippines. Her work leads to a chance encounter with the man who will become her husband.
Morgan’s younger brother, Randolph Carter, absorbs very different lessons from his youthful experiences. Rand is among “The Boys of ’98”, namely, young men who volunteer for the military when the Spanish American War begins. He joins the army and is sent to the Philippines. Rand enters an exotic, foreign land where the U.S. Army is fighting a brutal battle against Filipino insurgents. The insurgents are patriots trying to liberate their country from colonial rule. Their leaders recognize that their best chance for victory is through the efforts of the Anti-Imperialist League. Rand and his comrades are American patriots trying to emulate the military service displayed by their parents’ generation during the Civil War. They are all too aware that the work of the Anti-Imperialist League undermines their efforts while putting their own lives at increased risk.
History records that in 1898, American leaders thrust the nation into a new role filled with ethical challenges. Like their country, Morgan and Rand must navigate their way in a world with few obvious signposts. Choices are seldom black or white, but are instead a blur of old traditions and new realizations.
Two strong threads connect Morgan’s and Rand’s stories: the bonds of family; and the legacy of Abner Means, the secret service puppet-master whose reach continues to extend into the highest levels of American government.
1898 is a story about two independent siblings who find themselves on opposite sides in an environment that is experiencing rapid, disorienting change; change so drastic that it threatens to unmoor the old truths of love and loyalty to family and country.
The Cost of Freedom
Years ago my wife and I rented a former slave cabin on a plantation in Upperville, Virginia. The landlord was the grandson of a trooper who served with partisan leader John Mosby (the Gray Ghost). The doorstop was a ten-pound Parrott rifle shell recovered from the upper hay field (a cavalry skirmish had extended across the fields in 1863). Across Goose Creek was an historical marker signifying the place where Mosby's band first mustered. Here, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains we were surrounded by history and I began writing "The Cost of Freedom."
While my day job focused on military history, this was not what I wanted to write about in my novel. Instead, I was interested in how individuals confronted stark personal and moral choices as the great issue of the day -- secession -- threatened to rend the fabric of the lives. No such examination could ignore the salient role of slavery.
Research was profoundly enjoyable with each discovery bringing a new set of questions about motivation and loyalty: finding "The Journals of Amanda Virginia Edmonds" upon whom my Amanda is based and meeting her descendants; driving up a plantation lane to purchase our Thanksgiving turkey and seeing the antebellum, double decker balcony from where each year the elderly matron stood to bless the local hunt -- the inspiration for my race between Armistead and Min; finding a Confederate flag sewn by the local women at a small county museum with the hand-painted inscription "Go and Fight!" -- the basis for my scene where Amanda presents the colors to the Loudoun Grays; learning that a Union-loyal, Alabama-born officer had evaded Stonewall Jackson's trap at Harpers Ferry to lead yankee cavalry to safety, and realizing that my Armistead Carter had to help him find the way.
Well-crafted historical fiction has been a source of joy in my life; Dorothy Dunnett's epic sagas, Patrick O'Brian's sea-faring tales. They are page-turning adventure stories and explorations of character. If my "Cost of Freedom" can achieve even a faint echo of those wonderful reads, then I will be satisfied.
***
James R. Arnold is the author of more than twenty-five books devoted to military history and leadership. His published works include Presidents Under Fire, a study of how American presidents perform as war leaders, Grant Wins the War, a campaign study of Vicksburg, and Jeff Davis’s Own, the story of the future Civil War generals who served on the Texas frontier during the Indian Wars. Arnold is the founder of Napoleon Books, a niche publishing venture devoted to Napoleonic studies. His most recent book, The Moro War (Bloomsbury Press, 2011) examines the first U.S. war against an Islamic insurgency. He has also written forty-two library reference books for young adults that address the social and historical events associated with colonial America, the American and French Revolutions, the Industrial Revolution and the American Civil War. Arnold and his wife live on a farm in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley.
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