These are the people you don’t read about in history books.

A Harvard-educated New Englander. He was welcomed as a teacher by a school for apprentices in Charleston, South Carolina. But when his history lessons about the founding of America clashed with the pro-secession rhetoric of local slave-owners, he was out of a job. Can he find a way to reconcile his abolitionist sentiments with the practical need to support his family in a region whose economy is based on slavery? 

A wealthy Southern belle. She has always believed that her ancestors were benevolent slave-owners and that they treated their slaves with dignity and respect. Now she has inherited the family plantations, only to see the institution of slavery come under attack as an unmitigated evil. The coming of the Civil War threatens her land, her children, her marriage, and the values that have always sustained her. How much will she be willing to sacrifice in order to help her family survive?

A female slave. She was given to her mistress when they were both very small because they shared a common grandfather – a fact that everyone knew and no one talked about. The war offers her a promise of freedom as well as the prospect of a bittersweet separation from her beloved cousin. Will the bonds of family stretch or break?

A Confederate soldier. He supported secession and eagerly volunteered for the Army, believing, like most young men, that he was invincible. And like too many of those young men, he was wounded and taken prisoner. The aftermath of his war experience left him with wounds far deeper than those that caused the amputation of his leg. Can he conquer the pain, the flashbacks, the disability, and the nightmares that keep him incapacitated and unable to return to his former life?

The newly-weds. The couple married in haste, realizing that the coming of war might mean a long period of separation. But the young wife did not expect to receive a black-bordered letter telling her that her husband had been killed in battle. Now she faces life in wartime as a widow and the mother of newborn twins. She can return to her family or seek to make a a new life for herself. Which way will she turn?

The children. Uprooted from their home and school by a series of family disasters, they face an uncertain future. The teenage boy gives up his dream of becoming a dairy farmer. With tears streaming down his face, he begs his cows to run away because Confederate soldiers are confiscating all cattle as food for the army. His brothers and sisters struggle to adapt to new conditions of poverty, hunger, and hard work. And they watch with fear as those circumstances threaten the stability of their parents’ marriage. Will the family stay together or scatter as their friends and neighbors have done? 

An educated ex-slave. Despite his free status, he realizes that freedom is just a word -- meaningless without respect in the eyes of the community and without the ability to interact on an equal basis with those who once were his owners. Will his freedom really liberate him or will it destroy him?

America’s Civil War was more than a political disaster. It was a human tragedy, and everyone – North and South, young and old, black and white, rich and poor – everyone was caught up in that broken world. Yet somehow the victims held on to the hope that love for one another could mend the tears in the fabric of their lives. These are their stories.

One reviewer wrote: 

This book is not an action-oriented tale of battlefield and comradeship. It is instead a thoughtful narrative, driven by dialogue between and among the characters as the war begins and continues in all its challenges and emergencies; these strains that the war placed the civilians, becomes the heart of this story. What action exists in the book is usually related in letters the family members receive from relatives and friends in the Confederate forces, or in local discussions of the events. The steady decline of food supplies in the South (the Grenvilles tirelessly tend their vegetable gardens to hold back hunger), and the inevitable decline of the South is told quickly in the last pages, which makes a nice metaphor for the painful defeat that no one wanted to face

Damned Yankee is a good tale of the war from the perspective of the overlooked bystanders who bear no arms but suffer equally from the ravages of the conflict.

—Terry L. Shoptaugh.

Order your free copy here: 

(may mean that your mother wrote it!)

%$&*#  (written by a troll or your angry next-door neighbor)

( probably means just what it says: a good book but not the reader’s favorite genre)

I’ll take the three star reviewer any day of the week.

This fellow was looking for battles and tales of comradeship, and he didn’t find them. If he had ever been in one of my history classes, he would have known that “I don’t do battles.”  I’m interested in the causes that lead people to war (in hope that we can learn from them about what not to do.) I’m interested in the effects of war (so that we better understand what happens when the battles are over).  And more than anything, I want to tell the “stories behind the history “— the stories of the people who don’t make it into textbooks — but who suffer because of what goes on in those battles. And I think he “got” that. Listen to what he says:

"This book is not an action-oriented tale of battlefield and comradeship. It is instead a thoughtful narrative, driven by dialogue between and among the characters as the war begins and continues in all its challenges and emergencies; these strains that the war placed [upon] the civilians, becomes the heart of this story. What action exists in the book is usually related in letters the family members receive from relatives and friends in the Confederate forces, or in local discussions of the events. The steady decline of food supplies in the South (the Grenvilles tirelessly tend their vegetable gardens to hold back hunger), and the inevitable decline of the South is told quickly in the last pages, which makes a nice metaphor for the painful defeat that no one wanted to face.

"Damned Yankee" is a good tale of the war from the perspective of the overlooked bystanders who bear no arms but suffer equally from the ravages of the conflict.

Recently I was invited to submit my book, The Road to Frogmore to a website that provides great publicity to an author's target audience -- to people who are likely to read the book in question.  But before an author can submit a book, there must be evidence that it is not pure trash -- in other words, REVIEWS. They can come from various places, like Amazon, B&N, etc. But there are parameters that must be met:

* The average rating of the book must be a 4.0 out of 5.0.  OK, I can handle that.  The Road to Frogmore's average is 4.7.

* The book must have received at least 10 reviews in one place. And there's where I fail. Frogmore has only 9 reviews on Amazon.

I'll go on record here that I will never pay for a review. There are people who will review for a fee. And for a higher fee, they will write the review by this afternoon. They also guarantee a high rating, which makes the whole exercise meaningless.  Too many authors have already gamed the ratings system to their own advantage, and I refuse to be one of them.

However, I am not above a bit of begging -- especially to those readers who have already read Frogmore but "Just never got around to leaving a review."  Please, would you take the time to leave a comment on Amazon about the book?  It doesn't have to be a long, theoretic analysis. I'm not asking for something that would please your high school literature teacher. All you need is a statement about whether or not you liked the book, or what made you enjoy it, or who else might be interested in reading it. A brief twenty-word statement will do the trick.

My "site activity report" for this website shows that 1288 people looked at this blog yesterday. Surely one or two of you have read the book! Feel free to use a pen name if you don't want the world to know who you are (except to Amazon.) 

Thanks for helping out!

PS -- Does a review like that really make a difference? You bet it does.  Within 2 hours of my posting that review where more people could see it, there were five new book sales of Damned Yankee, and the book's sales ranking jumped from around 163,000 to 60,000.

Please, readers.  Do this, not just for me (although that would be nice), but for all of your favorite authors.  It just takes you a moment, but it's lifeblood for the author!