Jacob's Ladder: A Story of Virginia During the War
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4.1 • 8 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the Michael Shaara Award for Excellence in Civil War Fiction
A civil war saga that resonates with the bitter glory and human shame of the Confederacy.
Jacob’s Ladder is a Civil War epic, a love story that pits the indomitable longing of the human heart against circumstances of racism, slavery, and war. Duncan Gatewood, seventeen and heir to the Gatewood plantation, falls in love with Maggie, a mulatto slave, who conceives a son, Jacob. Maggie and Jacob are sold south, and Duncan is packed off to the Virginia Military Institute. As Duncan fights for Robert E. Lee, Jesse—a Gatewood slave whose love for Maggie is unrequited—escapes north and enlists in Lincoln’s army, determined to confront his former masters, while Maggie finds herself living a life she never could have imagined as the wife of a blockade runner.
From the interlocked lives of masters and slaves, Donald McCaig conjures a passionate and richly textured story in the heart of America’s greatest war. The destiny of these three compelling characters connect a Vicksburg brothel to a Richmond salon, the nightmare of a Confederate hospital to the lurid hell of battlefields at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville.
Winner of the John Eston Cook Award
Winner of the Boyd Military Novel Award
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Imagine a collaboration between Shelby Foote and Margaret Mitchell and you get some idea of the historical irony and passion that inform this fine literary novel, which captures the full sweep of the Civil War in Virginia. In 1934, a WPA writer interviewing 90-year-old Marguerite Omohundru, former Richmond bank president, uncovers the dark secrets of a prominent Virginia family. In 1857, 14-year-old Duncan Gatewood is disowned and sent off to VMI when his father, Samuel, discovers he has fallen in love with and impregnated Midge, a 13-year-old light-skinned slave. To prevent scandal, the girl and infant son, Jacob, are sold south by slave dealer Silas Omohundru, who eventually reclaims Midge from a Vicksburg brothel and marries her. But Midge (or Maggie) already has a black husband. When he runs away to look for her, the daughter of a neighboring white planter and her husband are sent to prison for giving him shelter. War breaks out, and these many oddly linked characters are flung apart and cross paths with various actual figures of the day. (This is the third book this season in which John Brown is a character: the others are Russell Banks's Cloudsplitter and Jane Smiley's The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton.) From the blockade-running at Wilmington and Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House, they make their separate ways through the carnage. McCaig's (The Butte Polka) portrayal of this moment succeeds not only as a splendid piece of writing but also as a searching indictment of inhumanities that still haunt the American soul. BOMC, QPB and History Book Club selections. FYI: A Virginia sheep farmer as well as a novelist, McCaig occasionally writes on rural living for NPR.
