By James Heffernan - jheffernan@nvdaily.com
LURAY - In the movie "Glory," a white abolitionist colonel, Robert Gould Shaw, leads the Civil War's first all-black volunteer regiment's assault on Fort Wagner off the coast of Charleston, S.C., in 1863.
Shaw (played in the movie by Matthew Broderick) is killed during the charge, but the loyalty he instills in the men of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry inspires the unit to press on, eventually engaging the enemy in hand-to-hand combat. The bloody battle ends in a Confederate victory, but the bravery displayed by the 54th inspires the Union army to openly recruit black men for combat.
Although a great movie, author and historian Kelly J. O'Grady notes that the film leaves out a significant, if long-forgotten, piece of the story: the ensuing courtroom drama in which 60 men from the Massachusetts regiment are captured and put on trial as slaves in revolt.
"It's one of the greatest civil rights trials in Civil War history," O'Grady says. "Can a black man get a fair trial in Charleston in 1863?"
That question is answered in O'Grady's new novel, "Soldiers Just Like You." It's the second book from the former journalist and middle-school teacher, who developed an appreciation for the Civil War while growing up in the Richmond area and honed his research skills as a guide and historian for the National Park Service. His first book, the nonfiction "Clear the Confederate Way: The Irish in the Army of Northern Virginia" (2000), has been tagged by Civil War historians as a must-read.
"Soldiers Just Like You," which took O'Grady about four years to write, was timed for release during the war's sesquicentennial this year.
Narrated in a flashback in 1961 by the lone surviving soldier from the unit -- one of O'Grady's only fictional characters in a meticulously researched account -- the novel details the courtroom drama that unfolds over four days in late summer 1863 in Charleston, a city under siege.
Confederate authorities have threatened to execute blacks captured in uniform, but South Carolina, a cradle of the rebellion, decides to try the soldiers in civilian court and put their collective fate in the hands of a jury.
"They adhere to the rule of the law and their own constitution," O'Grady says. "In retrospect, if they had decided to put it in military court, they might have gotten the outcome they wanted."
Two local attorneys, one a Confederate colonel and the other a hapless Unionist named Nelson Mitchell, are appointed to defend the men. The odds of outsmarting a slick upstate prosecutor and convincing an all-white jury are long, and a conviction would mean execution.
Without giving too much of the plot away, O'Grady says the story's hero is Mitchell, who, incidentally, would be killed only a few months after the trial when a Union shell battered his home.
"It's amazing how many important figures end up in Charleston during the period," the author says, including Clara Barton, Harriet Tubman, the sons of Frederick Douglass and a Confederate deputy, Thomas Jordan, from O'Grady's hometown of Luray.
In developing the novel's plot and characters, O'Grady says he was careful to stay true to the mood and dialogue of 19th-century America, and he drew extensively from history books he used during his days with the park service.
In fact, one of his peeves with the film "Glory" is that during the final battle scene, the black soldiers are shown advancing down the beach with the Atlantic Ocean on their left, when they should have been moving up the shoreline with the water on their right.
Realism aside, "Soldiers Just like You" attempts to paint shades of gray in a trial -- and a war -- too often portrayed as black and white.
"There are good and bad people on both sides," he says. "This is a war that was filled with complexities," where courage and justice -- "key components to a just society" -- sometimes prevail over racism and slavery.
The novel would be a good fit for a Hollywood script and a natural sequel to "Glory," O'Grady says.
"I think it would make for a great movie. ... Tell Denzel Washington to call me."
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