Some Great Characters Sailed Civil War Seas

There is high seas adventure in Burning Rage, the new Civil War mystery featuring Confederate soldier turned Benedictine monk Ced Buckley. By the spring of 1864 Commander Raphael Semmes’ Alabama is nearing the end of its career as a Rebel merchant raider.

 

A Currier & Ives print commemorates the sinking of the Alabama off Cherbourg, France. The French transitional Impressionist Edouard Manet painted a similar scene after reading news accounts of the Alabama’s battle with the U.S.S. Kearsage. From the Library of Congress Collection.

 

Semmes, born in Maryland, has traversed the globe as the captain of Alabama, a swift and well-armed British-built screw-sloop. He has menaced Union shipping, capturing more than sixty-two merchant vessels, most of which he burned to the water line. In his own words, Semmes considered the Alabama an inexorable staghound and a merchantman a panting breathless fawn.

But by the time of our story, the Alabama is being hunted in earnest by the Union navy and Semmes and his famous ship are exhausted. Piracy, it seems, even legally sanctioned piracy, is a young man’s game. Semmes, who served in the United States Navy from 1826 to 1860, including a stint during the Mexican War, was no spring chicken in 1864. In Burning Rage, the Alabama is in Capetown, South Africa, where Semmes meets one of the book’s fictional characters, Captain Nathaniel Tilghman, a rascally Marylander. Tilghman still dabbles in the slave trade though trans-Atlantic human trafficking had been abolished de jure in 1859.

Tilghman skippers a sidewheel clipper ship, the Salem, and meets Semmes in Capetown’s seamy Chinese quarter. Semmes has a business proposition for Tilghman, to smuggle a shipment of gold destined for the Confederate government into Baltimore.

Thus begins a sea adventure that features a naval battle with a Union warship, and leads the Salem to an open air slave market in the Portuguese controlled Cape Verde Islands. Tilghman finds friends in Sao Miguel on the island of Santiago; former Confederate officer Slim John Sweeney and his wife Carmen, who help him escape from a riotous mob of Portuguese thieves.

 

This tobacco company advertisement depicts the Yorktown, a three-masted clipper ship, modified with steam powered sidewheels. Nathaniel Tilghman’s fictional Salem  had a similar configuration in Burning Rage. The Library of Congress Collection.

 

Subsequently he comes to trust one of the very Africans he’d tried to sell in Sao Miguel. The slave trader and his odd crew sail for Baltimore, delivering the gold to Confederate operatives at the city’s Catholic cathedral.

By June 1864, Semmes and the Alabama are bottled up by the Union navy in Cherbourg, France, where Semmes had put in to resupply the Confederate raider. When Semmes tries to make a run for it, he is confronted by the Kearsage, a Union sloop-of-war. The ensuing Battle of Cherbourg was chronicled by the French painter Edouard Manet, who read newspaper accounts of the battle and quickly produced “The Sinking of the Alabama.” Within a month it was on display in a print shop in Paris, bringing the demise of the Confederate raider to the world in vivid color. Today the painting is owned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which has not displayed it for many years. Besides Manet, the Alabama’s exploits inspired many a romantic. An Afrikaner folk-song, “Daar Kom die Alibama,” became popular in South Africa after Semmes’ 1863 expedition to Capetown. The raider’s campaigns also spawned an English sea chanty, “Roll Alabama, Roll.”

Raphael Semmes statue, Mobile.

As the hardest of the die-hards, Semmes could inspire such romance. Off Cherbourg, as the Rebel ship sank by the stern, Semmes threw his cutlass in the ocean rather than surrender it. The commander and some of his crew escaped and were rescued by a private British yacht, which was ironically named the Deerhound. (Semmes thought the Alabama a staghound and is fished out of the sea by a Deerhound!) The Confederate skipper is taken to England where he is hailed as a hero by some. Shortly, he returns to the C.S.A., where he is promoted to rear admiral and commands Richmond’s James River Squadron for a time.

Later he is given a commission as an army brigadier general and leads his city sailors as an infantry unit dubbed the Naval Brigade. Part of this outfit fights with Lee at Sayler’s Creek on the way to Appomattox. Semmes though escapes with other sailors and joins Joseph Johnston’s army in North Carolina. After the war, Semmes serves as a judge and teaches literature and philosophy at the forerunner of Louisiana State University. He died in 1877 and is buried in Mobile in the Old Catholic Cemetery.

In Burning Rage, Captain Tilghman and his new friends set sail for Norfolk and eventually fall in with a Southern spy, another interesting character based on a real life Confederate agent who later became the president of Virginia Tech. If you like great characters like Raphael Semmes and Nathaniel Tilghman, try reading Burning Rage, a Ced Buckley Civil War Mystery, available at Amazon.com.

 

 

Civil War Trains Had All the Bells and Whistles

Burning Rage’s cover illustration is an 1872 Currier & Ives print entitled “Prairie fires of the Great West.” It depicts an indomitable steam locomotive crossing the prairie despite a fearsome wild fire. The image would have amazed the average 19^th Century traveler, showing how the mighty iron horse could blithely traverse the dangerous American frontier. And prairie fires were notoriously fast, sweeping in mercurial and capricious destruction with the relentless plains wind. But the iron horse could run with the wind, according to Currier & Ives.

 

The Western & Atlantic Rail Road’s 4-4-0 locomotive, The General, famous for its capture by Union raiders in 1862.  Confederates chased the train from Kennesaw to Ringgold, Georgia. This 1907 photograph is from the Library of Congress Collection.

 

In 1872, the picture must have symbolized the triumph of technology over nature; revealing in vivid color that locomotives and the new Trans-Continental rails had opened the west for progress and opportunity.

I chose this print for the cover to emphasize the importance of the railroads to the times and because exciting portion of Burning Rage involves a train hijacking (to use a modern term) and a running battle aboard the fictional Great Dismal Swamp Express.

The iron horse still holds a place in the romantic quadrants of the American mind. As I write this, I can hear the whistle and rumble of a passing Norfolk Southern freight not five hundred yards away from my front door. Though the trains are computer-controlled, clean-diesel behemoths now, the whistle is decidedly ‘analog,’ harkening back to a time when the locomotive was a relatively simple mechanical hulk of iron and steel, wood-fired, sooty, smoky, combining simple elements of water and heat, to create enormous power.

Those old locomotives resounded with the bells and whistles that are still with us today. They communicate, however rudimentarily, a train’s movement or intention to move; a hooter to clear a crossing, a bell to signal a depot or yard evolution.

I still like the sound of the passing trains. Perhaps the romance of that sound is why we like our modern gadgets, our vehicles especially, with all the “bells and whistles” today. But we would find the old stink pots dirty, noisy and uncomfortable—and they were slooowwww—fifteen or twenty miles an hour was making good time. You’d get a good long look at that prairie fire as you passed it for miles on your way further west.

For much of the train battle in Burning Rage, the Great Dismal Swamp Express is a runaway train, a redball, reaching perilous speeds of fifty miles per hour on a downward grade. They really couldn’t run with the wind, outpace a prairie fire. In reality the old locomotives crept along like snails. When we realize how slow they traveled we understand the romantic portrayals of Old West bandits on horseback riding down a passenger train, revolvers blazing. That would have been entirely possible. There are many contemporary accounts of swash-buckling train robberies. One of the more famous tales involved the Union capture of The General, a Confederate 4-4-0 locomotive train, in Georgia in 1862. The story led to both a Buster Keaton silent picture and an even later Disney feature film.

It has been said that the Civil War came by train, but even as early as the 1840s, the steam locomotive was transforming America. The building of railroads employed thousands of new immigrants, work that allowed them to forge a place for themselves in their new homeland. The railroads brought the country countless new communities, large and small, staked out along wherever the tracks led. Big Rail developed great cities of industry, brought all manner of goods to expanding markets, and demanded economic growth on a grand scale to feed the capitalist powerhouse America had become.

So it is not surprising that trains played an important role in the war. The steam locomotive and the burgeoning American rail system were cutting edge technology by the time of the Civil War. In 1861, Stonewall Jackson utilized the cars of the Manassas Gap Railroad to bring large numbers of battle ready troops to the front at the Battle of Manassas. This is said to be the first time in history that large numbers of soldiers were moved to a battlefront by rail. It started a trend that saw thousands of men, horses and countless tons of supplies ferried by trains for the duration of the war. Thus the railroads became strategically important to both sides. Major battles, important raids and innumerable skirmishes were fought to control or destroy lines, depots and junctions across the South.

In Burning Rage, the action-packed train chapters capture the romance of the rails, and provide a literary vehicle as the sweeping narrative moves from Virginia to South Carolina.  I’ve been careful to not give away why the Great Dismal Swamp Express is hijacked; I’ve not revealed who hijacked it or who tries to take back the cab. I hope you’ll hop aboard to find out these answers for yourself in this runaway Ced Buckley Civil War Mystery. Read, enjoy, and tell your friends about Burning Rage.

Brother Ced Buckley is the Civil War’s Father Brown

        Welcome, Ced Buckley fans! It’s springtime in the Valley of Virginia; a time of mountain shadows and valley shade and my latest novel, Burning Rage, is now available.

A Map of Kilpatrick’s Campaign to Richmond in 1864, including an incomplete rendition of Dahlgren’s Raid route. Dahlgren crossed the Mattaponi and was ambushed at Walkerton.

       It follows Soldiers Just Like You, which came out in 2010. Soldiers is based on the true story of the trial of captured members of the 54^th Massachusetts Infantry.

       The 54^th of course was a famous regiment of black soldiers who stormed Battery Wagner, near Charleston in 1863. Their assault there was made famous to modern audiences in the movie Glory, which starred Denzel Washington. Soldiers Just Like You told the story that Glory never got around to. Some sixty members of the 54^th were captured in the battle. Later the state of South Carolina put them on trial, asserting that they are not soldiers but are slaves in rebellion, a charge that carries the death penalty. The defense counsel, a local attorney named Nelson Mitchell, sought to clarify that the men were not slaves, but Union soldiers due all the rights of other prisoners of war. Mitchell, a long forgotten hero, was assisted in the case by a local Confederate officer named Edward McCrady, a historical fact so hard to believe that I could not have made it up.

       If a Civil War courtroom drama interests you, please read Soldiers Just Like You where you will be introduced to Ced Buckley, who testifies at the trial. And watch Glory. It is a fine motion picture even though the Union army attack as portrayed proceeds in the wrong direction along the beach! But I digress.

       Not quite a sequel to the Soldiers book, Burning Rage finds Cedric Buckley back in South Carolina, this time in Columbia. Buckley, a former Confederate soldier who lost a leg in the Charleston campaign, has left the army and taken vows as a Benedictine monk. He also has developed a knack for crime detection.

       In early 1865, Columbia fell to the onslaught of three Union armies commanded by the infamous William T. Sherman. When Union cavalryman Tupper Long finds the horribly mutilated corpses of a Kentucky regiment, he knows who did it and why. But Long doesn’t know the whole story. To see justice done, General Sherman convenes a court and turns to the peg-legged monk, Ced Buckley. Brother Buckley’s investigation follows a bloody trail of senseless murders, reforms a trans-Atlantic slaver and tracks a runaway train across three states. Along the way the humble Benedictine brother tramples out a vintage of atrocity and vengeance and reveals a treacherous plan to assassinate Abraham Lincoln.

       Burning Rage is the first installment of the Ced Buckley Civil War Mystery series. Buckley is the war’s answer to Father Brown, G. K. Chesterton’s Catholic priest detective, a character who “hears men's real sins and is not likely to be wholly unaware of human evil.”  Like Father Brown, Buckley is “characteristically humble, and is usually rather quiet, but when he does talk, he almost always says something profound.”

       As a Civil War sleuth who served in the Southern army, Buckley knows the horrors of the war; he is haunted by his own experience as a soldier. As the conflict moves toward its end, Buckley can see that it has changed the character of his beloved South; that the war’s outcome will make his homeland an angry, vengeful place. The war’s atrocities, its secret war as Buckley calls it, has set in motion a cycle of revenge that will not end with the fighting between armies.

       Burning Rage is a fast-paced adventure that opens with a retelling of Dahlgren’s Raid, one of the war’s most controversial engagements. The failed 1864 cavalry raid on Richmond outraged many in the South when mysterious papers found on the body of the raid's commanding officer, Colonel Ulric Dahlgren, revealed that one of the mission’s objectives was to assassinate Confederate President Jefferson Davis and his cabinet. Union leaders denied the charges, but the affair was an example of the treacherous secret war that spawned various acts of atrocity and revenge on both sides.

       I hope you enjoy Burning Rage, the first Ced Buckley Civil War mystery, as much as I enjoyed writing it. It is available at Amazon.com as a paperback or in Kindle format.

Kelly J. O’Grady

April, 2015

A Civil Rights Case in a Confederate Court

The Civil War Sesquicentennial Network on Facebook recently showcased a National Park Service video about Civil War sites associated with the Civil Rights struggle. Called "Civil War Through Civil Rights: Our Nation's Journey," it's been on Youtube for about two weeks now.

It's a beautifully done video in the NPS tradition of such things; no doubt no expense was spared in its creation. Watching it on Youtube is an emotional experience that makes me love this country so much the more. Only in America could such a revolution of rights succeed.

The video is part of an NPS emphasis to interpret the War of Rebellion as part of the Civil Rights struggle because it ended slavery. The tilt toward the interpretation of the conflict as being mainly about slavery has been spurred on for years by Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D.-Ill.) The leftist congressman made this his special project some say to lay the groundwork for the governemnt to pay the descendants of slaves reparations. A plan that would be perhaps the largest redistribution of wealth in human history.

Over time the stated motives have been moving targets as elusive as the monitor fleet in Charleston Harbor. At first, the new interpretative initiative was simply to be more inclusive. The idea was it would attract more black families to Civil War sites administered by the NPS. While that seems a noble idea, it has not worked out that way. No doubt the new emphasis has given more perspective, meaning and even emotion to the interpretation of Civil War parks, regardless of Rep. Jackson's ulterior motives.

Some comments on Youtube about the video hit home with me. Two comments have since been removed though they were in no way spam or vulgar. They were simply silenced because they criticized the government's presentation. It's frightening to think some functionary monitors Youtube posts and has the gall to censor them. Anyway, one commenter said the presentation leaned to the left, and that is true. In my own experience, the historians relied upon by the Park Service are hard left academics like Eric Foner. Another commenter said the presentation was all blue, meaning no Confederate sites or monuments were included.

On first blush this might seem an accurate portrayal. No southerner could have possibly done anything to advance Civil Rights during the Civil War, right? In Soldiers Just Like You I prove this idea wrong. One of the greatest Civil Rights trial of the century occurred in Charleston in 1863 and it was heard in a Confederate court. The soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts who were captured at the Battle of Battery Wagner never imagined they could get a fair trial in a southern court of white men, but they did. The question was: Are these men slaves in rebellion or Union soldiers due the rights of prisoners of war? The stakes were high; death or a return to slavery. As I chronicle in the book, the rule of law held firm against slavery and racism.

And the fair hearing sorted itself out long before the NAACP, Thurgood Marshall, or the Messieurs Jackson appeared on the scene. I can only hope that the NPS finds a middle course through the political mindfields that are attempting to high-jack the interpretation of history to fit a redistributive agenda.

Good Things Happen

Good things happen when a government adheres to its Constitution and the rule of law, even in a flawed society. That's the main theme of Soldiers Just Like You. The trial of the captured soldiers of the 54th Massachussetts, black men charged with servile insurrection by the state of South Carolina, was such a case. And what a case it was.

In so many countries around the world, even today, these men would not have a stood a chance in court. But even the Confederacy, a country vilified today by its defense of slavery, believed in its Constitution and the rule of law that it authorized. It was willing to follow the dictates of its laws even if the outcome was not want the majority wanted.

When I wrote Soldiers, I had no idea that it would wrap around today's news so well. Today our adherence to the Constitution seems minimal at best, with politicians of almost every stripe (Ron and Rand Paul excluded) constantly working to find ways around it. The progressives in both parties guffawed at the reading of the document in Congress and accused those who sought to put the Constitution front and center as having some kind of fetish about it.

Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein not long ago said the Constitution was "over 100 years old" and written in language that nobody can understand. His ignorance makes me wonder whose nephew he is. How else to explain how he got his position?

The president is ignoring the War Powers Act this week because it suits him to do so and no one bats an eye. He has called the Constitution a document of negative liberties because it lays out plainly what the government has no right to do to the individual. He clearly thinks it should have set up a government that could decide who gets what and how much. Postive liberties I suppose would be a list of all the programs that a citizen could partake of. But a Constitution that puts the government in charge of a collective redistribution of wealth would be no better than the absolute monarchy we broke away from.

Left wing academics who have studied the Irish famine like to say that the famine was caused by a free market system run amok. That greedy landowners watched the Irish leave or starve so they could maximize profits. But there was nothing like a free market in Ireland in the nineteenth century. The king ruled without check. He parceled out the land, the jobs, the capital and the law as he saw fit with no Constitution to stop whatever he wanted to do. When he finally moved to stop The Great Hunger, he sent a Welsh progressive to set up a central bureaucracy to deal with the problem by handing out meager government assistance. Of course, more government interference made things even worse.

Politicians always ask the question, "How will you pay for that tax cut?" The idea inherent in that question is, "Money belongs to the state, not to the people." Or even worse, the people exist to serve the state, not the other way around. Today we think of Robin Hood as a redistributionist, one of the world's first levellers. But he is not a symbol of social justice. The king was overtaxing the people and Robin Hood simply instated a "tax rebate" of his own. He didn't steal from the rich and give to the poor. He took from the government and gave the money back to the people who had earned it.The rich were those in government, the king, his nobles, their employees. The poor were the farmers, the merchants, the skilled tradesmen--the producers and ...the taxpayers. A government with no Constitution leads to corrupt, rich leaders and a wretchedly impoverished citizenry. Is that what we want here?

The Constitution was written, (over 200 years ago, Mr. Klein,) just so this kind of government could not take root in the new country. It was devised to limit central government control of every aspect of life. If we continue to ignore its principles, we will end up just like those poor taxpayers living as outlaws in Sherwood Forest.

Or one day we will be in a court of law, brought up on some phony charge like servile insurrection. If the government wants us convicted we will be, the rule of law and the Constitution be damned. I can be pretty sure those helpless black men of the 54th Mass were anxiously rubbing their necks during that 1863 trial in Confederate Charleston. Writing letters to their loved ones, saying one last goodbye. They knew they would be hung in due course. But then...a miracle happened. The jury ruled, the verdict was certified, the court adjourned, the mob dispersed, justice was done. Even in a Confederate city under siege, miracles can happen when the Constitution is respected.

Soldiers Just Like You is based on a true story.

Sesquicentennial Succotash

There are a few things that have been cooking together in this, the summer of the 15oth anniversary of the beginning of the war.

Here in the Shenandoah Valley, many communities are planning events to commemorate the War of the Rebellion. The good people that hold the ground at the Newmarket Battlefield had a recent reenactment of that May 15, 1864 battle. Very young VMI men, known today as the Newmarket Cadets, fought Union troops under Franz Sigel in that contest. Yes, we forget how young soldiers are. The average age of the private in the CW was about 18 years. But at Newmarket many of the Virginia Military Institute cadets would be in middle school today. When General John C. Breckinridge, the Confederate commander at the battle (and the former vice-president of the United States) realized he needed more men in the fight, how his heart must have shuddered at the thought of putting those boys in harm's way.

The cadets had marched north from Lexington, that's down the valley as the Shenandoah flows by the way, to aid a failing Confederate cause that had seen wanton destruction by Sheridan's army here. VMI itself would later be burned out of spite by the villain David Hunter. That was on June 11, 1864. Does VMI remember that? Not as a matter of course, but each day the cadet corps still calls the names of the ten cadets killed at Newmarket. The battalion consisted of 247 cadets. Ten were killed, 47 were wounded and Sigel was defeated and relieved command.

A recent article in Harrisonburg's Daily-New Record chronicled the Union burning of the little Mennonite village of Dayton in the same reckless year. Speaking of newspapers, I was remiss in not mentioning a recent article in the Page News and Courier by Joe Farruggia on Soldiers Just Like You. Mr. Farruggia, a thorough journalist, left no stone unturned in his interview about me and my books, including not just "Soldiers," but Clear the Confederate Way: The Irish in the Army of Northern Virginia, which was published some years ago. Thanks, Joe, for the wonderful treatment.

Another recent story in the news related that sadly an ancient oak tree with links to Gen. Thomas J. Jackson had succumbed to age and harsh weather hereabouts. Jackson's Prayer Tree as it has been called, stood for over 300 years in northern Augusta county. Accounts, one attributed to no one less than Jackson's map maker Jedidiah Hotchkiss, relate that the tree sheltered Stonewall Jackson and I assume a coterie of devout Presbyterians during a prayer meeting in 1862. With trees as well as battle heroes, the mighty must eventually fall.

Speaking of religion, The Arlington Catholic Herald, the paper of the Arlington Diocese, which includes our Valley, last week ran a story about Catholics in the Civil War. It was a good read, but as these things go, it quickly sunk into a couple of anecdotes about the Union Irish Brigade. It did mention Pope Pius IX's sympathy for the Confederate cause and even tip-toed around the fact that the longest serving pope in history had a personal relationship with Jefferson Davis.

Davis of course attended Catholic school in Kentucky for a time. Bardstown, Kentucky is the home of the second oldest Catholic diocese in the country after Baltimore. It was formed in 1808, about the same time as the dioceses of Boston, Philadelphia and New York.

Happy sesquicentennial summer!

NV Daily

Author recounts 1863 trial of 60 black Union soldiers - Lifestyle/Valley Scene



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."