Brief description:
The setting of this novel centers on the Armistead family plantation a few miles west of the Manassas Battlefield. It begins in August 1862 with military activities on around the Second Battle of Manassas and concludes in the aftermath of Gettysburg. There is vivid description of the cavalry maneuvers of during Second Manassas and the cavalry action at Gettysburg.
Elderly Judge Armistead has a son Henry, a Confederate cavalry officer and a daughter Lucy who is at home along with a handful of loyal servants. Henry Armistead’s best friend in college (West Point not mentioned) is Frank Kearny, now an officer in the Union cavalry. Both are bold officers having achieved reputation for daring while engaged in the “cat and mouse” skirmishing with their respective troops in and around the villages that between the armies of McDowell and Lee.
Kearny, carrying dispatches between General Bufford and McDowell, is skirting between the lines when he is chased by a Confederate patrol and ultimately falling under his wounded horse and injuring himself badly. Henry Armistead’s his patrol captures Kearny and, not wanting him to face prison in Richmond where he would surely die, arranges for some local servants to transport Kearny by wagon to the Armistead home, along with letters pleading for his father and sister to nurse Kearny and preserve him form Confederate patrols. This is where the conflict in the novel begins. Over the months of recuperation, the Union Army looks for Kearny, among rumors of desertion, while Lucy Armistead and Frank Kearny come to love one another. She hides him from Confederate patrols and eventually turns him over to a Union patrol, not revealing how Kearny came to be there to preserve the Armistead reputation among the Virginia neighbors.
Henry is captured in disguise trying to visit his family and faces a court martial and hanging as a spy. Kearny faces is own disciplinary issues, including a possible murder charge, while trying track down those officers who accused him wrongly of desertion. Meanwhile Mosby’s Confederate irregulars are marauding Union camps and supplies between the Rappahannock and Potomac Rivers causing great turmoil and futile chased by the poorly led Union cavalry. Lots of moving parts in the story.
Elderly Judge Armistead has a son Henry, a Confederate cavalry officer and a daughter Lucy who is at home along with a handful of loyal servants. Henry Armistead’s best friend in college (West Point not mentioned) is Frank Kearny, now an officer in the Union cavalry. Both are bold officers having achieved reputation for daring while engaged in the “cat and mouse” skirmishing with their respective troops in and around the villages that between the armies of McDowell and Lee.
Kearny, carrying dispatches between General Bufford and McDowell, is skirting between the lines when he is chased by a Confederate patrol and ultimately falling under his wounded horse and injuring himself badly. Henry Armistead’s his patrol captures Kearny and, not wanting him to face prison in Richmond where he would surely die, arranges for some local servants to transport Kearny by wagon to the Armistead home, along with letters pleading for his father and sister to nurse Kearny and preserve him form Confederate patrols. This is where the conflict in the novel begins. Over the months of recuperation, the Union Army looks for Kearny, among rumors of desertion, while Lucy Armistead and Frank Kearny come to love one another. She hides him from Confederate patrols and eventually turns him over to a Union patrol, not revealing how Kearny came to be there to preserve the Armistead reputation among the Virginia neighbors.
Henry is captured in disguise trying to visit his family and faces a court martial and hanging as a spy. Kearny faces is own disciplinary issues, including a possible murder charge, while trying track down those officers who accused him wrongly of desertion. Meanwhile Mosby’s Confederate irregulars are marauding Union camps and supplies between the Rappahannock and Potomac Rivers causing great turmoil and futile chased by the poorly led Union cavalry. Lots of moving parts in the story.
Publication
B. W. Dodge & Co (1888)